How a Lifestyle Blogger Transformed a Cookie-Cutter House Into a Tropical Paradise

When home and garden blogger Carla Bethany and her husband Eric moved into a house in the southern Atlanta suburbs, the new space didn’t really match her vibrant personality. “When I moved into this home it was very beige,” she laughs. “And it looked like my neighbor’s [home.]” A lover of all things colorful and interior design, Carla rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

The first thing she decided to do was paint, but not the walls — instead, she left the walls white and painted her favorite furniture pieces to brighten up the space. (Just like us here at HGTV, she quickly fell in love with chalk paint.) Later, she decided to add removable wallpaper accent walls to her dining room and this office-meets-guest room.

Carla works from home, so to make every day feel a little bit more like vacation, she chose a pink and blue tropical print, appropriately named Neon Flowers, for the wallpaper for her workspace, topping it off with overhead beach scene art. “I like to think I’m sitting at the beach somewhere,” she says. "Even though we're nowhere near the ocean." The rest of the room follows suit with pink and blue accents, including a punchy raspberry desk from Brighton Hill. "I built everything around the wallpaper," she adds. "It was really about the wallpaper."

The word “removable” is key here: Carla's design style changes with the seasons, and she’s not afraid to try something new. As her vision for the dining room evolved, she swapped out furniture — adding a new console, a pair of ginger jar-inspired lamps and red chairs she sourced and built herself from a restaurant supply store — and eventually took down the tropical print wallpaper mural she installed on her birthday one year. “I wanted to quiet the room a little,” she said after revealing the newest rendition of the dining room on Instagram. “I had way too many patterns.”

Removing the wallpaper created a more cohesive color story for the dining room that was still packed with personality. “I have a formal dining room … but I keep it playful, cheerful, a place that when I come home, it’s inspiring to me,” she says.