In the mood for Moodboards anyone!

2 months ago I enrolled for an interior design course! Just last week I finished my first proper moodboard for a lounge - and because the brief did not include a budget I just let loose every fantasy I had and put in eye wateringly expensive furniture and furnishings. So I now have a moodboard which I absolutely love but which will probably only ever exist in my imagination.

So in the hope that someone out there would have the ingenuity to maybe create an affordable version of this room scheme I am sharing some of the ideas on my blog.

The inspiration for the design came from Designers Guilds' gorgeous autumn collections. It has a mix of black and white geometrics with liberal doses of luscious pinks.









The room is a fairly standard shape about 5mx4m fireplace on the main 5m wall, window on the wall on the right of the fireplace, radiator on the left and door to the extreme left of the 5m wall opposite the fireplace.

Now the centre piece of the seating plan is this gorgeous rich pink sofa called Marigny by Guilles Nouillhac. This long three seater (2.5 m) is placed along the wall, opposite the fireplace. The wall itself is covered in Leopold, a bold geometric wallpaper in black, white and silver from Designers Guild. The stunning contrast was the starting point of my design scheme.

On the floor is a rug also from Designers Guild called Leopold Schiaparelli. The same fantastic octagonal pattern is reflected here but in grey and beige on a stunning, dusty pink background. An Ottoman covered in a white and black fabric called Barbier again from DG sits on the rug extending the whole theme of monochrome contrasted with pink. Scatter cushions in florals and geometrics create interest on the sofa.



On the left in front of the radiator is a Barcelona Sofa in white leather, essentially a reproduction modelled on the iconic chair and double its length to comfortably seat 2-3 people. On the right by the window is the dramatic wing chair by Squint, in black and white patchwork with a giant angle lamp in brushed steel from Graham and Green overlooking it.

The wall with the fireplace is what you see when you enter the room and befittingly it both pulls the whole design together and also showcases some of its more dramatic features. The chimney breast, covered in Leopold again but in a soft ivory, complements the geometric patterns in the room . It boasts the dramatic Constellation mirror in pewter by Laura Ashley. Flanking the chimney breast on the right is a set of glossy white lacquered shelves called Balance, from Content by Conran, with an intriguing array of accessories and books. On the left is an absolutely stunning chest of drawers in black glass and chrome called Giovanni by Celeste Dell Anna. Above the chest contemporary art reflects the dusty pinks in the room framed in a large vintage frame in dull gold. Tall graceful lamps in black and silver called Fluer, from The French Bedroom Company provide mood lighting both on the chest and on either side of the Marigny sofa.

And finally to finish off the design with a soft floral flourish is Portier a lovely linen in dusty rose pinks, which adorns the sides of the window with a blind in Fretz with a gorgeous tonal, filigree pattern. Both stunning fabrics are from the Darly collection of Designers Guild and were featued by House and Garden in September as new fabrics to watch out for in London Design Week.

I have to say though my actual moodboard looks more coherent than this post. If I could have scanned it and put it here I needn't have bothered with all the descriptions really. But heck its 24MB and an A3 size and I just haven't got that tech savvy yet! So this is it and I am hoping all the real design lovers will get it anyway!

Indian design blogs a nostalgic discovery

Happened to come across a list of top Indian interior design blogs. Having lived away from India for over four years now I was surprised by how much I warmed up to some of them.

My own personal style has swung completly away from the huge focus on bright colours in India. I don't like too much traditional Indian ornamentation or embroidery or art in my home. And yet looking at the beautifully traditional homes in rang decor brought a huge pang of nostalgia and homesickness.

The home of the blog author Archana Srinivas (below) was featured in Apartmenttherapy.


And then I thought I had found my absolute favourite! Posted on the blog anindiansummer - the photographs of this home were breathtaking. The home featured seemed to capture the essence of Indian homes without being overtly traditional. I loved the strongly natural feel - cotton, jute, wood, silk and stone everywhere - dotted with splashes of colour.




Well clearly I was so taken by the photos that I didn't actually read the blog - it was only much later that I realised the the gorgeous photos were of a villa in Brazil!!

Anyhow Brazil or Inda I know you can only ever pull off these looks in tropical places - but looking at these photos is really making me want a home in India - somewhere with lots of trees open verandahs, warm sunshine and colour!

Cushion covers - the new affordable art!

(Above tapestry cushion at rockettstgeorge.co.uk at £55 each for small and £75 each for large cushions)

I am really loving this new idea of cushion covers with attitude! Gone are the days of the pretty florals and sumptuous silks. Enter dogs, flags, geishas, cars and other such non cushion fare. Oh and what a fantastic statement they make!


Check out notonthehighstreet.com for some fantastic cushions. The camper van cushion alongside costs £55 and has a digitally printed illustration by Helena Carrington. The delightful cushions below right are by Thomas Paul and have Russian Matryoska dolls printed on silk. They come in at £75 and £61.5 each.








In fact I have a new theory - I believe cushion covers are fast becoming the new accessible art of today!

Now most people I know get thoroughly put off by pretentious artsy discussions. Conversations about an artist's potential and investment value of art would draw audible yawns around the room. And yet each and every one of them likes to have a talking point in their living rooms - something which reflects their personalities - has a bit of style and brings a smile to people's faces.

So what do they do? Set off for the affordable art fair - hoping to find the one definitive piece which will elevate them above the dreary pomposity others have succumbed to. I should know - my husband and I did it too!

(Alongside dog print cushions $20 a pair on etsy.com)

Now here is the thing if you are lucky you will find exactly what you looking for, get home a beauty under a 1000 quid and feel good at having grabbed a bargain. Said picture gets hung, dinner parties ensue and loads of fun chatting around the picture, the artist, his/her quirky depiction of this, that and the other - make you feel 'hmmm now that was a good buy"! But six months later sadly while your gorgeous painting still looks lovely people are no longer talking about it. Your living room begins to feel a bit jaded and boring and you start itching to re-decorate.

Enter the cushion with attitude!

(Alongside John Lewis brings in Christmas with the westie bauble cushion at a very tempting £18 only)


In £25 to £75 you can give the lounge a face lift, inject some panazze and get people talking again. Suddenly you are fashionable and irresistable again! What's more at that price you can do it every 3 months if you like!

(On the right the geisha cushion at Laura Ashley costs £35)

Its just a theory and I cannot wait to test it out myself on some of these delectable options!

Happy shopping!

Magic with Mirrors

My most recent search has been for bedside tables to go with the Oak bed in our master. It is a solid, fairly pleasant affair with a design which could safely pass off as a contemporary style but equally if mixed with the right pieces could fit in easily in a country cottage setting as well.

I went on to discover that bedside tables are one of the most neglected areas in high street furniture design. Having trawled through a vast variety of utterly uninspiring blocky oak affairs online and in stores I was just about ready to give up.

When I spotted on ebay a bedside table with a mirrored finish. They were called Venetian but to me were quite reminiscent of the Art Deco era. They were simple elegant, roomy and practical, would go with almost any decor and wouldn't add visual bulk to the room either. Hmmm definitely an option at £125 a piece +£20 delivery. As ever delivery for heavy items is a killer on ebay but it still wasn't a bad deal at £145 per table.

But having been spoiled by my search for table lamps I had come to believe that if you saw something nice retailing on ebay there was inevitably a posher cousin to be found somewhere in the real world. Just to satisfy my curiosity I started looking around.


And then I saw the Charlston range by Laura Ashley. Now that bedside table (image alongside) truly tickled every acquisitive bone in my body. Incredibly sleek with lovely curved wooden legs, it was just so sophisticated, though inevitably much pricier than its ebay cousin. At £250 a piece it was clearly beyond budget. To really rub salt in the wound it even went on sale, the week after I saw it, coming down to a tantalizing £187 a piece - low enough to make me lust uncontrollably but not enough for me to actually be able to afford it.

Life's not fair I thought! Thats the one I really, really want - surely my true and ardent devotion has got to be worth another £40 odd to Laura Ashley. Anyhow a couple of weeks of moping and frantic searching for further discounted versions on the internet ensued. But to no avail! If anything I kept bumping into fancier and fancier versions of mirrored bedside tables. Ivory pearl interiors had this version inspired by the Barcelona Chair for an eye watering £310 a piece. Incredibly smart and with the sole aim to taunt me it had been styled with the Graham and Greene bobble lamp. Made for each other it seemed to be saying - just not for you! Anyhow I convinced myself that I preferred the Charlston one anyway so it did not matter and continued my largely futile search for a discounted Charlston or look alike.

All this while my trusty and reliable Ebay version patiently hung around waiting for me to get around to the decision I was fated to make. Until finally one afternoon I happened to be browsing around the shops and lo and behold what do I see but my Ebay bedside table, I mean an identical version of it, being retailed by M&S Home, only it was priced at £199 a piece. A premium of a whopping £54 over what I was getting it at online. Instinctive shopper psychology took over instantly and I went home thrilled at having found myself a bargain and ordered the tables off ebay that very evening. I was clearly on a roll because I happened to also get £25 gift voucher from ebay that day. So great result all in all!

Every once in a while though I go around to the Laura Ashley website and wistfully look at the Charlston table. But I do always come home quite contentedly to my reliable, smart, (cheaper) ebay ones!

Plum equals Posh

After having watched about a 100 by now utterly indistinguishable episodes of '60 Minute Makeover' 'How not to decorate' 'House Doctor' etc I have colours like plum, taupe, teal, duck egg etc. coming out of my ears and way too often out of my mouth.

Well for the un-initiated plum is just another name for purple. As a word it serves two purposes - it sounds terribly posh, and for those who hate the thought of the colour purple in their rooms its a conveniently ambiguous term for someone selling a design scheme to you.

As it happens the colour 'plum' or 'purple', if you prefer, entered our home when I decided that my master bedroom needed, as a final touch in an ongoing decorating effort, large statement bedside lamps. I had some throws and cushions made up on the cheap in India in a nice purple and gold fabric and we had copperish, silverish organza curtains which were quite a statement. So I decided I needed a bit more purple in the room and lamps were the best way to add the colour in.

I had noticed that glass bobble lamps seemed to have been making an appearance consistently on high street shelves (John Lewis, Habitat, Heals etc) for a few months now but in most cases they seemed rather pretentious or just plain boring (apart from not being purple). Until I happened to spot this lamp on ebay.

Answering quite literally to the description purple glass ball lamp on ebay it drew my attention for being stylish and contemporary and yet classic enough to not risk becoming last season's fad very soon. The lovely black silk shade really gave it a classy touch. The attractive price tag at £45 (including shipping) helped even more.

Further research revealed that this was probably inspired by Graham and Greene's original (much pricier at £89 per lamp) version alongside. Beautifully styled in this photo with the vintage telephone. What I happened to pick up in the G&G picture was how thick and solid the metallic silver base was - it gave a sense of balance to the top heavy design. Couldn't quite spot the thick base in the Ebay pic and that quickly put a question mark on the cheaper cousin.



And then appeared contender number two a lovely sleek table lamp by Dar, called the Dillon lamp and also available in some really bright and fruity colours like yellow and orange - with a thin and tall purple glass base and a fabric shade in the identical colour. The pics will almost have you think that the shade and base are all made of one piece of glass. Which I am sure they are not but its a beautiful lamp all the same. Available at a variety of prices in several online lighting stores its currently available from www.lights4living.com on sale at a rather attractive £48.27.


I have to say though that the option that finally made it into our bedroom was one that I found online but bought in a store. The NEXT plum bobble lamp (on the right hand side in the photo) stands tall at a proud 60cms and will make a great statement whether in the bedroom or living room. The shade in the picture looks like a quite dark purple but in reality is a much more subtle and pleasant colour. At £45 pounds each it didn't break the bank either. I was also delighted to see that it has a lovely thick metallic silver base just like the Graham and Greene lamp automatically giving it style and solidity. But probably what I liked the most were the quite quirky bobbles in increasing sizes - like a fat old lady settling in comfortably onto a sofa - making it just the right combination of stylish and fun.

And the absolute final ace in the pack ofcourse was the fact that it was called 'The Plum Bobble Lamp" not purple - obviously I was only having the poshest one of them all!

Shit or get off the pot!

So what HAVE I been doing since I first posted on my blog. The weekends are spent doing loads of different fun things with my husband and are lovely but the weekdays when he is at work and I am at home are the times that need accounting for. So lets see

- 30% of my time is spent sleeping (like most of us),
- another 15% cooking (that's right I am discovering my domesticated side),
- 5% miscellanneous and unmentionables!!!!
- and a whopping 50% it turns out is spent on surfing websites on interior design and home decor.

That sounds rather bleak so I must add that this figure includes time spent on pursuits which spin off from the web surfing i.e. watching TV shows of a similar ilk, shopping for the home products I spot online, sometimes preceded by strategic influencing of 'the husband' on the need for another set of such and such, and when that fails thinking up clever DIY ideas to make it myself.

Once I was over the shock of that statistical deduction and the purely coincidental but simultaneous conclusion about the dire unpopularity and frankly sheer uselessness of my blog in its current form - I realised in its truest sense the meaning of the famous saying 'Shit or get off the pot'.

Oooh pressure not nice!!

Anyhow rather than walking off into bloggers oblivion I figured maybe I could write about what I actually found out there in my many online and other meanders. That way if I did pester my friends with links to my blog at least they would not have to be nice about my dreary attempts at trying to be writer - they could actually get some use out of my web trawls should they decide to redecorate their homes.

So I did a quick mental check on my fulfilled as well as unrequited decor loves of these past few months. As it happens my rather long-winded approach would typically involve a long list of about 10 possibilities. This would then be followed by mulling, sleeping over, rechecking, fretting as I lost a couple of options coz the sites ran out of stock while I mulled. This moved on in about 3 weeks (i.e. if I hadn't gone off the idea by then) to presenting a shortlist of about 3 options, in a well thought through financing conversation, to said husband. And finally based on the strength of the grimace on his face sort of making up my mind on what we were getting. Tedious as it sounds just by virtue of being so long and indecisive the process made it neccessary that I save photos and links in a word file.

So long and short of it I think I may actually be in business since I have loads of material stashed away! Yippeee!!

Now to kick off general lassitude and actually upload my first post! As ever easier said than done!

3 and half months on

Probably no different from millions of new bloggers I too spent a good amount of time wondering if I should start my own blog or not. I deeply analyzed my motivations for doing so, and after much rumination and having convinced myself that it was only a means of self expression and not a secret urge to unveil hitherto hidden talent - I courageously put up my first post.

I thought of a clever title (you know the kinds that would sound good if my blog ever got published in the real world - never hurts to be prepared for fame!) read it five times over tweaking the witty bits with each read, made sure I had been self deprecating enough to be interesting but not so much that I came across as a loser and finally clicked on the link that said post.

Job done - brilliant - first attempt at self expression successful. And now onto the nailbiting wait to see if anybody actually wanted to read what I had written.

As was plainly inevitable nobody did - I checked the next day - and the next and the one after - in fact I even came back 2 weeks later. But no - no sign of droves of delighted readers sending in appreciative comments and waiting with bated breadth for my next post.

Considering that I myself had never seriously followed a blog I have to say my idea of what to expect was mostly fictitious. Also my extreme self conciousness meant that I hadn't actually forwarded the link to anyone.

So 3 and half months later with much reflection and more self analyses I have figured out that unless I harass my friends by forwarding them links to my blog or gather the guts to ask someone how this is actually done, nothing short of a miracle can ensure that someone actually reads what I am writing.

Hmmm very interesting thought indeed - I mean if nobody is going to read this then I can actually write whatever the hell I want. But then if nobody is going to read this then do I really want to write it at all..... quite a conundrum!!!