Our Front Hall

Our front hall is tiny.  Really tiny.  Too tiny for all the giant shoes and boots it needs to hold.  Too tiny for all those feet that land on the mat on a wet or snowy day.  Too tiny for a small console table.  But it's what we have.

The door on the left side is for the front hall closet and the door on the right is the back of our front door.  There is a little dog bed at the foot of the stairs because our faithful dog waits for me by the front door when I go out.  

We needed to make this area both functional and pretty.  It is the first thing people see when they enter our home and the last thing they see when they leave.  It is a busy area with a lot of needs. 

So in pursuit of making the entry pretty, I painted the end wall a medium gray-blue colour (Nimbus Gray by Benjamin Moore) to give the area a focal point.  

We also needed somewhere for keys and glasses and purses, so we put up a pewter key rack made by Brian Seagull, a Nova Scotian artist.  I use the straw purse, bought at the thrift store, to hold my glasses.

The woodblock print, we hung in the entry, is a picture of Bristol sketched in about 1795.  We bought it on eBay after my husband lived in Bristol for six months in 2002 on a work contract.  The kids and I went over to the UK to visit him and we had a wonderful Christmas holidays together, so it holds special memories for us.

The details in the woodblock print are amazing.  See the ships sailing into the harbour in Bristol?

And on the other side are a group of people standing on the hill overlooking Bristol.

The mirror in the front hall was one we already had, but it had a gold frame so I painted it black, to complete the vignette.  

So there you have it - it's our welcome to the world, with a little bit of personality and a few organizational pieces to keep it working.

What about your front hall?  Have you added some interest to say welcome home? How do you deal with keys, glasses, purses?