Things I Loved Lately: New Kitchen Edition
shoes, sheets, paintings, pantries, my darling book!
It’s Sunday morning, and listen: I am writing this from my bed. Can you believe?
A real bed! With a mattress! I have been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for….quite some time…and I am a thousand years old. The last time I slept on a mattress on the floor for a prolonged period I was a youthful slip of a person and I didn’t understand why people complained about sleeping on the floor. Ha ha ha! Now I grow old and my spine grows even older somehow, and I have never been more relieved to have a bed.
I bought these mocha-and-cream striped sheets from IKEA, and they are incredibly chic, plus pure cotton and nicely heavy with good buttons. I have spent a long time trying to get on board with e.g. Piglet In Bed, very fancy, but I can’t get cosy in linen. I know this is the words of a heretic, but give me nice heavy cotton every time. (I like textured cotton too, look at these!)
I am in bed, in these nice sheets, and I am not looking at a single box. This is because I have put every single box in the spare room, which is a terrible pit of all our clothes: we don’t have anywhere, and I mean anywhere, for clothes. I don’t know how to buy a wardrobe. I don’t know how to get a wardrobe up our narrow terrace stairs.
I actually read an American blog the other day which would have classified our house as “a tiny house”. Hahahahaha. To me, it is a palace, albeit a palace in which I cannot get a wardrobe up the stairs and everything is going to have to be custom-built to fit the spaces available. My dad and R and AG have already hacked apart several hapless Billies to Frankenstein a wall of built-in bookcases. I am going to paint these re-worked Billies Dock Blue, which is the colour of the walls in there, and then, when I have stopped spending all my money on other frivolities, I am going to do the backs in this extraordinary paper.
Look: I put peonies in there.
We are leaving the wall on the left raw plaster: too blown to paint, but actually so pretty in that soft goldy-pink.
How spooky is this, though? I was looking for paintings, kind of aspirationally, for the house: lots of our previous art doesn’t quite work here, for whatever reason, and I was having a browse. And then I fell in love with this, which appears to have been painted of these peonies, my favourite flower, for me, and this room of pinks and blues and golds.
Who are you, Lilia Orlova-Holmes! How did you paint this picture for me! Alas, it is £6500, which is so significantly above my current art budget that I must simply yearn. But isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it perfect for my house? Won’t I mourn not owning it forever? I don’t have £6500 so don’t tell me to buy it. But I love it. The little dashes of gold!
Especially as this kind of gold-y-orange-y-rust is kind of the through-line of the house: I limewashed the hall and stairs and landing pale gold, with a fantastic wallpaper (which I will show at a later date), and upstairs the bedrooms are two different soft soft pinks, and they are going to have (at a later date) very soft gold woodwork, probably my precious Madeleine. (I have still not found anywhere for Bombolone: a harder colour than you might think.)
