Moodboard: The Sulking Room

  Another day of pretending to apply for jobs while in reality I find myself breaking every 10 minutes to browse for properties I can not afford in countries I do not live in. Another day, another pretend vacation. 

    Inspired by this stopped-dead-in-my-tracks pink living room, today I find myself on the Farrow and Ball paint website, on the hunt for a specific shade of pink. Something that falls into the no longer a blush, not yet a mauve category. And then I see it…No. 295, Sulking Room Pink. Although the living room shade I am after might be closer to No. 246, Cinder Rose, it is no longer a shade specific expedition, it has become an entire interior analysis. The sulking room. 

The aforementioned living room via The Modern House 

Images & Colors via Farrow & Ball

    According to a dive into Google searches, the sulking room is another name for the boudoir. Traditionally a woman’s small siting room or salon that separates the bedroom from the rest of the house, the term boudoir derives from ‘bouder’ the French verb meaning ‘to sulk or pout.’ I can't say it isn't fun to imagine myself as a 19th Century Parisian Socialite getting home after a long hard morning of enjoying the newfound freedoms for women in modern Paris. I return from a very stressful trip to Le Bon Marché in which I failed to find the perfect table linens for my upcoming soirée and swish my skirts behind me as I stomp to my perfectly powder pink boudoir to put my feet up on my velvet chaise and lament the elusive tablescape. Sacré bleu! Whatever shall I do? The party is in less than a month! 

    Despite this practice of historically fictional daydream, I also think that the idea of the sulking room has its modern incarnations. To me these days sulking is not limited to the boudoir, all of my rooms are my sulking room. I recently graduated from college and am only part-timely employed and living with my parents; I would use the word ‘sulking’ to describe my daily routine really. I’m working on it. 

    The first thing that lit up in my brain/file cabinet when I saw this color was the Baltimore home of Annie Reed in Sleepless in Seattle. Annie’s kitchen and living room are painted an amazing shade of leftover-from-the-80's pink that’s fit for any bachelorette pad. I feel like what goes on inside this interior world of the Rom-Com Universe carries on the spirit of the sulking room. Annie’s kitchen and living room set the scene for late night movie watching with best friends, frantic phone calls…and writing letters to long distance radio crushes… Anyway, unrelatable plot lines aside, this space acts as a place of respite that contrasts the workplace, the restaurant, and the awkward holiday dinner party in which lamentations of life’s little inconveniences can be expressed without regulation, alone or with others, and incubates the lifelines of commiseration, friendship, and after a suitable amount of time even nourishes schemes to end the season of sulking and just get on with it.

    Much like Meg Ryan in any of her movie interiors, every modern woman needs a place to sulk. Especially in "these times" during which most other meeting places have become inaccessible, cafe culture is currently off the table and winter threatens to encroach on the outdoor rendezvous spots we have created, the home is reinforced as sanctuary, social club (zoom movie night anyone?), and headquarters for getting your life together. Maybe for you that takes the form of this enviable pink concrete conversation pit/kitchen extension that is the perfect combination of modernist and kitsch. I could definitely see myself in the middle of an existential episode crying to the end of My Best Friend’s Wedding on that built in sofa. There may not be sex, there may not be marriage, but by god there will be dancing!!!!

The conversation pit...a whole other topic of interest 
Images via The Nordroom

    Or maybe your sulking room transcends beyond the color that has sent me into this headspace today. Whether its pink or gray or blue or wallpapered, long live the sulking room! I imagine all you really need is someplace nice to sit and maybe some dim ambiance lighting in order to create a space where its okay to feel sorry for yourself for a bit. After all, c’est la vie. 

-Kate