Café Design

Decorating Consultations

This Week’s Finds

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Wishing you a Happy St. Patrick’s Day, dear friends! I hope you’re having a fun-filled weekend, wherever you are. The first official day of Spring is just around the corner, can you believe it? Of course, I couldn’t be happier! There’s only so many bleak winter days a girl can take before the old mood starts bouncing up and down, and the need for sunshine and color and flowers becomes overwhelming. Project-wise it’s been a pretty low key winter at our house (i.e. we’ve been lazy), with more planning and daydreaming than actual doing, but I now feel the need to get out there and play, and be productive and care for my garden once again. 

Image via @figdesigncompany

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Discover the Magic of Cut and Come Again Flowers with Sarah Raven & Create Academy

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What if I told you there is a way to have a garden full of flowers, from early spring to late fall and, unlike gardening with perennials, the more flowers you picked, the more your plants would bloom?  What if you’d spend the same amount of time gardening, yet you’d have buckets of fresh flowers to bring indoors every week? Imagine a home filled with color, scent and beauty, day after day, all of it from your garden. Sounds impossible, right?

sarah raven and create academy - cut and come again masterclass
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This Week’s Finds

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn a commission on all qualifying purchases. Thank you!

Happy March, dear friends! Once again, I must express my gratitude for this kind and generous community we have here! I shared a decorating dilemma with you on Friday, and your responses have been pouring in ever since. How lucky am I? The fact that you took time out of a busy day to stop, read and share your advice, and did so gently and empathically, means a lot me. You’ve helped me make up my mind, and I appreciate it! (I’ll show you the outcome soon, I promise!)

Regarding this week’s finds, I assembled quite a few odd bits from my shopping cart, as well as my wishlist. eBay is one of my favorite places to shop for fabric that’s either been discontinued or is only available in smaller amounts. A little goes a long way, so a couple of yards of high-end designer fabric could be enough to make throw cushions, a roman shade or complete a smaller upholstery project. Below I’ve included a few lovely textiles that are typically only available through trade showrooms. I hope you see something you like. Also, I tried to resist it as much as I could, but I finally gave into the look of tiled seagrass rugs, so I’ve added a source for ready-made natural fiber rugs, available in several different sizes. There’s a pretty metal tripod table (another great Amazon find!), a set of seagrass baskets, and a few design stories to check out. Enjoy the rest of your weekend! 

Vintage Burnt Bamboo Side Table / Magazine Rack

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Decorating Dilemma: Form over Function?

I need your advice. It’s not a big deal, but it’s something that’s been bothering me for some time and I have been going about it in circles trying to figure it out, and I could use a second opinion. There are two sofas in our house, and I love them both. They are both serendipitous Facebook Marketplace finds, both 78 inches wide and comfortable, which makes this decision hard because size-wise the two are interchangeable. I’ll explain: One is a soft green & cream plaid English roll arm sofa that folds out into a queen bed, and that is now our living room sofa (below).

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This Week’s Finds

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I receive a commission on all qualifying purchases. Thank you!

Good morning, dear friends! Thank you for the lovely messages after Friday’s design story, I enjoyed reading your takes on decorating with found treasures very much!  It is clearly a topic that resonates with many of you, and it makes me happy to know that. 

For this week’s finds, I gathered a bunch of different stories, home tours and shopping ideas, with a focus on things that are not only (and hopefully) entertaining and inspirational, but also packed with useful decorating advice. We’ll get to be frugal and playful and reuse those tester pots we have lying around and paint with decorative artist Tess Newall; learn to style a comfortable bed with decorator extraordinaire Emma Burns of Sybil Colefax & John Fowler; and for those of you with a weakness for botanical prints, there’s a great source for herbarium specimens I return to time and time again for my projects, and a cute-looking and versatile metal drinks table that’s a budget-friendly option to the more expensive versions out there, design reads, fun and colorful cushions, and more. I hope you’ll see something you like! 

The One Day Box – A Life-Changing Love of Home by Flora Soames

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