Not so much the Curiosities, more the Cabinet…

Ok, not ‘cabinet’ but desk – but colour also and maybe that is a curiosity!

I have never really warmed to the notion of scandi-chic. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a mooch around Ikea as much as the next person – although living where I do, that’s not easy as the nearest to us is a 2-hour drive away in Exeter. In fact, since we moved here 8 years ago, I’ve only been once. Then there’s the colour scheme that goes with such furniture. I say ‘colour’ but what I really mean is ‘lack of colour’. Why are people so frightened of colour? In this household we LOVE colour, can get carried away with colour, but we’d both rather that than bland.

I digress…

My time in the antiques trade has left me with a love for, and a quantity of, deeply unfashionable ‘brown furniture’. Or brownish, the gryphon I blogged about previously is not what you’d call ‘deeply’ brown 🙂

What people most often mean by brown furniture is mahogany.

We have a mahogany dining table and chairs, a mahogany china cabinet and a Sutherland table and mahogany chests of drawers…

Oh brown furniture, why the stigma?

When we first moved to Cornwall I needed a desk. I couldn’t find one I liked so I bought a cheap stand-in: light beech wood-effect. I hated it, but then it was usually so covered in gubbins that I didn’t generally see it. It had drawers, but I was never motivated to make them up!

Roll on a few years and I found the desk of my dreams, a big mahogany pedestal desk with a superfluity of drawers and a cupboard.

To get it into the house, David had to take the front door off its hinges. To get it upstairs, he had to dismantle it and it has stayed dismantled in my step-daughter’s room, waiting for me to decorate my study.

That decoration process is now complete. Colour, dark wood, bookshelves all against one wall. I am in heaven. I am too ecstatic to write, I’m just enjoying looking at it. On my way to bed each night I pop my head around the door, just for another peek: lights on, lights off; curtains open, curtains drawn.

Now David wonders how long it will stay as tidy as it is currently and he’s got a point, but if it gets untidy hopefully that will be because I’m being creative.

But for now, I am basking in the glow of my desk, my yellow walls and my bird-covered wallpaper and curtains.

Fingers crossed that creativity will kick in soon my next blog will be less self-indulgent and more useful: a little more about the Cultivator self-publishing days, methinks…