Or Nomad – Bringing Your Travels Home is the title of Sibella Court’s latest book. It’s a photographic collection of travel shots and styled spaces. She has globetrotted and treasure-hunted to Japan, Italy, India, Syria and Mexico. Each place make a flavour with colour palettes and misc. stories. Room settings are inspired by ideas, photos and mementos, showing that any decorative background can be restyled with travel touches.

I realized I haven’t written a review about Sibella Court’s book Etcetera, but in comparison, Nomad is (imho) much more interesting. While Etcetera represents what I regard as typical Sibella Court-style – the glass jars, treasures from the bottom of the ocean, and ethnic-eclectic on smokey white vintage backdrops – Nomad takes a global step forward and delivers insprition from all over the world, still Sibella Court-ish and very likeable. My personal favourite among the exotic interior travels in the book is, at least after a first glance, Mexico!

Decorating a home is – like many other things in life -  a journey. But one needs not go travelling all around the globe in order to embrace the globetrotter approach to interior style. No tickets needed, just open this book and indulge! Or any other book, or movie or people’s home or nature or whatever inspires you. It is actually, in Sibella Court’s words, a matter of seeing things in a new way. And bringing it home. Sibella’s decor philosophy is about adding and subtracting, rearranging and recycling, transforming and rethinking a space to reflect your personality, lifestyle and adventures. The ideas can be as simple as painting a wall or creating a new ‘art wall’ or layering different textiles on your bed or hanging a new piece of fabric over your window. What the book Nomad wants to do, and does, is help open your eyes and fuel your imagination. After all, decor is all about stories and things reflecting you and your life. After reading Nomad, I feel the need for a touch of Mexico in my home.

And I’ve updated my top 5 of places I’d like to travel to:

1. New Orleans, Nashville & Memphis (by a big American car, listening to Townes Van Zandt and June Carter)
2. Clearwater Beach, Florida (for a loooong sunny vacation)
3. Paris (been there once, 20 years ago; must go back and stroll along the bridges nighttime)
4. Sri Lanka (the land of my brother-in-law)
5. Buenos Aires (to exercise the Argentine tango)

Where would you love to travel? And would you bring it home? :)

Today, I have a special feature for you. Trendey has had a word with the design duo behind fabulous escape from sofa. If you haven’t seen their furniture collection yet, I hereby make sure you do! Escapefromsofa are exhibiting later this month in both TENT LONDON and Istanbul Design Week with nothing less than ûber-trendey design that hits both at our love for mid-century and the surge for nature inside. Or as Henen put it: 50’s modernism meets the Flintstones. Design duo Mahmut Kefeli (industrial designer) and Kerem Ercin believe in simplicity and worship the details, and they enjoy working with new and emerging materials and technologies. Now, let’s hear some more! I found three favourites in the collection, one of them is the 2-functions-in-1 sidetable Coma (above), cravings!, and another one is this gorgeous shelf/bookcase named Longneck:

Please tell us about it!

Longneck is our first baby actually. We designed longneck while we were designing nisantasi berker house (name of the project). We created it as a tv unit and later on we decided to make it as a moduler unit. And after all we are quite satisfied.

You should be! Your furniture collection is lovely. What was your main inspirations and thoughts for the collection?

We always try to work with the sense of style, simplicity and functionality and mostly believe that scandinavian furnitures are really good designs and we as escapefromsofa try to look from their aspect. And also we believe that the devil is in the details!

For the collection also we tried to achieve the perfection of simplicity, the perfection of craftmanship and also the perfection of functionality.

Your brand name is interesting. It implies a movement away from the sofa?

That’s actually what we try to impress with the name of escapefromsofa. As you know mediterenian people live quite close to their sofas. But we as escapefromsofa try to stay away from sofas. We love our job and we love to design. You know the saying that “ let your job be your lover, so that you dont have to go work everyday!“ This is the main idea that we try to implement to our office and co workers.

That’s you reviving all couch potatoes! :)  Indeed a great saying. This is my third favourite, the rocking chair Short Tail:
Please tell us about it!

As you know every designer has at least one iconic rocking chair. So that we designed one :)

Well done! Love its vibe. Lastly, what are your plans -  when and how will your products be available?

Our goal is to enlarge our collection and meet with manufacturers. So that we can distrubute our products worldwide. Also if we manage to produce 1.000.000 pieces of one product than i can say that we achieved our goal :).

Our product are available at Nordist in Istanbul. Hopefully we ll come up worldwide soon :)

And yey, Trendey sincerely hopes so too!

Just a quick note about the brand new British online interiors magazine Heart Home. Great stuff! This is my favourite pic from the 1st issue. Love the style, the philosophy and the fact that the table is set for fika.

Now I’m back from an absolutely wonderful stay in London. Will show some smashingly trendey pics on Saturday, i.e. on Trendey’s birthday! As always when in London, I vistited dear Anthropologie at Regent Street and there I realized there’s a super-interesting book I hadn’t read: Creative Walls by Geraldine James. The book has the undertitle How to display and enjoy your treasured collections, but is not one of those How-To-books with rules and instructions – it’s just a pack of highly interesting ideas! I really like Mrs James’s be-yourself-attitude as well as the bohemian and eclectic looks of it all.

Wall displays and frame grouping is definitely one of the most interesting home decor features imho. Like nothing else and it can give life, meaning and personality to a home. And it can be done in zillions of ways. Furthermore, it don’t have to cost much, well in terms of creativity but not in terms of money. So is Mrs James’ passion to create beauty from nothing. A crucial element in this book is also her statement that “cold minimalism has its place, but not at my place”. (couldn’t agree more :)) This is my favourite photo from the book:

Beautifulness! A stairway can hardly be more attractive. Of course in this business, there is an obvious obstacle: it is hard to find those bits you want to decorate the wall with. I guess it can take a lifetime to collect them. Nevertheless, it should be worth the effort. Other nice inspiration in this book includes brilliant displays in bathrooms (example to the left below), and pictured right: prints hung with clips. Yupp, I really like this book!

Hang tight for Saturday’s treat.

In the meantime, while Trendey sisters focus on their regular careers & professions, we have the greatest blog tips for you: Dos family. As always, you might already know all about it, but if not: this is a blog by decorator (slash designer, columnist, TV-presenter, etc)  Isabelle Halling McAllister and photographer Jenny Brandt (who also has the sammy rose blog + shop) The lovely pics above are shot by Jenny at Isabelle’s. I think the black wall display is fabulous! And there’s loads of more inspiration on playful and charming kids’ rooms (like the one right) on their site. It’s undoable (and unnecessary) to define their interior style tastes, but I’d summarize it Happy Scandinavian :) Clearly creative, retro, personal, arty, homey, free-spirited and fun. Below is a really nice example of a ‘Dos Visit’, photographer Jenny Brandt visits Lisa Grue’s home. More of this lovely retro charm can be found here.

I think these two rooms below are very interesting! The decor is simple, yet the Josef Frank wallpaper looks nicer than ever together with the retro/vintage caramel sofa. The bathroom could have been downright boring but the pink pastel door (and a photo display or something hidden behind it) and the orange rug on the grey patterned floor is ‘all it takes’ to give the place some interesting character.

| all photos: Jenny Brandt @ DosFamily |

Now, lastly, I will join DosFamily’s upcoming blog battle – no idea what it will be about, but I will take the challenge :)

The last couple of weeks, my regular sources of inspiration (such as magazines, blogs, etc) haven’t injected the regular dose of excitement. I think maybe I’ve had a bit more than I can chew :) Nevertheless, during the year passed I’ve decorated more than ever. Had more creative thoughts than feasible. Our home is funnier than ever! And over and over again, I find new inspiring books. This is one of them, published in 2008: New London Style by Chloe Grimshaw; photography by Ingrid Rasmussen. Just next to Undecorate in my compartment of favourites, this book features the homes of some of London’s most exciting young talents from the music, fashion, design and art scenes.

The interiors have been put under the heading “New London Style” but it’s not a showy parade of ‘taste’ nor a rulebook or instruction on pretty – it’s a book full of creativity. I adore the kitchen above, it gives me so much inspiration! I’d take it right-a-way…Many of the interiors are pretty simple, or rather effortless, relaxed. With my love for beige-ish walls, I think this scene is lovely.

Though superbly edited, it’s the charm and sensible personal choices (i.e. the photos!) that matters in this book. Style varies throughout the book, and there is no glossy quest for perfection – which makes it spellbinding to study: there’s something interesting to consider in almost every photo! Like this one, who lives in this room below?