A Tour of our Living Room

I realized that with all my enthusiasm for Greek festivals, FleaFinds and Jane Austen, I had fallen down on the job of sharing pictures of our eclectic decor, so I thought that today, I would feature our living room. I actually took these pictures about three months ago -- hence the daffodils still in bloom -- but the light in our apartment is actually nicer at that time of the year, so I didn't bother taking new ones. Kif, our cat, is in his same favorite patch of sun everyday anyway.

I've always had a thing for burgundy velvet sofas -- for some reason, they just say "decadence" to me. When we were first together, we ordered one custom-made, but it went away long ago before some big adventure. However, we found these overstuffed figured velvet sofa and chaise on Craigslist and I made the brocade pillows to match.

When we started to redecorate our apartment about three years ago after living with the clean lines of Danish Modern/Japanese, we wanted something a bit more flamboyant. I think what we ended up with is sort of a cross between a Venetian villa and Versailles with a bit of Moorish palace thrown in. Wherever we've lived, we've always liked to have one wall painted in an accent color. Before, this wall had been a dark olive green, but we repainted it with several layers of light blue green and then an uneven coat of shellac, tinting it to look like soot toward the ceiling. The print is from 1789 and the sconces and mirror were estate sale finds.

We found a gentleman on eBay who did custom silhouettes and had him do some of us. I may have him do a new one of me though, now that my hair is short.

Two framed Bougereau prints of Classical themes hang above the chaise. The curtain is to divide the living room from...

...the "office". Since this picture, we have both gotten dark framed LCD monitors, which makes the corner feel much lighter. The wood panels are Japanese shop signs and the Tretchikoff print is a remainder from our Tiki days. We found "Phillip" the owl hanging on the outside of a house that we were liquidating and rescued him from the elements. Even though I brushed and brushed him before we hung him up, he is an amazing cobweb magnet, so we've just stopped trying to clean him off.

In a small apartment, the livingroom is also the diningroom and the the dining table is also my sewing table. Can anyone make out who lives under our table?

The Moroccan lamps look lovely with candles in them. The object on the right is a Victorian photo album that still has some of the original pictures in it, plus ones we have added. The terrarium holds some moss, an orchid and a moss covered stone fox head that we got at a market in Japan. The embroidery on the table is part of a three-piece altar set, which includes the runner I use in the bedroom on the dresser and a very large altar cloth that I have put away to wait for a bigger table someday.

A recent visitor mentioned that we must have some special preference for birds, but while I don't think that we do, we somehow ended up with a lot of them in our home. Maybe it's just to keep the cats confused.

Bats, bottles and a Herculean baby holding up a wren's nest.

In addition to being the living room, dining room and office, this room is also our library, although our book collection has far outgrown these shelves, so there are books tucked all over our apartment. The shelves also hold R's wind-up toy collection, my globes and our skulls, including the sheep skull on the top shelf that we found on Dartmoor during our honeymoon and were shocked that we manged to get through customs.

Oh, behind the curtain is our "home theater", a.k.a. the flat panel television. We haven't bothered with broadcast television for years, but we often watch movies. When we're not watching a movie though, we can enjoy a nice fire in the "hearth" at the lower right.

This is "Henry" the pheasant, another estate sale friend.

We had always wanted to paint the beams, but it sounded like such a huge task that I doubt if we would have ever gotten around to it. However, I had the idea of using wallpaper borders instead and I think that it worked out to be a nice alternative. I love the pattern of light that the lamp makes on the ceiling.

Thank you all for joining me of a tour of our living room!

Just a note for Lili M.: I don't know if you got my email, but I am definitely going to be wearing a bonnet to the Jane Austen picnic. Any excuse to wear a bonnet is a good one.:)