{tische + that}

tische, tische! or for all the english speakers, table, table! i'm currently on the hunt for this beauty for my living/dining room. i found it in the danish interiors magazine boligliv and learned from decor8 readers today that it is indeed an antique that was lacquered in white. there is a good chance i will never find anything like it but i hope so. i don't care what color i find it in, i want to paint it white exactly like this one. it is 100% my style, in fact i never found a single piece of furniture that clicked with more and that is the truth.

dream tische. :)

it is part timeless and clean and modern and another part feminine and curvy and playful. but not all practical or all whimsical because there has to be a perfect balance of both for me. i may wear jeans but i balance it out with a feminine shirt with either a ruffle detail, crochet, or some embellishment or pattern. if i could own two homes of my exact taste, one would be a 2-level townhouse in a jugenstil building dating the mid to late 1800's with soaring ceilings and architecture details galore in northern european city, and the other would be an extremely modern and clean home (think of the house in the recent iron man movie) perched atop a mountain overlooking the coast directly on a beach in either australia or southern california. ha, don't we all, right? since i doubt i will ever live in australia or california, there just may be a chance that someday i will end up in a jugenstil building in germany (fingers crossed). but for now since none of these places exist except in my head, i try to bring them together in my interiors so that i can play pretend. merging these two very distinct styles and periods together, pre-war and this modern/slightly futuristic design into a single apartment is a real challenge because although one can make this delicate balance work, it is quite difficult because it can be easy to add a piece that can prove to be the tipping point in the design making the space look quite out of whack, even sloppy or in bad taste. i've been inside homes where nothing matched that looked great, and i've been inside homes where nothing matched and it was a nightmare. and it wasn't just about personal taste, it was truly a nightmare. there is a method to the madness and i think that the scandinavians mastered this years ago and continue to amaze me with just how well they do it. i often look at american interiors and shake my head. not that i think i'm so stylish or better, please, more because i cannot believe how sometimes inconsistent mainstream design is in comparison to some of the tiniest countries that churn out killer looks. designers that are placed on pedestals here are often laughed at in other parts of the world for being tasteless and tacky. including some designers i actually like. outside of domino and the martha stewart empire, most people i meet in northern europe comment that rooms they see in american magazines truly make their eyes sore. my stockholm friend confessed to canceling her subscriptions to such design magazines because she considered them to be some of the ugliest "rubbish" she'd ever known. ouch. although i do understand how we can be laughed at for our government (lately), i don't always think what we are doing in our interiors is so bad that the eyes would burn. i like lots of what i see and think improvements have been made over the years. plus design is pretty subjective. but for the sake of being fair, i do understand why our reputations for interiors sometimes make those on the outside second guess our level of taste. the whole 60/70s throw back, zebra rugs, obsession with chocolate and robin's egg blue combined, and the mismatched patterns and cultures and why we see buddhas in bathrooms (which i heard is quite offensive to an actual buddist). so many homes featured on design blogs are starting to look like the homes of all the other blog readers out there. mine included as i'm buying lots of the same things that i write about. do we also eat the same food and drink the same milk and listen to the same hipster bands? like there is some mass cult of 'like forever' poster owners out there? if so, that's cool because i think we learn a lot from blogs. it's okay to admit that before design blogs, most of our homes were one big hot mess. i don't always understand the cult following for the same iconic pieces and fixation on arranging books by the color of the spine though. and what's up with the mid century modern madness out there? i like mid century pieces, i own some, but lots of people had a stained futon in their apartment with a guitar mounted on the wall and a tiny television delicately balanced on crates before they started reading (or authoring) blogs. and while it's completely fine to make changes and show your home online, that is what haus maus is all about, i don't know why some apt/home owners feel scared to admit that they didn't always have this level of style. no need to front. if you had a stained cream futon back in say, 2004 and now you have a fancy sofa, that is great. don't pretend that you've always had this impeccable style and that before this sofa and your mid century modern apartment, you had some posh apartment that was inspired by say, the designs of kelly wearstler. it's totally cool to admit you had no or little taste at one time if you truly didn't. no one cares how you once decorated anyway. case in point. i design interiors for a living. i write about it. it's all i know right now. i have been decorating and moving around furniture since i was a child, but it wasn't all good all the time. i went from a strawberry shortcake bedspread in the 80's with a crochet throw combined with white cane furniture to everything shabby chic/parisian flea market phase in my early 20s. i've stenciled ridiculous animal silhouettes in my kitchen (age 22) only to paint over them a month later because they were hideous no matter how 'trendy' back then. i even had a pink fridge from the 1950's in a kitchen with HUGE flower wallpaper that, if you stayed in the kitchen to long, you'd lose your mind and start speaking in tongues. i did the whole sponge painting thing on so many walls i can't begin to tell you, i've taken faux finishing classes, and i use to be all into sponge painting the sides of vintage clawfoot bathtubs using silver or gold metallic paint against a white tub. i once had black lacquered bedroom furniture with a black and and mauve orchid wallpaper border along the ceiling in my bedroom (age 18) and a matching bedspread and shams in the bag set. i thought i was freaking awesome back then, my taste could not get any better (i was quite the confident jr. decorator). i liked to shop from weird catalogs like popular club and speigel. i hit flea markets with my decorator mother. wicker tables topped with glass and vinyl-esque shower curtains did not escape me, owned 'em. but I can admit to it. hey it's cool. i often read the occasional snooty magazine article featuring an amazing home, or blogs doing the same, and as i read the owner's take on their taste and style i think, yeah right. you are like 35 and grew up in the 80s, we both know your style most likely came later in life, not sooner. and that's okay. okay i'm done talking. :) your turn. p.s. a few anons left comments that i have removed. conflicting opinions are to be expected and are totally fine by me, but rudeness will not be tolerated -- especially when left under an anoymous id or a false identity.