Shady shady
Bit of a random blog post today but thought you might like some interior inspo from the coolest offices in the world – Google HQ! I’m in residence for one week as part of my ‘real life’ job as editor of Company magazine.
Please can I work here?
Pod off!
So it struck me that Google have very similar design esthetics to me! For more pics check out our story on company.co.uk
Then get updating your CV – they have unlimited food and snacks all day long too!!! #dreamjob
Not suitable for anyone male and/or over 9
So, to recap… This is the pink I had chosen for my ‘salon’. And I hated it. Sorry Earthbourne paints, it’s not entirely your fault, I mean, this might be nice in a small girl’s bedroom. Possibly with some of those flowery padded letters spelling out ‘sleep’ but it’s just not what I had in mind for my grand salon. I’d chosen pink for my French salon as my London home is a haven of greys, khakis and blues (well my old London home was – the current one is a building site save for my bedroom which is a khaki haven farrow and ball Blue Gray
Farrow and Ball Blue Gray in my London bedroom
In France, as it’s in the middle of nowhere where no one will expect any specific design motifs (rooms without livestock in them are oddities around these parts!) and has huge rooms, I saw it as an opportunity to do things a little less ‘greige’ which is where my pink obsession began. But my salon had to be grown up and not at all girly. #epicfail so far.
This is more what I had in mind….
Maybe a touch girly?
A little more ‘mature’?
Definitely more sophisticated and ‘manly’
Dream room…..
And I know I teased last blog post that I’d reveal what I ended up with eventually. I might spin this out a bit longer – like an episode of Homeland. All WILL be revealed next post…..
Cosy huh?
When we first bought the ‘house in france’ one of it’s biggest selling points was the sheer size and scale of the rooms. Majestic one could say. Certainly compared to London living where if you can afford a three story shoebox with a postage stamp sized garden its considered living in Versailles! And the french house had rooms the size of entire floors of our London home. And so it was with the ‘Salon’. Too grand to be called a ‘sitting room’ and the word ‘lounge’ brings me out in funny lumps n bumps and certainly not a ‘drawing room’ as we had no intention of withdrawing to it – in fact we intended to spend hours of our time there so we plumped for the french – ‘salon’ when referring to it.
Initially the salon didn’t have a floor. It had rats running through it eating up the broken floorboards and so we closed the doors and avoided it at all costs. But once we’d had some people come in and concrete the floors (sorry Ratty – maybe they’re still there like Han Solo – frozen in time or people in Pompeii having their tea when the volcano hit) we started to use the biggest room in the house.
a bit cosier…
And for Christmas each year we built big fires and had the tree and a couple of sofas thrown in to sit on. The mid century modern sofa eventually ended up in the kids sitting room (see blog post here) but the big squishy grey sofa will remain. It came from IKEA and is a bargainous EKTORP – the cheapest one they do. But as it’s already had children peeing on it and paint splattered over it as part of project redecorate I think it was a wise move not to go for Parker Knoll!
It is essentially the last room we need to decorate and in some ways I’m worried about where my blog will go once I’ve shown you this!!! Although we still have sub rooms and hallways and barns and exteriors to make over. So don’t abandon me just yet.
Once Peter had plastered the most damaged bits of wall (and the Kings Speech style peeling paper had finally been removed) we started painting. I’d had an idea that I wanted this room to be pink. I cant even remember why I got this in my head but I must have seen a pink sitting room in some back issue of Living Etc or some such. And Peter insisted I get an Earthbourne paint as they are clay based and better for our damp walls. So THIS is what I plumped for being the only pink they had at the time. And then we started painting. And we made the kids help…
Who needs kid’s clubs?
Pink to make the girls wink
And it was VERY pink. And we used two whole tins of relatively expensive paint.
our brush with pink
And then it was almost finished and……. I HATED it. It looked like a 10 year old girl’s bedroom. All it needed was some White Company bunting and a One Direction poster and that’s where we’d be. And I knew that I could not leave it like that no matter how much our expensive, clay based paint had cost. So we went back to the drawing board. And the quest for the perfect pink began again…… like Indiana Jones hunting for the Holy Grail – I was looking for my dream paint colour. The quest was on…
My son, Arthur has started a blog – he is a bit depressed as no one has visited it yet- I’ve told him it’s a long game in blogs….
Ok so in this post i’m going to talk about people’s favourite doctors. So in the comments leave your favourite doctor and why . My favourite doctor is Matt Smith because he is always really exited when he meets new life forms and how he reacts to problems. For instance when he was playing chess with himself he used intellect to win back his body which was epic. Plus in 2011 while we were at a music festival(latitude), i met him in person and he was really kind. So to recap please leave a comment about your favourite doctor .Thanks see you next week.
Game on!
When we bought La Maison Blanche – we naively thought that bringing our children to rural france for every holiday would mean shared rustic experiences. There were to be no televisions in the house, so for at least ten weeks a year they’d be unable to watch that god awful rubbish on the Disney Channel involving the same rotating five actresses all bleating on about “dating and like, friends and like, totally relating…”
Instead, we thought, smugly, we would all sit around and talk. They’d ask questions about our lives before them – show interest in the history of us, the house or themselves. Oh no. We might occasionally get ‘WHAT?!!!*** THERE WAS LIKE NO MOBILE PHONES WHEN YOU WAS YOUNG….THAT SUCKS’. HOW DID YOU, LIKE, INSTAGRAM?’ But of course these days you don’t need a TV to watch, er, TV (yep thanks netflix and youtube). So electronic items have seeped into our french life. And access to moving pictures is unrestrictable as Peter needs his computer there to do his work and I need my ipads to play Candy Crush Saga. So it began with the children then using them to watch films. And then came the Olympics so we worked out a way to live stream via BBC.com to watch the Opening Cermony and so before you know it you’re right back to where you began with constant, 24 hour, TV access.
Anyone know what the thing behind me does though? Plays big black plastic disc things…
But if the battle against electronic items is a losing one – the war is being won slightly thanks to our enormous and ever increasing board game selection shown above. In London we may occasionally get the Monopoly out for a long, slow, torturous game which always ends with Seb banging his fist on the board and sending houses flying when he is losing, but that’s it. Apart from games of cards or endless pokemon card exchanging that I still don’t understand. However, in France just the lack of a TV seems to encourage game playing. And trips to Vide Greniers always result in some classic being bought in another version french or multilingual (I once found the French equivalent of a Countdown game)
My best ever buy is Mastermind – a 70s classic based around the TV show but nothing to do with the TV show. You have to work out the sequence of coloured pegs your opponent has selected. If you’ve got right colour, right place – you get a black peg. Right colour, wrong place – a white peg. Sounds wild right? Well it is.
Mastering your mind
J’achete!
And who could fail to be excited by french versions of English classics. French Trivial Pursuit played late, drunkenly at night can keep adults entertained for hours “c’est Vanessa Paradis?” Pretentious nous? And even Monopoly when played with french properties somehow seems just that bit more exciting. Occasionally we even get to the end of a game without anyone storming off in a huff of bankruptcy. Or reaching for the remote control to find out what’s happening to Austin and Ally.
You’re welcome
I am sometimes accused of moaning. I know? Fancy that. My husband says I complain too much about things and says I need to be more ‘half full’. My friend, and former boss Meribeth who is Canadian and thus I suspect born with inherent positivity starts most sentences with “you know, you gotta look at the positive..” and I really do try. And our great friends Johnny and Ana Maria who were about to arrive at Maison Blanche for New Year are great examples of ‘happy people’. Maybe they moan behind closed doors – in fact maybe they are both perpetually morose when not round at our house or entertaining us at theirs, but I doubt it. Ana Maria is Columbian and refers to everyone as ‘my darling’ or ‘amore’. Perhaps if we had one word for ‘loved one’ in english maybe we’d all be happier and more positive.
And so our gorgeous, positive friends came to stay for new year and they were the perfect guests to see our ‘almost quite nice’ house as they are fellow lovers of renovation projects AND some of the most stylish people I know when it comes to interiors. And, er relentlessly positive. They loved our newly decorated dining room. They cooed over our half finished salon with the peeling walls and no floors. Ana Maria played Cluedo for hours with the boys (they have two boys Thomas and Alberto who my kids have known since they were all born in houses next door to one another – not literally – it wasn’t Angela’s Ashes, we just lived next door to each other at that time!) and we even persuaded all our children to look positively on a massive walk around a frozen lake at Gavarnie
It is THIS much fun here honestly kids
And even when it rained and was cold and wet Peter managed to achieve the one thing he’d wanted to do since we got the house – host a screening of The Italian Job using his 16mm projector. I bought the projector quite cheaply on ebay as a gift for him not realising that to buy 16mm film is ferociously expensive. As a consequence, The Italian Job is the only film we have and setting it all up requires a lot of effort, so we’d never actually bothered – until now! And the boys all snuggled under a duvet in our half renovated salon while Michael Caine attempted to ‘blow the bloody doors off’ and the adults opened a bottle of champagne to see in the New Year. And even I was forced to admit that things really had turned out nice again.
Book em danno
So blog lovers, its time for a recap. We are now three Christmases into our French Home project and each year the tree gets bigger. This year we have plans for a Poseidon Adventure style tree that we’ll tip upside down at midnight and climb up the middle like Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman (younger blog readers – ask your parents!)
But what’s really going on with the house? How do we feel about it now? Now that the days of peeing in a bucket and not showering for days are over has it been worth it?
Truthfully the jury is still out. Sometimes when we’re in France and we’re cycling around in the sunshine it seems totally worth it. And just the idea that we actually OWN a lovely big house in France is so bonkers it makes me happy. But there are lots of days when I would like a)the money we’ve sunk into this project and b)the opportunity to visit other places. When friends regale us with tales of luxury resorts where they stick their kids in clubs where they learn to water ski or do macrame workshops I wonder if that’s what I should be doing. And it also means that I never truly relax. Like never. I work five days a week, I do housework at home in England in a house we’re renovating and as I live with three men/boys it is never clean. I barely keep on top of the kids increasingly busy lives and then when I go on holiday I’m cooking and cleaning there. We have no nannies to help with childcare (Peter and I do it all ourselves around our jobs), I have no parents nearby to babysit or do emergency pick ups and then I go on holiday where aside from the Landauers coming in to clean (and its about time to note that this is the beginning of our eventual breakdown in relations with the Landauers… more on this in a further blog) I’m then running a household of guests and families in France. In short – I’m exhausted. Brutally. Every fibre of my being is spent and emotionally it has started to take a toll.
But is this the fault of the house in France? Would a two week sunshine break alleviate all the above? If we lived in a wipe clean tiny new house in London would I still find week old pants under a bed and have to pick them up and move them to an overbulging wash basket? And if we had a nanny to give my children nutritious meals that involved some sort of green vegetable would Sebastian still refer to everyone he meets as ‘poo poo head’?
Can I really ‘blame’ my french house for all of the above? Who knows? So perhaps this is a good opportunity to really focus on the stuff that is great about having a house in France – especially as it is now fully habitable and we have in a sense realised ‘our dream’. The sense of achievement in that is second to none. Just the idea that you could go from this
To this….
Is such a major achievement I am metaphorically patting myself and Peter on the back on a daily basis. And I think, importantly as you grow older and your marriage becomes more mundane (sorry Pete but you know, I mean this with affection!) you need something that binds the two of you. For some that’s playing tennis together, for us, it’s talking about our French house. Planning our next bit of the project, sitting opposite each other at the dining table on our respective lap tops, me googling designer furniture sites, him sourcing broken tractor parts on eBay! And I am convinced that this sense of joint achievement and the fact that when we are in France we are able to experience a sense of actually living in a foreign country as opposed to ‘just visiting’ is a truly worthwhile experience. Sitting in our kitchen playing scrabble as a massive fire burns is a very gratifying feeling.
You just don’t get that if you’ve just done two weeks in Santorini do you?
Yep still not painted those sitting room walls…..
It can’t be time for Christmas again? Ooooh yes it can! This is our third Christmas at Maison Blanche and this year my parents had decided not to make the journey (Newcastle to SW France is a LONG way especially without budget airline assistance – be great if Easy Jet, Ryanair etc could sort a flight from Newcastle to Toulouse or Bordeaux – thanks in advance)
Christmas really should be the more the merrier and it doesn’t get any MORE than our friends the Candys. There are six of them (plus Duke the dog but he wasn’t going to be making the trip for Christmas – we got him a squeaky toy to be handed over once he got back from Grandma Pru’s) so we persuaded them to come and visit – there’d be kids, candles, crackers and champagne – yes this would be a christmas for Instagram to remember.
The plan was for us to perform an advance party arrival via road and for the Candys to arrive via air on Christmas Eve. We could take ALL the kids’ presents (er kids if you’re reading this we mean take the presents that Santa brought you all obvs!!!) in our car hidden under blankets etc. All kids had expressed concern about Santa’s ability to find them in rural SW France but we assured them that he just KNOWS – or for the elder, more curious children we explained that the elves have an online database that parents keep updated. There was also concern around ‘christmassyness’ of it all so we asked Serge our neighbour to get us a tree and a goose before we arrived. He then very kindly covered it in chocolate sweets and gaudy flashing fairy lights from Super U which I waited til he was out of sight and then switched for more tasteful white paper balls from cox and cox sorry Serge – he rarely comes into our dining room so would never know.
Don’t show Serge!
We then searched the whole of the Tarbes/Lourdes area for a suitably large tree for our ‘salon’. It didn’t exist. We called Gamm Vert who said we were too late – trees were all gone. Peter finally tracked one down that was about an hour and a half drive away so we sent him off to bring back in a manly, trapper like fashion (tho all he was doing was driving to a garden centre miles away!) He arrived back with a corker coming in at just over 9ft. After all, what’s the point of a big, grand house without a big, grand Christmas tree. This is what we ended up with….
The biggest tree in SW FRance
As you can see, our walls look pretty much the same as last Christmas. It’s all very ‘Kings Speech’ in the Salon but we did at least have a couch this year for us to sit on while the kids tore open their gifts. (Which we’d established a universal value for all to avoid any bickering on Christmas morning – most likely between Lorraine and I!) Santa had become an egalitarian for one year only. So we were ready. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, all good plans ….. Peter, Seb and I all came down with horrific colds the week before our journey. We were barely on the A2 when Sebastian vomited all over the car. And our usual plans to drive through the night while we take turns to sleep were thwarted by our illnesses. Neither Peter nor I could drive for more than twenty minutes without having to stop and rest. So our normal 14 hour door to door journey took us nearer twenty hours (and with the lingering air smell of vomit remaining in the car). The Candys were equally thwarted by illness and their youngest, Mabel was sniffly and not sleeping. So despite plans for adult all night drinking and Trivial Pursuit playing (cos THATs how Rock n Roll we are) we were all in bed on Christmas Eve by 9.30 and Mabel then woke up about four times in the night. Lorraine and I did manage to struggle gamely through a couple of these! But the reality was that Christmas morning could not come soon enough even for the grown ups among us.
G&T if you dont mind
We left out carrots for Rudolph, red wine for Santa and stockings for each child (tho how he was going to fit an x box into one of these was a real worry for Arthur!) And we all went to bed dreaming of a host of gifts to open in the morning – or in the adults case the prospect of feeling less like death.
Stocking fillers
And in the morning – HE’D BEEN! All the way to France – the elves had guided him in the right direction and it turned out that he’d had the presence of mind to bring all the children an Amazon gift card to the same value! Which meant they could order stuff online and have it delivered to their London home. How clever is Santa?
And then we did what any normal family do on Christmas Day, we ran around outside in our pyjamas, made Peter dress up as Father Christmas, ate our bodyweight in chocolate and started but didn’t finish about five games of Sherlock themed Cluedo (a gift for Lorraine which we made her leave behind we enjoyed it so much).
And then we ate a huge Christmas lunch in our newly renovated Dining Room (click here for before and after pics) with goose and pigs in blankets and the children all sat at one end of the table and the adults sat at the other and we suddenly felt a whole lot better.
Mirror, mirror….
So this is part two of my dining room makeover post (its like an episode of 24 isn’t it? Fraught with tension and cliffhangers designed to make you watch the whole series in one go! if you missed part one click here)
I know I talk about food a lot on this blog. Food and Farrow and Ball seem to be recurring themes. If only you could get Clunch cupcakes or Mizzle meringues I’d be in heaven. But my food obsession while in France (when at home in London I eat like a bird – honestly!) meant that the Dining Room was a BIG DEAL. And as our friends the Candys were coming for Christmas I really wanted a proper Dining Room where we could all sit down to a medieval style banquet with Peter as the Sheriff of Nottingham at the head of the table ripping game from it’s bones. (What actually happened on Christmas Day is we spent a large part of the meal carrying out Bush Tucker style challenges to try and get the children to eat sprouts. “eat the sprout, eat the sprout, eat the sprout…” we chanted as Gracie struggled through it with a face like she was eating kangaroo anus)
And this was where I really got to shop. I’d love to say no expense was spared, but as usual with us, every expense was spared. I started out going to John Lewis with my mum to get some of their ‘own brand’ fabric for my chairs. I had no idea which way to go so my choice was largely informed by the price tag. This grey and blue floral was only £16 per metre so I got 5 metres of it.
And Peter covered each chair one, by one with an upholstery gun we bought on eBay and a gazillion chrome studs. Each morning by the time we came down for breakfast he would have completed another chair. Its like a form of therapy for him and possibly what will stop him going off the rails and having affairs. Seriously, if Russell Brand took up upholstery his life might take a very different turn.
And once the chairs were done, the wall colour chose itself. We had to use specialist paint as the walls were so damp, the paint company in question is called Earthborn and specialises in paint for clay. The colour we chose was called Bandstand as we both liked the idea of a dark, wintery dining room (as in summer we eat outdoors anyway) and this has a sort of hunting lodge feel – perfect for that leg of venison, Pete was going to be chowing down on in my Sherwood analogy.
So that just left lighting and a fortuitous meeting via my job with the PR for BHS. Now if you haven’t checked out BHS lighting dept, you really should. The thing I love most about it, is that you don’t see your lights in everyone else’s houses. It’s like a secret find – everyone who sees your light fittings will assume they were VERY expensive. And they are in fact, VERY cheap.
The lovely PR encouraged me to take a look so I bought three of these blue tinged glass lanterns to hang over my table..
The blue lanterns
And for the first time, I had stuff to add into this room. Pictures and sconces we had bought at vide greniers, a massive mirror that our gardners had sold us as it was old and rubbish and they like new and shiny, plus lamps and candlesticks from Graham and Green
And I love this room. It makes me so happy to be in it. We’ve hosted dinners for 20, New Year’s Eve and of course our Candy Xmas.
And this summer the gardners came back with yet more enormous furniture for us to put in it as we are the only people they know with a room big enough. And so we have a games cupboard bigger than Sebastian!
A cupboard bigger than Seb
Game on
So here is a gallery of my favourite room ever. Hope you like it too
Ta da
Flowery
Christmas!!
Renovating homes is a tedious business. There’s always so much to do before the fun bits arrive (the bits when Peter goes on about PVA on walls and caulking etc before I get to choose paint colours and furniture). And as so many of our rooms have been done, bit by bit, often there isn’t a truly ‘Ta Da’ moment where I’ve been able to go from derelict, walls falling down to fully dressing a room and instagramming it safe in the knowledge it’s really properly ‘finished’. Usually there are several, slow stages in between which I’ve edited out for the purposes of the blog and a lot of my rooms are still not truly finished. But the Dining Room is probably the room that really did go from revolting to fabulous and although it was still done in stages, it is in real life now a really, truly, lovely room. That in photographs looks like a proper stunner straight out of a homes mag (even if I do say so myslef!)
So, blog lovers, here is the before….
pink – very this season!
Not quite Claridges
When we have guests to visit these days, we describe to them just how bad the house was before. And as, for most of them renovation ‘stress’ involves the arduous process of finding a rental house to move into while their architect draws up plans for a side return extension, I know their imaginations could NEVER create the pictures above. Even I sometimes forget just how awful our French house was. And even looking back at these pics now I’m not sure how or WHY we did this. It is horrible. Charmless. And we lived with our dining room like this for almost two years give or take. (I think the horrid white plastic table stacked with loo rolls was removed quite quickly)
But lets not dwell on it. Lets talk progress. Mr White did a LOT of plastering. You can see patches on the top pic of where he had started patching bits up but there was a lot more besides. And he would get up early while the rest of us were still asleep and paint large stretches of ceiling and wall with white emulsion to try and alleviate the gloom. And when he had finished, phase 1 he did what any man of a certain age would do. He bought a table tennis table to go in it.
![photo[3]](https://weboughtafrenchhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/photo3.jpg)
But where do we put our knives and forks?
And then there began the long process of restoring the marble fireplace and buying a wood burning stove which you can see in the picture. I may in fact direct you to Mr White’s blog about this as its really his thing and although I love having central heating via a wood burning stove – I must admit to glazing over as he tried to explain the actual technicalities behind it. But here it is if you want to know and I’ll get back to talking about curtains!
Our trusty chandelier that once hung in Peter’s Los Angeles Dining room was temporarily put up just for the want of somewhere for it to live. Since Peter and I moved back to London in 1999 it had languished in my Aunt Moira’s garage in Beverly Hills until a work trip a year or so ago. Somehow Moira persuaded me to carry it back as hand luggage as a surprise for Peter. The surprise for him was that I hadn’t ditched it at LAX as I never really liked it even when we lived there – it certainly wasn’t worth the painful stares from fellow flyers as I took up the majority of the overhead lockers with it on the flight from LAX to Terminal 5! But it lived on, in our half way done dining room in France. And although I don’t particularly like the chandelier itself, I did like the fact that we could sit underneath it and pretend we were back in Harratt St, West Hollywood where we first met.
But once I found my perfect dining table, the table tennis table was removed to the barn – where it still lives happily today, often covered in bat poo but nothing that a jiffy cloth and some Ajax can’t fix.
The table came from our friend Steve Cutts who has been selling his chateau nearby (see blog post here )
On a visit to his home, I admired both his big farmhouse kitchen and dining tables – both large enough to fill our space and perfect in terms of style. So I persuaded him to sell me both even though it left him and his kids crowded around much smaller ones until he found some to replace them. We then found some unfinished chairs at a vide grenier – all six for €100. Un bargain.
So we were starting to look like a finished room…. In fact I may leave the final phase for another post!
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A little place called Home
Farrow and Ball DO deliver to South West France, right?
Its another renovation blog!!! We're a family of five (three boys) two cats and three possums living in Brisbane, Queensland.
a blog about houses and beautiful things
we bought a french house 