In Room Refresh’s new episode, Mandy Cheng helps a woman reclaim a small nook space that had been taken over by her kids
For Helena Bermingham, a resident of Long Beach, California, having children meant giving up her home bar area, which quickly turned into an overflow storage zone for her kids’ books and toys. Getting sick of staring at the pile of stuff, Bermingham wanted to reclaim the nook off her dining room as a dedicated place to mix and serve cocktails and other beverages.
Enter interior designer Mandy Cheng. In the latest episode of Room Refresh, which launches today on AD’s YouTube channel, Cheng has four hours to make the former bar into a bar again. The nook had an existing patterned wallpaper that showed bubbles from the uneven wall underneath, so Cheng replaced that with a faux weave peel-and-stick wallpaper from Lillian August that disguises those imperfections. The surrounding walls were painted in a soothing shade, Portola Paints’ Half Moon Bay, which makes the zone stand out. A CB2 bar cabinet was added, plus a custom toe kick underneath it so it looks like a built-in unit, and Cheng put floating shelves and a drop-down table on the walls to increase the space’s storage and functionality.
As she brings the design to life with assistance from a couple of handy helpers, Cheng offers useful DIY tips, such as how to install wallpaper panels evenly and how to choose the right wood tones for a space. Watch the full episode to glean all of her informative tricks.