AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 12

THE BLACK FAMILY HOME
The Blue Room: Designing a Space for Reading,
Reflecting and Being in the AphroFarmhouse
Every room in a home should be designed with life in mind. Not just the nuts and bolts, but the
feel. For us, the point of designing a home is to feel at home in every room, at any time. And while some
rooms will always be more functional than comfortable, every home should make space for finding
the peace you need, doing the things you love, and ultimately, just being.
To give us that feel at the AphroFarmhouse, every room is also a story-telling space. They
have been designed as an expression of our story together, a gathering of a lifetime of moments —
places we’ve lived, traveled to, passed by — any place where we’ve just been together. The Blue Room,
our home library, is a collection of 27 years of moments. It’s also a reflection of one of Bryan’s most
enduring loves — books. More than anything else, the Blue Room is a space for literature, classics,
tomes that edify, and the conversations that follow.
The goal for the Blue Room was to create a space that we could lounge in all day long, surrounded
by our favorite books. We’ve been building our collection for almost as long as we’ve been together.
Left over from classes, scrounged from flea markets and gathered from every book store we can find.
And while more than one of our favorites has been worn out, loaned out, or simply lost along the way,
we were delighted to find that the collection we have now — comprised mainly of books by authors of
the African Diaspora — is enough to fill a room. Even better, it now has room to grow.
The Blue Room is where we go to study the philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr., admire the
prose of W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, dig into the rhythmic poetry of Nikki Giovani, marvel at
the insight and honesty of James Baldwin, or spend a day wrestling with the first printing of Richard
Wright’s Black Power, the oldest book in our collection. It’s where we go to understand what’s been
done and figure out what to do next.
We always knew we wanted a library, if we could find the space. The first room we saw in the
AphroFarmhouse was perfect, but getting it to be what we imagined was going to be a journey. The
layout of the room then left something to be desired. At that moment, the space was a largely empty
The Black Family Home is an
ongoing series focusing on the
history and future of what home
means for Black families.
This series inspired the new book
AphroChic: Celebrating the Legacy
of the Black Family Home.
Words by Jeanine Hays
Photos by Patrick Cline and Bryan Mason
Inchyra Blue paint by Farrow & Ball
$120, selection of art books from
Rizzoli and Taschen.
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