All posts tagged: house renovations

Kitchen makeover in CASA PYLA – phase 1

Following our garden makeover, I’m very excited to share with you today our kitchen makeover in CASA PYLA. For those who haven’t followed this new adventure on Instagram, earlier this year, we bought a very old house in Pyla, 2 minutes walk from the beach on the French Atlantic coast and 5 minutes walk from Le Moulleau (for those who know the area). The house initially named “Bagatelle” (renamed CASA PYLA by yours truly) was in the same family for over 50 years and as we say in French “dans son jus” meaning not much had been done in those 50 years to improve it. The worst room was the kitchen. It had a large hood (the only time I had seen something similar was in my great-grandmother house), a very old, chipped ceramic sink, old tiles on the walls, some Ikea kitchen units from the 80s and was looking pretty awful. While I was planning to freshen up the bedrooms with new paint, we really had to fit in a new kitchen and bathroom to make the …

Our guest bedroom makeover with plywood

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

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 …

15 of the best oversized mirrors

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

I’m currently planning a long-overdue refurbishment of the bathroom in our holiday home in France (see my bathroom board) and lately, I have been obsessing with oversized round mirrors. I was very happy with the minimalist look of the bathroom cabinet we got for our tadelakt bathroom in our London home, which would you believe, is from Ikea. I was even thinking of using it again for the French project as it ticked several of my boxes. Its design is simple, minimalist, yet spacious enough to host all our toiletries. The price is good too although this slimline cabinet (similar in look) from a bathroom specialist, comes in 3 finishes, an option that can be useful for some. Then Pinterest, happened… source: Sarah Sherman Samuel “An oversized mirror is a simple item that will make any of your rooms at home, look bigger, chic and stylish” From bathrooms, to bedrooms, hallways and even lounges, any room with an oversized mirror like this metal frame oversized mirror (1), simply looked really stylish and striking. A design feature also spotted in the Casa Cook hotel in Rhodes, whose …

Our Tadelakt bathroom

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

Doing a Tadelkat bathroom was a long dream of mine and it is now one of the projects I most proud of, out of all the things we achieved with our house renovations. You may have seen already our loft conversion, the new kitchen and the resin floor that many of you were interested in. Tadelakt is a material I have been wanted to use for years. It looks and feels like polished concrete and the results achieved with our Tadelakt bathroom really exceeded my expectations. What is Tadelakt? If you’re not familiar with this material, Tadelakt is a unique waterproof plaster finish originally from ancient Morocco. It was initially used by the Berbers to waterproof earthen cisterns for the hygienic storage of drinking water. Later on, it was used to decorate exterior façades, manufacture small drinking vessels. If you’ve been to Morocco, you’ve probably seen it in public bathing houses and bathrooms. The thing I love the most about Tadelakt is, how smooth it feels. While we used gorgeous grey tiles from Castelnau Tiles in the new loft conversion, I was eager to try something …

My perfectly imperfect wall

Published by BODIE and FOU Style Blog

This area used to be a terrace on the second floor of our home in London. As nobody really used it and we had a back garden, Steve re-designed the space into a home office fitted with a large window overlooking the garden (see picture). We hide the outside 80’s looking wall with cedar cladding (you can see the whole house here), a large window facing trees and fitted two auto-cleaning sky windows, slightly angled to catch the sun at different times of the day (see below). The floorboard is pine wood painted white. If you are interested, you can view the whole renovations album on Facebook here and on Instagram under hashtag #bodieandfourenovations.I was keen to keep the wall (photo 1) as raw as possible to contrast against the clean lines of the room and pristine white walls. However, my super perfectionist Painter tried to cover as much as he could to make it as white as possible and by the time I got home from work, the only ‘raw’ industrial area I could salvage, was the bottom part. It would have …