i am so much in love with my new chair. if i had a lappie there’d be no removing me from it ever. i’d have to be turned at regular intervals to prevent my skin from fusing with it. ewwwww.

it’s an original 70’s stressless recliner by ekornes, a norwegian company that appears to be the ultimate when it comes to reclining chairs. i’m a bit of a newcomer to “mid century modern” design, although i have unwittingly been filling the house with cheap repros from ikea :)

i found the chair on ebay (natch) it’s in near perfect nick except the tips of the arms are rather discoloured and cracked. i think i paid a good price for a 70’s model (and a fraction of the current new price) mostly because it wasn’t listed as leather, let alone ekornes (although the name and patents are on the label). it’s obviously a high quality piece of furniture, and immensely comfy, swivels all the way round and you just lean back to recline it. we’ve yet to figure out how to twizzle the knobs to get it to stay put in a particular position - it stays just where you want it while you’re in it, but returns to upright as you sit up - but if it turns out we can’t it’s no biggie.

most importantly there’s room for one and a half, so it’s the perfect story time chair, which is exactly what i wanted it for. well, that and swivelling round whilst stroking the cat on my knee, saying “so, mr bond…” in a cod eastern european accent, a fair amount of which has also been going on.

it takes up less space than i expected, both physically and visually. it’s replacing a large 3-seater sofa that only got occasional sitting-on use, but constant stacking-big-piles-of-crap-on-instead-of-putting-them-away-properly use. as soon as we’d decided to get rid of the sofa it opened up the opportunity to make a decent sized play space for madam if we could find a comfy chair to replace the occasional sitting function but thwart the piles-of-crap function. i think i hit the jackpot here, it’s perfect. so perfect in fact i’m considering fashioning some form of antimacassar for it (lol, now that’s proper mid-century) to protect the leather from my pink hair dye that transfers scarily easily when it’s fresh. in fact i’ve just noticed that my keyboard is going pink from the tips of my fingers which are always rather pinky for a week or so after i first do it - it is very pink :)

i guess this is as good a place as any to drop my restoring leather furniture links:

on the same slightly o/t theme piccies of the newly done rooms are still pending. i took a few shots earlier but a) i need to get out of my usual “details” frame of mind (engendered by too many years living in a house that desperately needed plaster and paint, perhaps?) so you can actually see the overall effect and b) i need to get my tripod out cos there’s not quite enough light to get decent handheld shots.

and finally, today i’ve had a throughly enjoyable time browsing the apartment therapy smallest coolest apartment contest for some extra pointers. although we’re blessed with rather more square footage than the 650 contest limit* and i’ve yet to see an entry that has to accommodate children full-time, i think there’s still a lot we could learn from here. i love our little house and dearly want to make it work for us as a family for as long as possible, so learning how to maximise the space and pull it all together visually is important to me.

i’m pleasantly surprised to see how “on trend” my decorating instincts (grey walls, aforementioned mid-century modern, mixing different woods etc) appear to be, especially considering that it’s all picked up by osmosis. i don’t read or watch any interior design stuff, the closest i’ve got to that is my recent bauhaus reading and the book on scandinavian design i picked up recently (more of which anon). otherwise furniture-wise i just tend to drool over stuff in habitat and then pick things i can actually afford from ikea and usually there’s not much choice it’s whatever they happen to have that fits…

*edit: out of curiosity i searched out our original agent’s details, and it turns out we have around 600 square feet. it feels like so much more space than most of the apartments i’ve seen in the contest, perhaps it’s just a visual trick of viewing everything in photographs, or maybe because we have 7 rooms over 2 floors rather than one large space, i dunno. i am half tempted to enter next year’s contest though, if only to enjoy the snidey comments about my bland and derivative taste and oh god not more ikea :lol: but then i’d have to tidy up the whole house for the pictures, which aint ever going to happen.