This Crocodile Rug Was The Ultimate Piece to Natalie Ebel’s Kitchen

What would make a obtain “worth it”? The answer is diverse for everybody, so we’re inquiring some of the coolest, most procuring-savvy folks we know—from tiny-business entrepreneurs to designers, artists, and actors—to tell us the tale driving one particular of their most prized possessions.

Who?

When Natalie Ebel cofounded Backdrop with her spouse Caleb in 2018, she was just searching for an straightforward way to paint her daughter’s nursery. “I wished a pure white, which really should have been a pretty simple challenge, but it was not,” she recollects. “Paint is the most impressive structure invest in, but it did not cater to the Do it yourself purchaser in a way that was truly client-friendly.”

Natalie grew up with portray. It was her interest as a kid, and her father also painted households on the facet. For her, it was normally exciting to see the way a several brushstrokes of a new hue could transform and refresh a space in an reasonably priced way. When generating Backdrop, Natalie and Caleb desired to make this transformation more available to individuals. The need for it became even much more clear when they moved future to a hardware retail store. 

“Repainting is the best design and style transform to make, but ahead of Backdrop, you would go to the retailer 4 periods, search at 300 whites, and continue to would not know what you were being on the lookout at,” she states. “Living next to this components retail outlet, we’d see folks in entrance of a colour wall for hrs. We’’d go to lunch, come again, and they’d however be there. We understood that the business was catering to contractors, not consumers.”

As a enterprise, Backdrop aims to make painting fun—allowing customers to sample colours with 12×12″ adhesive swatches that you can move from wall to wall, providing a correct sense of what the shade would look like in the place. Customers also really like the countless numbers of items of consumer-created material in the website’s gallery, which will help provide inspiration by showcasing Backdrop’s shades in the houses of its buyers. “Showing the paint in all of its varieties, and then also showing it in genuine areas so you can seriously see what it’s like, was genuinely crucial to me when setting up this model,” Natalie suggests.

What and when? 

In 2019, Natalie and her family moved from New York to Los Angeles. At the time, they have been obtaining settled into their new space, an outdated Spanish colonial-design and style house in Silver Lake, and just starting to design just about every area. Natalie experienced made a decision on Supermoon (Backdrop’s pure white coloration) for the partitions in the home, and Darkish Arts (their pure black hue) for the trim in the kitchen and all over the dwelling. Whilst browsing Architectural Digest for inspiration, she came throughout a attribute on Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and fell in enjoy with their Caiman rug. “I love rugs, but I’d never seen rugs as an artwork variety, a little something that felt like a accurate piece of artwork. Their full selection is just so hanging and graphic,” Natalie claims. “I like to connect with [mine] ‘the indignant crocodile.’ It is certainly artwork and a true conversation piece.”