Interior designer Pamela Harvey’s Oak Hill master bedroom is a fine-tuned blend of masculine and feminine. Tranquil tones of gray and pops of pink make for an elegant spot to wake up to in the morning or retire to at night.
If it were up to Harvey, who works from dual offices in Fairfax and St. Petersburg, Florida, the room would be a study in white—her favorite color. “I could just live in an all-white house,” she laughs. But marriage means compromise, and although her husband is less color-averse, all-white wasn’t going to cut it.
Harvey did start with all white bedding, but then customized with colors and patterns. Her velvet charcoal gray nailhead-trim headboard is at once sexy and handsome. The bed rests in the center of the wall—Harvey likes beds as focal points—beneath a hand-painted shimmering-but-subtle gray chinoiserie mural of flowering tree branches and birdsong. A sleek black dresser lends itself to folding away items, which Harvey tops with a rotating cast of gorgeous fashion and design hardcovers. A dramatic sparkler of a chandelier hangs above.
Harvey’s reverence for fashion icon Coco Chanel and the classic combination of black and white is evident throughout the room, with touches like a pair of white lamps with black shades.
On the bed, pretty print pillows and a rosy folded blanket complement the room’s color scheme; at the foot of the bed sits an eye-popping faux-leopard print bench she exhibited in a recent show house.
She gave the cozy gas fireplace the crisp white treatment as well, but left untouched the existing olive green granite surrounding it because “it’s so dark, it almost reads black.”
As she often does for her clients, Harvey mixed bedside tables in her own bedroom. She notes that couples’ needs often differ, which means different functional nightstands are usually in order: He might like an open shelf, while she prefers a hideaway drawer. Here, Harvey’s side displays her to-be-read stack of books, a painting of Coco Chanel and a fuchsia notebook for middle-of-the-night ideas. Vases of fresh flowers and a pair of blush lamps that light up both sides pull the space together.
Designer Digs
Design Philosophy
Harvey wanted her bedroom to be “a space that was soothing, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing and easy to maintain.” A few throw pillows get tossed off the bed at night, “and they’re not huge, so they’re not hard to find a home for,” she says, referring to the twin skirted pink chairs and the bench at the foot of the bed.
Renovation Frustration
No walls came down or were moved for the bedroom, but Harvey did chip away at the previous iteration which “had too much going on.” She quieted the mood with a calming gray (Sherwin-Williams Alpaca), loving its lavender-pink undertones: “It’s just a really pretty, soothing color.”
Favorite Part of the Room
“My bedside table, hands down.” Hers is half of a set; the other ivory table resides in a guest room. It comes by no special provenance; she loves it “from a functional standpoint, because I have everything I need right there. And yet, it still looks pretty.”
This post originally appeared in our April issue. Subscribe to the print magazine here. Want more home content? Subscribe to our weekly Home newsletter.