{My Houzz Articles} Multi-Functional Furniture

I like to choose pieces of furniture for my home that can work in a variety of ways. For example – a stool can be used for seating or as a small stand for a plant. In my lastest artice on Houzz i look at 5 furniture pieces that i call magical multi-taskers! They are furniture pieces that i love to have around my home, because they get used so often and in so many ways. Click the image below to get the full story –

Click on the image to read the full article on Houzz Australia

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{Girl Crush} Janelle from @awhitestyle

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

It’s been a while since my last girl crush, so i thought i would share one of my current favourites from Instagram – Janelle from @awhitestyle. I have been following Janelle for a while and i must say that i really LOVE her style. She shares pictures of her daily life everyday on Instagram.

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

I love Janelle’s style simply because it feels so effortless. There’s no overstyling or obsessing about perfectly placed cups – well, at least it doesn’t appear that way. All of her images feel like real, unedited snapshots of her life…..and it’s a beautiful life!

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

She recently shared 20 facts about herself on IG which confirmed why i love her feed so much. She’s a real person! yay! You gotta love authenticity. She loves to knit, crochet, DIY, bake and craft. She’s a cat lover, coffee lover and WINE lover.

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

Janelle shares the most divine images of her cooking creations on IG and shares her recipies happily on her blog – www.awhitefarm.blogspot.com.au And while i kinda hate cooking, i do love eating and her bakes looking particularly inticing. I’m almost inspired to take up baking.

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

Baxter and Lolly the cats star pretty heavily in her Janelle’s feed. They are seriously living the dream! Lolly in particular is Janelle’s little furry shadow. So adorable.

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

I highly recommend a visit to Janelle’s blog and her IG feed. You won’t regret it. Thanks Janelle, for being my girl crush. xx

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

Image Credit – Janelle from @awhitestyle

 

Bedroom Room Reveal: One Day Makeover

I love a good room makeover, especially one that doesn’t cost the earth and has maximum impact. The Block room reveals have sadly been postponed until tomorrow night, due to the cricket, so i thought i’d try and fill the void with my own room reveal. When we moved into our new home in January of last year, we couldn’t afford a proper headboard for our room. I was happy to hang our New York City print from IKEA over our bed as a temporary option as it looked fab. I was so pleased with it in fact, that I haven’t really looked for anything to replace it, until now.While the NYC print looked great, it was pretty impractical as it provided no support while reading or crocheting in bed. Still, I didn’t feel moved to replace it until I saw the perfect headboard at one of my local furniture and homewares shops. SOLD! Hubby and I strapped it to the top of our prado and carefully drove it home. We only had to stop three times to adjust the ropes – clearly we aren’t brilliant at tying knots!! 🙂 I bought a few bits and pieces to help tie the room together, but most of the items I already had on hand. Shopping at home is the best!! Overall, I’m pretty stoked with how the room has evolved. Hubby said it’s not the manliest bedroom, but I did I include a couple of skulls to keep him happy. 🙂

Love Show Cushion by Kezz Brett from Jumbled

Gold Mirror from Freedom Furniture

Marble cross – Freedom Furniture

Striped rectangular cushion from Big W

Framed card by Ali McNabney-Stevens

Gold Heart Cushion – hand stencilled and sewn by me.

So, what do you think? I love it. 🙂

{My Houzz Articles} Tips for Monotone Spaces

Check out my article on Houzz Australia, for my top tips on making monotone interiors beautiful and interesting. Just click on the image below. 

Christmas Styling – a natural table setting

This is what Christmas will look like at my house this year. I am moving away from the bright and garish decorating that is usually associated with Christmas and creating a theme that is more in keeping with our contemporary home. I am adopting a little nordic style and blending it with a bit of Australia. There will be lots of white, minimal decorations and focus on Christmas shapes, rather than colour. I LOVE that Christmas is a time when we can unapologetically decorate in excess, often in bad taste, but for our neutral coloured living, kitchen and dining, I wanted clean and simple decor. Don’t worry, I’ll be flooding my rumpus room with loud and glitzy decorations, all in the traditional red and green combo. A minimal and simple style of decorating style doesn’t necessarily mean boring. My Christmas table setting, while focusing on neutrals, maintains plenty of interest with the varying shapes and textures. The rustic hessian table runner provides some relief from the abundance of white and ties in nicely with our country setting. Using sticks from your backyard, antlers and blooms are a great way to bring nature indoors, especially if it’s hot outside. Including items from nature helps create a relaxing and down to earth vibe, as we often feel more at peace in natural settings. The large white wooden star works well as a centre piece and makes the table look a little more Christmassy, as do the white deer ornaments. And do those antlers belong to Rudolph, shed after last Christmas perhaps? All I need now is some matching Bon Bons to complete the table. So, what do you think of my neutral Christmas table setting? I love it!

How to create great gallery walls

 

A large central print with smaller items hung at the side.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to creating gallery walls, but I find a few gentle guidelines can make the difference between an ordinary gallery wall and an extraordinary one. I don’t like too many rules, especially for interiors because it make a home seem contrived and a bit cold, but I think these tips are helpful for anyone who isn’t confident enough to let loose! Here are my three main tips and some images of my own gallery walls –

Gold frames help to tie this gallery wall together

Tip #1 – Unity :  I like to have an element that ties all the pieces together whether it be colour, subject,  frame or shape etc. For example, a cluster of unique frames work well when they are all the same colour. In the parlour at the guesthouse I’ve used all gold frames to tie everything together. And below, our family portraits are in a variety frames,  but the tones and colours in the photographs are similar which makes the cluster work.

Family portraits in similar colours and tones

Tip #2 – Organise by size : if you have items of varying sizes it’s best to have the larger items towards the centre with smaller frames or pictures tapering off at the edges. This rule doesn’t always apply,  but it is definitely easier to achieve balance if you arrange your items this way. In the gold bedroom at RedAgape Guesthouse I’ve hung a large oil painting over the bed, in the centre of the wall, with smaller frames and items around this central painting.

The Gold Bedroom at RedAgape Guesthouse – layered with lamps, books and pictures

A large central framed oil painting with smaller frames tapering off around the edges.

Tip #3 – Balance : A poorly composed gallery wall will look and feel awkward. There are a couple of ways to achieve balance – symmetrically or asymmetrically. Try to arrange your items on the floor until they feel right or alternatively, use cardboard or paper to represents your items and blue tac them to the wall. If you are unsure, check out my Pinterest board on gallery walls for layouts that you can reproduce.

Symmetrically arranged vintage prints above a bedhead at RedAgape Guesthouse.

Gallery wall in my daughter’s room

I love gallery walls and can’t recommend them enough. They can inject lots of life and personality into a room. So take the plunge and give a gallery wall a go! 🙂

7 Vignettes for August 2014

Craft

Unique

Nurture

Vintage

Collector

Organic

My Week of Vignettes

Layering in Interior Design

Dining Room at RedAgape Guesthouse

When it comes to interior design, layering is all about what we include in a room to make it feel complete. For example – cushions, throws, books, curtains, candles and magazines are all objects we include when we layer our spaces. I believe the most interesting and welcoming rooms are those that have just the right amount of layering.

A bedroom at RedAgape Guesthouse – layered with lamps, books and pictures

Getting that right balance of layers into a room is really important. Too little and a room can appear very cold, clinical and unwelcoming. Or too many layers and a room may feel cluttered and disorganized.

My table at home layered with books and flowers

Ok, so getting the balance right? Firstly, I hate staged rooms. Don’t layer with items that serve no logical use in a space. Don’t sit a lamp on the dining room table if you don’t intend to use it, or coffee table books in the kitchen unless you plan to read them. When layering occurs organically then it’s more likely to look natural. I’ve added lamps to both side tables in this bedroom along with reading material, layered with purpose.

Layered bedroom at RedAgape Guesthouse

Try using different patterns and textures in your layering, but make sure there is a connection between layered objects. The striped throw on this bed adds interest with a contrasting pattern to the florals, but works well because the green stripe ties in with other green elements in the room.

The Parlour at RedAgape Guesthouse

Layering with cushions! Ahh…my favourite type of layering. A lounge with no cushions is so boring and sad. Once again, try mixing patterns and textures. It’s been suggested that you shouldn’t have cushions in the same fabric that match your lounge. While I agree, it’s hard because lounges are often sold with matching cushions. I think the only exception to this rule is when the cushions serve as a structural component of the lounge.

A coffee table at RedAgape Guesthouse

And don’t forget your coffee and dining room tables! Add books, flowers and coasters with different heights and textures. A layered coffee table is a warm and welcoming invitation to come on in, sit down, and make yourself at home.

My Home – dining table styled with candles, antlers and flowers

Styling My Colour Coded Bookcase

Oh man, i love my colour coded bookcase! When we moved house a few months ago my sister-in-law unpacked our books and was more than happy to oblige with my request for a ‘colour coded’ bookcase. With so many beautiful book nerds in our family we have accumulated a decent number of books, so my SIL had plenty to work with. She went beyond what i expected when she organised them by colour and SIZE! Yippee! Since then I have been rearranging and fine tuning. I do have a tendency to be a little OCD about some things. Not everything, but there are certain things where I’m very particular. For example, I need like the cushions on my bed arranged in a certain way. If even one cushion is just slightly out of place, I have to fix it. My bookcase is another one of those things. It’s becoming a bit of an obsession, to the point where I don’t like anyone borrowing the books. My hubby is currently reading one of the ‘white’ books and I’d be lying if I said the gap in the white section isn’t annoying me. It’s getting to the point where I’m considering buying books based on their spine colour. That’s normal, right?
Seriously though, it may be a librarian’s worst nightmare, but colour coding your bookcase is the best way to keep your books looking neat and tidy. Bookcases have the potential to become an eyesore if they aren’t organised. A colour coded bookcase can actually become a feature in your home as well as a practical place to store your books.
My daughter asked me where a particular book was the other day and I responded, “I’m pretty sure it’s in the middle of the reddish/orange section.” And sure enough, it was! Proving that there may be some method in my colour coding madness. 🙂

Styling a Monochrome, Pink and Gold Bedroom

I love monochrome interiors and I’ve using black and white as the base for mine and hubby’s bedroom for a while now. Black and white is easy to work with as long as you vary the tones and textures so it doesn’t look too stark.

Black and white also works well if you have males in the house that don’t really want their bedroom looking too girly. It’s the main reason I use monochrome in the bedroom….BUT, pink is really pretty and over the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to sneak a little into the bedroom. And according to Real Living Magazine this month, I’m on trend! Fancy that, and I didn’t even know. 🙂


I added pink by changing the pillow cases from white to blush, white and charcoal covers from Country Road. Changing your pillowcases is a cheap and easy way to update your bedroom, but I’ll be honest, the idea isn’t my own. I follow The Stylists Splash on Instagram and she is constantly changing the look of her bedroom by updating her pillow cases. Great idea!

The other pink touches in the room were items I found during a quick hunt around the house. A pink candle, some flowers, pencils and soap. Hubby also bought me perfume in a pretty pink bottle for Mother’s Day, which ties in perfectly. He did ask me a few days ago why his side table was looking so girly? But I think I’ve managed to limit the pink to an amount he can live with.

And the best thing about this room is that it was all done on the cheap!! All of the throw cushions, except one, I made myself. I used a cheap print from Ikea as a headboard until we can afford a proper one. The black trunk is from a secondhand shop and all the other bits I already had on hand. The only new items purchased were the Country Road pillowcases.