Lessons from a Home Stager

The New York Times Magazine has a great article about staging a home today. Eventhough the article is about staging for selling purpose, there are some great tips that you can pick up for your daily life as well...

For example:

1) Start with a white sofa and go from there, as you can change the look quickly by changing the pillows.

2) Have a story, or a theme, and build from there.

3) Do and reedo until it's right.

4) Avoid matchy matchy.

5) Build characters and personality by adding pieces that reflect your lifestyles.

To read this article and watch the video, click here.



Image source: NY Times

Gorgeous Silk Flowers from New Growth Designs

When it comes to silk flowers we like them to look as real as possible--this is why you'll never find us buying them at Walmart!

The good ones are pricey, for the very simple reason that they tend to look almost like the real ones.

We found some at New Growth Designs that we just love. The orchids are nice and tall, so they look super dramatic. Some of them are over 5 feet tall. We like putting them on a console table, in front of a mirror along with some other accessories.

Check out some of our favorite ones:






We'll be posting these on our silk flowers section soon.

Really Pretty Silk Flowers from Atrium Foliage

When the weather starts to get cold and gloomy, we find ourselves craving for colors. That's when we find silk flowers an attractive option--mainly for the fact that it's almost impossible to find fresh flowers in the winter, plus we're super lazy, and silk flowers require no maintenance whatsoever...

Here are some from Atrium Foliage that we really like. Based out of Atlanta, they make the flowers to order, one arrangement at a time... We like them because they look and feel expensive (and okay, they ARE a little expensive, but worth every pennies though).









We'll be posting these on our silk flowers section in a couple of days. Please check back with us to see the complete collection.

More Modern Vintage Furniture-Haute House

We featured Haute House furniture a while back. This line is kinda wild, kinda funky. It's great when you have great imagination and you are looking for statement pieces.

When in High Point last week we saw that they had a new collection called "Histography" that we thought was kinda cool. It is also much more livable and muted than their other pieces.

Here are some samples:







To see the entire Haute House line, check out their web site here. As always, if you need help with pricing, email us.

Modern Vintage from Noir

We were just in High Point last week for the home furnishings market. The weather was gloomy and cold--so was the mood of the market. This gotta be one of the toughest year for the home furnishing industry. Everyone we talked seem to have a rough time.

But it was nice to see that manufacturers are still coming out with new and fresh introductions. The trend we notice most this year is vintage done in a modern way. Maybe it's because we like to go back to comfortable things when time is tough. Generally the trend is muted, simple and organic.

Noir Trading has a few pieces that we just love. We wrote about them before but we are featuring them again due to the fact that this is a line that keeps getting better everyday. If you love Oly Studio, take a look at this line. It's very similiar but way more affordable.

Here are a few of our faves:











If you would like to see more of Noir products, visit their web site here. If you need pricing for any of the pieces, drop us a line...

Southern Accents Magazine Closing Down

We have been really blue lately.

It started out a couple of months ago, when we got our September Vogue issue. What is normally 10 lbs worth of magazine, the coveted issue is bare-thread and just ...wimpy. Then when we pick up our LA Times newspaper along with our latte in the morning, it is so thin one can browse through it in five minutes.

So our blueness is even more accentuated when we heard that Southern Accents is closing. This is in addition to Gourmet, a fabulous food magazine. What is the world coming to?

One can argue that the Internet kills the newspapers and magazine industry, but to us there is nothing more pleasurable than seeing the mailbox full of new magazines. Nothing beats holding a new stack of fresh magazines with delicious pictures to look at and glossy pages to hold.

So may we ask for your support of the newspaper and magazine industry? It's not a lot of money to keep your subscription going. A subscription to Elle Decor, say, costs less than $10/year? The New York Times is more, but oh it's so worth it.

We can not live in a world without things to read, stores to visit, beautiful things to look at. Let's do our part to keep our world from being more isolated than it is.

Holidays....Wonderful, but back to decorating!

Image from House of Turquoise

We have just come back from our 'trip of a life time' holiday to the USA and Toronto in Canada. It is very embarrassing to note that I haven't blog since July but I also was very concerned that if I made an announcement that we were going overseas, I would be devastated if the wrong people read my message and decided to pay my house a visit whilst we we gone! Our wonderful friends baby sat our home and our dog for us and they were also very sad to leave our place behind as they felt they had a holiday as well.


The trip was unbelievable and we stayed in the most wonderful hotels...thanks to Trip Advisor. We went to Disney Land LA, New York, Toronto, Las Vegas and Hollywood. New York is my favourite place and it always reminded me of Carrie in Sex in the City. I will say it was the wonderful hospitality of the American and Canadian people that made our holiday so much more special. No matter where we were, people bent over backwards to give us directions or help when we needed it. I have never received such good service in restaurants or hotels in my life. Anyway, enough about my trip, back to decorating!



Where am I at the moment...not much further down the track than where I left off in July. I have ordered blinds for upstairs which will look nice but all my beautiful drapes will have to be put on hold until next year as there are other priorities for the house. this Wallpaper fixation I have needs to be address however...I must get it done for the areas in the house so I can move on to finish the rest of the rooms. I did however manage to buy two sets of Barcelona style chairs for the house off my friend. These are beautiful chairs and often I will sit upstairs with my feet up reading a book or just relaxing. I may in the future put them both together but at the moment they are better in separate rooms so each lounge area has more seating.

My new addition to the upstairs lounge room

So that is about it....just trying to keep the house clean and decluttered, patiently waiting to get my wallpaper just like in the pretty picture of the bedroom above. Christmas is coming up (which I love) so i cant wait to see all the decorating ideas and pictures in all my favourite blogs.

Mrs B

sneak peak from our new fall/winter catalog mailing soon...