At last my renovations at the new old house are starting. The painter is coming. Well the plumber is coming first followed by a quick visit from the electrician then the plasterer then the painter but let’s not quibble. The sample pots arrived in the mail from Murobond and I’ve been busy painting up large swatches for the wall. Head over to my page to see me turn to the dark side.

I need 48 hours in one day. I have so much going on at the moment. A full time day job and the blog for one. The painter comes in just over a week and there is still  a lot of prep work to do. I’m trying to finish a “quick” redo of my kitchen (Ha! Quick! That’s a joke!) and the day to day cooking, cleaning and shopping goes on and on. I’m trying to finish a painting to go in a group exhibition here in Ipswich next month and there has been a door sitting on trestles waiting to be painted for 2 weeks now. I have no normal Saturday post ready to go and 3 loads of washing to do. Sound familiar? I know what I’ll do! Real estate stalking post. Good idea. A warehouse perhaps? How about this one in South Yarra, Melbourne? It has a red TV room. I swear it’s the strangest thing I’ve seen this week. Strange but kind of cool. The words “red rum, red rum” keep popping into my head. See I’m rambling. Time to go.

After yesterday’s amazing renovation I thought I’d share another. This time though it’s teeny tiny and on a shoe string budget. Alexey emailed to share this soviet era apartment re-do by interior decorator Natalja Radchenko in the Latvian capital of Riga.

The apartment belongs to a middle aged Russian literature teacher who has inherited it from his parents and who had quite an utopian idea to transform a one bedroom 40 sq m living space located in a depressing soviet project building into something at least slightly resembling Riga old town last century apartments with high ceilings and wooden floors. Her main goals were to create (an illusion) of space and not to lose apartment’s functionality.

What she did:

– Eliminated all the doors, leaving only one – to the bathroom;
– Created wide openings;
– Optically expanded space with wide cornices and plinths;
– Chose neutral tones for walls and black varnish for the floor.

The result:

– Dining room/space with kitchen work space;
– Living room, semi-integrated into bedroom (owner’s requirement);
– Small dark corridor transformed into wide hall leading to dining/kitchen, where wall is turned into a kind of gallery of owner’s family relics;
– Tiny wardrobe between bedroom and entrance hall.
In addition to small size, another obstacle was that the owner had a very limited budget. Hence, not a single piece of furniture is just bought (except for kitchen appliances and bathroom); almost every item is redone and redesigned. For example, a sofa in a living room is bought in a second hand furniture store (and was originally disgustingly pink), bed – on the closing hotel auction, dinner table is inherited from owner’s parents, and almost all of the lamps are found on furniture dumps. Visual appearance of every item was changed via being repainted, overlayed with another fabric, accessorized. It was not a classical restoration, rather an ironical one – e.g. chair in the hall is overlayed with canvas bag fabric.

First time visitors claim that the effect of entering the apartment from a dark claustrophobic staircase is probably similar to entering Narnia chronicles wardrobe – the contrast is astonishing.

I warned you! More from the dark side. The Milan loft of furniture designer Rodolfo Dordoni via AT Casa. This is more me. Still undecided on the oversized humanoid sculpture (this coming from a woman with a life size Mary and Jesus statue, a 3m Papua New Guinea spirit post and a Tiwi burial pole) but the rest is perfect. Soon I too shall be welcomed home each day by a darkling den.

It’s amazing what is hiding behind the most conservative of exteriors. That’s why I love real estate stalking. A house full of art is close to my heart. A house with sculpture makes my pulse race even faster. But this house? The owner must love dogs! Walls are hung with doggy portraits, larger than life 3D dogs bound and bow (with ice-cream?) and it is all the more fun because of it. The doghouse of a canophilist! Perched in Bellevue Hill with a killer view of Sydney Harbour, you can find the link here while it lasts.