You know that my mission is to live a Vintage Glam life full of iconic Fashion & Avantgarde Art. But let me tell you: Living a Vintage Lifestyle does not stop at the fashion you wear or the museums, you visit. It should encompass your whole life and of course the home you live in. I have recently renovated our home and have seen one more time: All the grinding, painting, upholstering, and sawing proved one thing: Creating your own Vintage glam home isn’t a hobby or a side project – it’s a passion.
Your HOME is an AUTOPORTRAIT
My apartment is my main personality trait – on this many, who know me, will probably agree. But seriously, renovating & decorating a new home challenge your whole personality & taste, and goes far beyond the question of what your favorite styles & colors are.
It’s about creating future favorite spaces for eating, reading, working etc.
It’s about finding the perfect balance between form & function.
It’s about the very practical part of integrating your existing favorite furniture pieces in new rooms – I call it “the art of tetris”.
And it’s about developing your skills, managing your budget, and a LOT of logistics.
Develop the STYLE
Our apartment is in an old building with apartments with huge rooms & high ceilings. The perfect basis for creating a Vintage glam home. But where to start? For me, Pinterest is my very first, very relaxed research base. I just start scrolling, dreaming, and looking loosely for interiors I like, for the design decades I prefer and start pinning pictures. I make a main mood board and then slowly develop boards for the bath room, the salon, etc. .
Focus on the FACTS
Somewhere in between the dreamy research process you need to start focusing on the facts: Taking the measurements of every room on the one hand and listing all furniture you want to keep on the other is key to the “tetris game” of renovating & decorating. Of course, you’ll need to think of each furniture piece and its possible function and position and attribute it to a room.
It starts with a SKETCH and ends in a lot of WORK
Once I had done these necessary basics I started sketching room by room and made ground plans (more or less true to scale) and ‘placed’ my furniture pieces. This is also the moment, when your “to buy” list of furniture pieces comes together, even if you don’t know the styles yet.
Start DESIGNING
Once you’ve got your ground plans, furniture lists and pinboards all together the glam part starts: Designing room by room, attributing colors, shapes, fabrics etc. . This is also the moment I love to print out my faves and create real mood boards of each room on paper.
CHANEL, DIETRICH & LOOS at home
I do love many interior eras of the past century but what I personally don’t like is if they are copied precisely when styling a contemporary home. I love it when styles merge, and eras are rather quoted & combined than copied. For our Vintage glam home, the idea was to imagine a place, Coco Chanel would have shared with Marlene Dietrich & Adolf Loos. So, what we are talking about is a marriage of 1910 ornamental as well as minimal aesthetics and Art Deco interior.
We are talking about a rather austere Vintage glamour: Lots of black & white drama, ornamental marble, gold brass details, curvy furniture, and cool old Hollywood style. We are also talking about some personal touches: I wanted to have a blue room & and some pieces of my personal collection of Yugoslavian handcrafts. Both, I believe, rounded it all up pretty well.
The functional SALON
The salon was the most complicated room as it has many functional aspects to it: We have the TV & reading area, a dining table, lots of things to store (books, CDs, vinyl records, DVDs, photos, candles, a bar with lots of bottles & beautiful glassware, etc.). So, a wall bookshelf was the go-to furniture for these reasons and let’s be honest: Who doesn’t like such a huge 1900 bookshelf?
However, building the fake built-in bookshelf wasn’t as dreamy as drawing it, I fear, but it was all worth it given the effect that it has on the room and the space for all our things. The price however was not as huge as one would think: For practical reasons I chose BILLY shelves from IKEA, which are modular and not expensive at all. But it is a lot of work to put everything together und to adjust it to the ceiling and the ceiling bar – don’t have any illusions on that one.
The couch is equally from IKEA – it’s the KIVIK couch (that I have upcycled with supplementary foam rubber that I added to the upholstery) but a special cover I ordered at Cover couch.
Together with my best friend I built the couch ottoman, which is already the second time we did that. I love this kind of couch table, it’s super comfy and adding a glass plate to it makes it practical when having a drink.
Beautiful 30s style furniture pieces with round shapes add the art deco feeling to the room that I wanted to have as well as white columns on the walls, that are repeated in the design of the bookshelf.
The AUSTERELY GLAMOROUS bathroom
The bathroom is the stylistic center of our Vintage glam home: Here black & grey evoke the austere elegance of Chanel all while the ornamental marble evokes the ideas of Adolf Loos, who rejected any ornament other that the one inherent to natural materials like marble or wood.
The cool elegance of the room is rounded up by the super long black velvet curtains and the Art Deco chandelier. Both add glamour and drama to the scenery.
A BLUE office
Useless to say that I love blue, right? Well, one room needed to be blue, no matter what Loos or my husband (would have) said. My office was the matching space for it. We painted it in the FACTION blue of course.
The style however remains the same: I built (fake) built-in office cupboards with IKEA’s PAX cupboards, that I painted. In the middle of them I place my old writing table, which is a grand antique 50s office desk mimicking Art Nouveau ornaments. I bought this writing table years ago and painted it myself. Find the painting tutorial here.
On top I chose a rather playful 1900 chandelier paired with an equally round but cooler Art Deco desk lamp. The black & white entered the room’s design with the classic IKEA rugg.
Lust for more DIY tutorials? Here you are.
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