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

"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.