This Designer Showed Her Contractor ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ to Describe Her Bathroom Inspo

Ironically, blue is not Rachael Petach’s favorite color (it’s mustard yellow). But when it came to decorating the Hudson Valley, New York, tasting room for her black-currant liqueur, C. Cassis, she couldn’t think of a better shade. “Blue feels like it connects to the calming sense of the beverage itself,” she says. “Also, black currants are a phenomenal natural dye, and when they develop, they turn into this really perfect, kind of soft middle blue, the color of our label.” 

The hue appears almost everywhere: in paint (it’s Behr’s Sojourn Blue), in grout, and in the square bathroom tile. To balance out all the indigo, Petach, who designed the space with her graphic designer husband, went for natural elements, like Bedrosians’s terracotta tile on the bar front, and nestled below the counter, three custom stools by Jack Rabbit Studio’s Brett Miller, who shaped the seats to resemble C. Cassis’s logo. “If you’re only going to do three stools, they better be special,” Petach says with a laugh.

But in the bathroom, which Petach wanted to look like it was “dipped in tile,” the idea of a pure blue world really comes to life. The Design and Direct Source square pieces wrap around the preexisting porcelain sink, a countertop, and even most of the walls. “My reference was My Neighbor Totoro,” she says of the ’80s anime film by Studio Ghibli. “I literally showed my contractor a still from the family house that has a sink wrapped in tile.” And when the tasting room officially opens this weekend (and will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am to 6 pm at 108 Salisbury Tpk in Rhinebeck), guests will be able to see it for themselves when they take a seat at the bar and feel, well, the opposite of blue.