The master bedroom got a big fat redo before we moved in. The photos show the before and after… It was minty green with a built in set of white wardrobes and drawers, and the roof eaves were exposed.
Well, the built-ins were removed pretty damn fast: it's always painful to remove something that's new but..it’s hard to live with someone else’s colour scheme and design (unless you were lucky enough to move into Axel Vervoordt’s home).
The two windows behind the built-ins were blocked in. Heresy, right, to block in windows and kill the daylight? We thought about it, but realised we had more than enough daylight with the French doors and we added a sunlight, so the guilt subsided... Note – do not put a bed under a sunlight, or rather a sunlight over where you want to place your bed…bad, bad, bad idea. You will not sleep because of the moonlight and forget siestas because of the sunshine. All that romanticism about sleeping by the light of the moon is rubbish. One ends up with a pillow over the face and a shitty night’s sleep.
The main reason to take out the built-ins was because they had been designed to hold a wardrobe for a child. In other words, barely any space at all. One of the biggest reasons behind moving house was to gain much more storage space. Anyway, I guess the former owners were minimalists. Something I've tried and utterly failed at.
To give you an idea of the layout, the head of the bed is now where the built-ins were located.
The ceiling was odd. Lots of dead space and the aircon set up didn't work properly. Our architect suggested we lower the ceiling and thereby hide the eaves. The aircon is hidden in the false ceiling and the air flow is more efficient now. To be honest, the eaves were a bit too “chalet” for our liking.
I'm not into feng shui despite being half Chinese. I was put off after seeing my father (old school chinaman) get conned into building something in the garden that cost an arm and a leg. Something with fish and wealth. Hm. Not a man to suffer fools gladly, it's amazing how superstition overrides common sense... Most of it is just that - common sense. Don't put your bed under a sharp hanging light fixture. Really? Don't sleep with your back to the door - well that's obvious, no? You want to see who's about to murder you. Face your bed towards the East etc. Not if you don't want to be woken by the rising sun...which was how we felt. That, and not wanting to be front and centre for our neighbours.
We positioned our bed to the side of the bedroom. The placement makes the room seem larger and the flow is better. (I get to see who walks in, and figure I’ll have plenty of time to shoot them first).
Cream walls. Yawn. I lasted a year before I had a eureka moment and painted the headboard wall in the darkest colour I could find that wasn't black. Thank you Benjamin Moore. It's a deep, dark and solid purple. It gives the Virgin Guadalupe the perfect background. The ceiling is only 9ft so no room for a headboard and the painting. Still getting used to the average american home ceiling height being 9ft max… Only one wall was painted (by yours truly, I find painting walls super relaxing, read: loser). The rest of the room is still cream with white trim.
The walls remained bare and sad for the longest time. Just last month the paintings went up. I still yearn for more though. It's too minimal...
An off-white flokati rug, holly wood credenza, comfy sofa and two Danish chairs complete the room.
One door leads into the master bathroom, the other to the dressing room. The bathroom was formerly a bedroom, and the dressing room was formerly the master bathroom. Once we started knocking down walls, we got a bit carried away.
You’ll notice the lack of window dressings - the doors are being demolished sometime this year...and then I will have my drapes with the perfect puddles at the bottom. Stay tuned for the "back of the house" overhaul project. It'll involve saying goodbye to the bedroom balcony, the French doors...and it'll include the dining room below it plus the LONG awaited garden!
Elaine
PS: the construction for the entire house took just shy of 6 months – during that time, more than half of the neighbourhood visited the house to check on the construction…and most of the time, we weren’t there. They’d just walk in and have a nose around. Is it just me, or is that just ridiculously bloody weird? Even worse, they would tell us! “Oh we like what you’ve done to your master bedroom but are you really putting your bed THERE?”. When we had our neighbourhood housewarming, 95% of the guests had already seen the house and spent more time in it than me. WTF, people? Is this an American thing?
No comments:
Post a Comment