Interior Decorating : Brooklyn Brownstone

Picture 1, with my favorites!

Design Sponge has an amazing house tour of this couple with a brownstone in Brooklyn.  The first time I went through the pictures I thought the house was much bigger than it actually is, I only just realized that the sitting room and kitchen and dining room are pretty much the same room!  But you want to know my three favorite things about this house, which you can actually see in the first picture...?
1. That amazing built-in bookshelf in the dining room that displays not just books but mirrors and rocks and stuff.  So neat!  And the fact that it's white makes everything really stand out!
2.  That guest loft with the ladder above the dining room, but also the fact that the ladder can be used for the bookshelves right next door! So crafty.
3.  Those lights that are facing the kitchen area that were rescued off a ship in India.  Really cool looking.

 This picture on the left gives another great look at that amazing bookshelf!  See the track for the ladder, as well as the museum-like display of masks?  Really creative.  That dining room table is really neat too, I think the husband made it.  He's a woodworker and made a lot of the wooden objects in the house, like the 4 posters of their bed in the picture below!  I also love that big mirror propped against the wall in their room, as well as that phenomenal original fireplace in their room!

The picture on the left is a sitting room that doubles as even MORE guest sleeping quarters if need be. See those "couches" with all the pillows?  They're actually mattresses! (Glad to know we aren't the only ones who do that!)  But the real reason I included this picture, aside from their adorable puppy, is that I LOVE those tables that are tree trunks, seriously, super fantastic.  Of course the husband made the tables, as well as the legs for the mattresses, and those wooden things in the window. 
That's it for the house tour, if you want to see more pictures visit the Design Sponge post, it's amazing.

Decorating with Typography

So decorating our house has been happening slowly but surely, resulting in an amalgamation of furniture from my parents, grandparents, IKEA, and assorted things we've all picked up over the years. (Like the 100 lb. television Dot and I bought off Craigs List. Definitely buyers remorse on that one...) There isn't much of a theme to the house, although people always say our house feels very homey.

But I ran across these photos on the blog Design is Mine. And they make me want to redesign every room of the house, even the bathroom.





I love the way the letters (or numbers) used can sometimes help define a room (like the SOAP one), or just provide a creative montage to accent a wall (like all those letters behind the desk). Either way if I ever run across a bunch of letters, I may have to buy them purely because these pictures totally inspire me. And it kinda reminds me of those fridge magnet letters. I always thought those were really cool. So I hope that those lovely design images got your inner interior decorator neurons firing.