About a Boy

My child dragged these branches from the furthermost corners of our property for several days to create this. Isn't it beautiful?

Come On Get Happy!

My friend Becky writes a blog and runs a brand called Deluxe. Her slogan goes like this: Make Your Home Your Happy Place. It really resonates with me...I think that's what I try to do with my space.  I have creative, messy kids and an open space house. I kind of have to embrace the small child thing when keeping house and decorating. Here's some pages from  my rulebook:

1. Keep the walls white and touch up those dirty walls every 6 months or so.  Make space on those walls for colorful "art".

2. Clean it up every night, but focus on play during the day.  I've learned that kids get really creative when two unrelated toys meet, and my time is better spent not picking up after them all day.

3. When introducing a new color, spread it around the house.  I recovered my dining room chairs with teal linen.  I added accents of teal shades throughout the house, with books, storage and a patterned accent wall. 

4. Use the ceiling as design space.  I put the anthropologist lanterns over the formal table, a Calder-esque mobile over the kitchen table, and a molded plastic pendant lamp in the kids play space. It draws the eye up.

5. Lighting is key.  I get a little grief for putting a lamp on my Christmas list every year.  My lamp collection floods our house with soft, warm light in the evening, eliminating the need for overheads. For me it's a real mood changer.

We have a small house, but it's in a wonderful neighborhood with unique outdoor space fit for impromptu pirate treasure hunts.  Should we ever move away I hope to recapture some of what we've put together here in the woods.  It's our happy place.

A Haus of One's Own

The Playhaus

                     

I wanted to make an outdoor play space for our kids.  We don't have a sprawling lawn, in fact our backyard is a eucalyptus grove, and hilly.  Inspired by the architecture of some of the houses around us in the canyon, I came up with the idea of a German style A-Frame. It needed to be water tight, and we needed to keep the wildlife out so I decided to make the roof out of green house corrugated sheets, alternating clear and opaque.  I had to dust off my math skills, and of course get some help constructing it from someone who knew how to build structures (Ben Jennings), but it turned out to be a 4 hour project and well worth the money $285 (comparable kits out there are upwards of $1000). When we thought about it, if you doubled it in size adults could actually sleep in it. We added a hanging chair to one of the adjacent trees, and have grand plans of putting an old playground slide into the hill and maybe even a covered sandbox. For now we have a space for the kids to hide, swing and do their thing.