Introducing... Jen Collins, illustrator and ceramicist

I haven't yet got the hang of Instagram – I know, late in the game, but blame Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and life – I have no followers and can't work out how to find people...

... but I have already made my first lovely discovery and may just find myself hooked. (Do come find me by the way, and share your tips!)



Above: sitting tigers, £50 each

Glasgow-based illustrator/ceramicist Jen

The Insider: inspiring tiles from Bert & May

The Conran shop is usually out of this blog's price range... but this story is only partly about Conran.

The rest of it is about Bert & May, a new company (but also not so new, more of which shortly) specialising in beautiful reclaimed and made-to-look reclaimed tiles. Bert & May today launch their collaboration with the Conran Shop, with whom they have exclusively developed a hue named Azure

Introducing... Homestuff with history

I'm not sure I love the say-what-it-is name of this shop I recently discovered, but I do like what it does. And at least the owners are making that clear.

Homestuff with History, an online shop based in Hertfordshire, is run by brother and sister Matt and Kathryn Brown and they may love old junk possibly even more than I do (did you miss my breathless post about the secondhand shops of Lewes?)

I went to Copenhagen and all I got was...


I'd never been to Denmark or Sweden before last month, when we took in Copenhagen, Malmö and southern, coastal Sweden for a wedding and a mini-break.

And I promised to write a post on the trip. Not quite the post I'd intended to write though...



Photo: Declan Fahy

Any fan of good design and nice furniture would get excitable at the thought of such a trip, especially Denmark – birthplace of

Object of the day: Slim Aarons photography made affordable

I have previously lusted here over Slim Aarons' gloriously glamorous seventies photography. 

But have never been able to afford it... until now.



Just when I thought digital wall print experts, Surface View, couldn't get any more exciting (you may have seen my breathless post about their John Hinde range a few months back), they pull another corker out of the bag: yes, now you can get your

Before & After: a dramatic transformation of the downstairs loo

Would anyone ever describe their house or flat as finished? 

Eight years after moving in, I'm finally getting around to painting that bit of bare plaster, tidying up those wonky shelves and changing various unsatisfactory light fittings.





And of course my tastes have changed since I first moved in, so there's a fresh round of updating too. So sometimes it's good to wait a while until you're

Scandinavia here I come...

No posts until later next week... as you read this, I should be sitting on a train going across this baby. Fans of The Bridge will understand my excitement.




Fans of sleek Scandinavian styles will too, as at one end there's Copenhagen, and at the other end, Malmo. Design heaven. Look out for the photos on my return.

Have a good weekend and week!

Simple pleasures

I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how I'd decided to start collecting the dubiously 70s brown range of Hornsey Pottery. 

Having inherited one piece – the biscuit jar among this bundle of treasures – I came around to the idea slowly, but was totally sold after visiting a park cafe filled with the stuff. It just made the place seem so homely and nice, and it went well with the many Ercol chairs in

#cheaphometricks: table pimping for less

Last week I wrote about the new Pretty Pegs table legs that you can buy to transform your ordinary Ikea table into something extraordinary. 

This week, it's still my most read post – and the legs are lovely, clever things. The downside? They aren't cheap. So if you're cash-poor but DIY-enthusiasm-rich, here's some inspiration for taking on the home-made version of that project.







Despite

Object of the day: making kitsch look classy

They're kitsch and kind of silly. But also kind of brilliant.



These ceramic indoor animal-shaped planters are new in at Urban Outfitters. Some of the homewares at UO can be a little studenty and these could, of course, fall into that category (there's also a pink plastic flamingo in the new indoor garden range...). 





Nothing wrong with a pink plastic flamingo, of course, but full-on kitsch