Our living room

I haven’t had any guests over for the longest time because of this social distancing thing so as I found this post from my drafts where I’ve had it for quite some time now, I thought to invite you for a virtual visit to our living room. How exciting that you came, welcome! I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to drink but perhaps I’ll share a recipe for some quarantinis next to make up for it. I know I said I wouldn’t do it, but I have spent the last month of this lockdown pretty much crazy cleaning and organizing everything but somehow nothing has changed. I took these pictures before our window/facade renovation project started last fall but otherwise it still looks pretty much the same, except that you can’t see outside anymore.

Our living room has sort of taken over two separate rooms at the moment, the rooms are joined in the middle but have their own doors to the entry and the other one also to the rest of the apartment. We have been planning a possible little makeover here ever since we moved in this apartment but have postponed it because of the window renovation project that has been in works for a few years now. Perhaps later this year you will see a whole different kind of living room here but for the time being we have been enjoying the extra space here and made the other room our dining room.

When we moved in this apartment about four years ago, it was luckily in a pretty good condition otherwise as it had been recently renovated but desperately needed some fresh paint. Mostly because of the Parisian pollution that makes everything quite dirty very fast but also because the walls were in a pretty bad shape as the previous tenants had TVs and shelving attached to many of the walls. I’m also a fan of light Scandinavian interiors and we didn’t quite share the same taste with the previous tenant as pretty much every wall was of different colour and there were some purple and dark brown walls as well as radiators in here which my white loving mind simply couldn’t handle. I feel like there is always so much going on in Paris so I need my home to be a calm, light, neutral environment.

When we started the painting project, I was very excited as I love renovating and we had lived almost five years in an apartment where we couldn’t do much related to that. I had an image in my head where I would head to the paint store like in Finland and carefully pick just the perfect shade of white or light grey from hundreds of options but got quite disappointed when there were just a few options available. I guess it could be that people are much more into colours than whites here, not as obsessed about different shades of white as me or perhaps I just didn’t find the perfect white paint store back then. After careful evaluation and hours spent at different hardware stores we ended up picking the very basic painters white that they often use for walls here, as most of the other ones seemed either way too dark or too warm considering the wooden flooring that we have here. But we have been quite happy with the result especially in the living room, it goes pretty well with the flooring and brought so much more light in here. We ended up painting the windows too since they were half black, half white before.

For the other parts our interiors, we have wanted to keep it quite neutral too. We live in a building that is from the early part of the 1900s, so it is a bit newer than the typical older Parisian buildings but luckily it also has some interesting details that I love from that era, a bit more modern than those in the older buildings but still quite traditional with wall/ceiling moldings, old doors, lots of mirrors and original wood flooring. To balance it out we like our furniture quite modern. Some of those like our dining chairs from Kartell we have had for a long time and I’m quite a collector for all the little things that I keep with me always but when we moved in here we had to purchase some of the larger furniture.

As we never know how long we are going to live here and had the idea of possibly changing the rooms a bit later, we wanted furniture that could be easily converted if needed. Our sofa can be changed or cut into pieces in many ways and for storage in both rooms we have the Bestå-units from Ikea which are also quite convertible. We keep quite a lot of toys in the living room among other things so these are perfect for all kinds of storage if you want to hide something but still keep it easily accessible. Our dining table and black marble coffee table are both from AM.PM, a French brand that makes quite nice contemporary things.

To make things a bit softer with our modern furniture we have added white linen curtains to the windows and a pop of colour (the neutral way) with our greenish grey carpet in the living room. This is actually pretty much our first apartment where carpets have really found their way as I find nice carpets being not only the hardest thing to find but mostly because our dog has been quite busy making sure we can’t have any carpets in the house for too long. Let’s just say that the jute carpet in the dining room is not the first one of its kind. Unfortunately that Ikea carpet is not washable but we keep getting a new one here always since we really like it and also believe it protects the other carpets from destruction.

I also always try to keep some fresh flowers on the dining table in addition to all kinds of books, candles and other things on the other counters. We have also added some marble shelfs to the radiators to get that space used too as there is never too much space to display those scented candles. The kid has been quite a climber from the start and very interested in all of the things that could be there on display, so only recently we have started putting things like candles and flowers back on the tables. The items we keep on the lower counters are still things you can move quite fast, accidents still happen and the coffee table still works mostly as a dancefloor or dinosaur display during the days but my candles and flowers have been a lot safer now. But yes, that’s about it for our living room. There’s also the balcony which I already showed here if you want to see more of it. It is now out of use because of the renovation but hopefully it will look like that again in the summer. I hope you enjoyed the visit!