Tropical Hideaway
On building a room that finally looks like you — all the way through.
The paint is called Tropical Hideaway.
I want to be honest about that. I spent weeks debating the color — hunter green, sage, charcoal slate blue, deep teal. I consulted the room, the furniture, the sightlines, the coastal palette of the rest of the house. I thought carefully about what the room needed to be and how the color would serve that intention. I drove to Lowe’s, stood in front of the Valspar wall, and landed on a chip that was exactly right.
It’s called Tropical Hideaway.
I’ve made peace with that.
The room is a pass-through. That matters architecturally and it matters for the story. There are no doors to close, no way to seal it off from the rest of the house. It opens at both ends and has a window into the kitchen. Whatever goes on those walls has to live with everything visible from them — the seafoam kitchen, the sandy tan hallway, the dark sky blue accent wall in the dining room. The room can’t declare itself a separate world. It has to belong.
The rest of the house is coastal. Not kitschy beach house — something more considered than that, more deliberate. Blue and sandy tan. Seafoam. The palette of a Florida home that takes itself seriously without trying too hard. I’ve been building toward that aesthetic for years.
And in the middle of all of it, for longer than I’d like to admit, there was a red and brown recliner.
It was my mother’s chair. That’s the whole origin story. It arrived the way inherited things arrive — without ceremony, without a conversation, already occupying the space where something else might have gone. It lived in my living room for years. Red, in a house of blues and sandy tans and seafoam. I considered reupholstering it more than once. I never did. The chair was fine. It held a person in a seated position without complaint. It just wasn’t mine, and it didn’t belong to the house I was building.
In February I moved it to the study. A temporary measure while I figured out what I actually wanted in there. The study had been an unused room — broken inversion table, boxes of empty picture frames, the particular accumulation that happens when life moves fast and some things just land wherever they land and stay there. I’d been clearing it slowly, uncovering the built-in shelving that came with the house, building toward something I could feel but hadn’t fully named yet.
Mom’s recliner held the corner while I figured it out.
As chance would have it, my mother needed it back. She’d made an offhand comment about wanting somewhere to sit when my father has the television. The chair that never quite fit anywhere in my house turns out to be exactly what she needs in hers. It’s going home. That’s the right ending for it — not a replacement, not a disposal, just a thing returning to where it belongs so something else can finally take its place.
The replacement is a brown oil wax leather push-back recliner — the Red Barrel Studio Ikraam Chance, parawood frame, channel tufting, walnut arms. I knew where it was going before it arrived. That’s how the right things work. You don’t buy them and find a place for them. You know the place first.
It landed the way I expected. The walnut arms against the honey maple shelving. The dark brown leather in the corner with Tropical Hideaway behind it. The channel tufting — structured but not stiff, considered but not precious. I sat in it for the first time and looked at the room and thought: there it is. That’s the sentence, finished.
To the right, the turntable and vintage receiver and the records I’ve been accumulating for longer than this publication has existed. To the left, the side table with whatever I’m reading and whatever I’m drinking. On the wall beside the door, framed in black: three black belt certificates and the trophies and medals from various 2019 tournaments. The year I won the state title in sparring, forms, combat weapons. They are going to sit nicely next to the 2026 titles from this season. Biography on a wall. Across the room, the French doors to the pool, the bronze ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.
On the rug, unbothered by all of it: Scooby. He’d claimed that spot before the paint dried and hasn’t reconsidered since. Some decisions make themselves.
I want to say something about what it means to finally finish a room.
I collect mechanical watches because they are built to last and meant to be carried forward — serviced, not replaced. I collect vinyl because it resists the convenience of disappearing into a subscription. I collect fountain pens because choosing how to write is its own kind of statement. None of these things were accidents. All of them were decisions, made one at a time, building toward something I could feel before I could name it.
The room works the same way. The shelving was here when I bought the house in 2017, left behind by a woman I never met, a grandmother who moved into assisted living and left her built-ins for whoever came next. The books arrived over forty-something years. The records came slowly and then all at once. The memorabilia — the Emmitt Smith cards, the framed photographs, the baseball, the beer stein — all of it was already mine. It just needed somewhere to sit down.
The red recliner was the last thing I was still borrowing from someone else’s life. It’s gone now. Everything in the room is chosen.
The workbench wall came last. That’s where I open watches — green felt mat, loupe, strap tools, the particular quiet of a Saturday evening with nowhere to be and something worth paying attention to. The new mat arrived recently: green leather, larger than the old felt, the Bezels & Bourbon logo pressed into the surface along with the tagline. It fills the frame the way it’s supposed to. It looks like it was always going to be there.
The cigar humidor lives on that bench too. The room holds everything — watches, records, books, bourbon, cigars, forty-something years of a life that finally has the right place to put it all in the same room at the same time.
The knife display cases are still coming. Two wall-mounted boxes, walnut finish, glass fronts, black interior lining — going up on the fourth wall when they arrive. The Damascus blades will look the way they’re supposed to look behind glass, against Tropical Hideaway, in a room that finally knows what it is. That wall will finish itself when it’s ready.
Everything else is already in its place.
The paint is called Tropical Hideaway and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The name is slightly absurd for a room I spent weeks designing with intention. It’s also, if I’m being honest, exactly right — a Florida man building a considered retreat inside a coastal house, landing on a color that bridges seafoam and deep water and warm wood grain and aged leather, and discovering that the name on the chip was Tropical Hideaway all along.
Some things just name themselves.
The room didn’t start anything. The Emmitt Smith rookie card was 1990. The books in the childhood cabinet go back further than I can clearly remember. The construction career that taught me what craft actually costs — twenty-four years of that. The taekwondo certificates on the wall represent twelve years and a third-degree black belt and a state championship and two instructors I’d follow anywhere.
The room is just where all of it finally had somewhere to sit down.
Scooby already knew that. He picked the spot before I finished painting.
-Jaime