All posts filed under: our home in France

Our guest bedroom makeover with plywood

This is the 3rd bedroom makeover I’ve tackled in our home in France since we left London and moved back to France. This room used to be a guest bedroom with a double bed and was decorated with pretty French vintage lights (for sale here). When we started living full time in what used to be our holidays home, I changed things a bit to suit our new living requirements. I first moved the two single mattresses out of Mila’s bedroom and replaced them by a comfortable super king mattress from EVE to make sure the ever-growing teen she is, would get good sleep. You may have seen the whole room makeover already but if you haven’t, you can read about it here and here for a desk area makeover. New living arrangement Steve now works in London again and sometimes works from home on Mondays and Fridays. As I seem to talk too much when we both work from the dining table, he set himself up a little home office in that guest room. This was fine …

Before & After: Our white, minimalist bathroom makeover

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

This has been a long time coming but here is our white bathroom makeover. This is probably the most drastic makeover to date in our home. Although, if you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen our new renovation project: CASA PYLA where the kitchen was quite a beast too (more of this later). Basin, shower, and toilets were fitted at the end of June ’18. I finished painting the walls literally 5 minutes before our first guests arrived. We couldn’t lay down the floor tiles on time so as a temporary/emergency solution, I bought some waterproof plywood sheets to lay on the concrete slab and we fitted some lino on top with double-face tape. Unfortunately, over the Summer, we got a leak from the toilet pipe behind the newly fitted plasterboards walls and had to cut into the wall to replace the faulty part. At that stage, I was hugely grateful we hadn’t fitted the electric underfloor heating and floor tiles yet. Eventually, bathroom renovations resumed mid-October. We installed the Warmup underfloor heating system (you can see …

How to add warmth & comfort to a master bedroom

Our master bedroom makeover

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

Adding warmth and comfort to our master bedroom was a priority of mine when we left London and relocated to our home in France. In the past few months, our French home has seen several complete makeovers. The kitchen is now very functional, user-friendly, has plenty of storage and is a pleasure to look at. The hallway also had a complete makeover with a fresh, new coat of paint, additional storage and is looking more beachy and inviting. Next is the bathroom which I will share with you shortly. Today, let me show you what we did with our master bedroom. In comparison to other rooms in the house like the bathroom, our bedroom didn’t really require an update besides a fresh coat of white paint. Twelve years ago, I designed the bedroom (see below) with a ’boutique hotel’ feel in mind. It’s a look I still see featured in decoration magazines and on Pinterest (you can follow my boards here if you wish). White stonewashed linen duvet from here >> | Tolomeo wall light from here >> BEFORE The “feature …

Inspiring and affordable ceramics for your home

Inspiring, affordable ceramics for your home

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

Inspiring, affordable ceramics for your home is always a good thing, right! It’s one of life’s small pleasures that uplift our spirits don’t you think? First of all, let me wish you a wonderful and happy New Year filled with lots of precious moments with your loved ones, a sense of well-being and great, exciting projects. The end of 2018 was for us one of the best in many many years. I joked that nobody died this year but 2015 & 2016 were pretty awful for our family and I’m grateful we could end the year feeling lighter this time around. I also know that some of you have experienced painful loss (we all do at some point in our lives sadly) and I hope you will see brighter days in the near future. For what it worth, when my dad died, travelling was one thing that really helped me to keep my head out of the water and move on from the pain. To Mila‘s delight, Steve got a new job for a large …

Le relooking de notre cuisine blanche, minimaliste

Our white kitchen makeover

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I’m so excited to finally reveal our kitchen makeover which you may have spotted on Instagram. Having used it daily for the past three months, I’m delighted to say that this is now the perfect kitchen for us in terms of storage, usability and design. I absolutely love it! In fact, there isn’t a single thing I would change. At home, our living space (kitchen, dining, lounge) is open-plan. So this is really the heart of our home and the room we spend most of our times as a family. We eat, cook and entertain friends and family. It’s where we all gather and hang out together. I also work from there on a corner of our Norman Copenhagen dining table. SHOP OUR TABLE: The kitchen before The first time we did the kitchen up (and the whole house) was 12 years ago. At the time, I wasn’t cooking much and a lot of my decisions were based on look, design and budget. The kitchen had decent storage. Not so much after we relocated from London with …

Kitchen renovations update

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I know I owe you a full-length post on our kitchen renovations but for those who followed our adventures on Instagram, dealing with the Swedish giant hasn’t been plain sailing. Besides the 5 weeks delay, they also managed to deliver seven kitchen doors with the wrong finish. Mistake that we sadly noticed only when the doors were fitted and the protective film was off. An expensive mistake that costs me 200 euros to get the guy back to take down the wrong doors and fit the right ones. Sadly, I’m pretty sure that it is not something that IKEA will refund, despite the fact that the mistake was made by their kitchen planner at the time of my order… On the plus side, I absolutely LOVE our kitchen. It’s becoming my personal laboratory to create and test new smoothies and green juices recipes. Soon, I’m hoping to tackle protein balls so if you have any great recipes, please share!! The new layout works perfectly for us. Steve and I can be both in the kitchen without being on …

BEFORE & AFTER: Our minimalist, beachy hallway makeover

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I’m excited to finally show you some of the renovations I started in our home in France before our Summer holidays. As some of you know, our holidays home became our main residence when we relocated to the beach in France after twenty-three years in London. When we bought the house about twelve years ago, it was really in a sorry state. Yet, both of us could see the potential of the house which had a good layout and came with a 2175 m2 private garden. For Steve, who grew up on a farm in New-Zealand with a lot of space, the garden was everything. To this day, the outdoor space we have is one of the things I appreciate the most (that and living close to the beach!). Since it was 12 years since we renovated the house, it was time to freshen up a few corners… THE BRIEF: Turn our entrance and hallway into a welcoming, summery space with a beachy feel, Add storage to put away things we use often, Make it easy to clean THE …

Our home renovations Part 1

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

These past few months, I mentioned several times that we were planning to renovate the bathroom which is a real eye-sore (you will see that I wasn’t joking in a few weeks). Unfortunately, we also had water damages just before last Summer. As we needed to take off the oak floorboards Steve and I had painfully glued twelve years ago, I thought it was time to make a few design changes to make the kitchen work better for us. So today, I’m going to take you through the first steps of this renovation project, what they involve and the mistakes I feel I made when I designed our kitchen twelve years ago. There will be also a small section about the renovations of our hallway which took place a few days later. THE KITCHEN RENOVATIONS Our previous kitchen was a single counter running against the wall and fitted with a SMEG hob, a SMEG oven and a dishwasher. The fridge was a large American stand-alone fridge (very similar to this one). We also had a vintage …