Hello dear friends! Its almost the end of the week and I have a wonderful treat for you today- a home tour with the writer of one of favorite blogs, Holmberg Living. I just adore her ethereal interiors and as I transition from a darker/warm color palette to a brighter more light filled pastel interior, I am inspired. Hope you are too!
1: Personal Introduction to Gathering Spriggs readers
I'm an interior enthusiast who tries to create spaces and moments where I
find room for joy, comfort, relaxation, as well as room for socializing with
family and friends. I am 37 years old, happily married and have three adorable
kids. We've just build a new home inspired by the New England architectural
style by the fjord just on the outskirts of Norway's capital city Oslo. I was previously an IT consultant, but have stayed home for 5 years with a chronic fatigue syndrome. As part of my rehabilitation, I found great inspiration in making my own "feel good" book. My blog contains abstacts from this book.
2: What are your design influences and where do you get your inspiration?
A lot of my inspiration naturally comes from Norwegian and international
magazines and books, as well as from the amazing world of blogs. However, I
also find great aspiration walking around markets, stores with old & used
and standard interior shops. We find ourselves buying most stuff when we
travel.
Denmark,
France and
Italy are fantastic places to buy old & used
interiors at affordable prices. We can bring smaller goods on the plane, but
sometimes we bring a car to collect larger items. Buying things abroad
also creates nice stories. Because the buying experience is always filled
with joy over finding treasures and expectations for how it will fit when
you come home, - you never forget where you bought it. Last, but not
least, I get great inspiration from visiting church buildings in old Europe. Even though I don't regard myself religious, I do indeed find great comfort inside churches and the figures that decorates them. Adding that up with some Gregorian music (favorite album is
Jan Garbarek and The Hillard Ensemble's "Officium"), - you have the setting for perfect meditation.
3: Do you believe where you live affects your design style and how?
Both yes and no. Subconsciously and historically, I guess my style is
affected by where I live and where I have lived. Apart from a short stay in
France, I've lived in Norway all my life, so this naturally affects who I am
and what we surround ourselves with.
But my conscious orientation lies with the Danish and the French as far as
interiors are concerned and with New England as far as the exteriors are
concerned.
4: What are your favorite items to collect and use in your home?
Well, it's not a very structured process, it's more about what you discover
when you go hunting for treasures. Previously, I was a great fan of collecting Madonna sculptures and figures. For the last 4-5 years, I've been collecting a lot of lamps. Both industrial looking lamps and old prism crowns. I get great satisfaction from mixing and crashing the two. There's always a couple of good stories:
. Last summer we bought 21 lamps in France. The most unique one, was
an old working spotlight standing on the floor on stilts that we're gonna
use lighting up the whole roof of our new loft.
. At a Sunday Rome market, we found a fantastic old art-piece in
green of Jesus' Last Supper made of iron metal. Don't ask how we persuaded
the airline to bring it home, but it is now nicely decorating our living
room.
. At the online auction site Lauritz.com I bought an old used skin
chair just for cents only to be called up afterwards by a production team
that wanted to use it in an upcoming film production. They did, they paid
for it and brought it nice and safe to us just as our new home was finished.
To me, there are two inseparable elements to an interior piece. It's the
functionality of it and it's the beauty of it. "Body & soul" if you like.
Even though it's always the beauty that attracts the eye at first, the true
long term joy of a possession comes from using something beautiful. It may
be sitting comfortably in a well used nice skin chair, it may be enjoying
the good light of an old industrial lamp, looking at your favorite view
through a nice window, etc.
