This Crocodile Rug Was The Closing Piece to Natalie Ebel’s Kitchen
What makes a purchase order “value it”? The reply is completely different for everyone, so we’re asking among the coolest, most shopping-savvy folks we all know—from small-business homeowners to designers, artists, and actors—to inform us the story behind one among their most prized possessions.
Who?
When Natalie Ebel cofounded Backdrop along with her husband Caleb in 2018, she was merely searching for a simple strategy to paint her daughter’s nursery. “I needed a pure white, which ought to have been a very simple venture, however it wasn’t,” she remembers. “Paint is essentially the most highly effective design buy, however it didn’t cater to the DIY buyer in a manner that was actually consumer-friendly.”
Natalie grew up with portray. It was her pastime as a baby, and her dad additionally painted properties on the facet. For her, it was at all times thrilling to see the way in which a number of brushstrokes of a brand new hue may rework and refresh an area in an reasonably priced manner. When creating Backdrop, Natalie and Caleb needed to make this transformation extra accessible to customers. The necessity for it grew to become much more obvious after they moved subsequent to a ironmongery shop.
“Repainting is the best design change to make, however earlier than Backdrop, you’ll go to the shop 4 occasions, take a look at 300 whites, and nonetheless wouldn’t know what you have been ,” she says. “Dwelling subsequent to this ironmongery shop, we’d see folks in entrance of a colour wall for hours. We’’d go to lunch, come again, they usually’d nonetheless be there. We realized that the trade was catering to contractors, not customers.”
As an organization, Backdrop goals to make portray enjoyable—permitting prospects to pattern colours with 12×12″ adhesive swatches that you would be able to transfer from wall to wall, giving a real sense of what the colour would appear to be within the house. Prospects additionally love the 1000’s of items of user-generated content material within the web site’s gallery, which helps present inspiration by showcasing Backdrop’s colours within the properties of its prospects. “Exhibiting the paint in all of its varieties, after which additionally displaying it in actual areas so you may actually see what it’s like, was actually vital to me when constructing this model,” Natalie says.
What and when?
In 2019, Natalie and her household moved from New York to Los Angeles. On the time, they have been getting settled into their new house, an previous Spanish colonial-style dwelling in Silver Lake, and simply starting to design every room. Natalie had selected Supermoon (Backdrop’s pure white colour) for the partitions in the home, and Darkish Arts (their pure black hue) for the trim within the kitchen and all through the home. Whereas looking Architectural Digest for inspiration, she got here throughout a function on Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and fell in love with their Caiman rug. “I like rugs, however I’d by no means seen rugs as an artwork kind, one thing that felt like a real piece of artwork. Their complete assortment is simply so putting and graphic,” Natalie says. “I wish to name [mine] ‘the offended crocodile.’ It’s positively artwork and an actual dialog piece.”
