Long, Low, and Mies Van Der Rohe

At the end of this year or the beginning of the next, my parents are hoping to move our family home up from the surfer town of Encinitas in Southern California to the Bay Area. What Northern California lacks in sunny beaches and Mexican food it makes up for in beautiful mountains, proximity to San Francisco, and of course, wine. So long as there’s an In n Out Burger, I don’t care what part of the West Coast I’m on. But it’s interesting to note the way the architecture of residential houses differs so vastly between the two areas. My mother had always wanted a one-story,  long and low, Frank Lloyd Wright-style house with plenty of glass and exposed beam ceilings – and we’ve come to realise that Northern California is the place to go for this style. They’ve got their eye on a few homes that would fit Don and Megan Draper perfectly should they ever want to buy a vacation home, but that’s just the problem. When we see these Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright-style homes we immediately think of midcentury modern furniture. And while this style of furnishing suits the house perfectly, would it be easy to accidentally make your house look like a Mad Men set?

My mother’s dream house

(All it needs is Walter Cronkite on the TV… well, maybe  Anderson Cooper)

How to decorate your mid-century modern home now

(I spy a lot of tufted leather…)

(and of course a sputnik chandelier)

But you could always go classic…

Or skip the ‘mid-century’ and just go ‘modern’…

(Dinosaurs, why not?)

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The Graduate

Less than a month ago I finished the last exam I will ever have to take, and in two weeks time I will be able to call myself a graduate, à la Benjamin Braddock, with a Masters in Art History and Modern History. After much to-ing and fro-ing and waking-up-in-a-cold-sweat-agonizing over what I would “be”, I decided last year to pursue a career in interior design after college. I’m now enrolled as an interior design student and will spend the next one-two years getting this degree, writing my blog, and hopefully delving deeper into the scary grown-up world that is a job in interior design. I plan to post interiors that I love, DIYs that I’m brave enough to try, and beautiful house tours from the places I live and have lived in throughout the world including Scotland, England, and California.

My bedroom in California