Step Inside: A Pattern-Filled Omaha Cottage With a Joyful Color Palette

When Brandi Herrera was conceiving the design for the cottage she and her husband purchased in Omaha’s Aksarben neighborhood, it all came back to a vintage photograph. In the black and white image, taken circa 1970s, a dapper duo are in attendance at Royal Ascot, the famed English horse race. They’re chic but low key, done up but casually, enviably cool.

“I just loved that nonchalant ethos, and I wanted to somehow capture and incorporate it into the cottage design, so I wound up creating a fictional narrative about them and the home’s original owner,” says Herrera, the founder of Portland-based design consultancy A Lively Manner. It went like this: A Swiss grandmother bequeaths the abode to her London-born granddaughter and her husband. The couple adore its colorful interiors and original details but add chrome, glass, Danish furniture, groovy artwork, and treasures from their European adventures to the mix. Horse racing—a pastime at the historic Ak-Sar-Ben Track—is a shared love among the generations. “And surprise, it all comes together,” explains Herrera. “At least, that’s what I’m hoping!” A wander through the colorful, eclectic result of her renovation clearly confirms: It does.

We spoke with Herrera about the cottage’s history and how she replaced builder grade finishes and renewed original architectural charm through color, pattern, and thoughtful details. The result is a cheery new chapter in a story that’s being written in real time.

Can you share a bit about how it came to pass that you and your husband decided on a second home in Omaha?

We had been searching for years for a small home in Omaha, where my husband was born, and his family still lives. This one happens to be located in the neighborhood where the old horse racing track was located, which my husband frequented with his dad while growing up. It’s only 767 square feet, but on a corner lot with a huge yard and detached garage, which offers a lot of potential space for the future. When we found this place, we were initially kind of shocked that it was in as good of shape as it was for the price, and that there weren’t already ten active offers

The major systems were in good working order, but previous owners had stripped away much of the home’s original features, “updating” the kitchen and bathroom with what I like to call the Home Depot Special: gray, gray, and more gray with builder-grade finishes and fixtures.

What were the biggest challenges of bringing its personality back?

What was supposed to be a four-month project took a full year. Not a surface went untouched: walls and ceilings skim-coated, painted, papered, and paneled. Floors were refinished. The bathroom was gutted and plumbing relocated. Everything got re-tiled. The back porch was reconstructed, new doors added—needless to say, it was extensive.

Let’s talk about wallpaper: There are so many good hues and patterns! How do you approach mixing and matching?

I think with cottage design especially, you can get away with a lot of color and pattern-on-pattern. It’s a pretty forgiving design aesthetic when it comes to the rules of balance and harmony—more is more!—but my brain always wants harmony, so I was sure to keep the wallpaper selections in line with the double-complementary color scheme I had already laid out.

For example, all three papers—the bedroom paper is from Schoolhouse x Hygge & West; the dining room paper is from Mind the Gap; and the kitchen paper is Josef Frank for Svenskt Tenn—have some type of prominent floral element, and all of them feature some type of dots or small dot-like floral clusters, as well as organic curves and/or arch-like elements, which all also show up in other furnishings, fixtures, and textiles throughout the house. So even though the dining room paper primarily features Swiss horse-drawn carriages, there is a connection between that paper and the kitchen and bedroom papers.

One thing that’s so wonderful about this home is that it’s small but embraces a kind of restrained maximalism, with so many fabulous patterns and colors and textures. Can you share a bit about how you kept that all in balance?

There was never going to be a version of this space that didn’t include a lot of color. Also, historically, you rarely see neutral schemes in cottage design. Color was very common in homes during the 18th through early-to-mid 19th centuries, and most old homes, like this one, were highly decorative in their furnishes and finishes.

At the outset, I fashioned the palette out of a double complementary color scheme, consisting of two pairings of complementary colors: orange-red and blue-green, and yellow-orange and blue-violet. This offers the visual interest and dynamic energy that occurs when pairing two sets of complementary colors together. And yet, it also offers the flexibility to dial the scheme up or down to create lively or calming palettes in different rooms, based on the varying moods I was hoping to achieve.

What does that look like in practice?

So, for example, the palette in the bedroom: It actually includes all four color variations in varying degrees—but green, white, and blue are dominant, courtesy of the Schoolhouse x Hygge & West wallpaper. It’s a tiny room, but the colors and pattern make it feel more expansive.

You also carried the colors through in furniture staples, like the dining chairs.

Being from Portland, I have loved Schoolhouse since it first opened. And what I think I love most, is its attention to detail, and its commitment to quality craftsmanship. Those TON 18 Bentwood caned chairs were one of the first elements I envisioned for the cottage. The color is not only to die for, it’s also the perfect match to the orange-red in the cottage color scheme. But the chair also has heritage: It was first created in the mid-1800s by Michael Thonet, a German-Austrian carpenter and pioneer of bentwood furniture. It’s such a classic cafe chair you see all over Europe, even now. That’s the kind of furniture I wanted in the cottage—pieces that would feel timeless, but also somehow simultaneously modern.

Any small space renovation wisdom you would impart to our readership?

It may seem like designing for a smaller space is easier than with a big space. Actually, the opposite is true. Every literal inch counts. When I was designing the bathroom layout, for example, I went through at least six iterations before finding one that worked—not just aesthetically, but functionally and to code. The room is only 6’x6’, so it was almost impossible to figure out where to put the toilet and the sink, if not in the spots they previously occupied. But I love puzzling it out—and it also makes for a solution that’s much more satisfying.