Hope you all had a good weekend! For the next weeks I’ll be vacationing, working & blogging from way out in the Swedish country side. More exactly from our summer house in Torp, the tiny village with only seven houses in it, situated right on a beautiful lake. It’s serene, peaceful, and like stepping 100 years back in time. It’s worth coming all the way here even if it’s just to smell the incredibly fresh air!!
I’m very happy to have changed from sitting in traffic on route 7, an unfortunate daily occurrence, to be staring at this beautiful view…
When I blog it will be sitting here. This is my desk at 10.30pm at night. It never gets dark here in the summer time. In another hour or so the night fog starts rolling in over the lake and the sky turns pink and yellow.
This place is very peaceful with lots of white, a big change from all the color I’m surrounded with back in Virginia. The rest of my sitting room/office here looks like this…
A simple vintage desk chair, a Swedish woven mat and pretty much everything including floors painted white.
I might also sit in the bedroom, in my favorite chair and write…
The chair has old torn up Swedish Tenn fabric still on it. The seat is covered with a piece of carpet from Ikea. All the interiors have a decidedly different feel than most of the stuff I design in the states. The walls have white painted paneling.
You simply get caught up in everything light airy and Scandinavian when over here. It’s contagious. The light is so beautiful here, you don’t want to spoil it with too many forceful colors.
I’ll be very busy improving this house.
When we bought it a few years ago, the foyer looked like this….
Plastic carpeting and mismatched wood finishes.
I tore out the carpet and reinvented it like this…
Shockingly void of color. But I prefer it that way. After the plastic carpeting was removed we painted the original wood floor with white porch paint.
Floors, walls and ceiling are white. A colorful woven carpet , a vintage turquoise chandelier and the inside of the cabinet is the only color.
If you leave the main house and head down to the guest house which is closer to the lake..
…there are lots of renovations going on. A couple of years back we started with the first room. The bedroom down there looked like this when we bought it…
Pretty depressing and with hardly any view of the lake. I was itching to get my hands on it!!
Now it’s of course…white…
…with a bunch of new windows. The wall to the right is an entire wall of windows. We purchased salvaged windows from old homes and installed. I painted the chest turquoise myself.
We’re putting in a kitchen next door and a “sleeping hall” upstairs. It’s one of those family projects that seems to take years, it has taken 4 years actually…I’m almost afraid it’s going to take a lifetime!
Have you ever had any projects like that, that never end?
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