All posts filed under: our home in London

Throwback to our home in London

I was going through some old pictures and came across this one of our home in London. The lounge with its resin floor and high ceilings was my favorite space in our home. It felt really spacious and airy and I love that in wintertime, we could also have a fire going. Apart from the wooden stool which I sold when we moved to France, I have pretty much everything. The NEW-YORK print is available here. The Milk lamp is stored waiting to find its spot in CASA PYLA and the dining table is now in our home in France (available for rentals here). I’m sometimes nostalgic about our 23 years in London. Mostly when I looked at old pictures ;-) I miss our family brunches in Chiswick, going to Columbia Road flower market, hanging out in the old Spitalfields market, and grabbing a bagel in Bricklane. Yet that old market had been destroyed by the time we left London and replaced by a new, property development. However, would I move back there and leave coastal living? …

Our pared-down & natural London home in Grazia

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I never got around to share with you the new pared-down and natural look of our London home after the renovations (you can see various stages of the renovations here). We have since then, sold the house, moved to our holiday home in France where I started more renovations (see the rooms I’ve already tackled here) Luckily, we managed to squeeze a photo shoot with Photographer Michael Paul who had already photographed the house for ELLE DECORATION before the renovations and the new house got featured in Grazia UK (yeah!!). As many of you reside outside the UK, I have managed to get hold of the pdf to share the whole feature with you… Downstairs, we gave the existing grotty kitchen a massive makeover (read all about it here), painted the brown beams in white and added a large floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the garden. The latter is one design feature that I will do again. Being able to watch the changes of the seasons was beautiful and very special (see what I mean here and here and more under this hashtag). …

Effortlessly chic & natural style bedroom

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I recently re-decorated our bedroom to create a more natural style bedroom and found out that our home in London will soon be featured in the UK edition of Grazia magazine (mid-July issue 688). News that, in the middle of the renovations of our home in France, got me super excited. When I left London a few months ago, I was feeling extremely tearful and grateful at the same time. We had so many happy years there as a family… To the extent that I ended up kissing our walls. Have you done this before!? If not, you should try, it’s good karma :-) Here I was saying goodbye to a home, I had loved and cherished. Our first family home. It was where I first painted Mila’s bedroom walls in dark grey when no-one was using dark colours in a child’s bedroom. Where I finally designed our first (and probably not the last) Tadelakt bathroom. We also completely transformed the old 80s kitchen to create an inviting and open-plan kitchen filled with natural light. Last but not least, …

Adding natural touches in your home

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen (or not… thanks to Instagram’s new algorithm…) that a Photographer came to shoot our home in London last week. Unfortunately, I can’t show you the final look I put together or any beautiful images he shot as they have to be kept under wrap until the feature is out but I wanted to show you these beautiful and inexpensive natural wooden stools and a few other natural touches I added around our lounge. I brought similar versions but much smaller stools for our home in France after my first trip to Marrakech. In fact, I was almost in tears when I came across these stools and these gorgeous baskets in the Souk the first time I visited Marrakech. I think if I had still the e-shop, I would have come back to the UK with a container full of beautiful things but as it happens, I sold it in 2016 to focus on more creative projects like this blog and my portrait photography. The ones I brought back from Marrakech were …

Beautiful, handcrafted ceramics for your home

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

Do you love handcrafted ceramics? If so, you are in for a treat… Last June, Mila, my niece Lily and I got stranded in Singapore because Mila had only 6-months left on her passport to enter Bali. Luckily, I had some good friends living there and we ended up staying with them for a week until we received Mila’s New-Zealand passport. During that time, my friend Sofia took me to a lovely home decoration shop where I spotted some really beautiful, handcrafted ceramics by Zakkia Homewares. A Sydney-based studio founded by Swedish Sara Lundgren, Zakkia Homewares produces beautiful handcrafted ceramics and objects to love and cherish for a lifetime. I fell hard for the two black ceramic pots (above on the right) and really pondered whether I should be backpacking for three weeks with ceramics in my bag. In the end, common sense prevailed (for once!) and I just took a picture of the brand to look it up later. Once back in Europe, I spent a lot more time on Zakkia Homewares website. When I found …

A few new things in our home to add warmth & textures

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

If you watched my stories yesterday, you probably saw the amount of brown boxes in my lounge. It was a mess and it freaked me out a little but our home is being photographed on Monday (and I will use this opportunity to promote my portrait photography). I also thought it was the perfect opportunity to finish styling the house properly. I always find that when you go through major renovations, you tend to be on top of things for 90% of them and by the time, the heavy work is done, you have no energy left to finish the remaining 10%, which is, in fact, the fun part. It was also a challenge to source everything in the UK when I was stuck in France but apart from a few things, it went pretty smoothly. As I mentioned in this article about adding textures to your home, I moved this lovely Berber rug to our bedroom and put a much larger and beautiful rug from a company called Larusi in our lounge. They have …

How to add textures and warmth to your home

How to add textures to your home

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I’ve always loved the minimalist, relaxing look that exudes from our resin floor in our London home. However, since I’ve painted this wall with Kalklitir paint before Summer, I have been drawn to more intimate, muted colours, wooden furniture and handmade objects and of course, stonewashed linen in the bedrooms. I suspect this unpainted plaster wall is not going to get painted anytime soon and that’s ok… I love it just the way it is, with its small imperfections and soothing atmosphere. It’s also the start of Autumn and personally, I feel more inclined to stay at home where it’s warm and cosy rather than hitting the town on high heels in the cold, don’t you!?There are different ways of adding textures and warmth to your home but one that doesn’t fail is adding a rug, even a small one like this wool berber rug I got from Next a while ago but never got around to photograph. You can see here how the lounge looked before the addition of this small rug (especially here!) … I should have …

White bedroom + white floorboards

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

Here is a sneak-peek of our white bedroom with white floorboards and if you are in need of new bed linens, you may find this post useful. We had some guests that had stained some of our bed linens with pizza and wine so I had to purchase new bed linens from The White Company and Muji. From Muji, I got these soft washed duvets for all the single beds in our home. Five years ago, I had bought an organic white duvet cover from Muji for Mila’s bedroom and at the time, I wish I had bought more because the cotton had a really nice texture that felt like linen. I don’t think these are organic but they still have a really nice texture to them. Made.com has also some nice stonewashed linens. I recently bought this Brisa stonewashed linen bed set in pure white for our home in France but I haven’t unpacked it yet. For our bedroom and the bedroom in the loft conversion, I ordered the Savoy duvet cover in white. I had …