PLANTATION DESIGN: LOOK FOR LESS

Now that this is finally over, I'm starting to slowly regain my sanity and my interest in blogging. My past week has involved very little sleep, making plenty of design boards (yay!), and a lot of long, angry lines (boo):


approximately 1/3 of ONE of the two lines that wrapped around the MFA on Saturday - picture via Twitter



With my newfound downtime, I was flipping through an issue of Elle Decor a couple days ago and came across this ad for Plantation:



apologies for the bad scan



I love the calm but playful atmosphere of this room. It feels like the perfect twentysomething room, the kind of room I could see a lot of my friends loving... if any of us had the money to buy $2000 mirrors. Every time I browse Plantation's website I fall in love with about a hundred things, and simultaneously wonder who on earth spends many hundreds of dollars on a single tiny box or frame. This particular image got me to thinking about how many of the things in this room are beautiful but not particularly unique, and I wondered whether I could put together a lookalike room on a more reasonable budget. Here's the result:

rug one / rug two / Plantation rug
nightstand / Plantation nightstand
ring pull
pillow / [cheaper, if you don't care for pink] / Plantation pillow
lamp / [closer, more expensive lamp] / Plantation lamp
stool / [the same stool, for less] / Plantation stool
mirror / Plantation mirror
duvet set
bench / Plantation bench
bed / Plantation bed

Not perfect, but pretty close. The rug is clearly meant to be a knockoff, but it appears to be darker than the original, which is why I offered an alternate option. Despite the different pattern, I think the second option more closely resembles the luxurious texture and muted colors of the one in the ad. The details of the garden stool and the bench aren't precisely identical to Plantation's, but the prices are right! The bed was by far the hardest to match; after scouring the internet and browsing through what now seems like hundreds of upholstered beds, I realized that I'd have to compromise on something. I found tufted beds with no wings in the perfect color, tufted wingback beds that came in all the wrong colors, wingback beds with no tufts, and beds whose headboards were twice as tall as Plantation's (see below, Z Gallerie runner-up) - not to mention a few almost-perfect ones whose price tags took them out of the running. I ended up choosing a white one, prioritizing tufting and wings over that precise platinum-grey color. I know it loses points for having curved wings rather than those pretty clean-lined straight ones, but I think it most closely fits with the idea of the original room. Plus, it's about half the price of the Z Gallerie bed that I was leaning toward.

None of the accessories seem to be on Plantation's website - they were probably brought in by a stylist - but here are some lookalikes to fill in (almost) every last detail:

clockwise from upper right:
jewelry box, $30
pink quartz cluster, $23
Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000 exhibition catalog, $63
big skeleton key, $12
frame, $17
green vase, $23

What do you think? Is it a good substitute, or do "looks for less" just not compare to the real thing?