Home Office / Studio Decor Inspiration

I'm in the (never-ending) process of redecorating a slip of a room as my office/studio. This room is part of our wrap-around verandah and received a fresh coat of yummy mango-yellow paint recently. I stripped the junk out of the room and right now, it has just the bare essentials - a table, two filing cabinets stuffed with magazines, two thin tall antique cupboards with 'stuff' and a thin single bed, formerly used as a doctor's bed. As you can tell, there's not much room for 'junk' so I'm studiously avoiding getting any in while I figure out storage. Three colourful trunks hold stationery and old notebooks. I'm hoping to use this room as a space to spread out my paints and canvases (in storage since we packed up our lives in the UK six years ago - shame!) and allow me and the boy to paint our afternoons away. Goa is wonderful for languid pipe-dreams and doing up this hot sunny room is one of mine.

Here are some inspirational images for this home-office/art studio/playroom/hideaway. Some of it is contemporary, some traditional.













Dream on, baby.

All images via my imaginary-home wishlist board

A Complete Guide to Modern Chairs

I’ve got chairs on my mind.

  

Some of you might know that I live in a house that dates back to the early 1800s and was once the Mint of Goa. The house is built in the typical Goan-Portuguese style with high ceilings, wooden floors and big airy rooms. The house has been in my husband’s family for over 100 years and is full of old and beautiful antique furniture. The chairs in the house are typically part of a set, with cane seats and backs. Several tilt towards the ornate with elaborate carvings on the back.

Keeping this background in mind,  I must confess I am often drawn to the sparseness of modern furniture. Formal wooden chairs are lovely to look at but not always the most comfortable to lounge in. I feel that overtly traditional homes breathe better with a good dose of the contemporary in it. I would like to see the occasional modern chair in our house like a Barcelona or Eames Armchair Rocker. These would go into a quiet corner (dream on!) and would pair up with a tall floor lamp and a pile of books. (And earplugs – now, wouldn’t that be bliss.)

Do you know your Wassily from your Jacobsen? Curious to know who designed the Egg Chair or what the ‘Coconut Chair’ looks like? OneKingsLane has created an extremely helpful guide to chairs taking you from Pre-Modern to now. If you love design, OKL’s ‘Complete Guide to Modern Chairs’ is one of those staples that you must pin and download and save for future reference. 

Do you have any interesting chairs in your home?

India Circus

India Circus is one of my favourite design labels and online stores. Created by renowned designer Krsna Mehta, the store offers a whole range of beautiful products for your home, including some lovely clothing and jewellery. “Flavoured by the Indian aesthetic” is how they like to describe their offerings and this is evident in every product they sell.

I was delighted to receive this gorgeous floor cushion and the matching document holder. The floor cushion is large and colourful. The texture, oh my goodness. The soft velvet of the cushion makes you want to run your hands over it all the time and it can get addictive. The colours and prints pop-out at you and are a fun reminder of the madness that is India. The symmetry of the polka dots keeps it all together and I’m sure it will find a spot in every room of our home.

The matching Polka Masti document holder is so pretty too. I love the pink and cream combo, which is feminine and chic. The prints make a great conversation starter as well. The holder is sturdy and I’m already making good use of it to hold my notebook and everyday documents. Such a relief to have a clear desk for a change!

India Circus has several other gorgeous document holders and floor cushions in other prints. Take a look – you might find something that fits your home perfectly. 

*Disclaimer: I received the complimentary products in exchange for a honest review.

Open House

 

In February, we began serious roof work on the house. This is supposed to be an annual procedure for tiled homes, where the tiles are cleaned and refitted in place, to prevent rainwater from seeping in. It is also horribly expensive (and it is increasingly difficult to find experienced roof workers) so most homes do this daunting exercise once in a few years. Ours is quite a large old home and like most old homes, opening up one area reveals problems that you didn’t anticipate. In our case, it was the discovery of two termite eaten beams, hollow and fragile. We had major pest control done four years ago, so while there were no termites, the beams had to be replaced. Guess what this means? Major bucks and a whole lot of chaos. 

The beams were in the attic over our bedroom, with a wooden false ceiling nailed to it. To get access to the beams, we had to remove the false ceiling. What a waste! The false ceiling wood was old and fragile as it is and not much was salvageable. Heartbreaking stuff, these old houses, I tell you.

Once the new beams were put in place (a herculean effort involving ropes and lots of workers), the new false ceiling was commissioned and took two weeks to put in place. We took the opportunity to conceal the wiring in the bedroom and to paint it a bright mango colour with all the woodwork in white (where it was brown earlier –not sure if it is a sensible choice given our levels of dust, but it looks really nice).

The tile work progressed slowly and two and a half months later, the workers have moved on with only little odd jobs remaining now. I’m hoping for an April shower so we can test for any leaks. But fingers crossed, we’ll have a dry monsoon this time.

But look at these images – we had a few days of being open to the sky and it was gorgeous!

Take a Break

Happy New Year, dear reader. How is the New Year treating you so far? I’m taking a break from writing assignments to focus on several other things closer to hand right now. At the month end, we host the 4th Casa da Moeda Festival at our house; if you are in Goa from Jan 31-Feb 2, please drop in.

Right now, our house is agog with musicians and orchestra rehearsals and talks and all sorts of things. Our fledgling orchestra is preparing for a prestigious concert next month and we’re lucky to have five accomplished volunteers from the US, Canada and Spain to work with our musicians this month. The thrill of having a full orchestra reverberating through your living room is something else – even if the constant moving of chairs and pushing away of tables leaves a toll on the wooden floors.

This will be a month of cleaning and painting, in preparation for the Festival (ha! so the plans go).

In the meantime, dear friends, posting will be sporadic, if at all.

Wish us luck!

Image via Pinterest

#ChangetheAer this Festive Season

The end of the year herald the festive season in India. To us, this means colour, celebration, good food and fun times with friends. How do you evoke the festive mood in your home, though? Some of us might choose to update our decor with bright cushions, zari work, diyas glimmering with oil. Rangolis and Torans also make their presence felt. Just the fleeting presence of these little things is enough to make the house seem brighter and cheerful.

There is, though, one thing I find myself reaching out to, any time of the year, to give our house that extra festive touch.

Flowers.

While bouquets and baby’s breath are fine, my heart thuds a little harder for the more traditional flowers. Panjim’s market is such a treat at this time of year. Reams of incredibly fragrant mogra, baskets full of bright orange and yellow marigolds, the overpowering fragrance of fresh roses. Is there anything better to give your house a treat?

When we have something special in our house, I buy several strings of mogra for our traditional altar. People buy these to wear in the hair but try them as decoration for your home and see the effect. The white garland complements the antique wood beautifully and adds an unexpected Indo-Western touch. For events at our heritage house, the marigolds are pressed into duty, giving brass utensils on huge urns a dash of unexpected colour. And to our potted plants, an agarbatti (incense stick) wards off mosquitoes and welcomes guests.

Apart from these, we use air-fresheners in our home and car. Have you tried the festive range at Godrej Aer? (I love their new #ChangetheAer campaign. It is a reminder of how we really need to pay attention to our air and do something urgently to make it better.)

Do your festivals have a fragrance associated with them?

All images – mine.

Verandah Living in Goa

This has been an unusually long monsoon for us. October has set in and the grey clouds are still hovering in the humid sky. In Goa we have no ‘winter’ to speak of, although temperatures fall by a few degrees and it is so much more pleasant during the nights then. Right now, the days are bright, hot and sticky.

Unlike the West, we don’t have a clear ‘Fall’ season with colours that define this time. With the festival season around the corner, though there are a few things that come out of storage. With the rain on its way out, it is time to make a few changes around the house.

We want to get a few cane/ wicker chairs to create a little seating area to enjoy our wooden wrap-around verandah. Alfresco dining, anyone? I’ll settle for a quiet cup of coffee and my notebook, thank you.

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Actually, we have several of these plantation chairs (below) as well, already in the house, which we could use…

(via Pinterest. I’d love to see the rest of this house (above).)

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I would love a reading nook like this.

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I want to refurbish my entire verandah ‘garden’ with new, large pots, bright crotons and flowering plants. I’m hoping to invest in a few new palms (my old one seems to be dying rapidly) and some boxwood type of plants to block our lovely view of the traffic outside.

In my dreams…

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so hard to find tall planters like these…

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What do you think of my plans? Will you come visit?

In my home : Light and Shadow

The best pin-pricks of light fall into our kitchen between 7 and 7.30 in the morning. From the tiles near the (now defunct) chimney, a single streak of early sun hits the attic wall. Then it begins to move, vanishing entirely in a little while. The rest of the day, the house is awash in light, but we don’t really get the kind of God’s light that makes for, well, divine photography.

So it always enthrals me to see light making its way stealthily into the house whenever it can. Here, at around 5 pm, a slightly open Dutch door in the living room brings in a flood.

 

In the bedroom (facing the same way as the living room, above), the windows are ablaze.

I’ve got a little collection of horses going. Here, a traditional Rajasthani horse complete with mirror-work coat and harness is flanked by a vintage leather horse from Germany, which my better half used to play with as a child.

All images by me.

In my home: Two things

There are two things always present in our 200-year old home: Books and Dust. We can’t do much about the dust (a tiled roof, thin window panes, busy road outside and hardwood floors make it a mammoth task to clean), except to,  well, dust occasionally. The books, though, are another story altogether. This home currently hosts four generations-worth of books. We have hundreds of books tucked away in cupboards, trunks and stacked on top of cabinets. Seven cupboards filled with antique and vintage books in Portuguese, German, French and English line the kitchen corridor. Three cupboards in the entrance host fiction, books on Goa and music. Other cupboards hold medical textbooks going back to the late 1800s until the 1990s. And all of this is just what my in-laws have. My own modest collection is still lying at my mother’s house (sorry, mum) and I dare not bring it here yet because we’ve run out of shelf space.

Despite the daunting dust situation, I’ve taken to displaying a few books here and there. The trio above is in our formal living room. Three different styles of art, completely at home. In the dining room, a quartet of hard-bound books on ballet sit on an antique laundry basket, now re-caned and re-purposed as a cabinet of sorts. The books are accompanied by a brass leaf and a wooden elephant rattle.

In my former ‘office’, a clean-up is underway. This sectioned off portion of the verandah was my father-in-law’s consulting space. It became my office and writing space after I moved here. After my son was born, the office was moved indoors, to where I could hear the baby crying. The computer has stayed inside since (the wireless connection is better too!). I’m weeding out the junk now, only to have a space where I can escape to, to write and to paint. Several trash bags worth of crap and old paper have been meticulously segregated and are awaiting trash day. There’s still more sorting to be done. One corner of the room has a pile of books given to me to Bookcross. The English language ones are easy to distribute. This is a pile of German books. (Anyone interested?)

I love the cover on this one. Classic yet so contemporary.

This cover makes me want to yearn for a tropical garden of my own with lush palms screening the world from us.

  

What does one do with this consuming need to have books? We’ve got to figure out what to do especially with the medical textbooks in the house. Medical advances mean that a lot of the information may already be obsolete. But the books are so lovely! They’re occupying a lot of prime real estate too, so if you have any suggestions please let me know! I’ve obsessively begun reading on my phone’s Kindle and that takes away some of that desire to buy more physical copies. I’ve got an online wishlist a mile long, but I’m being very good and restraining myself from adding them all to the cart.

Yet, there are some books that you just have to have, to hold.

This one arrived today.

I was so taken by the premise of this book that I bought it. We do heritage walks in Goa and just reading the summary has given me ideas for several new walks. Also, a few hours devoted to ‘the observation of trifles’ seems very necessary.

Do you have issues with books and their storage? Is dust a major problem for you, too? (Or I’d have floor-to-ceiling open bookshelves on every wall of the house.) Let me know in the comments.

A Little Old Chair needs help

I was browsing through Lark & Linen today, when this image caught my eye.

We have two similar chairs at the house in Goa. These vintage chairs came back with my in-laws when they relocated to Goa from Germany several decades ago. The chairs are small – children’s chairs. The images don’t really give you an idea of the scale. As you can see, this one is not in good condition. The frame is metal and rusted, but that can easily be sorted out with a coat of paint. The seat is in bad shape – the cushioning has come off and the rexine cover torn. How does one repair this? The frame is in excellent condition, but the seat will have to be changed. I’m thinking of taking it to a local upholsterer who might be able to salvage it. Any ideas?

In different light…

Top image via Lark & Linen. All other images me.

Right Now

The setting sun makes pretty patterns on the verandah

Fishing boats crowd the Mandovi protesting a diesel hike

A Portrait by The Boy smiles back at me. Precious.

Play Clan

I’ve been super-lucky with giveaways this year and one I was delighted to win recently was An Indian Summer’s Diwali giveaway of Play Clan products. I’m sure most of you are already familiar with Play Clan’s quirky and fun things for the home. Play Clan “celebrates life and Indian subculture.” This is evident in their irreverent designs for stationery, cushions and other home accessories. They have won several awards for their work, have stores across India and are now collaborating with brands like Paul Smith and Levis too.

Here are some of my recent favourites from their shop:

The beautiful Haveli dress

Kathputli mug

The Stree T-shirt. The many faces of women in India. And the print promises to be effective in hiding baby fat (!)

A Truck business card holder, because I really must stop squashing my cards in my wallet…

and this ‘Lavkar Chada’ cushion to remind me how lucky I am not to be doing this anymore on a Bombay local.

And here’s what I won in the giveaway : A bright blue cushion filled with peculiarly Indian characters, a quirky eye mask which Mr. Right is already using (quite scary for me when I wake in the night!) and a Ghalib journal that I’m considering filling with verse. So lovely!

A closer look at the cushion…

The parcel came in the loveliest packaging which just adds to the charm of receiving a gift from these guys. Made for a magical surprise! I’ve preserved the wrapping paper. I hope Play Clan considers selling it on their site soon!

 

the wrapping paper!

Thanks once again to An Indian Summer and Play Clan for the giveaway! Visit Play Clan here.

Images via An Indian Summer and Play Clan.