The pretty, the silly, and the downright ugly....

[ghostlybohemia]

It's so cold here. I realise that it's probably cold everywhere but it seems particularly cold today, right here, in my Ugg boots. Seems like a good reason to indulge in some pretty things to cheer us all up and remind ourselves that not everything is as grey as the sky. :)

Comments

[dragonclouds]

As a young'un, my dream was to become an interior designer. I had little notebooks filled with ideas and colours and pictures taken from magazines and I used to ring up all the homeware companies and ask for catalogues. This was when I was about nine. The Pier was my favourite.

My mum still gets all those magazines. I ought to make myself a nice binder because I'm always seeing amazing things in them. And the Vogue Homes section just slays me every time, as they're always (obviously) MEGA RICH AND EXPENSIVE houses filled with interesting bits and pieces. And usually a huge shoe cupboard.

I actually had to record an episode of Escape To The Country the other day because one of the houses was decorated in such an incredible way and it had all these incredible pieces of furniture. I am such a sucker for these things.

[ghostlybohemia]

Interior design is wonderful today because of the ability to mix styles and really express your personality in a way that is not always possible with clothing. The Pier is lovely, I used to wander around the glass section in Chester wishing I had some money (and a house) so I could buy all their stock. They had those apothecary chest things before anyone else caught on to that idea.

Interior design makes us happy. Use of colour is so inspiring in a lot of these homes, especially on Domino. I agree, Vogue Homes is to die for but the owners are so annoyingly rich and and bourgeois. They have some great ideas.

[dragonclouds]

I generally hate the owners in all the magazines and on tv and everything. I feel like they don't deserve their homes. This may just be jealousy.

The people at my church all have IKEA show home type things. Everything is new and it all matches. And every house is the same! Cream walls, brown leather sofas, those strange fake fur rugs things, black and white pictures of flower heads. It drives me insane. I like things to be out of place and to come from lots of different shops and different parts of the world and different times. I like houses to look as though they've evolved and grown, to tell a story about the people who live there.

I'm dying for the book William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Home. That aesthetic is so dear to me and I really hate mass production.

[ghostlybohemia]

Oh, I had a huge argument with my lecturer the other week about Mr Morris. He said that the Morris Co. was an inspiration to The Bauhaus because of his mass production ethic. I was all, "Oh no, my dear chap, I beg to differ. Mr Morris was not about mass production, in fact that flies in the face of what he stood for. It was about bringing individual, handcrafted objects into peoples homes; this could not ever be done on a scale to warrant it being called mass production. Also, the prices were way beyond working class wages, so how could you say that it was mass produced? Although Morris probably wanted to make the products more accessible, it wasn't feasibly possible. So, pfffff." It went on like that for a while and I don't think either side won. What do you think? I can kinda see his point, but then maybe it's the word, mass-production, that makes me all Morris defensive. To me, his work was the opposite and also, I would totally marry Mr Morris if possible. He's one of my historical dead boyfriends

[dragonclouds]

Morris was actually fiercely anti mass-production. He thought that it was stifling and destroying the creativity and individualism in the world. He was a supporter of artisan crafts and hated the entire industrial revolution. His house was filled with things made by him, his wife and his friends