My mid-century tendencies

My eyes are slowly opening to the fact that I actually do have specific tastes that veer in a very specific direction - you may be reading this thinking 'duh!!!', but to be perfectly honest until I had to knuckle down and make choices and think seriously about buying things (as opposed to my renting days, when I trundled along compiling fantasy buys in my head) I just thought that I liked, well, lovely things regardless of what style or era they are from, just all lovely things. But no, my leanings, subconscious as they may be, are firmly mid-century, with a smattering of Scandi. The biggest purchase of my life was a late 1930s/early 1940s house for goodness sake. And yet I only really twigged just how intrinsic and natural these tendencies are when my newly purchased Ilum Wikkelso sofa (above), that I had my heart set on and had drooled over for months on the Wild Child website, had arrived and made it safely through the front door and into the living room. My (clearly far sharper than I!) sister in law turned around and said "it really suits the house, doesn't it?" It had never occured to me that I would buy furniture that is roughly of the same era as the house - after all, it seems quite a luxury, doesn't it? But it just happened that two things I fell in love with were created around the same point in time and they marry beautifully, if I do say so myself. I was just buying things that I loved willy nilly, but I guess it really is true that when you really love things you should just buy them (finance permitting, of course, ahem) and they really will just naturally work together - the only way to achieve a genuinely natural and uncontrived look. My mum was dubious about the sofa before she saw it in the house itself, she thought that it would swamp the room, but it fits in hand in glove. I approve of the whole large-pieces-in-small-spaces theory, it somehow makes the place seem uncluttered, I think it's the strong shape of the sofa. And then, as if I don't have enough to be spending my money on, I got this Normann Copenhagen Norm 69 pendant light in the sale on Finnish Design Shop (I don't think this is on sale any more, but I swear there was money off it when I bought it!!!). How beautiful is it going to look hanging above my Wikkleso sofa?

The latest on the renovation front is that I have escaped to my big bro's house while he and his family are on holidays, as it is all a bit bananas in my little mid-terrace palace at the mo. The builder came over and put doors between the front room and living room and it's amazing the difference that they make, the front room looks like a whole new room now. Yes, I know, 'duh!!!' again, but honestly if you had been living in it for two months as I had you would know how that one simple change made the main living area feel brighter and more spacious - and, most crucially, more and more like my very own space. My dad, who is something of a superstar in the garden, very kindly paid a visit and got to work with a strimmer and a saw to tackle the forest in the front and the jungle out the back, so now there is also more natural light coming through the front and back windows. So - now there is also the sofa in the living room - and then the plumber came in to start working his magic on Tuesday and the place is now hilarious, there is rubble and old sanitaryware and stuff out the front and there are pipes and other plumber-y yokes hanging out of walls and floors. I didn't realise that the bathroom could actually look smaller without anything in it, but amazingly enough it does, whoulda thunk it. It's a pity that I didn't think of it before I started going bonkers buying sofas and lightshades and curtain fabric, but I have to go and get the tiles for the wetroom now. Looks like there'll be a whole lot of beans on toast in store for me for the forseeable future! I'll nip in today or tomorrow to take pics of the ginormous work in progress that is my home, so that you can see for yourselves just how very, eh, in progress it really is.