Remember the fabulous Style Lab launched at Life Instyle Sydney with Jane Frosh and Lucy Weight from Cool Edie’s? Well it’s back for the Melbourne fair and Julia Green and Jacqui Moore from Greenhouse Interiors will be the stylists doing the honours. Exciting!
Style Lab explores the elements of style and creativity through a series of changing scenes, designed and created live each morning of the August event. Julia and Jacqui will create a different theme each day, allowing visitors to witness the creation of a real life photographic studio set, using exhibitor products and industry trends to build and grow a concept on the spot.
Are you ready for our next Instagram challenge? Just in case, here’s the list:
And a reminder that the prize, for one lucky winner, is two extra large canvases of your choice from Urban Road’s latest collection. I’d definitely pick this one!
You must tag @interiorsaddict and guest judge Suzie Atkin (@suzie_urbanroad) and use the hashtag #7vignettes. You must have uploaded all 7 images by midnight on 7 June, and be an Australian resident, to be in with a chance of winning. The usual instructions can be found here. The fun starts tomorrow (1 June). I’m looking forward to the hashtag passing 15,000 images this time around!
Or indeed his ‘n his or hers ‘n hers. We’re all inclusive here at Interiors Addict!
How to combine two people’s styles when moving in with your other half is something I’m often asked for advice on. I’m not sure I’m the best person to give it (or if my fiance would think so either). So I asked the girls at new Sydney wedding registry The Wedding Nest, for their top tips.
Their in-house interior stylist (former Belle interior design editor Imogen Naylor) works with their couples to collate a registry of gifts that will achieve a beautifully styled space true to both their individual styles.
Top tips
Be involved together from the start! Even if one partner takes the lead, keep in mind that it’s best to consult the other partner regularly and ‘take them on the journey’ so they don’t block all the hard work by the time it’s well down the track.
Plan! She might call this a mood board, he, a strategy, but either way the key here is agreeing on a vision. We invite couples to bring magazine cut-outs and to get pinning on Pinterest. Together they work through the collection to agree on a style or a selection of key pieces they both like that will suit their home.
Looking at Julia Green’s styling work, it’s very hard to believe she’s only been doing this professionally for 3 years or, indeed, that she spent 15 years in the corporate world of pharmaceuticals!
“Yes it’s true I used to pedal drugs… all legal ones though,” she jokes. “After uni I needed to earn money. I saw an ad in the paper promising a car and money. I interviewed and blow me down, I got it. Then comes the timewarp of some 15 years where I sell, manage and recruit in that industry before having my last baby and realising I had been living a lie.”
Fenton and Fenton shoot
Whilst everyone always told Julia she should be “in interiors” she had no idea how to turn her passion into a real job, or that stylists even existed (true story). Then fate intervened. One day, a man came to her door to collect a couch she’d sold him on eBay. “Ends up he is a photographer for Vogue and he asked me who I styled for. In perfect ignorance, I asked what he was on about, only to learn of a whole new world out there, that I apparently should belong to. He gave me a card and told me to call. To cut a long story short, I have not stopped running from job to job ever since!”
Exciting news, folks! We have a fabulous prize for one lucky winner in next week’s 7 Vignettes Instagram challenge (starting on 1 June): two extra large canvases of your choice from Urban Road’s new collection, released this week. Which would you choose? I’d choose these two!
For all the diehard 7 Vignettes fans out there who love to start prepping before the monthly challenge starts, I have some good news! The list will now be released a whole week before the start date each month. To be the first to get your impatient, creative little hands on it, you’ll need to be signed up to my Wednesday newsletter. You can do so here. See you next month!
Every month since we started in January, 7 Vignettes, the Interiors Addict Instagram photo challenge, gets bigger and better and with its amazing community.
“Her entries were consistently fantastic,” says Amber. “I’m really drawn to flat lay and her composition was really thoughtful. The chalkboard background gave them a really distinctive look, I knew who they belonged to even from the thumbnails. The objects used were really varied and I loved the different interpretations of each theme. If I had to pick a favourite from all her entries it was day 2.”
Here we go again, folks! It’s a week until 7 Vignettes starts all over again on 1 May and this month we’ll be giving away a prize for the best vignette each day as well as a bigger one for the overall winner at the end of the week! Thanks to fabulous new store The Woodsfolk for teaming up with us on prizes! And now it’s time to reveal this month’s list!
Here are the prizes which, as you can probably work out, tie in with the themes…
It’s always really tough to pick a winner of 7 Vignettes, so when we had two $200 vouchers this month it seemed a good idea to have two prizes: one for best overall and one for standout single vignette. Luckily the tough judging job went to Louise Olsen of Dinosaur Designs, not me! But then she decided to award a third special mention too!
The overall winner is @mollysmaison. These are my favourites of hers:
The standout single vignette prize went to @loumasters for this beauty:
Tomorrow I’m off to the Sydney launch of stylist Jason Grant’s first book, A Place Called Home, so it’s about time I reviewed it for you!
If you know MJG, or follow him on social media, you’ll know this is a project that has taken over his life for a good year. Luckily he is DELIGHTED with how it turned out and I can see why. It feels like if Jason was a book, this would be it.
It’s light on words and heavy on beautiful images by photographer James Geer. And let’s face it, who has time to actually read their coffee table books anyway?! I actually devoured this book in one enjoyable afternoon, but it’s the sort of book you’ll want to dip back in and out of on rainy afternoons, especially as its many photos of the beach and Bondi will bring back memories of summer.
Jason is a well known freelance interior stylist and was previously style director of Real Living, who he still works for, alongside almost every other Australian homes magazine. He was also one of the very first people I interviewed for Interiors Addict! Jason has his own paint ranges for Murobond and recently styled Freedom’s new winter collection for its catalogue and advertising.
Earlier this month we ran a competition to win a course at the new International Institute of Home Staging (IIHS) and asked readers to send in their own room makeovers aimed at helping sell a home.
We asked our friend Shaynna Blaze, star of The Block and Selling Houses Australia, to judge. Who better?! She chose this unisex toddler bedroom entry from Iva Izman.
“This room is a work of art in itself. All decorations are DIY from salvaged items and recycled materials. From the wall art down to the cushion details and baby mobile, it was all handmade by me,” said Iva in her entry.
Interior stylist Dina Broadhurst collaborated with brandsExclusive to demonstrate an easy classic makeover for your bedroom, step by step. Even better, you can buy everything she uses online!
As if 7 Vignettes wasn’t already enough of a feel-good, creative share-fest, it’s now started attracting the younger generation too! This month I noticed two young participants in particular: 9 year-old ‘India Kitty’ and ’13 Year Old Vignetter’ (real name Radha) who created her account especially for the photo challenge!
Simone Patterson, Radha’s mum, said: “There was instant curiosity when she saw me pulling the place apart and building vignettes. I showed her the hashtag on Instagram and that was it, she was off on a vignette frenzy! She enjoyed the creative process, but she especially enjoyed seeing all the likes and lovely comments from other vignetters, and says it made her feel ‘awesome’.
“She loved watching all the other vignettes getting uploaded throughout the day and seeing all the different styles. I was more than happy for her to take part because, as an interiors addict myself, it was a joy to watch Radha get so engrossed in the process of developing her own style and expressing her individuality and creativity in this way.”
Guest judge Darren Palmer and I were equally impressed with her consistent effort throughout the entire week (never mind the outtakes which have continued to be posted as extras ever since!). This is why she won…
It was such a tricky choice this month with so many stunning entries! I think even Darren might agree it was tougher than judging a room on The Block! But we both feel pretty confident we picked the right person. Darren, who said the quality of everyone’s work was inspiring, added: “Dee definitely had the most vignettes I liked over the week. Great work all round and there were many entries in my shortlist. I was so happy to see such great style and skill out there!”
Are you a first-time first renovator, a flipper, a property developer or simply a would-be stylist who’d like to start their own business? The International Institute of Home Staging, which launched this week, could be just what you’re looking for! Luckily for one reader, we’re giving away a course worth $497 to whoever impresses our judge, Shaynna Blaze, the most.
The International Institute of Home Staging’s Naomi Findlay
The International Institute of Home Staging (IIHS), which offers the first and only interactive online home staging and property styling courses in Australia, launched this week to help budding designers learn the art and business of making homes attractive to buyers. The demand for staging professionals has reached an all-time high in Australia, as real estate agents and vendors alike realise how much it can impact final sale prices.
Founder Naomi Findlay says: “The courses offered are put together by a fantastic array of Australian design, styling and business mentors that provide great insight into what is a growing industry. It’s designed to teach other people how they can make money on their own property sales or start their own property styling and home staging business.”
Sarah Ellison has the job many readers would kill for: senior stylist on one of the country’s most popular magazines: Real Living, where she’s been for more than 2 years. Here she shares what it’s really like behind the scenes and gives plenty of advice for those wanting to follow in her footsteps.
After fashion college, Sarah Ellison started a small fashion label but to earn some money, she took a job doing visual merchandising for an interiors store. She met many stylists there and started assisting Paul Hopper from House & Garden part-time.
“Fashion and interior styling are very similar jobs,” she says. “The main difference would be that interior styling is much more of a mammoth production. There’s a big difference between calling in some clothing and calling in 6 rooms’ worth of furniture to shoot. Creatively though, the ideas come from the same part of you that gets inspired. Inspiration can be applied to any media.”
Sarah assisted freelance for a couple of years and built a portfolio of test shoots in her spare time. She was assisting stylist Kirsten Bookallil, who had been putting a good word in with Real Living editor Deb Bibby. “I met with Deb and she gave me my first editorial shoot. Unbeknown to me it was actually a bit of a test as there was soon to be a position opening up for a stylist. Deb loved the shoot, put her faith in me and hired me for the job. Great timing too as I must admit there aren’t many jobs out there.”
Photo by Nick Scott
She says the most common misconception about the job of a stylist is that it’s all glamour. “Most of the time you are schlepping furniture around, crawling around on the floor putting Ikea together and being a bit like a courier,” she says.
But when Ikea Australia asked me to take part in its wedding table styling challenge, as a bride-to-be, I thought it sounded like a lot of fun! And it was.
The challenge was to create any kind of wedding table setting using nothing but what you can buy in Ikea, apart from large ticket items like the table itself, for under $500. And above is the result, my very pink and floral dessert station. I know it isn’t very good but hey, you can’t take yourself too seriously! Everything there, edibles aside, is from Ikea, right down to the faux flowers (really not that bad, don’t you think?), the frames, the napkins, the table covering, all of it. Tempting as it was to get one of my many stylists friends to do it for me, I think you can probably tell I didn’t!
Elizabeth Raptis and Melanie Parker, the interior designers behind Ivy & Piper magazine, are relaunching it as an online ‘shoppable’ look book. Not only allow will it allow readers to shop right from its pages, it will also show them how to easily style their homes and even their parties and events. Here’s a first look…
Each section will feature a different style or look with lots of tips on how to achieve it. Products from their own Ivy & Piper range, such as wallpapers, cushions and decorative pieces, will be featured. See something you like? Just click and buy!
Elizabeth Raptis and Melanie Parker
Elizabeth pays tribute to her father, who sadly passed away while the first look book was in production, in the first issue. It went live today and be found here.
