Apartment Tour: Living Room

One of the great benefits to being a painter by profession is I get to use my own artwork to help fill up some wall space!  The portrait of the four brides is one I’ve been working on off and on for years— it’s still not finished, but I needed something on the walls, so up it went.

I was obsessed with the idea of a black chandelier like this one from Domino and was thrilled to find a much less expensive, *plastic!* version from DOM, a funky novelties/fashion/interior shop in Berlin.

Finding large table lamps here has been a real challenge, and I’m always wishing I could shop at a place like Home Goods.  I would kill for some ginger jar table lamps! But for some reason they’re impossible to find here on eBay or at flea markets (sigh).  The white lamp was given to us for free, and all it needed was a new lamp shade that I picked up from IKEA.  Even though it really too small for the space, it’s a cute shape, and a large stack of books and magazines helps to give it the boost it needs until we find a replacement.  

On the same table you can see a small gold frame with an antique looking photo inside.  You can use this website to upload some of your photos and give them a fun antiqued look.  

This bookshelf was another eBay find, carried back somehow on public transportation.  I had originally planned to paint it, but ended up liking the color of the wood more in person than in the photos, so we kept it as it is.  As I have mentioned in other wallpaper posts, when I traveled home for a visit with family a couple of years ago, I raided my parents’ attic for extra rolls of wallpaper left over from projects they’d finished years ago.  To give the room another layer of color and texture, I lined the back of the bookshelf with a fantastic blue-green raffia wallpaper from my parents’ guest room. 

We framed the envelopes from two wedding invitations with particularly beautiful hand-written calligraphy, one from each of our two last addresses.  At first the idea just came to me because we desperately needed some decoration, but I love the pretty simplicity of the envelopes and the reminder of the places we’ve lived.  

There are plenty of differences between life in the US and life in Germany & Austria, and one big thing we noticed right away is almost all of the apartments have NO storage.  Literally no place to put anything.  No closets, no bathroom cabinets, in some cases like our apartment in Berlin not even any kitchen cabinets.  So you have to make your own storage with bookcases, shelves, cabinets and wardrobes.  That’s why one of the first things we bought was a bunch of IKEA’s most inexpensive, adjustable wooden shelving.  They advertise it for storage rooms, like garages or basements, but I really love the contrast of the open, rustic look to some of the more formal elements in the living room, too.  

When we moved to Vienna I started thinking of ways to cover some wall space in our living room as well as show off the height of the ceilings in our early 20th century building.  (You may remember my post on this a while back.) I started thinking about a framed series of something—maps, botanical prints, vintage photos—and ended up choosing these prints from a calendar made on beautiful thick paper by Cavallini & Co.  We have actually travelled to Italy many times, including on our honeymoon, and have seen most of the places in the paintings, so they’re special to us. 

The monogrammed K pillow on the couch was a Christmas gift from my parents last year (they know us well- we LOVE anything monogrammed:)), and the two patterned pillows I made during our first year in Berlin with fabric from Printer’s Alley in Raleigh, NC.  I can’t remember its name, but I still love this fabric years later and would be thrilled to find more of it.  

The green couch is ok for now, but it’s not our favorite piece in the apartment.  We used to have a chocolate brown, super comfortable sofa, but it wasn’t a pull-out, and with a one bedroom we needed a place to put guests when they come to Vienna to visit.  The trouble was, sleeper sofas can get really expensive, so I faithfully kept a lookout on the internet and finally found this one on Craigslist for an amazing deal.  It’s not the fabric I would’ve chosen, and the couch itself could use some extra down filling to make it more comfortable, but I like the lines of it, and inside is a real feather mattress that is a million times better than our old leaky Aero Bed!  

We have loved living here, so it's sad to be packing up.  The next time I post I will have said auf Wiedersehen to Vienna!  


xo

Liza