The Hotel Adagio is the gorgeous boutique hotel we stayed at during our honeymoon in October of 2006. I was truly captivated by the unique, modern decor and I have to admit that without a doubt the Hotel Adagio has played an influential role in the development of my personal style. Unfortunately, I was not able to take many quality shots during our stay but I thought I would post a few pictures that I found around the internet.

I want to say a big thank you to the Apartment Therapy community! They helped us out with some clarity for our living room light situation. Despite having a very low quality photo, I sent our question over and got plenty of feedback in return. A lot of people felt that the Le Klint 172 would work well while most people thought that we shouldn’t have any pendant lighting at all!! A few people agreed with us about the PH 5 pendant being a good mixture of our table lamps and our dining room pendant.. (I still love it and wish I could use it somewhere.) You can read their comments here, if you want.

My interest in home design and decor has been developing at a rapid pace for almost three years now. It wasn’t until I got engaged in the summer of 2006 and realized that I would soon be making a home for myself and my new husband that I began exploring the world of interior design. Boy have I learned a lot since then! As I said in an earlier post, most of what I’ve learned is from trial and error and a whole lot of studying! I study everything! I study my surroundings and the interiors of all the places I frequent regularly, I study books, magazines, catalogs, design shows and decor blogs, and I study my friends and families’ homes. I take absolutely everything in. I promise you, go anywhere with me and wherever I am, I will be noting every last detail. To a fault. Because of this, I feel like I will never stop learning because I can’t help but absorb all I see. Fortunately, since I am pursuing interior decorating as a career, I will have an outlet to pour all of this learning into. Eventually.

I recently picked up a book called Apartment Therapy: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions. It’s by Maxwell-Gillingham Ryan, founder of the popular shelter blog ApartmentTherapy.com. In the introduction of this book, the author has a couple of solid things to say about the home. Listen to this….

I used to think of home was the place where we cook, eat, and sleep. I now understand it as a force that shapes our daily lives. More than just a physical shelter, the home is both a second skin that protects us from the world outside, and an emotional center that nourishes us and supports our inner-most dreams.

Whether you live in a rental apartment in New York City or own a house in Seattle, your home is the one space on earth that you can call your own. You owe it to yourself to make it as beautiful, organized, and healthy as you can.

By taking care of our home, you are taking care of yourself. A healthy home will nurture and support you.

Now, I would caution myself to remember and consider that my TRUE home is not on this earth but with Jesus in eternity. No dwelling place on earth can compare to the beauty that is my future home in Glory, much as it’s hard for me to even comprehend this. But I can appreciate this quote because I think it resonates with my reasons for why I do what I do, for my home that is. Our home is a shelter, a nourishing center, a protection, and a second skin and I absolutely believe that it should be all these things. I believe this because I believe that I personally am called to live my life in and from home. Right now, I have the great privilege of being able to work from home which is something I do not take for granted. We also plan to raise a family together so being a mom will be a couple of decades worth of work that will take place primarily at home. It’s also a great possibility that my children will be educated at home. (But more on that later, much later.) I love to have people in to our home, and I want to be more hospitable to do so more often. I also, and you could say first and foremost, want my home (our home) to be a place of refuge for my dear husband. I want him to come home to a place of rest and be blessed for his hard work outside of the home.  I know that my husband could be blessed by our home even if we lived out of a cardboard box because it ultimately has to do with the homemaker’s heart and desire to serve (or her lack). But since I have been blessed with more than a cardboard box, for right now at least, I’ve been endeavoring to be the best steward I can be. 

Say the words ceiling fan and I cringe. They’re big, they’re bulky, and they’re usually hideous. *shudder* Plus, the light they cast is glaring, unflattering and pretty much bunk, especially if it’s the only source of light in a room. Ew. So when I moved into my husband’s house, switching out the ceiling fans was one of the first things we did. We went to Home Depot and picked out an attractive fan that we thought would match our new home’s decor. Then we bought three of them and put them up in our living room, office, and bedroom. That was two years ago and, well, things have changed. For one thing, our style has shifted towards a definitively more modern aesthetic. Not that we weren’t going for modern before, we just didn’t know exactly what “modern” was or, for that matter, what our style was. We’ve made many a change in our home over the past two years, as opportunity and budget would allow. We’ve also made many a mistake because of not fully understanding our own tastes. You’d think it would be common sense NOT to try and decorate your house when you don’t know what you like, but alas, we learned by doing. (I don’t necessarily recommend this, however.) Slowly but surely we are making fewer and fewer mistakes while making more assertive design decisions that are relevant and consistent with our sense of style. One such mistake, which we could only see in hindsight, was the purchase of the aforementioned ceiling fans. Don’t get me wrong, the fans would be great in the right context. In fact, they will probably stay in the bedroom and office where they’re…..getting by. But now that the living room opens up into the dining room and kitchen, the lighting/ceiling fixtures from all three “rooms” must work together and that ceiling fan definitely doesn’t work. It’s not even centered! Lame-o. We ripped that thing down months ago and we’ve been living with a few little pokey wires that are hanging down 6″ from the ceiling. Now I just have to decide if I want a ceiling fan w/a light, just a fan, or no fan and a light fixture instead.

Here are a few fans that we like:

And here are some light fixtures that we like:

Here’s a sampling of some of the current lighting in our home and our possible choices for the living room:

Notice that the mention of the practicality of a fan in Florida didn’t come up. Yeah, it would be very practical to have a ceiling fan. Some would say it’s a necessity, and believe me, this past summer we could have really used the extra help in keeping our home cool. Yikes…. But some of those lighting choices above are just too amazing to pass up. I don’t know, I think it could be worth it to endure the larger electric bill in the summer if I could have one of those lights in my LR. Let’s face it, I tend to ere on the side of form over function.