Bodie & Fou

CASA COOK hotels have always been a great source of inspiration. Their latest addition to their collection of laid-back, luxurious design hotels in Chania (Greece) is no exception to the rule. With its beautiful concrete walls, natural material & handmade furniture, this place makes you feel you are in Bali or Sri Lanka. A place where we've just spent 3 weeks over Xmas and I. What better way to kick off a series of posts on the CASA PYLA renovations with the makeover of our outdoor space with FERMOB.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw the kitchen in this minimal home in West London. The layout and glass roof reminded me of our home in London (you can see some pictures from the renovations here). Before you ask, yes I miss it from time to time. Then I think where we live now. Following our garden makeover, I'm very excited to share with you today our kitchen makeover in CASA PYLA. For those who haven't followed this new adventure on Instagram, earlier this year, we bought a very old house in Pyla, 2 minutes walk from the beach on the French Atlantic coast and 5 minutes walk from Le Moulleau (for those who know the area).

I'm back from a girls weekend in Marrakech (which was so good on so many levels!) and I have to admit that after spending days in the souk surrounded by beautiful woven baskets and shades, hand carved wooden home accessories & furniture, the natural look is really high up in my mind to revamp our home in France. So when I received the press release from Carl Hansen & Son in my inbox, their re-edition of the CH23 chair caught my eye. Unveiled in 1950, the CH23 chair was one of the first four pieces, Hans J. Wegner created exclusively for Carl Hansen & Son.

With the help of Hbsch Interiors and Farrow & Ball, I created this intimate and minimalist workspace in one of the bedrooms. Just to give you a bit of a background on our house plans, we signed the deed for villa Bagatelles (which I rebranded CASA PYLA) on my birthday in March '19. Given our project to rehabilitate this big house, I knew we couldn't achieve all we wanted to do before Summer '19. So I broke down the work in several phases. March-June '19: Freshening up the house to make it welcoming and liveable for Summer '19.

Have you ever considered oversized art prints for your home? It is something that I have been thinking about quite often these past few months especially since I started planning the interior design for CASA PYLA. For this up-and-coming renovation project two minutes from the beach, I envision a luxury residence. Think bare, textured walls, high ceilings, muted tones, and oversized art. Something in the lines of the interiors I recently posted on the blog like this Belgian flat designed by Vincent Van Duysen (thumb up for the muted tones!) or this home where the Tine K Home collection was photographed.

I was going through some old pictures and came across this one of our home in London. The lounge with its resin floor and high ceilings was my favorite space in our home. It felt really spacious and airy and I love that in wintertime, we could also have a fire going. Apart from the wooden stool which I sold when we moved to France, I have pretty much everything. The NEW-YORK print is available here. The Milk lamp is stored waiting to find its spot in CASA PYLAand the dining table is now in our home in France (available for rentals here).I'm sometimes nostalgic about our 23 years in London.

I'm starting a new Thursday feature called DETAILS dedicated to Interior Details. I don't know about you but quite often, when I spend time on Pinterest, it's very much one specific detail in an image that inspires me and leads me to click and discover a pretty cool home, a new Architecture Studio or a Designer. This gorgeous patio painted in pink did exactly that last year. So today, my first share is this white outdoor staircase which is part of a house in Hammamet, Tunisia renovated by SEPTEMBRE, a collective of French Architects from different backgrounds with complementary skills in architecture, urban planning, urban programming and interior design.

I recently updated Mila's bedroom which you can now see in our catalogue (on issuu here), and made a few changes to show you how to create a French style kids bedroom for very little money I think. Stylish French homes love grays and the ones I mostly use at home, are from Farrow & Ball. When we moved in three years ago, the first thing I did, was to paint all the floorboards and the walls in white (except the one behind her bed which I painted in Down Pipe). To soften the whole look, I then painted her wardrobe in light gray.

Following my last post on the renovations of our holiday home in France, here is a sneak-peek of the new floor in one of the bedrooms. I'm totally in love with it. Our builders took away the sisal floor we had laid down ten years ago, applied a new layer of concrete, polished it and paint it with hard-wearing floor paint. The walls are getting a new coat of pure white paint too. This option was a third of the cost of a polished concrete floor and still looks fantastic. We will see over time if it is hard wearing.

A minimalist bathroom with off-white tones is likely to be the look of bathroom #3 in CASA PYLA. As known as Mila's bathroom. Mila spent years telling me that our home in London was too white. Now that I'm moving towards warmer tones, she wants a white bathroom and ensuite. Go figure. This ensuite bathroom is 3.46 m2. It is not a huge space but decent enough for an ensuite. East facing, this bathroom has plenty of natural light all day and a window overlooking the front garden from the first floor.

My readers are predominantly female, from an ABC1 demographic, aged 25-44 from the UK, US, and France and are interested in interior design, fashion, healthy living, travels and celebrating life through a positive outlook. As a Blogger, Stylist and Photographer, I love connecting and working with like-minded brands, small companies, and independent shops to create beautiful, tailor-made and inspiring content that will benefit your brand and my readers. So let's work together! Projects include room makeovers and styling posts in my own home, Instagram stories, Facebook Live, trends report, social media posts, styling and photography for your brand website.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw the kitchen in this minimal home in West London. The layout and glass roof reminded me of our home in London(you can see some pictures from the renovations here). Before you ask, yes I miss it from time to time. Then I think where we live now. Designed in 1949 by Swedish Architect Nils Strinning, theString shelving series is now considered a design classic thanks to its versatility and understated aesthetic. Still manufactured in Sweden, the String modular shelving system consists of various basic elements (shelves, desks, doors), which can be assembled together to create a scalable shelving system that fits right in with your living requirements.

Now that our resin floor has been laid in our lounge and kitchen (yeah!), it's time for me to shop for a new dining table since I sold our radius table from Habitat before we started the renovations. Here are three looks I love with a preference for the first two, which one is your favourite? GET THE LOOK >> 1. Dining table | 2. Desk lamp | 3. upholstered chair | 4. pink sofa | 5. floorboards I'm so stealing the idea of the moodboard against the wall and this pink sofa from is to die for!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin While doing some research for Mila's bedroom upcoming makeover to add storage and give her walls a fresh coat of paint (see the most recent makeovers here and here), I came across this soothing lounge in natural hues in the home of Interior Designer, Susanne Swegen. Since we sold our home in London and relocated to the beach in France, I have been moving towards interiors with a more natural feel, textures, and hues of whites and soft greys rather than the all-white Scandi look we had in London.

To start your weekend in a relaxing mood, here are more inspiring interiors pictures from Jacqueline Morabito. For someone as talented and renowned as Morabito, it's actually quite tricky to find photos of her designs but I'm delighted I've found these on the front cover of I'm home, a Japanese magazine. The right one is a picture of her lounge and I've always loved the simple lines of the fireplace and the furniture she designed. Jacqueline Morabito is without a doubt one of the most talented French Interior Designer & Architect and Elodie & I have always been huge fans of her simple, contemporary, minimalist style which she often mixed beautifully with vintage pieces.

If you've been following our home renovations on Instagram(#bodieandfourenovations), you may have seen that we've added some large windowsand a couple ofvery modern extensions to our home like Steve's officeand the loft conversionat the back of our home while preserving the beautiful Victorian features of the house. I've always loved mixing vintage treasures with modern design to achieve an effortless style in all the homes I decorated, however, when it comes to architecture and art, I'm a Modernist by heart, which is why I fell in love with this beautiful home/office designed by Architect Mari Castell Martinez, on the island of Formentera.

I'm so pleased to share with you another makeover done in CASA PYLA. This bathroom makeover and this kitchen makeover were two of the biggest jobs in phase 1 of CASA PYLA. Luckily, the previous Owners had started renovating the bathroom a bit and it didn't look as bad as the kitchen. However, it was far from being finished. Bearing in mind that it was only a 3-month project before we take everything apart and move the bathroom somewhere else, I did everything I could to create a modern, bathroom for people staying in CASA PYLA over Summer.