EACH WEEK, WE ask an Irish person with a passion for interiors about a favourite spot in their home.
This week, vintage and retro-lover Aisling Riordan (@vintagehillcork) chatted us through the space in her home which she loves the most: the gallery wall in her dining room.
Aisling lives with her husband and three children in a Cork house they bought in 2009.
This part of our house has a vaulted ceiling and is south-facing, so it’s full of natural light and warmth. It’s part of an open-plan kitchen and living area ,so it’s always full of hustle and bustle. It’s where we eat, where the kids do their homework, arts and crafts and where we can light the stove and listen to some vinyl in the evenings.
The focal point of this room is the gallery wall, which is arranged over a G-Plan Fresco sideboard which I snapped up online for a mere £80 (€91) – they can cost up to ten times this price retail. The peacock chair, record player and typewriter were also all sourced online.
The rug was a car boot sale find that I bought off the person who had woven it over 45 years ago. This is one of the reasons I’m drawn to vintage items: more often than not there’s a great little story attached! The gallery wall is made up of items picked up at car boot sales and charity shops mixed in with some prints sourced online and other pieces from Homesense, H&M Home and Ikea.
We bought a large old laundry table at an auction and wanted to create a larger dining area, so we moved it into the centre of ‘the sun room’ and arranged the other pieces around it. Due to the vaulted ceiling there was a lot of wall space to fill, which is why I decided upon the gallery wall.
The sideboard provides a great amount of storage, too. With three small kids you can’t be too precious about a room and it has to be functional!
It reflects my home quite well, to be honest. The decor in our house is very eclectic; a mix of vintage, retro and boho and it has really evolved from years of collecting. A lot of the pieces in our home have been sourced at auctions, car boot sales, salvage yards or in charity shops, as well as online from eBay, Done Deal or Adverts.
It’s definitely a look that is created with time, but it has a lot of personality and plenty of stories to tell.
On the surface of things I didn’t do very much, apart from giving the rug a good hoover and moving the dining table and chairs out of the frame. What lies beneath though is a different story: if I were to open the doors and drawers of the sideboard, all signs of the chaos that comes with three small children would be revealed!
Toys, books, arts and crafts and everything in between, rammed in on top of a disorganised record collection, exercise mats and various bottles of rarely-consumed spirits.
This is the beauty of a mid-century sideboard; not only is the design aesthetically pleasing, it is also incredibly functional in terms of storage space!
Do you have a spot in your home that you’re particularly proud of? Do you enjoy styling the different rooms in your house? Are you always adding and changing little things to make your space stand out? If so, we want to hear from you! Email amy@thejournal.ie with a few lines about yourself and your home for a chance to feature in My Home in One Photo.
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