Moi, l'architecte d'intérieur

This September, my brother surprisingly married his milker Татьяна. So far my brother and my parents were living in the farm house. Nevertheless, my parents were anticipating a marriage much earlier and wisely bought decades ago a small house down the road to use it as Stöckli:



My brother is not always the speediest and now my parents are aged 77 and 85. You can imagine that moving at this age is no easy undertaking. However they are up to it, but need some help to get the place ready. My sister makes no bones about things and thus took care that the carpets get cleaned, the hardwood floors get reworked and that a telephone line is connected. But since I'm the pooftah of my clan, interior design just had to be declared my field of expertise.

I is unclear when the house was actually built, but it must be around 400 years old and this had to be taken into account when selecting things. I don't mean that I was going to get 400 year old furniture and that all plumbing had to be removed. What I had to find were things that match with both the old building with its tiny rooms and my parents.

The pièce de résistance was clearly the settee for the drawing room. First I tried affordable furniture stores. This was torturous! Who was I to know that this planet is chastised with so many ugly furniture. I then tried the second hand stores. All furniture of the affordable shops obviously ended there. Close before I hit hit rock bottom and was about to declare defeat, Toño demanded that I had a look at a store nearby, which had a wide range of couches. And yes, they had the one model I was looking for:



I know, the Louis XI lounge table is not the most perfect match, but my parents will bring a lot of their old stuff and it will be a wild style mix anyway. If what I got would be too perfectly matching, it would not go with the other furniture.

In the background you can see the coat rack. It was originally designed for the Statens Järnvägar (Swedish State Railways). I chose it because it is solid and dynamic at the same time.



One of the most neglected fields is light. And since I also worked in designing lighting is usually spent a lot of time choosing lamps and bulbs bringing the lamps into effect. Luckily I found the Berliner Messinglampen GmbH. Of course choosing a chandelier would be nice, but the rooms have a low ceiling and thus I went for this:



and for the bedside tables:



Now, my parents can move. When this is completed, a second round will be necessary to fill the gaps.