Welcome to my home: Vignette 4
Welcome to my “formal” living room! Formal living rooms are so funny…a room in your house that no one ever goes in'; where you can’t sit on the sofa or mess up the pillows; where all the antiques and special items are kept; and where kids are NOT allowed! Clearly, that is not the case in this casual room. Like the rest of my house, this space is meant to be lived in. My goal is always to bring in things of interest to keep your eye moving. My sofa in this room is very well loved, jumped on by little boys for years. It’s stained and dingy but luckily you can’t really tell due to the copious amount of pillows. Again with the black and white and my favorite metal: gold.
To the left of my sofa you’ll see a little occasional table with a beautiful Prayer plant and a colorful butterfly pillow below. The prayer plant sits in a super cool vintage planter I picked up at a garage sale in Eastern Washington and my plant is thriving in it! The pillow of the butterfly is something my mom made for me. I found the butterfly fabric at a fabric sale (of all things). It is actually a vintage print by Robert Van Allen. Butterflies are a symbol of metamorphosis and change, and at the time I found it, it really spoke to me. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it since it is pretty bold and I don’t have orange and yellow in my house, but I knew I loved it. It sat folded in a bag of fabric in my linen closet for months until one day I asked my mom to make it into a pillow. And she did: it is backed with a bold black and white striped fabric. Its a big pillow so it hangs out there under my pretty plant and brings vibrancy to that corner of my house.
To the far left is a white piece of furniture with some tchotchkes on it. That white thing is a shoe rack: if you know, you know I have a shoe problem. I’d show you the inside but it’s packed…that’s where I keep a lot of my fancy heels that bring me so much joy! My home is small and I lack closet space so I have to get creative about where I squirrel my shoes away! But hanging over that shoe rack is a neutral colored canvas with threes printed on it. Again, I love the contrast and the neutrality; and again, the size! There is a beautiful box with mother of pearl inlay that was my grandmas, and a white manzanita branch. The branch is a funny story: back in 2010, I spent a month in Los Angeles staying with my aunt and uncle. I was on their back deck and looked next door at their neighbor’s house which was under construction. My uncle told me that the person who lived there had moved and that new people were remodeling the house. I commented on the white branch that was hanging on the side of their house and before I knew it, that branch made its way into my uncle’s house and became mine! I packed that thing home in the car all the way from Los Angeles many years ago, and it’s been with me ever since.
The art hanging above my couch is probably one of the coolest things in my house. Those three pieces are from Australia, and they’re Australian Bark Paintings. If you look close enough, and it’s hard to tell from a photo, the painting is actually painted on bark, as opposed to paper or canvas. If you can catch it from the side, you can see the texture of the tree bark. Typically Australian Tree Bark paintings are Aboriginal and look much more tribal than my pieces. I’m not sure beyond that what the story of these paintings are. My grandma married a man in the Navy and she and my dad moved from the East Coast to Australia and lived there for a few years. It was then that she acquired these paintings, which would be sometime in the late 1960’s. I love the big center painting, it has such beautiful dimension and contrast, it looks as if the tree is popping off the bark behind the glass. Very cool.
The round copper plate above it all was my grandmas as well, and I’m not sure where that is from. Overseas, no doubt!
Off to the right is a beautiful lamp, reminiscent of the Middle East that was my grandmas. I adore punched metal and have a lot of it throughout my house. I remember this lamp sitting in her living room in their house in Florida. I’m grateful to have it today.
And above that beautiful lamp is a silly thing I made. That was a plain old Chinese lantern that I covered in unbleached coffee filters. In one of my houses, I had that hanging over my kitchen table. The filters really darken the light coming out so it isn’t incredibly functional but I loved it there at the time. There’s really no reason why I still have it other than I spent a lot of time making it and I think it looks cool; it adds something of interest and creates some cool texture.