Home, where the heart's escaping...

We finally have some parts of our home looking the way we wanted. It's been a long time in the works. We moved into this house almost 7 years ago, just A and me. We had heaps of books, lots of prints of paintings, some souvenirs from our travels and a few things we'd picked up during our courtship - a lamp, some pottery dishes, an ostrich egg, a Chinese vase...So we really had fun shopping for furniture and linen and setting it all up.

Then our water curse kicked in. We had 7 floods in a first floor flat. We traveled some more and bought more souvenirs. We visited antique shops and junk markets and scouted for finds. Then the kids came along and brought along their own contributions to home decor - tons of toys, clothes, diapers, paper that they had scribbled on and now considered art, projects they brought home from playschool. Scribbles on a wall, crayon marks on another... We outgrew the old space, lost our library to make a bedroom for the kids. Our guests had to share their room with the TV and the two kids during playtime. We were bursting at the seams and we had a baby coming!

Then this year the downstairs tenant moved out and we rented the whole space. It turned out lots of repair work was required, and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, we knew we'd have the space for a library once again, so we ordered bookshelves. I had great fun going down to Nehru Place and hunting down fabric for curtains, we hit all the sales we could find for area rugs, cushion covers, and I got to order the furniture I coveted for our new family room.

We still have bits and pieces to come together. We only decided on the theme for the guest room - Chinese - two weeks ago so new lamp shades and bed covers have yet to come. A table needs to be moved into the library. The plants need a bit of reorganising. The mural on the kids playroom wall needs to be painted and I'm being quite slow. But most of the rooms are done or offer some clue as to how they'll look eventually. Oh, and our water curse is alive and kicking!
Welcome home...
That's where I had my moment of peace yesterday...
looking at this view:
The entrance is one of my favourite spots, just because it was such a process to get it right. I wanted the wall to be painted a deep blue. I even gave the contractor a reference swatch - but clearly he didn't take it to the shop with him, because I nearly fainted the first time I saw it. He'd painted it a horrible shade of muddy turquoise blue. He repainted it twice but kept getting it wrong until finally A went with him to get the right colour. And the light fixture - I spotted it when Dad and I were shopping at Lok Nayak Bhavan for the other lights, and just fell in love with it. Luckily for me it wasn't that expensive. Expectedly, A loved it, but unexpectedly, everyone else did too, including my mom and grandma who have more traditional tastes.

My view of homes is that they should reflect the personalities of the people who live in them, be welcoming and comfortable and have little moments of surprise or delight, unexpected discoveries, if you will, even for the people who live in them. I hate homes which are all done up to impress other people, stiff, unyielding and with relentless beige. I'm so not a minimalist! Maybe one zen corner somewhere, but for the rest of the house, I need colour and light and texture and warmth.

As soon as you enter our house, thanks to a huge shelf which was built in already, you have a pretty good idea of what we're about. The shelf has a few souvenirs from travel, including my favourite, a thepanom - a kneeling figure with hands joined in a namaste, made of blue celadon, which we bought in Bangkok. The rest of the shelf has books, but naturally, since our library is always overflowing. We have books on travel, cooking, history, art, gardening, decor and entertainment here - pretty much summing up our interests! Oh, and there's usually a chair which has the overcoat, bag and shoes I wore to work that day, reflecting my other passions:)
Our house used to be mostly in our two favourite colours, red and blue. Now we have a few more colours in there. In fact, I realised that our winter decor all has touches of gold, since that's also the festive season, and that keeps the same mood throughout the house, except for the kids' playroom and bedroom which are in shades of green and cream.
That's the drawing room:


And the family room:
I had been loving this style of furniture for a while, and it was great to finally be able to order it. Somehow that and the rug we bought last year in Turkey come together to make the family room a place where we instantly feel warm and cozy. We usually end up curling up on the floor, though, instead of sitting on that sofa. As you can see, Bojjandi's enjoying a nap on the floor cushion!

We put up two of my favourite pieces of wall-art in the kids' room. I used to have a fairy tale book that I loved, as a child. A family friend had gifted it to me when I was five. It was called The World's Best Fairy Tales, compiled by Reader's Digest, and used to have the most wonderful illustrations. Sadly, this hard-bound book had fallen apart over the years. I was loath to destroy it because I wanted my kids to be able to read the stories. then I scouted around on abebooks.com and found the book, albeit in two volumes. So I ordered that and promptly took the illustrations out of the old book to have framed. We had close to 65 illustrations, so we got them framed as two large pictures, as if each illustration was in a window. I simply love these two pictures, they're so magical, and the colours so bright and beautiful.





And the kids are having great fun playing house...