housetrained. homes, interiors, domestic design

Vinyl flooring from Zazous

housetrained — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:02:09 +0000

A huge percentage of us have vinyl flooring in the kitchen or bathroom – it’s cheap, hardwearing and easy to lay. But it’s definitely not cool, and I have a problem with the fact that so much of it is made to look like fake tiles, stone flooring or floorboards – who are we trying to kid? It is slowly moving away from its association with cheapo landlords, though, with pretty products such as these, sourced from France by online store Zazous. The only downside is that you have to order in multiples of 5sqm. I haven’t measured my kitchen, but it would be just my luck that it’s 10.1sqm…

Down home textiles by The Colourhouse

housetrained — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:37:20 +0000

I don’t know how I managed to miss these lovelies at Tent London during London Design Festival, but I put it down to being all bleary-eyed from looking at too may good things. The Colourhouse (an interior designer and a costume designer) launched themselves into the world in September with a small range of sweet, simple, colourful textiles. The standout for me is this ‘Be Lucky’ fabric, and with all those horseshoes and four-leaf clovers you’ll be sure to have Lady Luck on your side (although the less said about those lonely single magpies the better). Made and printed in the UK, too.

Retronaut-inspired ethnic chic

housetrained — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:43:58 +0000

Here’s a scheme inspired by a great picture from one of my new favourite things, How to be a Retronaut, a cavalcade of visual fabulousness dragged from the archives (I can’t really explain it better than that, have a look though, it’s brilliant if you love social history and totally addictive). Its ‘…in colour’ series is the first thing I click on, and features rare early colour photography of everything from New York in the 1940s to Egypt in the 1920s. Nothing transports you directly into the past than old colour photography and some of the colours and textures are so unexpected; I think my brain thought that everything was actually black and white in history. I can glean more design inspiration here than in any glossy magazine, and this pic of Russian girls, taken from a set shot in 1909-15 seems right for autumnal plummy colours. I love their sombre expressions and stiff deportment (I guess you had to hold pretty still then) especially compared to their exuberant clothes. I was going to cast my shopping net a bit wider here but Zara Home was my first port of call and it pretty much nailed it, so hurray for that.

Clockwise from top left: Flecos blanket, Melia bread plates, Filigree cushion, Cameo tableware, Wayne stool, Rombo jug, Gardenia tray, Velvet cushion, all Zara Home

Lubna Chowdhary ceramics

housetrained — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:29:39 +0000

I’m a bit of a tile obsessive – yes, there are better things to get obsessed about but I can’t help it. And I particularly love tiles that are hand-made, where no two are the same and you can sense something about the maker in each one. Lubna Chowdhary makes the most beautiful tiles from her Streatham studio, with intricate, colourful target patterns, textured concentric circles like a drop of water in a pool, or more sober muddy-coloured geometrics that remind me of Cubist paintings. She has worked on some wonderful commissions but has recently opened an online shop where you can buy things directly – little groupings of tiles, plus hotplates and storage jars. I just don’t know what it is about her work, but it makes me feel happy looking at it. She’s having a studio sale on Dec 3&4, if you want to see what she does (and buy) first-hand.

Open House/Kings Grove

housetrained — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:34:38 +0000

I don’t know whether it’s because property is cheap-ish or because Southwark Council’s planning department is particularly receptive to new ideas, but there are some great contemporary houses where I live in Peckham (and its immediate environs). This is particularly apparent at this time of year when Open House weekend means they open their doors to the public. Within a 10-min walk of my flat is the super-slim, sliding-roofed 15-and-a-half Consort Road, best known from Grand Designs (warning – very smug image of McCloud when you click that link); Quay House, a live-work-gallery space almost unrecognisable from its former life as a milk depot; and, open for the first time this year, Duggan Morris Architects‘ 16a Kings Grove. I visited today, and it’s wonderful from the get-go. You enter via a gate between two Victorian terraces which opens up into a little coppice of silver birch trees, and the house itself, two storeys of simple, warm brick and glass. It completely hugs its slightly telescopic plot, so it gets narrower as you reach the back, but lots of glazing (including a central light-well) stops it from being dark; the house backs on to 10 houses so it must have been tricky achieving a design that didn’t overlook the neighbours too much. And it’s beautifully finished, as you would expect from the house of two architects, although the interior is spare and architect-y, for want of a better word – concrete floors, oak joinery, and brickwork, which continues inside. There’s some fun stuff as well though, especially the bathroom and en-suite, both resplendent in dirty-pink tiles with brass taps (from perennial architects’ fave, Vola), and the similarly shiny-shiny Artek pendant lights. This post is going on too long, but suffice to say, it’s very heartening to see such good stuff happening in my neighbourhood. And yes, my pictures are rubbish, but see View picture library for good ones.

Falcon enamelware – back (but never really gone)

housetrained — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:33:18 +0000

It’s always interesting when older British brands reinvent themselves for a new generation (or perhaps more accurately, a nostalgic older generation). Now it’s the turn of Falcon enamelware, which is rebranding/relaunching itself at this year’s London Design Festival. The product is pretty much the same – Falcon’s near-indestructable blue and white kitchenware has been around since the 1920s and has seen off millions of happy campers, students and lovers of simple design – although with some new products (tumblers in grey and red) that won’t detract from the original functional feel. If you’re at all interested in branding, take a look at their website to see how the company now presents itself – the minimal cardboard packaging and site design fit the current vogue for utilitarian homewares (see Baileys or Labour and Wait, for example), with natural-looking food photography that taps into that whole Brits-know-best, pies-and-crumble school of cuisine. It’s all very sensitively done, and I’m sure that it will win the company lots of new fans. Read a bit more about the teams behind the rebranding on Creative Review‘s blog. Falcon is officially relaunching at this year’s London Design Festival, at the Tramshed on Rivington Street, a venue that should provide just the right mix of nostalgia and functional design as the products themselves.

Art Deco home for sale

housetrained — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:42:58 +0000

I often wonder what’s behind the doors of London’s grand townhouses, but from my limited experience of going inside, they are just scruffy offices with the carpet gaffer-taped down, and few original charms. But this house for sale on Harley Street has fired up my imagination again. It’s an astonishingly in-tact Art Deco home that I just can’t believe isn’t better known, considering how few domestic interiors of this calibre from the period survive (with the exception of buildings that have been saved for the nation, such as Eltham Palace). It was built for top ophthalmologist Sir Stewart Duke Elder; he had his consulting rooms here, hence the grand entrance to impress his well-off clients. The surviving interiors include in-built joinery in sycamore and contrasting ebony (typically Deco materials), a sinuous brass balustrade and curvy fluted plasterwork. It’s listed, of course. I’m not above posing as a buyer to nose round an interesting house but I think agents Beauchamp Estates might sniff out that I haven’t got the required £6.95m.

The House Hotel, Bosphorus, by Autoban

housetrained — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:10:48 +0000

Istanbul is at the top of my list of places to see before I die, and this newly opened hotel gives me a little extra push to make it there sooner rather than later. Turkish product/interior designers Autoban have a long-standing relationship with mini-chain of boutique hotels The House Hotel, and this is their latest opening, in the artsy Istanbul neighbourhood of Ortaköy. The House Hotel Bosphorous is a very grand late-19th-century building with some pretty special original features such as ten-foot-high ceilings and decorative plasterwork. Autoban has drawn out these details beautifully by painting nearly every surface white, and colour is entirely eschewed in favour of neutrals, from the marble bathrooms to the geometric parquet floor. Furniture really needs to hold its own in such surroundings, and Autoban added its own grand gestures, from the huge bedhead made from three overlapping circles of woven cane, to the retro-futuristic gold chandeliers and other light fittings. The finish looks to be of a very high quality, something that sets it apart from many other hotels attempting the designer-boutique thing. All in all, it’s a real masterclass in when to be sit back and let the architecture do the talking, and when to take on that architecture with (restrained) opulence. Some of the products designed for the hotel, such as the Zenovich chandelier, have been subsequently put into production, so you can have a little piece of contemporary Turkish glamour at home.

Get onyx

housetrained — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:08:42 +0000

Now that the 1970s are back in, interiors-wise, it’s kind of OK to like things that just a few years ago seemed pretty brash. I’ve been moving towards the vulgar end of the spectrum when it comes to natural stone – big chunks of striated onyx are where it’s at, cream and green and yellow with the occasional provocative blood-red seam. As ever with me it’s the associations with the past that help with the appeal – I think my gran used to arrange flowers in onyx and (fake) gold vases, and we definitely had one of those heavy spherical lighters that sat on the coffee table like a trophy even though no one in the house smoked. A quick look around some interiors stores shows that almost no one in contemporary retail shares my love – although there are some rather fabulous onyx toilets available if you want to get all African dictator-chic at home – but I know that something so beautiful can be used tastefully too, in small doses, or as the centrepiece in a room. Clavel Arquitectos harnesses the translucent qualities of onyx to wonderful effect for this mausoleum in Murcia, Spain. Let’s see it in some houses next.

Mausoleum in Murcia, by Clavel Arquitectos

New British ceramics by Flux

housetrained — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:14:40 +0000

It’s always good to see traditional British manufacturing get the glory, especially when it involves a injection of young talent. That’s just the case for Flux, a ceramics company set up by Staffordshire University to give MA students active business experience while boosting the ceramics industry of Stoke-on-Trent. Its collection was unveiled last year at Paris design fair Maison et Objet, and since then the designers have picked up numerous commissions: if you’re in London, you can currently see the prototype collection at EDC on Margaret Street. It was such a stroke of genius to give the designers/students the same colour brief, a rich royal blue highlighted with gold – it looks traditional on one level, fitting in with Staffordshire potteries’ heritage, but it also makes you want to collect the set, or mix and match. Download the full brochure here, but here’s a selection of pics: