[ad_1]
When it was time to fix up our new home, we turned to travel for some design inspiration. The pandemic-enforced retreat in 2020 forced us to give more thought to our living space and interrogate its ability to not simply provide shelter but also to keep us inspired. As part of our life update series, we share how we made travel influenced design choices for our home, with a nod to vibrant destinations like Morocco and Turkey.
We needed to move!
Our two-bedroom, rented flat in Southeast London was convenient and functional, but boring. It did not matter too much to us because, before the pandemic, we spent considerable time away from home travelling — never putting much thought into making our abode a proper home. We simply weren’t around long enough to focus on it.
However, the first lockdown of 2020 came with a sobering reality as, along with our industry peers and partners, we watched with dismay as international travel died a temporary death.
We were extremely grateful not to have been stuck in a different country when international borders closed. We were even more grateful to have a roof over our heads during the enforced downtime. This was when we really began to take a closer look at our living space, and its limitations.
Our walls were an uninspiring off-white colour. Our furniture was drab and dark. Our two indoor plants had seen better days, and the amount of natural light coming into our flat was severely limited. For two people now confined within four walls, like most of the rest of the world, our makeshift workspaces only increased our frustration and discontent.
After years of saving, we’d always planned but not prioritised buying a home. Therefore, as soon as the property market reopened in July 2020, we dived into the process, armed with a mix of determination and opinions about the type of space we craved.
We needed to move and move quickly.
The search for our new home
Proximity to London had always been high on our list of priorities when considering where we would like to buy a home. However, with the shift in work culture in recent years to hybrid working, we became more open to the idea of moving further away from the city. With Kent, southeastern England being within easy reach, we focused our search on the county known as ‘The Garden of England. Still, it was important to have decent transport links into London so that we wouldn’t have to commute for more than 90 minutes at the most.
Our search lasted for three months. The process of viewing homes, adjusting our tight budget, making offers, and losing out on bids became routine. Drawing wider and wider circles in a southeasterly direction eventually led us to a decent-sized property in an unusually styled housing development in Kent. The elderly owners of the twelve-year-old property had retired and had placed their house on the market just before the pandemic — in what was a stroke of bad timing for them but an auspicious moment for us.
During the viewing, we fell in love with the amount of natural light pouring into each living space. We loved the idea of being closer to nature, surrounded by lakes and farmlands. We began to envision paint colours, art on the walls, meals in the kitchen, and a beautifully landscaped back garden. Big city living meant that we’d never had a garden before.
The owners accepted our offer quickly. However, due to poor solicitor services, it took a further eight months to close the deal. Although frustrated by the delay, we tried to use the time productively to plan for our desired home improvements.
HDYTI Tip: Thinking of buying your first home, read this useful guide from Money Helper on the home-buying process.
Interior design inspired by travel
On our very first visit to Morocco in 2015, we immediately fell in love with Moroccan interior design and their generous use of colours. Another travel destination that further stoked our interior design ambitions was Turkey.
Morocco, in particular, inspired the choice of colour palette for our new home. We poured over photos and memories of our previous trips to that country and decided to base our design ideas around the colours and textures we had seen and experienced.
We also wanted to evoke feelings of comfort and wanderlust when stepping into each room and soon we began making associations between our colour palette and choices for furniture, flooring and fittings.
There was no way we were going for sterile, all-white walls. However, although we love bright, bold colours, we didn’t want each room to become a random and isolated expression of our colour palette either. We wanted to ensure fluidity between spaces. We agreed that the living room on the ground floor would become the anchor of our colour journey, with the colours of the rest of the house branching off from there.
For our living room colour, we chose the Orange #02 paint from Lick. It has a warm and earthy tone that pairs perfectly with a variety of colours we’ve fallen in love with during our travels to both countries including shades of blue, mustard yellow, terracotta, olive green, and bougainvillaea fuchsia.
After months of searching for the perfect corner sofa that would fit our space, we decided on a vine green sofa and ottoman from Swyft sofas. This way we could get the comforts of a chaise lounge, but have maximum flexibility for entertaining with a detached ottoman.
It was also important to us that we left some flexibility for seasonal changes in soft furnishing items, lighting fixtures, plants, and artwork, especially since colours in the living room furnishings would be used throughout the rest of our home.
We had the best intentions…
Being a homeowner is an exciting feeling. You want to do everything to make the space an expression of your personality. However, putting artsy ambitions aside for a moment, reality soon hits when you start seeing the costs of materials and labour.
Now that we’ve lived in the house for some time, we have realised that some of our original home improvement ideas were slightly ambitious.
We have also learned that home projects don’t always go according to plan, especially with the inflationary increase in labour and material costs. There is also the ‘hit and miss’ game that homeowners play with contractors and tradespeople. Reliability of tradespeople, especially for more complex projects, can be hard to find and comes at a premium when you do.
Additionally, there are always unplanned expenses that magically appear from nowhere and require your immediate attention and scarce funds.
For example, we had originally believed that we could fast-track a kitchen renovation but the funds earmarked for that project soon dried up on other tasks. As a compromise, we settled on a ‘soft kitchen makeover’, which keeps the space functional and reflects our colour palette without doing a full refurbishment of the entire space.
Truth be told, this past year has seen us managing our expectations — cheering when we come under budget and grabbing our heads in frustration when we go over. Can we talk about finally getting carpets and flooring done ten months after moving in? Don’t ask us how long we slept on a mattress on the floor.
Our journey from living in a two-bedroom flat in Southeast London to buying a home in the Kent countryside has been both a thrilling and revealing one. Despite the highs and lows, we can’t help but feel a sense of humility and gratitude that we now have a space that feels more like home.
We have had so much fun leveraging ideas collected from our travels as we turn our home into an oasis that comforts, inspires, and energises us.
Now let’s take another look at that bank balance…
Absorbing cultures through interior design
Travelling as a couple and individually over the last decade, we’ve both absorbed a range of culturally influenced design choices…from intricate patterns and geometrical designs in Morocco to bold and vibrant colours and varied textures in Turkey and Mexico. We find that we are drawn to revisit destinations like Spain and Portugal where natural light is given expression in both architecture and interior design.
For us, our best souvenirs are the travel-influenced design ideas we bring back home with us. When we turn them from memories to reality, they evoke feelings of wanderlust.
HDYTI
Wherever our travels next take us, you can be sure we’re keeping our eyes open and soaking in the different interior design styles we encounter.
Has travel influenced how you design your home living space? Do share.
This post was modified from the original version which appeared in the print edition of House of Coco Magazine Volume 21.
Pin This
Related
[ad_2]
