Bedroom Decor

We've been considering a Moroccan theme for the bedroom, although I'm finding that widening that to North Africa/Middle East seems to be more productive. This is some of my current thinking.

The room is up under the roof, with a central section of flat roof, which slopes to about five feet on one side (in which there are some fitted wardrobes and access to the attic), and about three on the other, where the bed is, headboard against the wall. Furniture I'd really like to hang onto includes the antique wardrobe and chest of drawers/dressing table we got from freecycle. They're both dark mahogany.

I want colours to be either earth tones or jewel tones. No pastels, no primaries - I found myself looking at this one and going "what about blue and red?", but I reckon that pure blue and red aren't much used in this style.

Most things should have a texture of some kind - either patterning, or an actual physical texture.

Lighting should be from things that cast some of their own shadows - lantern style with patterned cuts, for instance. These Eygptian lanterns are utterly gorgeous, and I want them all. The central pendant light that's there at the moment really has to go.

And I'd like to do something with storage - books and clothes - that echoes the orderly market scenes. I'm not sure how to approach that one, though. I don't want open storage, and obviously, our clothes can't be made to fit the colour schemes. But I'd like it if drawers and wardrobes, when opened, looked like part of the room, and not the backstage area of the set, as it were.

Thinking continues.

IKEA Shelves & Consequences

It's been a busy couple of months indoors, and the place is still in a small degree of chaos. Over our years of renting, we'd built up a ramshackle collection of bookshelves; mostly flat-packs from Argos, with one or two more solid specimens. These moved with us, and most of them were in the sitting room - but they were beginning to bulge at the seams, sag in the shelves, and generally behave badly, as well as looking pretty awful.

So we did a trip to IKEA in Belfast, and bought a sofa, a reclining armchair, a kitchen table and four chairs, and no less than five sets of shelves; three wide and two narrow. These are IKEA's "Billy" range, and we bought height extenders for all of them, and a variety of glass doors - some full height, some half height, and small doors for all the height extensions. Having put them together over the course of two days, we now have a much better looking sitting room (or possibly library is a better term), and more storage space in there. We even managed to shelve our 1902 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  And a display cabinet that was stuck in a dark corner of the sitting room has now been moved to a much better place in the kitchen, displacing a cheap Argos drawer-and-shelf unit.

There's a slight problem, though, in that the old shelves were absolutely stuffed with goods, and having accomodated everything, there's some miscellaneous junk left over. Magazines, a few games (computer games are on CD or DVD, but usually come in a box as big as a trade paperback), and the category of stuff that can only be called oddments - ephemera from various events and museums, odd-shaped books, special edition DVD boxes, and so on. I'm responding to this by viciously culling the book collection; we have thousands, and some of them can go. The travel books got attacked last night, and anything older than about 2004 got boxed to go. That turned out to be about 70cm of shelf space in one swoop. Continuing that should clear a lot, and then the cleared books can go to a second-hand bookshop.

Then there are the shelves. The current spare room/study is about to become a pure study, as the not-quite-double bed gets chucked out. I'd love to hang on to the mattress for emergency guest accomodation, but realistically, it has to go. It hasn't gone, yet, though, so the future study is currently holding that, plus my desk, a chair, two sets of resident bookshelves, several as-yet unpacked boxes, and now three more sets of old shelves.  This weekend should hopefully see that gone. I reckon breaking up for firewood is the fate for two of those sets, and once the bed is out, one set may get a reprieve so that we can store some books in the study. That might even happen this weekend.

The main part of the study plan is to put a long desk under the window, which looks out onto the garden, and put the household's two large desktop machines there, along with space for my oversized laptop. And then the last set of 'liberated' shelves from the sitting room (currently stashed in the downstairs bathroom because there's simply nowhere else they'll fit) can go in the Lodger's room. And then the drawer and shelf unit can also be broken up, and will end up in the fire too.

So stuff has been shuffled around a lot, and we still have a degree of chaos, but we're making good progress toward being completely sorted - at least in the short term. 

Antique & Vintage Furniture

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, antiques are out of style in the US (thanks to Claris of Talk to the Clouds for the tip). This is something I'd be happy with myself, as I like antiques and have no regard for style in furniture beyond my own taste. There's one line that's particularly interesting, though:

"The '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s is the hottest market going right now," said Jerry Goldman, of the monthly Alameda Point Antiques and Collectibles Faire. "People are buying their childhood. Designers are snapping up the mid-Modern stuff."

That's very clear from any of the design sites I've been watching - the strange, streamlined shapes of the 60s and 70s are very much in vogue, along with colours that in many cases, I've only seen in photographs.

Yet there's another trend mixed in there that I haven't seen anyone draw attention to - wire. Birdcages, metal framework furniture, spindly lampshades, and so forth. Those, together with light colours, painted wood, and the flash-animation-derived patterning of fabrics, really comprise the look of the current era for me. And yes, it definitely looks 70s: