Colours and Rooms 2 - Thoughts about Dining Rooms

So I allow myself the pleasure here to chat to you about favourite colours for several rooms. No need to agree with me, but bare with me the pleasure of thinking about it.

One thing is important and experience has taught me one universal truth: different countries have different needs in colours for  the interior decoration of a house. The colours which work well in Portugal or in Turkey do not easily work in Belgium - the light is different, as is the climate and the "feeling " of the place.

Here in Brussels colours are naturally more muted and calmed down. The sky is flat and most of the time a nondefinitive sluggish colour of grey. Rare are the days with clear blue skies and white clouds - what I miss about Bavaria...  No wonder that the shop "Flamant" is all over the place with greys and browns, blacks or mushy whites combined with wood and a lot of silverish stuff.
When  I arrived 10 years ago from Turkey in Belgium, the yellow striped sofa did not fit into the feeling of the country any longer. I have since changed the furniture tones more to muted terracotta, soft greens and some creamy whites. Strong, bright colours do not work in this climate - they can look out of touch. Strong dark colours are another thing - friends of mine have a dark red diningroom, which is lovely and cosy, definitively made for long dark winter evenings and one can wonderfully imagine the celebrations at Christmas in this jewel coloured, cosy room.




Provisiorial dinning room

But then only fools do not change their mind: I have painted my new dining room in a bright  Canari yellow, with bright yellow curtains and a red carpet. And it is nice as well. I have a dark grey stone floor and big white windows, which pulls it all together. The dining table has been dressed in a soft terracotta coloured  tablecloth with a wildly flowered greyish table square on top. Sounds adventurous, but is nice and until now we have had many a wonderful meal in this room and the children use it as the place to do their homework, when they come home in the dark afternoons from school.
It has the big advantage of having sun in the morning, so it doubles in the true sense in being a classical breakfast room, small, square and friendly, full of light and  generating a happy athmosphere and/or a square smallish cabinet of a dining room in the evening, ligthed by candle light and only a soft lamp in one of the corners.

Always remember, please: NO light from above in a dining room. It makes people always look sick and tired. Better have two or three lamps in different places and lots of candles - so much more becoming to the teint and putting a sparkle in your guests eyes.

Another lovely combination for dining rooms are soft old rose tones and or a muted green with soft rosecoloured curtains. Again thought out for eating in the evening - there is rarely a colour which is so beautiful in daylight and electric light as the right shade of pink. Many people are afraid of using it, but in the right combination with furniture, curtains, flowers and porcelain it is hard to beat.

Naturally many of you will prefer the current fashion of having  a very high tech and cool dining area. Not everybody of us has the luxury or (with the kitchen being too small) the need of having a room or designated area in our homes for the purpose of eating alone.

Funnily enough the dining room is a quite recent invention - until the beginning of the 19th century, i.e. 200 years ago, people used to eat in the place they just where. A small table was brought in and set out to eat where it was convenient. The last  left-overs of this attidute today are the hotel's "Room Service" and, more ironically reverting to olden times, having your dinner in front of the telly.
Dining rooms came up when the upper middle classes became more influential and more keen on displaying their riches and newly aquired tastes and habits.
.

Sometimes a dining room seems a waste of space especially in times where only few of us still have personal to wait on us - good bye, Downton Abbey..... So, in the sense of practiciality and also common sense,  there should always be a second or third use to them. The fact of having a huge table in a huge room, as we can still see in may old houses nowadays, was also the pure necessity of making space for big families and their doings. Dining tables do still today double as working tables, to do your homework, sewing or sweating over puzzles, playing monopoly and sitting around with a cup of tea and happily chatting away. I have seen the most beautiful dining table set in a small room full of books - unforgettable athmosphere.

But also very stylish and coming back in fashion is having kitchen dinners - so much fun and so beautiful. But about those more in a post about kitchens - I am thinking already about it.

 Back to some more colour ideas....
Some other very chic chic combinatioon of colours for a dining room is cappuchino brown, white and a third colour - you can choose whatever you think would go well together. Or a simple white room, dark wood furniture and lovely flowers. Or a dove blue with grey and cream... the combinations are endless, just make sure that you do not use more than three dominant colours get the light right, have a pair of candles and some flowers on the table.
Then you need only  a few lovely smiling faces sitting around a good pot of stew, fresh baguette and a good glas of red wine to be perfectly happy.
Sure one of the things you do not need to be rich to achieve.

Why don't you....

This time of the year brings us back to stay put at home and invite some friends over in the dark evenings.

So, why don't you...

- invite a couple of friends for playing society games: Good old charades are almost lost to human memory and even a session of very competitive Monopoly opens up new horizons and traits of character. Provide some good wine, enough water and a huge tablett full of sandwiches ( not for nothing the Earl of Sandwich invented the stuff while gambling away and not having time to get up for dinner), or hotdogs, or Brezen with butter - something easy and simple to eat out of your hands, just with a papernapin around. Place all of it on a small table and let people help themselves.

- start to do a huge 1000 piece puzzle on your dining table. Just leave it there and every time one of you and your family passes by, there is the temptation of having a look and finding the right piece. Work in progress.

- dress your house or flat up for winter. You can change the covers for your sofa to a more cosy texture with some throws and cushions on top, hanging those thicker curtains to help keep out the cold, think about getting an artificial fire going in a corner of the room and use a lovely warm scented candle in the evening to make the house smell good of joys to come.

- put your flowers in a context of winter - with bare pieces of wood, found in the woods when on a walk, or with the flowers which are right now in season - no tulips now, please!!

- revive the wonderful tradition of making a "Jour Fixe" - almost lost tradition of keeping  an open house for friends and aquaintances on a certain day in the month - let's say every last saturday of the month from 16.00 - 20.00 during the winter months. People need no special inviation but get in september an ivitation with the dates until end of  february and can come if they like. Your job is to be at home, have enough tea, water and white wine at hand, some sandwiches and huge bowls of nuts, olives and what ever comes to your mind. And then relax and look forward to your visitors, may it be many or just a few. If you have a cosy home, people will love to come and look forward to those evenings once a month. And if they bring a new face, even better!

Colours and Rooms 1

I have moved house several times in my life, and fear, that those moves are not over yet.

One of my great regrets is that I always had to live - that is, from my 19th year - in rented houses and appartments, so that the feeling of being "chez moi" never could sink in really really deep. I wonder how it feels? Must feel nice though...
But I do not complain, as I am very near to house heaven right now in my new abode here in Brussels. It is coming slowly together and I have tremendous fun in choosing colours and curtains - in a small way and even smaller budget, but all the same.

At home, in Bavaria, my parents, and especially my mother was most indulgent in letting me and my brother Gotthard live out our dreams of interior decorations - in a sort, she was "happy that we did it". We were polishing floors, painting rooms and doors, discussing houses and concepts, studiying the Villa Wittgenstein in Vienna, looing through books without end and hearing Caruso while dreaming up THE necessary ideas of making our house and home beautiful. I was feeling as happy as could be in those years. I still live on them now.

 I remember distinctly deciding a day, that the guest loo in the ground floor was in dire need of being done up - so I went to the villages chemists, bought a small sack of pigments for a really small sum f money, made my mother drive me to the next little town to buy some paint and off I went, happily renovating the guest loo. There were some things I could not change, but I changed the mirror for a nicer one which I had found in the house, my mother got inspired too and sew some garmets to cover a hitherto plain wooden  table, which afterwards looked so much more pretty and welcoming than ever before. I painted the space around the little sink with oilproof paint and the door and the window in a gleaming new white: we had a framboise coloured loo, white and lovely doors, a display of white kleenex, some new soap and fresh white guesttowels piled up - and that was it.

I still do admire my mother for her nerve. If one of my children would start to do my house up in their sort of idea of being chic and elegant, I would most probably go ballistic and get most certainly horribly protective about my home. My mother was more the type if joining in, with great fun and following our lead. We had a lovely home, believe me.

I only late had a room for my own - I was 17 I think and I painted it in a first go in a sky blue, later then in a deep and warm peach - more tending to terracotta, if I think about it. I asked one of my other brothers to drive me to Ikea and bought a lovely little sofa. Mami made me simple white cotton curtains and I got the old iron bed down from the attic -  today my youngest son sleeps in it. I loved my room at home.

My rooms as a student in Munich were always nice and simple - and as G. says, looked "always the same" - I suppose, my house now here, 20 years later, looks all the same again.

When I moved to Portugal, we restored a rented appartment and painted the whole flat in a deep yellow, unheard at the time in Lisbon. There it was the habit of painting rooms generally always in white, because of the heat, I suppose.  And, I do admit, it looks very beautiful with the 18th century Azulejos, blue and white tiles on the walls and an ox-blood red tiled floor. But I felt more at home with yellows - remembered me of baroque austrian walls and all.

After that,  my colour choices have been decided by landlords ever since - until now. I have reverted to all the colours of the rainbow - very un-chic in the current times of belgian colourschemes like taupe, brown and off white in the now famous Style Flamand. Which can be very elegant, I admit, I was there at the Sablon with friends only yesterday and am always impressed in the sheer scale of presentation of a full blown decoration scheme - "from the cradle to the grave" -  to be found there. No need to have ideas of your own. It is place for pilgrimage for all coming to Brussels and I pop in, whenever I have time to know what is going on.

But as the weather is already grey and darkish, I somehow want more colour for my own home and have painted "my little hut" in bright yellows and greens. Until now, I think it is wonderful and cosy.

As you now me by now and might well imagine, I have always ideas about interiors. Will write a post soon with some ideas about colour schemes for rooms. Give me just some time....

Film: "AMOUR", by Michael Haneke, 2012

It has been a long time that I have been in a cinema at all - and on top of it to see a film, which really moved my heart and made me think hard.

This film is a french/german/austrian coproduction and has received a Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival this year. I suppose  this was more for the fact that three legends of  The French Film, Jean-Louis Trintignant , Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert  have been starring in it and we all know, that France is one of the last countries left, which knows what their artists are worth.

This film is different. First of all the story could be told in one sentence: Old couple faces death. Not normally a sujet which will fill the cash boxes. But then the cinema was pretty full. And very silent ( might have helped that in the cinema I went there was no popcorn available). It is a very quiet and slow movie, painfully slow sometimes, not, as we have to get used to more and more, running and anticipating,  leaving you breathless only by watching it...
Here feelings  and thoughts are expressed, often without words, but so clear and so courageous that you stomach twists and turns. Impossible not to be drawn into the  story, into the relationship between those two old people. To start thinking about it. Then the relationship with their daughter, here Isabelle Huppert:  a mirror to all of us, showing selfishness and helplessness in the face of the truth. Impossible not to react to that too.

I am not sure, who of the both main charactes/actors are more to be admired - Emmanuelle Riva takes the plunge in looking the part - and when she is proud and haughty, the fear and helplessness is there as well to be felt and seen. Jean Louis Trintignant fights despair and memories but keeps the stiff upper lip - and this will slip as well in a moment of letting go.. Both are old in reality too, which gives this film a tone of truth, which is heartbreaking. If there ever was a need to prove that old age has its own courage, there it is. There is hope for us all. Inspite of everything.
What stays is dignity, independance, despair and joy, clearness and awe. A beautiful film. And not for the faint hearted.

News

Hello to you all!

It has been quite a while, that I have been on this blog and sorry for not having written anything for such a long time. But now it looks, that slowly slowly I am coming back...

In the meantime, my oldest son has left for university, the new house starts to feel like home for the "leftover-children" and me and even the dogs have found their way around.The fat squirrel, that lives in my backyard has got used to us people and has eaten all the hazelnuts from all the three trees, which I have. Right now the chestnuts are on the menu.

Today I had a lovely day off, working in my garden and having enough time to think about this blogs and actually felt that I miss writing! Between the need of finding new curtains ( I am getting there as well), the daily bussiness in the office and the other daily necessities of a family there is pretty little time to write about my usual nonsense.

During the summer I was in Bavaria and have visited the old house - there will be some pictures of how it looks now soon on this blog. And I have heard of some old and dear friends, which makes me think about the importance of staying on touch, even if it is only once a year. Another thing I was contemplating was the great possibilities this rentree has brought in the sense of fashion and the need to sort out some stuff right away - how about the new coats and which kind of boots does a girl need this year..
Then THE DECORRATION of the house - so exiting! I have gone wild on colours and have once and for all decided, that I go with colour. No greys and creams in my house - at least not fot the next years coming. There is yellow, lots of green and some very nice terracotta red in defiance of the dull belgian sky!

Well, all this just so say, that this handbag still has some content to come up with.
I'll keep you posted!

Jola

There is silence on this blog - house moving!

I have been moving house - right now I sit here between the last boxes in a living room, which looks more like a jumble sale, that something I have been imagining for the last weeks. But I am here and happy - on top of it it has been a glorious blue days here in Brussels, blue blue sky during the whole week and the garden, of which I am now a pride keeper, is in full glory. In the morning I totter out in the garden, coffee cup in hand and walk a little around to see how things are. I feel at home.

Sleeping in a new place is always an ordeal, as human beings are such creatures of habit. Must be some old genetic inheritance, this not sleeping sound in new premises. But it gets better and better. I have made already aquaintance with a red squirrel, who is everyday doing its round of checking the ripness of the hazelnuts, doing the most acrobatic moves and once in a while throw a glance at me and then gets on with the bussiness. And I know already the place in the Chestnut tree, where the doves like to sleep. The dogs are happy as well, sitting in the sun in the garden.

Utter luxury is a roofed terrace, right next to the kitchen. We have been eating out everyday, as the weather is going on and on with blue skies and  lovely temperatures in the evenings - have been sitting out more times already here than in the last years together!

The funny thing is, how the house has a will of its own in getting furnished. You will laugh, but I am very convinced that houses have their own personalities and it is normally no good to go against them. This house here has a very earthy feel and a sort of easy going elegance. Not a city elegance, but more countryhouse elegance. It is not rustic, but not urban neither. My furniture feels at home. The pictures as slowly filling the few walls I have, as most of them are windows. Curtains and colourschemes take shape in my head all alone, it is no hard work, but great great fun.

It will take some time, but one room after the other will find its voice. And then the more human voices of happy children, guests and a lot of music should make it simply a Happy House.

Why don't you...

start having fun with summer in the city? You could for example..

- spend the summer holidays at home: No hustle-bustle in long traffic jams, no overrun planes with screaming infants, no crammed beaches,  but a quiet life in town, money to go eating out, to the cinema and evening spent with friends on the terrasse doing the odd BBQ.  No traffic jams, people nice and relaxed... Cheaper, calmer, more comfortable - your own bed, your well known supermarket around the corner and the possibility to do whatever you like!! Going to Paris for a day? Off you go. Going for a walk at the beach? Off you go. Sleeping until noon? Off you go. And so on and on.... By far the most comfortable way of spending holidays I can imagine.

- have a new haircut? Change is in the air! What is nicer for the girl about town as the sensing of the "rentree" slowly creeping up in August? It is now, where all the glossy magazines bring out their autumn/winter issues, with all the "new" stuff coming fresh from the pintshop. So be prepared... And, not to forget, during the summerholidays your hairdresser will be not stressed and will have time to discuss this new "you" and give you a VIP treatment. As you have not spent those 600 Euros for a plane ticket, throw in the odd manicure as well. Luxury!

- have a first look through the shops for the Fall collections, especially if your size is quickly sold out. Go with a friend and have fun in trying on everything you might find interesting or quirky. Then don't buy, but go home, sleep a night and consider if this money well spent? A better investment than buying the 54th sun hat or overcharged swimming costume in the overcrowded holiday resorts, where you out of sheer boredom will spend money on junk you will never ever wear once you are back at home in reality.

- work during august? Sounds odd, but is fun. The offices are calmer, the lunch breaks can be longer and there is most probably all the time in the world to reorganise your desk and have all up to date when the storm starts on the 2nd of september. My collegue and I did a lunch spree to Ikea and came back full with plants and made our office look like a jungle. Fun!

- change the rhythm of every day life: No cooking, but a good brunch. An afternoon off in town, alone. No ironing for 2 days in a row ( believe me, what a difference!). Trying new fruits and vegetables. Make the children cook. Have a pijama day. Read in the garden. Write a letter - oh yes, please! Do things differently, have a look from another point of view, get out of the trample pfad of the daily treadmill.

Most important of all is to find time to slow down. Let the other search for entertainment and change far away and come back exhausted from the stress of having fun and "the time of their lives". Mostly crap anyway.