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During lockdown, the decorator Shifra Greenberg ran into a friend on the street. Like everyone, the friend griped about being stuck at home. Her house in midtown Toronto had walls the colour of powdered icing sugar, creating a stark and uninspiring ambience. Ditto high ceilings that felt cavernous and cold.
“I said to her, ‘I know the perfect thing to lift your mood: wallpaper,’” Greenberg recalls.
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A Toronto decorator by way of New York, Greenberg specializes in bringing pluck into interiors through a playful use of colour and pattern.
“Colour especially plays a vibrant role in setting a mood and energizing a space,” Greenberg says.
As such, when she next saw her friend, she thrust a square of Missoni wallpaper in her direction. With most people, Greenberg offers two or three selections, but not this time.
“She’s such a visual, vibrant person,” Greenberg says. “She needed something to excite her on the daily. I knew this was it.”
With its tangle of plums, pinks and yellows, the floral print, called “Oriental Garden,” is not only striking visually but in a tactile way, too. The paper is embossed to mimic embroidery. And it’s wipeable vinyl, suiting a home with four kids.
Her friend loved the wallpaper, so Greenberg wrapped the dining room in it. “It feels like a flower store every time you walk into the room,” she says.
The purples in the print play well against the lavender-blue wool dining chairs. Over the table, Greenberg installed a gold Art Deco-like chandelier as another mood-enhancer.
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“She only had pot lights before, but when you drop the lights low, you create a more intimate experience,” she says.
The warmth was needed. The adjoining central hallway of the 5,000-square-foot home has a two-storey rotunda that bounces sound around. Softening the space with wallpaper and layering in textiles helped muffle noise and shifted things into cozy territory.
This is evident in the now-snug living room.
“My client comes from a Hungarian background and her parents went super modern [in Canada],” says Greenberg. “(So she) had this yearning to go back to old-world, decorative tchotchkes from her roots.”
As it was, the living room felt flat with its white walls, roller shades on the windows and zero decorative detailing.
“(Her husband) had a lot of books, so we added bookshelves on either side of the fireplace,” says Greenberg. As for her friend’s treasured Hungarian trinkets, those have been displayed in glass-shelved niches by the doorway.
Classic, ochre-toned curtains, meanwhile, lend elegance to the room, which is adorned in wallpaper by Coordonné. Just like the dining room, it’s a touchy-feely affair: three-dimensional gold raffia wallpaper has a lattice print; a sumptuous rug from Y&Co is covered in repeating Greek keys.
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The room is a balance of old and new elements, says Greenberg; it isn’t stuffy. “The custom bench with the bolstered arm has a contemporary silhouette with an old-world tweed,” she says. “The sofa is beautiful dusty-rose velvet and we piped it with a metallic lamé, so it has that Las Vegas tinsel shine to it.”
One of the biggest changes, however, is the access the room. Before Greenberg’s intervention, you walked straight into the house, looping around to the living room. To fix the awkward jog for the homeowners, who host fundraisers and family and wanted a better flow, Greenberg punched an archway off the foyer.
The doorway and floor transition is trimmed in trendy viola calacatta. “We chose it because the warm purples and rose in the marble was a great introduction into the living room, where you are hit with a saturation of colours and warmth,” says Greenberg. “We liked marble because it envelops, like a keyhole.”
Further inside is the bar zone. The husband is a mixologist, and he makes good use of a new amped-up nook with scalloped-shaped uppers lashed in a bright, glossy pinkish red paint from Farrow & Ball. It’s loud and joyful and the farthest thing from white.
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