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Room reveal: our rustic-minimalist dining room

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[Advertisement – this post references PR products, but all words and opinions are my own] After months of flooring, sanding, priming, painting and juggling different trades, the ground floor of our little 19 th -century cottage is pretty much finished – and this once-tired and unloved house is really starting to feel like home.   I’ll share the kitchen and living room in future posts, but I want to start with the dining room. It’s the first space you enter when you step into the cottage through our miniscule vestibule (I’m not sure it even counts as a hallway!), and it sets the tone for the calm, cosy mood that we want to create throughout. It’s also of course the first room that we saw when we viewed the house, so it’s where we began to fall in love with its charms and see the potential behind its then-scruffy and dated decor.   The overall scheme I outlined our renovation plans for the cottage as a whole in this post , where you can also see so...
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Profile | Jewellery designer Michiel Bosman of aēr

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I’ve long admired the work of Netherlands-based Michiel Bosman, whose beautiful house I’ve featured both here on this blog and in my first book , The Soft Minimalist Home . An interiors photographer and trained art therapist, he also has a longstanding passion for jewellery design and last year turned this into a business with the launch of his own brand, aēr. Named after an Ancient Greek word that can mean ‘atmosphere’, ‘air’ or ‘mist’, aēr encompasses fine, hand-crafted pieces in silver and gold. All have a poetic quality to them, evoking the natural world, the emotions it stirs and the mysteries it holds. Their flowing, organic shapes and quiet, timeless beauty instantly appealed to me, and Michiel’s artistry and talent are clear in every one. The first two collections from aēr focused on rings, with ‘Faces’ taking its inspiration from the spirit of nature and ‘Arbos’ from weeping willow tre...
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Home tour | A contemporary take on a traditional Swedish longhouse

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For today’s home tour we’re heading to Österlen – a picturesque region of Skåne in southern Sweden that’s famous for its rolling countryside, verdant orchards and white sandy beaches. It’s here that Stockholm-based Note Design Studio , long known for its product- and interior-design expertise, has created a minimalist villa that takes its cue from traditional longhouses – its second foray into full residential architecture, following on from a rural cabin it developed last year. Like the cabin, the Österlen villa is firmly rooted in its setting. But whereas the former has an isolated location amid the rugged mountain landscape of Ottsjö, the latter is tightly interwoven into a historic village environment, with views over bucolic farmland and the wide expanse of nearby Hanö Bay. Österlen’s cultural heritage and the proximity of the local church had a strong influence on the project, inspiring both the material choices and the overa...
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