The Secret to Mixing Pattern, Colour, Old and New

FORMAL BUT but whimsical, the dining room in Chris Barnes and Maisha Closson’s home in Los Angeles’s West Adams neighbourhood bursts with wildly disparate design references. How did local designer Dee Murphy, founder of Murphy Deesign, convince a wavy-fronted mahogany buffet to coexist with chairs as rigidly linear as Pierre Jeanneret’s 1950s designs; a live-edge dining table with an antique Turkish oushak rug? Shouldn’t the mix be as jarring as it sounds? Expert layering, said Ms. Murphy, comes of pairing hues, materials and shapes, not periods. “Anything that has history and has stood the test of time, those pieces you can always use no matter what,” she said.

The aesthetic glue that unifies the dining room’s seemingly random components begins with the choice of William Morris’s Strawberry Thief wallpaper. The Arts and Crafts pattern, from 1883, features rhythmic flourishes of flora and fauna in enthusiastic colours. Its rich blues and luscious pops of berry red led Ms. Murphy to choose pieces with companionable hues and forms. “When I look at this room, what’s really tying it in and calming it down is the paint, wallpaper, window treatments and rug. Those were the base pieces, the starting off points.”

Here, the other decisions that helped this obstreperous collection of elements cohere.

Botanical Engineering

Ms. Murphy admits she would normally set the finely detailed Indian chests against a less hectic, larger-scale wallpaper pattern. “But there was something about these chests and the black-and-white nature that felt neutral enough with a paper that’s just as busy,” she said. The camel-bone inlay, which depicts flat-petaled blossoms and spirals of climbing plants, also helps the little dressers jibe with the wall covering. Just as you can use a consistent palette to make a motley assortment of elements feel familial, she said, “you can use consistent themes to tie pieces in.” Scalloped-edge sconces from Nickey Kehoe allude to the red berries in the print, and the painting’s lyrical arches and colour palette similarly reinforce the motifs of the paper.

Dissonance and Harmony

The brass base of the walnut-wood dining table has been fashioned into a butterfly, or wishbone, shape. “It’s about a contrast, right? And a tension,” explained the designer. “The table slab has a more masculine feel because it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood. Then, you have the curves of the legs supporting it, and that’s more feminine.” An industrial or hefty base would have been much more predictable and created a cluster of angled legs. The modernist chairs and boho mirrors, meanwhile, respectively masculine and feminine, resolve their tension via matching organic materials: cane and wicker. “It’s very subtle, but it’s something that a discerning eye can pick out,” said Ms. Murphy. “There’s a reason why it feels fluid.”

Curve Balls and Line Drives

Interior designer Dee Murphy carefully weighed the formal qualities of the furnishings she included in the dining room of this home in the West Adams neighbourhood of Los Angeles. “Most rooms are square or rectangular, so you want to offset that and put some beautiful, curvy movement into the room,” she said. The undulating wallpaper pattern, the bow-front Federal-style sideboard, the looping wicker mirror frames, all contribute roundness. At the same time, angles and lines are needed to create dissonance. The sharply edged chairs were an inspired addition to the heart of the dining room, as was the slender, horizontal contemporary chandelier. Of her decision to hang a series of three petite mirrors from France she explained that repeating a single object allows you to make a statement but stops short of being garish. “If I had tried to add in a vintage, French, gilt gold mirror, that would have taken that moment a little too over the top.”

As a competitive rower in my long-ago prime I sometimes used a racing strategy called fly and die. Sprinting to an early lead often yielded a fast overall time, even if I couldn’t hold my torrid pace through the finish line.

Some professionals take a similar approach to their desk jobs, starting their workdays with a 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift. They are up before the sun—and, more important, before their co-workers—to get a jump on the workday and impress the boss.

Nothing screams go-getter like a predawn email! Getting stuff done early allows them to clock out midafternoon and still look like stars, even if their routines require Ben Franklin-esque sleep schedules and vats of caffeine.

Melissa O’Blenis rises by 4:30 a.m. for prayer and Peloton time before starting her job at the digital consulting firm Argano.

“I just love checking things off my list,” she says. “I need that focus time away from Teams messages, email notifications and text alerts.”

A mother with two sets of twins, O’Blenis, 48, often breaks for her kids’ afternoon sports without feeling guilty or judged. Colleagues jokingly call her Granny because her 9 p.m. bedtime makes the early starts possible. But Granny got the last laugh when she was promoted to a director-level role in March.

More than 90% of knowledge workers want to flex their hours, according to surveys by Slack’s Future Forum . In the pandemic many of us got in the habit of handling personal commitments during standard business hours, then catching up on work tasks later .

Now that the office battle is largely over, fighting a return to rigid, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedules might be workers’ last stand. But managers complain about afternoon dead zones when employees are out of pocket.

The solution for more workers is starting sooner instead of finishing later. Workflow software maker Asana reports that 21.4% of users are logging on between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. this year, up from 19.8% in 2021. About 12% of work tasks are completed before 9 a.m., the company says, compared with 10% before the pandemic.

Early-bird bosses

Gibran Washington and his basketball teammates at Hofstra University used to run at 6 a.m. He maintained his early wakeups while climbing the ranks in food-and-beverage management.

By 9 a.m. meetings, he had already exercised, meditated and put in a couple of hours of work.

“I always found myself more prepared than my colleagues who hadn’t had their first cup of coffee yet,” says Washington, 40, who doesn’t drink coffee. Now he is chief executive of Ethos Cannabis, a chain of 12 dispensaries in three states, and rises as early as ever.

Waking and working ahead of the pack is a common CEO habit, from Apple ’s Tim Cook to General Motors ’ Mary Barra . Even if your ambitions are less grand than the corner office, starting early could help you stand out for one simple reason: The boss is probably up, too, and taking notice.

Matt Kiger says being the first one into the office helped him catch his manager’s eye and advance after changing careers from education to media sales. He would set his alarm for 5 a.m., hop a train from Connecticut to New York and be at his workstation before 7.

“I thought, ‘What is it going to take to break through?’” he recalls. “‘It’s going to take being there when my boss comes in, already at my desk making phone calls.’”

Now a senior vice president for digital sales at Townsquare Media , Kiger, 47, says much of the daily communication among company leaders happens by text and phone from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. It’s possible to succeed as a night owl, he says, but people who sleep in risk missing a window when many executives are awake and accessible. While some working parents can’t swing early-morning meetings, others like Kiger say they are the key to being present at kids’ after-school activities.

Getting the worm

Matt Sunshine—whose surname surely predestined him to be a morning person—wakes at 5:30 a.m. to read the news. Then he cycles or takes a Pilates class and is on his computer by 7.

Sunshine is CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy in Tampa, Fla., which helps healthcare, media and professional-services companies generate leads. He doesn’t expect his 55 employees to follow his schedule but says it becomes progressively harder to get his attention as the day goes on and his calendar fills up with meetings. He also tries to log off by 5:30 p.m. for family time, so working after hours won’t necessarily make an impression.

“If you want to get my attention, a good time to get me is first thing in the morning,” Sunshine, 55, says. “Because people know I’m an early riser, I think that does influence other people to do the same.”

Elvi Caperonis’s morning routine is next-level organised. Her alarm rings at 6 a.m. She goes for a run at 6:30. At 7 she showers and eats breakfast. At 7:30 she opens her laptop and sets a timer for 25 minutes. That’s her first block to focus on the most important task of the day before a five-minute break. She repeats the on-off work pattern throughout the day.

Caperonis, a technical program manager at Amazon , makes a daily to-do list with nine items. She rates one critical, three medium-level and five lower-priority. This helps her work efficiently and in the right order.

The 41-year-old works from home in Florida and often picks her daughter up from school at 2:30 p.m., freedoms she has preserved partly by being highly productive early in the day, she says. Much of her job involves identifying potential risks to a project’s success, and when she sends an early-morning alert it arrives really early for company leaders in the Pacific time zone.

“They appreciate having that information first thing when they open their email,” she says. “In my experience, leaders are also early birds.”