Café Design

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10 Home Decor Items to Buy Vintage

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

If you love that collected-over-time-as-opposed-to-decorated look of an old English cottage, then buying vintage furniture, art and home decor is one of the quickest ways to create a similar vibe in your space. Today’s topic – buying vintage home decor – is one I’m very passionate about, and this post was sparked by my latest purchase – a gently-used English roll arm, sofa bed. For the last three years I’ve been looking for just the right sofa for our living room and recently I found it on Facebook Marketplace! It looks brand new, the mattress has never been slept on, and it’s the right width, color and pattern. I had almost given up on it but the lady I bought it from was able to deliver it for an additional fee, and made the trip all the way from Connecticut. I couldn’t have asked for a kinder seller!

Our new sofa bed
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Spring Cleaning & This Week’s Finds

Spring is in the air here in Western Mass and our neighborhood is buzzing with activity! Isn’t it funny how a little bit of sunshine and clear skies can spring us into action? After months of cold weather, winter storms and snow days, the weather has finally let up and we’re slowly coming out of hibernation. The last couple of weeks I’ve been “enjoying” myself doing a bit of spring cleaning in our front yard, whenever I can find a spare hour or two, gathering twigs and fallen branches, cutting down overgrown shrubs and a particularly invasive species of roses that is hurting some of our trees.

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A Note on Create Academy

Prompted by a dear reader’s question (Hi, Sheena!) I realized that, while I have reviewed a number of Create Academy courses on the blog, many of you are perhaps still not familiar with the platform, so I thought I’d give you a flavor of their amazing mission and course offerings. Create Academy is a learning platform focusing on arts, crafts, gardening, food and interior design. They launched in November 2019  with an online course by the British interior decorator Rita Konig, followed by a class on floristry with the lovely Willow Crossley. Since then, they’ve expanded their curriculum to include numerous interior design and styling courses, gardening and cooking classes, as well as arts and crafts – my favorite. If you love audiobooks and podcasts, this is, in many ways, an even better learning opportunity because you get to watch experts do the vey thing you’d like to get better at. In addition, each course comes with a free lesson you can sample before making up your mind, which I found very useful. (Bellow is a link to such a free sample taken from Rita Konig’s fantastic class – The Ultimate Guide to Interior Design.)

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Create Academy | How to Create Timeless Interiors, by Alidad

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

If you, like me, can’t have enough of Create Academy and their wonderful course offerings, then today’s review will hopefully inspire you to check out what I think is one of their best classes on traditional interior design – How to Create Timeless Interiors – taught by the legendary Persian-British decorator Alidad. The promise: a home that will outlast trends and that will be just as beautiful, with minimal tweaks, twenty years from now. And isn’t that what we all want?

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This Week’s Finds

Happy Weekend, dear friends! Here are this week’s finds: 

1. The Louvre’s entire art collection is now accessible online, for free. Peruse some of the world’s most famous collections of pottery, fine art, textiles and furniture, from the comfort of your sofa. Click HERE for more.

2. A wonderful Nantucket cottage to obsess over – the home of fashion designer Veronica Swanson Beard, decorated by Michelle Holland of Nantucket House Antiques. Click HERE for a tour.

3. Indulge your love of textiles with a lovely assortment of Anatolian patterns, kilims and embroideries to choose from, via THIS Etsy shop. 

Lumbar pillow:

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