Bella Vista - The House of Fun

So this is the new home (in a house called Bella Vista, even though there's not even a sea view! Why the name?!) ready and cleaned up after painting, wallpapering and decorating.

The exciting beginning

In new year's eve we got keys to the new apartment and we were of course full of excitement what the place looks like without furniture so we went there right away. To our new home :) Here are some pictures from the first days, when we are beginning the redecoration:

The previous owner left the pendant in the kitchen so that we'd see something there. This time a year the day is light about 6 hours, and all those hours are of course spent at the office... So basically we had only weekends to do the painting that requires daylight. And by the way, I'll always remember this winter as the warmest winter of my life. In January it's green outside and we keep the door open! And still hang around in shorts inside the house.

Here's the ugly red wall in the living room.

And ugly red wall in the bedroom.

View from the ugly red bedroom wall to the hall and kitchen.

A freshly blackboard painted wall. This lamp we just bought and installed ourselves with sweat and tears :)

Weird cream and grey coloured walls in the living room.

Bathroom pictures will be in some other blog post later when it gets ready. But otherwise, these pictures give a peak of the amount of work in front of us (luckilly already almost behind us)!

Our new home - Before...

These are the pictures in the sales ad of our new apartment in Herttoniemenranta, Helsinki. First I didn't want to go and see this place because there's no sauna there, but then on the other hand, the price was excellent and after seeing it, we fell in love and made an offer the next day. It was accepted 30 minutes later :)

Architecture gone tilt

Carry Me (to Snoopy's Home!)

One of my favourite things in the design Expo HABITARE in Helsinki this year was this lamp:

This lamp, Carry Me, designed by Antti Konga is brilliant. It's easy to carry around from the handle, it's light, stylish and funny. But the bad side is that it's only on prototype level and you can't buy them from anywhere. Maybe I write him e-mail and ask if he has an extra one lying somewhere in the corner :) Or then I could try to get it being sold on the web shop (kauppakoti.fi) I have been working on. Let's see, but I want it!

Kinda reminds me of Muuto's Wood lamp I've been wanting too:

 

All in all the best thing I saw in HABITARE was in the ecodesign-area. It's also a lamp, designed by Yuki Abe and Anna Salonen: Snoopy's Home.

This I want even more than Carry Me, because this is more multifuntional. You can better control the amount of light so it's good for couples when other one wants to read and the other needs to sleep. Also you can use it as bookmark. Plus it's more than beautiful in it's simple white design. Nice design company: mottowasabi.com.

Top Vitras

Today I finally found the perfect dining table from internet auction, but tomorrow I'll see if I'll get it. I still started to dream about the perfect chairs for it already and as I was going with the flow, I acidentally found the most awesome sofa at the same time. I was just surfing on Vitra's web pages to find inspiration on chairs, because these Eames chairs have been my dream for a long time:

But my boyfriend used his veto, so I started dreaming about these Tom Vac's (white looks better with these). I didn't even ask his opinion on these so that it wouldn't ruin my day :D

I had already decided about Tolix-chairs earlier, but now that I found the perfect table, I noticed that they really don't match together. At all. That's a pity, because I really wanted the Tolix chairs. Maybe some day, some other room will have them.

But the sofa, Suita, is everything I dreamed of (excluding the price, what my boyfriend is again vetoing now): It's light, modern, tailorable, beautiful and kind of looks like a piece of furniture that would last forever.

Doesn't it?

Project Norm 03

 Normann Copenhagen's Small Norm 03 lamps were on sale in Finnish Design Shop (www.finnishdesignshop.com) and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to replace the lamps that I had before them. The other one was just a broken shit quality rice paper shade that I had found somewhere half free when I needed just some kind of lamp with a budget close to 1 €. The other one was a perfect mismatch for it: an IKEA "cone" lamp. Ugh. I hope someone would buy it soon from my Internet auction site.

I actually tried and tried for very long to find 2nd hand lamps to this place but I couldn't find anything I would have liked. Once there were 2 Normann Copenhagen 69 lamps on sale and I tried to get them, but then the price rose even higher than what I paid from my new Norm 03 lamps! So it was'n worth it anymore.

Anyways, now after 2 visits to post office and several hours of assembling I have them both in the living room and there is finally something here that actually matches!! :)

I even lost the other package to metro yesterday: I was waiting for the metro and talking with my dad on the phone. Then I got into the metro and talked until I realized I missed my stop so I ran out and thought I had forgotten it into the metro. Then I walked to train station where I was supposed to meet my boyfriend, then we searched the package from the metros that were coming back to the direction where I came from 5 minutes ago :D After 2 trains and 5 metro cars, I found the package from a kiosk on my metro station! Turned out I had never ever taken it inside the metro at all! But that was a very happy reunion I had with the package. Emotional.