Design inspiration can come from anywhere, even your cat

When you meet Tropic, a ginger cat from the Bahamas, you don't immediately think of her orange stripes as a source of design inspiration.

But when it came time for Sara and Peter O'Keefe to pick out colors for their Washington dining room with designer Barry Dixon, the color of their rescue kitty felt like a natural place to begin. The cat reminds them and their two children of tropical sunsets and fun times from a 2017 vacation to Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Now the terra-cotta, pumpkin and coral room does, too.

"Tropic is the coolest cat there is and a real people person," Sara says. "She spreads out all around the house. The kids adore her."

In decorating, inspiration is everything. Yes, you can just throw a bunch of furniture and matchy-matchy accessories together in a room and live in it. But if you build a room around a specific treasured item or feeling, you will create a place that really captures your personality.

"Many things help to tell the story of a room," says Newton, Mass., designer Liz Caan. "Typically, I try to focus on a feeling and then support that story with personal items that a client has." Those pieces could include an antique or a favorite piece of art. "Every single thing we specify, design and collect for a space plays a role and helps support the story and the feeling," she adds.

New York designer Alfredo Paredes says it's important to talk to a client "about what they are dreaming" of for a space. He once worked with someone who wanted his cliffside Caribbean beach house to feel "like you spent the whole day in the sun and you jumped out of the shower and, still with wet hair, put on a pair of white shorts." That idea became a jumping-off point for Paredes's vision for the place, which he describes as "a beach house in Mykonos where you are barefoot" and looking down at the sand and the water.

Interior designers can find inspiration in just about anything: museums, travel, fashion, movies — or even Instagram. Some clients show decorators a sentimental item that informs the color palette, spirit or style of a room. It could be the purple and gold of a favorite Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, a hand-woven textile from a Santa Fe flea market or the sparkly gray mineral in a prized gemstone collection.

When Dixon met the O'Keefes, Tropic came to the door to greet him. The cat quickly became part of the conversation about colors for the space. "We came up with a lot of Caribbean sky colors and textures," Dixon says, but it was the zesty colors of the cat that really spoke to the family. "We took the colors of the orange tabby and then added pale blue and sea grass," he says. Dixon enveloped the room's walls in color and pattern using Morris & Co.'s Acorn wallpaper. He added Phillip Jeffries' Chromatic in orange opalescent on the ceiling.

"When we look at Tropic, we think of the Bahamas," Sara says. "The dining room is full of that energy."

A few years ago, Richmond designer Janie Molster saw a flowing pink-and-red silk dress online from Brandon Maxwell that she just had to have. "That is one of my favorite color combinations," Molster says. "It seemed like an incredibly comfortable dress that looks elegant but not stuffy."

That's the same vibe that Molster cultivates in her renovated 1903 farmhouse in the city's West End, which she uses as a design testing ground for her decorating work. "My house is in constant flux," Molster says. "Nothing is ever really finished or done. It's an ongoing laboratory."

She had that dress in mind as she put together bold Moroccan rugs, vintage Murano glass lamps, a faux-fur-covered bench and pink paint (Benjamin Moore's Confetti) for her den. The linen slipcovered Lee sofa has a red-and-pink suzani-style quilt on it. Everything is comfortable and durable, because she has five children and four grandchildren, and she loves to have friends over.

Using fashion, Molster says, "takes a little bit of confusion and intimidation out of people's design decisions. You make a design decision every day of your life when you grab your clothes out of your closet."

"I'm drawn to the combo of pink and red together. Growing up with a sister, my mother's perspective on our color preferences was that I was a pink lover while my sister preferred red," Molster adds. "I remember the day it occurred to me that I didn't need to choose. I could have it all."

Molster says that she is always drawn to the den and that it can transform her mood. "When I'm here in this room, it doesn't matter whether it's freezing or hot out," she says. "It's always warm and happy in here."

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was devastating for designer Penny Francis, who owns the New Orleans shop Eclectic Home. Years later, an unexpected treasure that surfaced from that painful period became the inspiration for her grandson's nursery.

"My entire family was affected," she says. "All of our homes were flooded to some degree." Her own two-story bungalow, which she shared with her husband and daughters Casi, then 17, and Camryn, then 4, took on 3 feet of water that stayed in the house for 10 days. "With 100 percent humidity and 95-degree weather, the house was completely entrenched with mold and mildew and had to be gutted," Francis says. The girls lost virtually everything in their rooms.

The inspiration for the room came one day when Francis was cleaning out a closet. A long-forgotten jack-in-the box that both of her daughters had played with popped out of a storage bin. It was an emotional moment.

"It's a classic Americana kind of toy that was a token of my childhood," says Casi, now Casi St. Julian and a decorator herself.

The primary colors of the 1980s jack-in-the-box "got our juices flowing on the color palette for the nursery," Casi says. French blue and yellow with touches of green and red became the theme for the room. Francis found a wallpaper pattern of hot-air balloons (Balloons by Schumacher) that had the toy's colors, and she dressed the windows in yellow and white indoor-outdoor fabric (Schumacher's Blumont Stripe). The baby quilt and Huppé Adelaide blue swivel rocker and ottoman pulled it all together.