Graham and Green has launched an auction of designer stag heads (Stag Sixteen) today, The auction, which is a joint initiative with Centrepoint in London, UK, aims to help young homeless persons get their futures back.  Some brilliant stag heads to choose from and a very worthy cause, so if you have the wallet for it, go and drop your bid here!

These are my favourites:  1 – By Rob Ryan. This is certainly a stag with attitude! :-) Wacky, mustard-yellow and punky with a strong lamenting message.

2 – By Nicola Malkin. Fun, crazy and decorative!

3 – By Lulu Guinness. Cute and cool! Would like this over my dressing table mirror.

Although these designer stags are regrettably not within my price range, I’m getting all sorts of ideas on how to pimp my own Graham and Green staghead. And with a little donation to the homeless cause I can feel as if I’m participating in the initiative in a small way also. :-)

The house tour continues in the kitchen! When we moved in, the kitchen was tiny and very outdated, so to create a larger and more user-friendly kitchen we knocked down a wall to combine two small rooms and opened out the chimney breast to make room for the range cooker (which I love because it’s got so much oven space!). It was an excruciatingly dusty and noisy job and I’m really glad it’s over. But it was all worth it of course because now we have a spacious and modern kitchen which makes life just a bit easier and cooking a lot more fun!

View of fridge-freezer and pull-out larders. We don’t normally have that much wine, but I won auctions on three boxes full of wine so now I’m rather unexpectedly rich on wine, if not money.. :-)
Dining room. My favourites here are the vintage empire-style chandelier, the Chinese cabinet and the cute Polish “Cyrk” poster (my birthday gift). This room turned out a lot more traditional looking than we had initially envisaged – mostly because of the period features already in the room and the antique furniture finds we laid our hands on along the way. Decorating can be quite an exciting journey – you never quite know where you’ll end up and often mistakes, path-corrections and chance discoveries can make the end result a lot more interesting than what you had in mind from the start! :-)

Finally, check out the lift below. This is brilliant – I only wish it was a real lift which I could take up to the loft! Sadly it’s just a trompe l’oeil wallpaper from style-your-door… Highly recommend this for a boring piece of wall actually – it certainly brougt some fun and colour to the disused door under our stairs :-)

| all images: trendey |

Welcome to my place! And where better to start off a housetour than in the hallway? My favourite items here are the quirky clown bust and the vintage-find mirror.

Another view. I really enjoy the colour infusion from the purple wood floor (painted in Farrow and Ball’s “Pelt”) and the roughness of the diy branch chandelier – which casts great shadows in the nighttime.  Still a lot of unfulfilled decoration potential and empty walls around, but slowly and surely I aim to fill them up!

Finally, a glimpse below of the living room… The glam flowers in the Chinese urn are from my husband on our wedding anniversary last week – regrettably not a permanent fixture in this room! :) That’s it for now, but the housetour will continue shortly. Next up, dining room and kitchen!

| photos by mia @ trendey |

After many weeks of packing and moving out and moving in mayhem, I’m finally beginning to settle in in my new house. At last I have the phone and broadband sorted and my new study/office at least partially decorated! Quite a relief after many days of sitting on a stool in front of a make-shift desk made of moving boxes trying to get a dongle to work for more than ten minutes in a row:-)

As I’m a big fan of black walls, I decided to make the walls of the room I spend the most of my time in (except for the bedroom and the kitchen) this colour. I went for Farrow & Ball’s “Off-Black” and I really love how it turned out! In some lights and next to pitch black items (as below) it looks like a lilac-y grey…

…whereas most of the times it just looks like a mellow black or very deep grey. More on this room once I manage to get some more furniture in! On display at the moment are some colour-bursting Mexican fairy lights and vintage finds like a pink Victorian arm chair and my gold-rimmed H. Next is to get some shelves and storage furniture in place, must go shopping!

Dark moody grey with deepest black and warmest oak, plus hints of light green and autumn reds equals yummy…

[images_from_Nikki Tibbles_and Paul Massey]

Grey is definitely one of my top favourite wall colours at the moment. Below are rooms decorated in a mix of styles, all with a gorgeous shade of blue-ish grey in common. 

[pic sources: 1-Marie Claire Maison, 2-unknown, 3-Selina Lake, 4-Paul Massey, 5 and 6-vtwonen]