Life in the Barbie Dream House: Designing the Formal Living Room (aka Vanesa's Bridal Shower Room)

Perhaps one of the most important rooms (to me at least) in the Barbie Dream House is the formal living room, which comes in a distant second behind my closet. This room is important for a wide array of reasons, including:

1. Most importantly, it will be the location of my best friend Vanesa's bridal shower, and many other bridal and baby showers I anticipate hosting for my friends over the next ten years or so (I'm looking at you Mary Beth, Jill, Laci, Sandra, Hurleys...). After all, we are all in our mid-twenties. It's the logical time to get married and have babies.
2. It will be the female oasis of the house; the antonym to "man cave," if you will.
3. Given #2, it's one of the only rooms where I don't feel guilty including pink in the color scheme. Ross doesn't decorate the house in UT Orange, after all. It's common spousal courtesy.
4. Architecturally, it's one of the best rooms in the house. It has two different ceiling heighths - 10 ft in the main area and 20 in the turet; a semi-circle with 6 windows as one of it's walls; and connections to three other rooms.

Long story short, this room needs to be chic. Vanesa worked her butt off for a year helping me make sure every aspect of my wedding was going to be fantastic, so the least I can do is make sure her bridal shower is hosted in a venue as fabulous as she is.

This is my inspiration pallette:

Here is the space we're working with (under construction, of course):

Dark hardwood floors, as is the case with the rest of the first floor.

Here are the light, dusty pink 18 ft long curtains, which my mom gifted us a few weeks ago. We found a specialty curtain shop in Buffalo Junction, VA - Bed Bath and Curtain Outlet (http://bedbathandcurtain.com/) (They had a HUGE selection, great prices and a very helpful staff. The lady who helped me looked exactly like Jennifer Aniston and was super sweet and knowledgeable. I highly recommend the place! They say they're the biggest curtain store on the east coast - and it shows.)and when I went to the register to pay for them, mom had already paid for them. My mom is the best, that's another story for another time. This is the closest replica I could find to what they look like, except ours are 18 feet (to go from the top of the second story windows in the turet to the floor, hopefully with enough room for some puddle action on the bottom). Ours are probably slightly more pink though.

These are the couches I'm currently keeping an eye on for the room. I want two, of course, so the room will be symmetrical and to provide seating room for shower guests. :) This is the Emma Tufted Sofa from Homedecorators.com. It went on sale yesterday, but I hesitated to pull the trigger for whatever reason. Hopefully I'll be able to get the courage to buy them soon. They're very reasonably priced for what they are, but its still a big purchase (not to mention, shipping on couches is outrageous).

I plan on using gold as an accent color, ala the color scheme of our blush pink & gold wedding in 2010. We picked up a mirror like this at the Raleigh flea market over the summer. It has a bit of a cool story behind it too, but I won't spoil my best conversation piece here on the blog. :)

This is one of the only rooms where we didn't order a chandelier through the builder (basically, none felt special enough), so I've been looking online for the right chandelier. So far, this gold Vaxcel chandelier is my favorite, but I'm likely to change my mind between now and move-in in 8 weeks.