Design blogger shares love for all things French
Anita Joyce draws from the past to create stylish new rug for Annie Selke
The simple patterns of 18th-century farmers’ grain sacks inspired Anita Joyce’s newest project, a rug with a blended gray-white background and French blue stripes.
Joyce, editor of the Cedar Hill Farmhouse blog she started in 2011 and author of the soon-to-be-updated book “French Accents: Farmhouse French Style for Today’s Home,” took part in a rug-design contest sponsored by the Annie Selke Companies.
She had caught the attention of Selke when Country French magazine named her as one of their three favorite stylemakers in 2016. The year prior, Joyce’s Heights home was featured on the cover of that magazine just as her book was published.
She also writes about interior design for the Round Top Register, and in February launched the lively Decorating Tips and Tricks podcast with design colleagues Kelly Wilkniss of Pasadena, Calif., and Yvonne Pratt of Lancaster, Penn. Including social media, Joyce reaches 6 million readers per month.
Selke invited 14 style influencers to design rugs for its Rug Design Challenge conducted with Apartment Therapy. Votes were cast via Instagram, and Joyce was one of seven designers whose rugs were deemed winners. The 12 winning rugs will launch at the spring 2018 High Point Market.
While Joyce has tackled plenty of DIY projects around her Heights home and at her family’s farm in Round Top, designing a rug was new for her.
“Rather than think what’s going to win a contest, I needed to be true to my style and my readers, and so I went with the grain-sack stripe,” Joyce said. “It’s a humble thing that European farmers would have used to carry grain to the mills. Rather than writing their name on a bag, they used a color and pattern.”
Samples of the rugs are being made, and Joyce expects to see hers in a month or so. After their debut at the furniture market, the rugs will be sold in a variety of sizes at Selke’s Dash & Albert e-tailer.
“It’s a classic, that’s the beauty of the stripe and the simplicity of the rug. Simple patterns lend themselves well to work with an elegant high-end style, and it’s wonderful with something casual, too,” she said of her rug. “I could see this on the back porch with a pine table on it. If you have an elegant dining table and fine French chairs, it would work well there, too.”
While Joyce was born in Oklahoma, her family moved a lot when she was a child because her father worked for an oil company. They landed in Houston when she was 15.
She and Kevin Joyce, her husband of 34 years, have two daughters, Elise, 24 and Evangeline, 21.
As much Joyce loves city life, she said that weekends at their 30-acre Cedar Hill Farm — also decorated in farmhouse French style — are a respite.
Joyce said that while she’s always loved interior design, it didn’t become a career for her immediately. Out of college, she worked as an industrial engineer in a variety of settings, including a paper mill, oil field equipment manufacturing and hospitals.
When Elise was born, life changed. The Joyces’ daughter has Down syndrome and was born with health problems that required heart surgery.
“Someone once said that everyone has a plan till they’re punched in the face. I’d been punched in the face,” she said. Joyce quit her job to put everything into caring for her daughters, and she stopped taking care of herself.
“I hit a low point, then I started doing creative things again. I started a photography business — it was a way to pay for professional equipment — and I realized how much I loved being creative again,” she said.
She tapped into all things French after going to an auction of French antiques and buying a huge armoire.
“It just kind of sparked my interest in who owned this before, what were their lives like? I love history and European history, and I became fascinated with this armoire and its life,” Joyce said.