The paint and the trim came first

gabrion2 settled the paint and the trim before anything else, and let the rest fill in around them. The green is Westhaven by Sherwin-Williams, in the Emerald line with a satin finish, and it covers the walls, the trim and the ceiling. The trim is mostly Ekena Millwork, ordered through Amazon: a pressed cornice at the ceiling and panelling below the dado. The pictures hang on kits from a gold U channel screwed up under the cornice.

Two desks meet in the corner and he built both. The tops are acacia butcher block from Lowe's under an espresso stain, oiled with something citrus, which is what the room smells of. The main desk is 39 by 72 inches on legs left over from a sit-stand desk that had a poor top, so it still rises to standing height. The side desk is 25 by 96 inches, and HOOBRO three tier bookshelves carry it instead of legs, stacked with old books. A brass lamp leans over an open book on a stand at that end.

A 48 inch LG C4 OLED is the main screen, with a Samsung 34 inch ultrawide stood on its end beside it. Both carry the same thing, a scan of an old map of the world he found looking through historical maps, at a resolution high enough to fill them. A Sonos Ray sits under the LG. The machine is a OneXPlayer X1 Pro handheld, 64GB and 4TB, and a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti runs beside it in an Aoostar AG02 over Oculink. The webcam is an OBSBOT Meet 2 on an arm clamped to the desk, so it flips down for a call and away after: above the screen and below it were both worse.

Raphael's School of Athens hangs on the left wall, and a print of the Disputa faces it from the opposite wall, as the two frescoes face each other in the Vatican. The four gilt portraits over the desk are his family, made with him and his daughter from photographs: the youngest with his bulldog, the eldest as a knight, his wife with her turkeys, and his daughter with the pony that died, now a unicorn in heaven with her cat riding on its back. A globe and a brass balance stand on the shelf above, and there is an astrolabe elsewhere in the room.