Home Grown Potato: Our Home
I adore our beautiful home; my husband and I queued up for it for 3 long days and we've been in it for about a year and a half now. Since we've got the house, Interior Design has become a massive passion of mine and my Pinterest Board with ideas for the house is insane! I love getting great bargains and building up out house bit by bit. We are very fortunate to have such a beautiful home but we do have a policy in place to ensure that its perfect for both of us; unless we both like something we don't get it. As you can image the process can be slow at times (it look us almost a year to find the perfect Molton Brown hand soap for the downstairs bathroom!) but the results are great. Thankfully we have similar tastes.
We decided that downstairs would mainly following a French Grey theme with the kitchen being a darker black/champagne mix. We are still working on the upstairs, it'll take much longer but we're not in any rush and we want to make sure its perfect.
Mark surprised me with a trip to Rome for our first wedding anniversary last May and we stayed at this beautiful little boutique hotel called The Fifteen Keys Hotel. It was the perfect choice, they have this gorgeous dining/bar area with Italian blues, dark furniture and copper accessoires. We loved it so much we are designing the Master bedroom around it.
The guest room tries in with the French grey theme and we're not sure what to do with the back bedroom or the study. I was thinking greens for the study but to be honest we need to get the attic floored as both rooms are just filled with boxes!
Mark thinks I'm mad but I love to seasonally decorate; currently we have an Autumn box, many Christmas boxes, a Summer box and were working on a Winter (Jan/Feb) box and a Spring box. I love putting subtle accessories around the house which complements the different seasons; I'm particularly fond of my Laura Ashley Pineapples :)
I'm also obsessed with our mantle piece in the living room. We love the brand Rivièra Maison (and not just because R & M are our initials) and that's where the hurricane jar and the candle holders are from. We cant find a mirror for above the mantle, so we got these two Ikea frames and they are fantastic; I mentioned to Mark one day that I saw these lovely prints online and I come home one day and he has them designed and printed. The R is for Rome the M for Melbourne, two of our favourite cities. Mark is very creative as well which means he has a great eye for detail and design <3
The kitchen is one of our favourite rooms; its a great space where we enjoy many coffees and looking out over the garden. As I've said its a black and champagne theme. The Sage Coffee machine was a wedding present to ourselves and we adore it. This house was built on coffee and Mark makes me an oat milk flat white every morning before we go to work <3.
In the kitchen we have a beautiful view and have just spent the past weekend gardening as there was sunshine here in NI and it was the first real opportunity to get anything done as its been so wet and miserable. It makes such a difference to the look of the house when the flower beds are weeded and Mark cuts stripes in the grass.
Seeing as the weather was so good, we ordered these gorgeous John Lewis deckchairs. We had discussed them last Summer and they had come down massively in price this year so another great bargain! As Mark calls it Spudgeting (Spud + Budgeting)
We have some frames to put up today and we've found a great picture (involving yellow tulips and, of course, coffee) as a Spring accessory. So there loads more to do- but we are getting there, slowly, surely and perfectly.
