Reader's home - Nataliya's Ottawa suburban project

I'm super excited to share this home with you today because it's from my city of Ottawa. Not only that, suburban homes here are always super boring, poorly designed and really poorly finished. Nataliya and her husband did a FAB U LOUS job with their home and I am so happy to find out there's one more person in O-town with good decor sense! 

When we bought the house 3 years ago, it was a spur of the moment purchase. We really wanted to stay in our neighbourhood and felt that we had grown out of a townhouse. A backyard with a deck sounded divine...until the move in day. Hubby and I shared a beer on that deck and freaked out all over each other about the amount of update this house needed. The floor plan is the typical suburban house with separate kitchen, dining, living and family rooms. Not to mention the most awkward in the world fireplace placement.
With a small budget that had very little room to pay a contractor, hubby had to learn how to do everything himself. And I had to choose all the finishes myself. Thankfully, there is desiretoinspire.net!! Kim and Jo provided a world of inspiration for the regular DIY'er and made my job of choosing tile, paint colours and everything in between infinitely easier.
3 years later the house is freshly renovated from top to bottom. To celebrate all the hard work the house was photographed by a local photographer (Shabana Beg). The photos represent so much hard work, but also personal grown. The house was our labour of love and we are so proud of how it turned out.
P.S. Funny fact, in a few weeks we're moving into a different home and I can't wait to put my design stamp on it!

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The Baudelaire family home

What a wonderful family home, full of light and a life well lived. Children and music and friends and entertaining. A kitchen as the centre of it all and everywhere  a casual sense of style. Long time reader Kimberley and her husband Adam have sadly sold this house and moved on but Kimberley assures me that it is to another renovation adventure. So without further ado I present to you a wonderful Australian home, the Baudelaire family home.

P.S. You can see before and afters here.

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Margarida's weekend home in Portugal

I am in awe of this weekend home submitted by a reader named Margarida. Here is a bit of info she included: Its located 13 kms from the little village monsaraz & alqueva big lake in the region of alentejo (Portugal). Its our new weekend and holiday family house but its concept was done to be rentable by other families so we are building the new site for it. The Architecture project was done by João favila Menezes. He is very talented and conceptual artist. The interior decoration was done by myself and there is still a lot to do :) it accommodates 12 people and it took us 3 years to finish this project and the idea was to have a piece of modern land that would allow us to go free on modernity but respecting the landscape and the traditions of alentejo architecture. the next step on this family investment is the building of a garden, its a project made by an amazing award winning architecture Teresa Barão. It is absolutely beautiful in its surroundings, and perfection in its simplicity. WOW!

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Irving's home

Perched above the streets of New York is the home of Irving Diaz-Burg. "The apartment is in a new construction, utilitarian high-rise building by Toll Brothers' located at 110 Third Avenue, with floor to ceiling windows and amounts to a well-considered 850 square feet," writes Irving who works in  architecture as a Project Coordinator and Marketing Manager. It's not hard to see how Irving has honed his fabulous sense of style. "I have been working in high-end architecture and interiors for a number of years.  I was an art history major with a practical background ranging from furniture specification, to whole event planning to assisting project managers on all levels of organization and project actualization.  This has been a great outlet for my creativity, organizational and social skills ..." What a wonderful contemporary apartment Irving! Super stylish living in the Big Apple. And for all the readers who will want to know what and where and how to get their hands on various pieces in the pictures you'll find a comprehensive resource list here. You wouldn't expect anything else from a Project Coordinator ;)

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Reader's home - Elisabeth's lake house

This little blog apparently supplied Elisabeth with inspiration to come up with this absolutely incredible lake house. WOWZERS. I can't help but feel like a proud mother because this weekend getaway is a DREAM. I bow down to her for coming up with that 'sub' kitchen - I have plans for something similar in my next house and now I'm totally sold on the idea. (FYI: Her architect was Jay Corder)

the house is right outside of austin, tx on the pedernales river. we live in houston and drive there as many weekends as possible to relax, have family time and let our kids wakeboard on our boat.
the house is 3000 sq ft. with four bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths. there are a lot of great aspects about the house. the bunk room is cool because it was built to be an indoor/outdoor room for the kids - bunks inside with huge glass sliding doors that open out onto the 'outdoor' part of the room - a screened sleeping porch. we also have another interesting interior design aspect which is what we call our 'sub' kitchen. we have 2 main kitchen counters out in the main living space and then the sub kitchen is a small room adjacent to the kitchen that houses the refrigerator, shelf storage, an extra dishwasher and counter appliances and can be closed off with giant barn doors to hide all of that or to hide dishes after a dinner so the party can go on without a mess.
we love the simplicity of the house. it is incredibly functional and also provides such a relaxing respite for our family.

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