A little red flower I found right outside my door. It must have blown away from the planters outside my neighbours kitchen window. I put it in a small vintage vase. It makes me smile.
Little red flower
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Little things
Posted in General living and fun stuff, Share your house with us
Tagged Decorating, easy, Flower, simple, small, Tips, vintage
Bedding
One fourth or one-third of our lives is spent in bed. That is more than at work. Yet so many people neglect the bedroom or bed when decorating their homes. Usually the bedroom consists of a double bed, a linen closet or wardrobe, maybe a chair, two night stands and a picture of the kids on the wall. The bed usually made up with a regular duvet with cover, two matching pillows, an occasional extra set of pillows with covers in a matching tone, and if the room has no double glazing, an extra blanket or spread. A small TV sits somewhere near the end of the bed or is mounted on the wall. Nothing fancy, but practical. Yet with the right touch and a bit of work the bedroom can be turned into a private sanctuary. The Americans have known this a long time. An abundance of shams, euro pillows, throws, bed skirts, duvets and quilts can can be found in even the cheapest home decorating shop. Target for instance sells amazing quality bed linen for very little.
Target's collection
On a recent trip to the US, I got inspired by the US way of making beds. We ourselves have a great bed, a Hästens. But the blue and white checked pattern is a bit overbearing. As ours is a relatively high bed, I thought of buying a bed skirt. A bed skirt is, like the name suggests, basically a skirt for your bed.
Bedskirt
This would hide the bald pattern and would also hide the fact that we city dwellers tend to store stuff under our beds. In our case, the spare mattress for guests is tucked underneath, but can be seen from the hallway walking to the room. I was well pleased with my clever idea and started my quest for the ultimate bedskirt. Here they often call it a bed volant. In the US, a good bed seems to begin with the right bedskirt, or dust ruffles as they are called there. They come pleaded, neat, in all colours imaginable and cost from practically nothing to a small fortune. If I had known such a clever product would be so hard to come by here in Europe, I would’ve stocked up in the US.
H&M bedskirt
The H&M home collection features one. And for a great price starting at €29.95 It is pretty much exactly what I had in mind, yet the it comes in the wrong sizes. Our bed measures 1.80m by 2.10m, and H&M’s only comes in 2.00m. But I figured if H&M sells it, it might be a Swedish thing in general so I checked out Ikea. They sell a more ruffled bed volant for a sweet €9,95. It fits a 1.80m by 2.10 bed, but is a few centimeters short with 40cm whereas our bed stand 55cm from the ground.
Ikea's TIDLÖSA bedvolant
I might be able to fix this by covering the top of the box spring with white sheets and then strapping the bed volant around it slightly lower. But it might look as if our bed is dressed like the back-up singers from Wham. As we don’t really have a store like Target or the wonderful Bed Bath and Beyond, (I smell a golden franchise opportunity!) I tried the few smaller bed stores around our neighbourhood. Again I was disappointed because the few bedskirt sold were either too small, ugly or so ridiculously priced that it would be cheaper to fly out to the US and buy a few myself. To cut a story short, I have yet to find the right bedskirt. Hastens themselves do sell them but they come in the same checked pattern I am so desperately trying to cover up. Besides, they don’t list the prices on the website which is never a good sign, but when they are on offer on any web-based second-hand store they are often refered to being bought for prices well in the 100′s.
Queen Beige Fitted Bed Ruffle from Sanrich Inc through Homevoyeur webshop
As most US web shops don’t ship to non US addresses yet, shopping online can be tedious. There are many stores and shops online that sell amazing bed linen and bedding which are great for inspiration though. If you have a sewing machine you can maybe even make your own bed skirts or other bedroom accessories.
However, Amazon, who ship to pretty much all over the globe, started selling home furnishings and bedding not too long ago and stocked up on great collections like Ralph Lauren’s but also more affordable lines. These can be bought trough my own webshop too, as I do not only sell books there. I myself will go ahead and order the perfect bed skirt, bed volant or Dust ruffle right there. The one in the picture here comes at a kind $17.97 before shipping. You can find it here.
For great tips and inspiration on how to decorate your own bed or bedroom, check out these and other books from my webshop.
Bed Linens (Chic Simple Components): Head to Toe, by Kathryn Livingston
And So to Bed: Style in the Bedroom, by Joanna Copestick
A few examples of bedding sold through my webshop
Bed in a bag 7 piece set
Nautica Boston Full/Queen Comforter
Posted in General living and fun stuff
Tagged bed in a bag, bed skirts, bed volants, bedrok, bedroom, beds, Decorating, hastens, inrichttips, slaapkamer, styling tips, webshop
Choose paint colours online with pictures of your own room
In a DIY store or paint shop, colours look so different from when you actually put them on your wall. Also, that hint of egg shell tint that looks almost to faint to notice in the shop can make your bedroom look like a giant Easteregg when all walls are painted. Another mistake often made is that relatively dark colours can make rooms look smaller. The contrary is more true; colours that are to pale and lack any contrast make a room look not only smaller, but also darker. Shadows appear much more grey and grim on light colours such as yellow and white than on dark ones like red and darker blue. Especally in darker rooms. Don’t be afraid to paint north facing rooms in darker colours. It will likely add more warmth and depth to your room than a lighter shade will. Currently all our walls downstairs are white. We still don’t know what colour to paint them, but some of the walls will get a contrasting lick of paint.
Online there are several websites to help you choose the right colour for your own home. Many of them offer tools that allow you to ‘paint’ walls online to check the effect of certain colours. Most of these make use of stock photography of rooms in a variety of styles. An example is the Sherwin-Williams visualizer. Below a picture I used from their, limited, options.
Courtesy of Sherwin-Williams
They do have an ample palette of colours available to choose from, but all rooms look more or less the same to start with. What I really like about this site is that the fields to paint are clear and lines and borders are recognized by the tool.
A Dutch initiative is Kleurinspiratie.nl Here you can upload your own photographs so you can see what works and what doesn’t in your own interior. By dragging and dropping paint in a bucket to your wall, the tool fills fields with the colour of your choice. Shadow casts and electricity cords work as borders so it takes a while to ‘paint’ entire walls. Also, somehow the tool does not recognize paintings or other decorative ornaments such as lamp shades as it tends to paint those on the way too. There’s an eraser function to get rid of excess paint.
I had a lot of fun ‘painting’ the wall in my stairway, my bedroom, loo, kitchen and living room. The last one is pictured below.
Left is actually the painted wall
As you can see drawing a straight line is a bit hard, but it does give an amazing impression of what it would actually look like. I really like the colour actually. As you can see it does not make the room darker at all, despite it being a pretty hefty dark colour. We were thinking of using this colour in our bedroom but it doesn’t look good there at all!
Check the site here and give it a go yourself. All paint colours used are widely available and are part of the collections of some of the biggest interior magazines in the Netherlands.
Other, mainly American equivalents are to be found here, here and here. All work with stock photographs of standard rooms per theme. The last one charges a small fee to upload your own photograph.
See how I live, check my own home
Many of you were asking when I was going to put up pictures of my own home. I was planning to do so for a while but just wanted to get a new camera first in order to make good pictures. Camera phones are fun, but Blackberry is not too great with pixels.
But here you go. yesterday a brand new digital pocket camera was delivered to my doorstep. (after I ordered it I should add) Today the weather is a bit grim, but with a few lights on here and there I think the result is pretty good.
Let’s start with telling a bit about the house. It’s two top floors, the 2nd (or 3rd in the US) and 3rd, on top of a city monument in the heart of Amsterdam. This means a bit of a climb but once upstairs it’s worth it. The apartment is light, roomy and has many nice features such as panelled doors, doorknobs inspired by French train doors and a solid hard wood floor. All in all it measures approximately 140m2 which is 1500 square feet give or take.
Hall, toilet, middle bit of the living room
The three frames contain old record sleeves. I found the small tea table on Marktplaats
On the main floor of the apartment, which is the 2nd floor of the building, there are a hall, toilet, living room and kitchen. It has a large and deep, albeit narrow-ish, l-shaped living room from the front to the rear with big windows on both ends. The windows in the back are new, and don’t really fit the house as much as we would like to. This is why we hope to renovate them and put a small balcony there too.
Sitting room and dining room
The red sofa is Ikea. The love seat we bought on sale in a huge department store. We ended up renting a van to move it which made the sale price a little less amazing. The blue and white rug on the love seat is from Tunisia. We bought it when we were visiting my brother who lives there. The two chandeliers above the table are from Ikea as mentioned in an earlier post.
As the view to the back is very nice with big gardens below and a massive tree in the back, we decided to put the dining table in the back and the sitting room in the front. Also, the kitchen is in the back so it makes sense to have the table there too. I sit there as I write this and through the kitchen window it looks as if I am in the woods instead of the city. The tram down the street gives away the true location though. To the front, the view is less appealing. We look onto a very grim and dull 1960′s office building. They are planning to demolish it though. Hopefully they’ll replace it with something more in feel with the area.
Kitchen, dining room, book shelves and art!
The Tabasco pictures are actually three photographs printed on canvas. A friend of ours is a stills and commercial photographer and gave this to us when we moved in. The kitchen was brand new when we bought the house. So was everything really. We didn’t have to do anything but move in. I love the extraction hood with the clutter on it. The kitchen has many stainless steel details which is nice enough but tends to look rather cold. This way it makes it more cosy.
Upstairs are three modest sized bedrooms, one with walk in closet (too small for the wow factor). Furthermore there are a bathroom, a storage for washer/dryer and stairs to the roof-light with access to the roof. We are not allowed to create a roof terrace there unfortunately. The council does not allow any alterations to sloped roof constructions on city monuments.
We fell in love with the bathroom
The bathroom is amazing. We didn’t do it ourselves, everything was done by a contractor hired by the guy who sold the house. He shares the same taste though as we love it. It was done in dark grey slate tiles and crispy white porcelain for the sinks. The tabs are all modern. To break the sterility of it a bit we put up a very baroque mirror. If anyone can give me tips on how to remove calcium stains I would appreciate it!
Master bedroom
We found the white little chest of drawers by the trash one night. We changed the original knobs with porcelain ones we got for our wedding.
One of the original features in our bedroom is the pulley with wooden beam many houses in Amsterdam have.
We use one of the other two bedrooms as study/office. I am supposed to run my business from there but prefer working downstairs. The other bedroom is in use as dressing room and guestroom. I now realize I don’t have pictures of that room. On the compilation below, the picture with the antlers above the portrait of our Queen’s great grandfather is taken in the study.
Picture frames in the stairway, vew from sitting room to dining area, liqour cabinet and more picture frames in the kitchen
The brown cabinet with the black lamp on it was bought at Emmaus, a flee market in my hometown Haarzuilens. I bought it as partition when I moved into my first flat which was a studio flat. It let the light shine through both ends of the room, yet provided for a separate sleeping area. Now it’s used as liquor cabinet. Along the stairs we put up many picture frames and artifacts. We both used to travel extensively for work and when flying business with KLM you get a Delft Blue porcelain house. Most of them are not mine to be fair.
There you have it, my home. I am very curious to hear what you guys think. Please let me know. And don’t forget to share pictures of your own homes!
