“I was teaching over Zoom from home, and on my lunch breaks I would just paint something,” says Marita White. The teacher-turned-designer lives with her daughter and their pets in a 750-square-foot Seattle-area home built in the early 1900s, which, over the course of the pandemic, became a canvas for color and patterns. The first area to go under the brush was the living room.

“My daughter saw it and said, ‘This is the pink room,’” Marita says. “And I thought, ‘Hmm, we can maybe make this a little more pink.’ So we added more color, and then it just spiraled from there.”

With the living room pretty in pink, the kitchen looked “boring” by comparison, so Marita covered it in a range of greens. “Then I realized we had enough rooms to represent the rainbow,” she says. “So I took it as a challenge.”

The mudroom beyond the kitchen, named the Kitty Room after the three resident cats, now has bright orange accents and a cat-themed wallpaper from Chasing Paper. Marita chose yellow for her bedroom, and a soothing mix of blue wallpaper and tile for the bathroom. Her daughter had ideas of her own. “She wanted every wall in her bedroom to be a different color, but they’re all jewel tones,” says Marita, who finished the ceiling with floral wallpaper from Lust Home to bring it all together.

With time off from teaching over the summer—and fewer surfaces to work with in her own home—Marita started taking on design clients that shared her sensibilities. “My whole thing is kid-centered design,” she says. “I go and interview kids, rather than their parents, and make their dreams come true with paint and finishes. Kid clients are the best. They don’t care about style, and they know what they want.” Below, Marita talks about her process, and transforming her own home.

After working with so many colors, are there any unexpected combinations that you’ve grown to love?

I have tried to push myself a little bit to do things that aren’t as expected, but my designs tend to be more monochrome. Like, this is a green room, and this is a yellow room. But I’m starting to do more combinations. I love yellow and green when it doesn’t look like a John Deere tractor. And I like to use different colors with stuff you can change, like linens.

In redesigning your home, were there any mistakes that you learned from?

Absolutely. So many mistakes. The hardest thing to get right was the little hallway that connects some of the rooms and goes up to the playroom on the upper floor. I think I painted it seven different colors before I realized that nothing was going to work. More than once I got up on the ladder, painted all the way up to the second floor, and then thought, Oh, this is awful. The room wound up white, but now it’s where I hang all my daughter’s artwork, so it still has a rainbow quality to it.

How do you choose wallpaper?

I make decisions really spontaneously with paint, which is why my hallway wound up seven different colors. But wallpaper is a bigger investment, so I’ll think on it for months at a time.

Do you install it yourself?

I do not mess with wallpaper. I haven’t even tried. I have a guy who goes by Wallpaper Bob who does it for me. I’ll paint a mural, I’ll paint anything. I can do some woodworking stuff. But I say ‘No thank you’ to wallpaper. My dad is an engineer and is super handy, and my mom is really artistic, and we do everything together. Except for wallpaper.

Do you have a favorite paint brand? Paint tool?

I can walk to Sherwin Williams! A total perk of my neighborhood. But overall, my favorite brand is Clare. It’s the easiest to paint with, and it honestly looks the best. And I can’t paint without my Wooster brush—it’s the best!

Why do you paint or cover the ceiling?

Everyone forgets the ceiling, and no one wants a boring ceiling. My hope is that when you come into my house, there’s color in every single space and on every single surface. I want to create a holistic color experience.

Related Reading:

Before & After: A Gloomy Brooklyn Brownstone Gets Spruced Up With Splashes of Color

22 Ways to Pop Off With the Color Pink

Project Credits:

Interior Design: Inner Child Interiors / @the_rainboww_house

Appears In

My House: No Surface Is Safe From Paint—or Wallpaper—in Marita White’s Wild Seattle Home