A home away from home

I am in B’s home town-Stockholm now, the place we call a home away from home.
For many of our friends from USA and Asia, Stockholm is “ the far far away kingdom” and it is. We usually spend  least 16 hours fly time to get here from either Taiwan or Los Angeles [where we lived before.]

Since my blog is all about A+AB home, why not introduce all “homes” we had lived from now on? So lets start with Stockholm then, where we lived, we are now and we definitely will come back many many many times in the future.

After we graduated from THE college, we started our Gypsy life style. The first place we moved to was Stockholm. It was summer and everything was bright and shin around the city, we planned to stay in Stockholm for at least 6 months.

B still had his room [yes, just a room] in his parents apartment but who on the earth could live in your husband’s little teenage room with your 14 boxes luggages and with your in laws for 6 months? At least I couldn’t. “YOU GOT TO FIND A APARTMENT FOR US!!!!!” I yelled to B.

And he did, we soon found one charming little furnished apartment located in a cool area” Soder” [meant south in Swedish] were available for 6 months. What a surprise? I thought it was hard to find spot in the center of the city? Well, it was an understatement to say the rent wasn’t cheap, it was super expensive!! And, the size of the apartment was very mini for people lived in Los Angeles near a decade. At first, I felt like sleeping in a shoe box....But we were not in the position to make a bargain, at least it was wayyyyy cheaper than living in the hotel, hahahaaa [ bitter /dry laugh]

Even though the apartment was quit small for us, I quickly fell in love with the life in Soder. The location was superb! People who visited Stockholm knew that this was a tiny little city. You could walk through the city easily with in couple hours. For example, it took me 35 mins walking from my apartment to my mother in law’s apartment. It meant I walked across 3 islands [ wasn’t that amazing?] and 3 town parts!

I was extra careful when we used the kitchen because we knew the apartment owner was a clean freak and he reminded us many many times how much work he put in building his gorgeous, completely white open kitchen.

I bought some white home accessories to go with the kitchen--My favorite spot in town " Tosse Bakery" 

Not only I stained the white counter with Kimchi sauce but B burned the owner's super pricy/ designer/ one of the kind kitchen table with our grill hot charcoal ....... - _- He was MADDDDD, and made us pay for a new one. The apartment came with a tiny tiny patio, the owner managed to put a table and a bench in that little corner. That was my favorite corner.

The other thing we loved to do or I should say B loved to do was taking secret pictures with his spy like long distance camera of our strange visitors in the park right beneath our apartment. The park was a gathering spot in this area and we could see people doing all kinds of activities here. Sometimes they just got too comfortable with the environment...

If you ever want to visit Stockholm, please don't forget to pay a visit to Soder! I love this mixed cultures, mixed personality and weirdo friendly place---just get out the station " Slussen" and you will have a lot of fun~

Recycle the waste from Fanapi

A close view of my dear new dining table

Taiwan has 2 big nature enemies---Earthquake and typhoon. 

We are so used to have these 2 enemies attacking us we get worried if they don't show up for too long. Like this year, the radio stations keep broadcasting that we have to watch out!! Because we haven't get any typhoon this summer! If the typhoon comes during this autumn it must be a HUGEEEE disaster! We are so deeply damaged by all the bad typhoons and earthquake, we never think positive when it comes to typhoons, I never hear anyone in Taiwan says " Yes! we won't have typhoon attacking us this year!"

So, everyone in Taiwan now is extra worry about this upcoming Typhoon---Fanabi.

This is our first typhoon this year and the weather forecast is panicking. We are informed that this typhoon is so powerful we have to prepare for any disasters cause by either too much rain or too windy or just too much ....

Under this scary atmosphere, B and I still decide to go to studio today, we have to finish all the work in 2 days and take off to Sweden, we get no choice but risking our lives!!

Mr/Ms. Fanapi typhoon seems not that powerful as we expected in Taipei city, maybe it damages lots other cities in Taiwan but it simply feels like a rainy and windy day in Taipei.

But when we are on the way home [we can walk home from studio, I think that is the best work out for me~] We found this...

A lot of tree branches are blowed away! Poor trees!

Poor bicycles and trees are falling everywhere, I cann't believe their owners just leave their bicycles outside on a typhoon day .

I decide to make those poor tree branches a happy ending of their lives !!

I love this small vase I bought at Nordiska galleriet in Stockholm 2 month ago. They are handmade and each one naturally look slightly different from the other.

I put the rest of the branches into my the other beloved Royal Copenhagen vase.

My gift from Fanapi Typhoon.

This is what I have been doing.

Here is my line: LazyWife--talking about design out of experience!

A lot of people are asking what's our next step, to be honest, we also have no idea at this moment, hahaa. Who knows? Maybe it will lead us somewhere? Here is little preview about lazywifeNO1--the whole process and design features demo are under development.

I designed my dinning table! Lazy wife product line

When we bought this apartment, we were sooooo excited to find out what kind of furniture we want to put in here. We had the IKEA home back in USA so we were so looking forward to have something unique and personal this time. Unfortunately, we found that the furniture we likeed were either too expensive for what it was or just not good enough to our expectation. So we started to find the furniture shops can deliver our own design in Taiwan.


My series called " Lazy wife" simply because I am one lazy wife,hahaa.


To get married and to maintain a life style is hard especially for a career driven woman  and this is a interesting issue for me to discuss and to find out a better way of marriage living through the furniture.


This dinning table is the third piece of this line and I like it bit more than other two because I am clear about what I want  when I design it.


Here are the pictures we took in the factory couple days ago, it is on the way to deliver to us! 

More home made breakfast!

I officially announce here: July is the month of "PEACH!"


Taiwan has its local grown high mountain peach but you can find all kinds of imported peaches from USA and Japan in higher end supermarkets. They are not cheap but the taste is sensational!
We love peaches and last month, we discovered one kind of strange yellow peach from Japan which we never had it before! The morning was nice and kitchen was super bright in the morning cause our living room facing East [you know---Feng-Shui, hahaa]. We had simple and delicious breakfast together in our lovely kitchen again.

bright and shine

Aoki Jam--yummy!

Left side dish is the new Japanese peach we found!

Le chef preparing the dessert for dinner after the breakfast

Red wine "APPLE"---a twist from red wine pear..cause our apple was going to go bad...

Breakfast in our new kitchen

New Kitchen is not completely done but it is usable. Our favorite thing to do is cooking a big big breakfast together.

Zombie in the kitchen

Have a nice day!!

sofa!!

Sofa pix are coming soon~~

Here you can sneak a peek of THE sofa!!

 

Customization---easier say than done

Back in Los Angeles, during the school time, we had a complete IKEA home. We swore so many times that we won't  do it any more once we graduated.
Easier say then done.....sign....We still shopped in Ikea when we lived in Stockholm and Taiwan. Please don't get me wrong, there were many good design pieces in Ikea but it was like you picked up some Lego pieces from the same toy box and trying to arrange them in a slightly different way than other people did. 

Customization was the key to us in this project in order to create something new but what we got from the workers is big"NO !!"  They told us either " it's too expensive!" " too much trouble" " you will regret" or simply " WE DON'T DO THINGS THAT WAY !"

The rules we set for this remodeling projects are:
1. Use as many local materials as possible.
2. Design as many parts as we can

So, Here is the first part we made under these 2 rules.
I liked the old American hexagon shaped tiles but it was too small and impossible to find in Taiwan:

I also was thinking about using marble as tiles because the entire East-North coast mountain in Taiwan is marble. Green material! Oh yeah~~
2009 when B's parents visited us we went hiking there ---Taroko, Taiwan. It was beautiful~

So I combined two things I like and made 5cmx5cm Hexagon shaped marble tiles and they looked great.
We used them in the kitchen and master bathroom

Moved in!!

We moved in right before Chinese New year!! Feb. 13, 2010, the day before Valentines day.

My blog is very slow comparing to the real schedule...I know I know, as soon as the apartment is done, as soon as I have everything set up I will upload more pictures. As soon as......

There were some Chinese traditional preparation we had to fellow when we spent the night in our new apartment. We didn't really complete the whole ceremony but we did greet our house trolls the first morning we slept overnight in the new apartment.

Chinese house trolls are a couple, they handles mainly the kitchen activities. We had to get couple things they really like to eat and presented this feast to them for our future happy life in this apartment with them. Because they were short[ all trolls around the world seems short..] we used a little box as table so they could reach the food.

The little box was facing the stove [where they usually stay around in the house] with rice bowls, rice wine, chicken leg, one fish, and some small side dishes.

[It was cold and early, you can tell by the look on my face...]

Everyone told me that the chicken leg was essential, our trolls would be very unhappy if we forgot to include that in this meal. We lit up some incense candles during the time they should be enjoying their meal and we went downstairs to burn some paper money so they also could buy things in their world..... Then, in a traditional sense, I guessed we officially moved in our new apartment.

Go green! It isn't cheap

It is strange to me that Eco is expensive in Taiwan. If you want to go green, you have to pay for them with no help from government what's ever! For example, all the hybrid cars are much more expensive than gasoline cars, no lower tax, no carpool.

Unfortunately, all the manufactures here seem have no clue about what real Eco friendly products are as well. You have to spend extra time and effort to dig out the materials are closer to the green ideas you have in mind.

Finding out the energy saving electronics was the easy part in this searching process. The problem was to find the ones were energy saving, smart to use and also looked good in our place.

We picked the basic ones really quickly:

Refrigerator--Hitachi 543L

                      













Washing Machine: SFB1200T

                           










TV: LED Samsung UA40B6000VM

                         





Food compost: Izumi ICM 300TW

                                














Air Conditioner:Daikin

We also picked up some LED spot lights [33 of them in fact] and a solar panal water heater which was the only one thing Taiwanese goverment promoted with 300usd rebate, then we were done with the easy part.

More Sketches in baby-step speed!!

First time to sketch for a space was not easy to me...

I found that I lack of the sense of the real space proportion in my apartment especially because we have low celling and meanwhile I was trying to think about the thickness, relation between objects and users, materials and finishing in a larger scale at the same time. The strange thing was although all the process sounded really like any other design tasks but interior design was somehow too different to me compared to design a car. I was like an adult got trapped in a baby's body and tried to run....

Here are some examples that I started to planned out the space and doodled out some ideas about living room and my walking closet.

And---SKETCH!

After deciding the floor plan, I started to sketch up some ideas of how I want the space looked like. Sketch! Almost my favorite part of the designing [ OK, I actually love to see the final products the most.] I started with rough sketches to figure out how many items I want

to put in the space and how the aesthetic gonna be .

We both thought putting color themes into different spaces especially we won't have obvious walls in between the areas. As a cooking antreprenor, I sketched the open kitchen first. When I picked up the makers to shade the sketch, I thought about BLUE ---I imaged using a kind of wood dyed with deep and rich blue paired with stainless steel top!

Cooking station + Kitchen counter 

The floor plan...endless decision making step one

Of course we thought about how we wanted to layout the floor plan couple million times before we actually drew it out....

It was so difficult for first timers like us and we loved to do it a gazillion times anyways.... We definitely wanted a large living room and an open kitchen on the first floor and have a half open bedroom and master bathroom on the second floor.

Then the hard part kicked in, how did we want to layout the guest room, guest bathroom and dressing rooms? Later on I found out the most difficult part was to decide the moving path between toilet, shower, bath, changing area, dressing rooms and bedroom. It was especially important to me because I spent a lot of time in my bathroom [which women doesn't anyways?]. Then we had to fit in all the details: windows, doors, storage..etc. After one month of discussion [also some small arguments here there, heheh] here is the final outcome!

First floor

Second floor

Designer disease

Since B and I are both designers [the worst part is we both are not interior designers but trying to design our apartment...] , this project is bound to be a big nightmare to my interior design friend who gonna help us to make the thinking into reality..... We have our own thoughts about how we want it, what type of method we want to use, why should we design this way....etc. We basically have opinions about almost EVERYTHING!

In the design book rule No. one: Set up a tone which meets up what the users want!

Luckily we don't need to do lots target research because we are the users!

But it really takes a lot of effort to narrow done what we want at this point.

I started cruising on line and buying interior design magazines to get myself inspired. After a long study and million questions we asked ourselves, here comes the conclusion of what our new apartment should be:

A library+a chic restaurant+ a SPA =our ideal home.

Here are some references I put together. 

 

Most of the images are from a great website desiretoinspire.