Photographs by Marian Parsons, Feels Like Home
dining room
Artful Impact: Blogger Marian Parsons never shies away from DIY. After struggling to decide how to personalize the home’s dark and boxy dining room, she painted a mural on a whim. “One morning, I broke out the paint, and I just didn’t stop,” she laughs. “It’s very loose and drippy and watery, but it makes such a great statement.”
Marian Parsons never imagined she’d feel at home in a beige-and-cream builder-grade suburban home. The author, artist, and blogger (known as Miss Mustard Seed online) amassed hundreds of thousands of readers and followers by sharing DIY tips and room tours of her 1940s Pennsylvania Cape Cod home—and, when she and her family moved to Rochester in 2017, she dreamed of renovating an old farmhouse in the Minnesota countryside. But she struggled to find an older home that fit her family’s needs, and they ended up buying an early-2000s build instead. “I remember thinking, when we picked this house, that my blog audience would be so disappointed,” Marian recalls. “But what I found was quite the opposite—I received so many comments from people saying how much my house was like theirs. So it became this very relevant story of customizing a house that was built to be very generic.” This connection with her followers inspired Marian to write her recently published second book, Feels Like Home, which is filled with photos and tips guiding readers through the evolution of her home—from drab and bland to colorful and collected. Here’s a look at a few of her rooms.
“I love buying stuff used—it’s my favorite way to buy. I prefer that to going into a new store and looking for something. I love old things.”
—Marian Parsons, homeowner
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drafting table
Co-opting Space: Originally, Marian’s studio was a three-season sunroom, with every surface covered in wood paneling. “It wasn’t even included in the real estate photos,” she says. One of the first tasks after the Parsons bought the home was insulating the space and painting it in Benjamin Moore’s Simply White so Marian could use it as her studio. “I try to keep it strictly for creative work, so I use it for design work, brainstorming, planning, all that stuff”—including photography, painting, and podcast recordings, she says.
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work space
Subtle Detail: Instead of ripping out the deck board floor, Marian painted a checkerboard pattern using a custom blue-gray paint inspired by Farrow and Ball’s Skylight and a white semi-gloss enamel.
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Cabinet
Revived Furniture: Nearly all of the studio’s furniture is secondhand (save for the Arhaus drafting table, above left). A favorite piece is the huge cabinet in the corner—which is actually two different items stacked together. Marian found the bottom drawers, originally from a hardware store in Maryland, on Craigslist in Pennsylvania. She also found the top cabinet, once used in the Wilder School in Minnesota, on Craigslist. “Sometimes you have to be willing to look at things in a fresh way and see how you can rework them,” she says.
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Marian Parsons
Hunt and Gather: Marian’s tip for shopping secondhand? “Be willing to do it,” she says. Look online often—multiple times a week, if you can—and use generic search terms to open up a world of possibilities.
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split staircase
Welcoming Touches: At first, Marian cringed at the house’s two-story foyer, which represented some of the suburbanism she was trying to avoid. But she loved the sidelight windows and the split staircase (a set of back stairs leads to the kitchen), and after some new Montauk Blue slate flooring in the entryway, hardwood flooring on the stairs, and a wash of Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (mixed at 50 percent) throughout, the foyer felt like a more cohesive entrance to the rest of the home.
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Dining room hutch
Mini Makeovers: Marian found the dining room hutch for $400 on Craigslist when she lived in Pennsylvania. Originally a bright blue, she painted it a soft blue-green with milk paint (the same kind of paint as the mural surrounding the dining room) and removed the top doors to display her collection of dishes. The table and chairs are also from Craigslist and painted with milk paint; Marian made the cushions herself.Colorful Organization: Most of the white and glass pieces in the dining room hutch are antiques with special meaning. Mixed in are parts of Marian’s collection of antique white ironstone pieces, a vintage pitcher her mom purchased when the family lived in Germany, bowls and bottles from France, Victorian ink bottles, glass cozies Marian crocheted herself, and a green jadeite-like set of dishes from—that’s right—Walmart.
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Dash and Albert rug
A Nod To History :The dining room’s Dash and Albert rug adds more than warmth and texture to the space. “The mural has sort of a Rufus Porter feel to it, who was a famous muralist in the 1800s,” Marian says. “He did a lot of New England murals, very folk art–style, and a lot of those rooms would have painted checkerboard floors. This is sort of a modern interpretation.”
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Laundry room
Pretty And Practical: Marian’s goal with the laundry room was to make the small space functional yet beautiful—which she accomplished by adding beadboard detailing to the walls, painting the shelving and cabinet green (a custom paint mix that’s used throughout the home), and organizing closet space to fit the family’s eight laundry baskets. Glass bottles hold cleaners that stay out in the open, and anything that Marian deems visually unappealing simply gets tucked away.
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Feel Like Home book
Feels Like Home ($14, Worthy Publishing) by Marian Parsons. Find it in bookstores or at worthypublishing.com.
