Happy Easter!

Hello lovelies! Just a quickie to say Happy Easter. I'm having a break for a a week so I will be back to my blogtastic friday regularity next week!

Dark Blue versus Deep Teal in Interior design

I've been thinking a lot about colour recently because we are going to redecorate our living room. The only trouble is that I can't decide what colour it should be... I'm torn between my love for dark moody blues....and more cheerful bright teal/turquoise colours. I may have mentioned before that I'm very sensitive to colour, it is super important in my life...so I have to make sure the colour I choose is exactly right. If it isn't perfect, then every time I go in the living room I will feel a kind of slight unease and spiritual itching of the eyeballs. I cannot have that, it will ruin 'Fredagsmys' (for all you non swede readers, that means sitting on the sofa with all the family on a Friday evening eating snacks and watching films). As an aside, sometimes Swedish really manages to capture a whole concept with one small word and it is very useful. The French word 'Sabotage' is like that too. Try finding another word to explain what that is to your kids, you can't. That's why the English thought, yep, we'll have that word, it's much faster. It's a keeper. Ok, I'm going off into the world of lovely useful words now and that's not where i meant to go, but I'm so easily distracted... you know, we creative types, our minds are a rambling mad mess of endless possibilities  and distractions. It's a wonder I manage to get from A to B sometimes without wandering off down the metaphorical alley ways of the mind...and .....Jeez, I exhaust myself sometimes...got to get back on track here!

I'm talking about BLUE

This kind of dark blue looks so great with gold and copper metallics and although I have always thought of dark blue as a rather conventional colour, it can be interpreted in a very eclectic or bohemian way...

Then we start moving in a greener direction, just a tiny bit. For example take the Farrow & Ball Stiffkey paint colour

It has a touch more green in it, such a gorgeous colour...

But then comes the glory of deep teal which is a braver choice in some ways. The only problem is that when I see this colour I think it belongs to someone else.. I can't explain what I mean there...

and then of course there is the cheerful turquoise/teal colour. This is Annie Sloane's Chalk paint in Florence colour, painted on the living room wall of Janice Issitt's bohemian home, which is not only a nice colour but the chalk paint gives a wonderful velvety finish to the wall too.

But ultimately I know what colour my heart is .... and it is a deep moody blue...

If you like all these kinds of interiors and want to see more then do follow my Dark & Decadent Board on Pinterest

               Follow Van Asch's board Dark & Decadent Interiors on Pinterest.    

Chalk Paint & Colour Inspiration

Me and Chalk paint go way back!

My friend, UK blogger and style maven Janice Issitt introduced me to it years ago when I was pimping up my home for a big photo spread in one of Sweden's biggest newspapers. She flew over to help me style it all up and painted a few nick knacks in Antoinette pink...

I just loved the colour and the way the paint goes on virtually anything, with a really nice slightly textural result. So when I began my collaboration with Isabelle from BVN Design, I recommended that she try painting up furniture in Chalk Paint and teaming that up with my designs...

The wall is painted in Antoinette pink too.

Then things really took off and Janice became the Painter in Residence for Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint and did the most wonderfully innovative things with colour, (check her blog for some fabulous paint and colour inspiration)

Here is one of my cushions with a chair and whole dresser painted up for example...

And I got all excited to paint things with it too! I painted all kinds of weird things to use as props in my various photo shoots!

I also sell my wares to lots of Chalk Paint stockists like Monica's Butik in Falkenberg Sweden. You can see lots of fab pictures of the store on her Facebook page 

Van Asch fabric Dreamcatcher on the left wall, Pearls & Lace on the back wall

My fabrics (Shrine pictured above and Pearls & Lace right) and Chalk Paint are natural companions ... part of the reason I like the paint so much is that the colours themselves are so delicious and if I think a colour is delicious, then I'm going to be using those kind of colours in my designs. Hence, lots of possible fabric and paint combinations.


Antoinette pink is still one of my favourite colours years on from when I first started using it and here is Martina from MyHouseInColour on Instagram using it teamed up with my Spring Cottage fabric.

And here, another Chalk Paint stockist called Glada Ungmon in Stockholm has found a fun way to display my fabrics to her customers..

So if you don't have any special plans this weekend and fancy giving a new lease of life to a tired piece of furniture, go get yourself a pot of chalk paint and have some fun with it!

And if pink is your favourite colour, check out my Pink Pinterest boards for some inspiration...

               Follow Van Asch's board Pink & Peach on Pinterest.  

               Follow J▲NICE ISSITT  LIFE  S⬆YLE's board Pink on Pinterest.  

Millesgårgen Ghostly Angels & Art

I visited Millesgården yesterday and was totally blown away! Firstly, the weather was very weird. It was so foggy that you couldn't see far which gave the impression that we were totally cut off from the rest of humanity. This feeling was only compounded by the fact that there were no other visitors there, so we had the place to ourselves. If there was a zombie apocalypse, then this is the place I'd like to hole up in whilst waiting for aliens to come and solve the zombie problem... I think I might be getting a bit off track here... But the point it that it is so beautifully landscaped and curated that I could just live there. Not to mention that there is the sea and a sheer cliff on one side and high security walls on the other, making a nice secure home that the zombies would have a great deal of difficulty getting into.

Ok, so I haven't really explained what Millesgården is...basically it is a museum and sculpture park full of wonderous, um, well sculptures obviously... click the link if you want to know all about the couple who built it.

 And it was all super moody with that thick fog. On a normal day you would look out over the water and see Stockholm behind the musical angels but with the fog, it gave them a kind of blank canvas, with no distractions for the eye. The perfect viewing conditions infact!

This was my favourite sculpture. It had so much humanity and feeling in it, so much soul. Ok, that sounds all a bit vomitty and special feelingsy but it really was so amazing and real looking with such emotion in the material. I was super impressed!

Also going on was the glass art exhibition which initially I thought was going to be those awful glass faces and stuff that are super collectable here in Sweden but I was pleasantly surprised to find a very varied array of glassy weirdness...

Chief amongst the weirdness was the sofa with glass hands that have lights under them so that they are body temperature...which feels quite odd to hold. (here is my daughter trying to comfort the disembodied sad hand)

There were also these things..

I love visiting art exhibitions. It fills my mind up with all sorts of inspiration and thoughts. If you want to see more of the kind of art I like then do check my Pinterest Board

               Follow Van Asch's board Art I like on Pinterest.    

If you haven't got any plans this weekend then why not go and take in some art or visit a museum or something...get a bit of mind food in there!