After last week’s blog on our wish to be individuals and not have the same stuff as everyone else in our homes, guess what? A Japanese artist, Yuko Shimizu, said pretty much almost exactly the same thing in an interiors feature in The Observer Magazine on Sunday. You can find the feature plus photos here.
When it comes to furniture, the article says, Shimizu decided to challenge herself to a “No Ikea rule.” ‘“It’s pretty hard because they have some great stuff,” she says, “but the problem is, whichever country you go to, everyone has the same furniture and it feels wrong.” So she tries to buy original items, either on Etsy and eBay, or when she travels.
She is a collector of both “junk and expensive things” – from figurines of Chinese dictators to Fornasetti pieces. “I like to support artists,” she says, “and often that means I can’t immediately buy the thing I want [because it’s too expensive], but that’s OK. One day I might be able to.”’
Yuko lives in Manhatten, so she sadly can’t take advantage of Jali’s brilliant design-your-own furniture service, which, let’s face it, is the nearest thing to heaven for anyone on a modest budget who wants bespoke, individual pieces.
(We regularly get enquiries from the USA, but shipping costs and distances wipe out any hope of it being a sensible prospect at present.)
Pausing only to renew our subscription to Mind Readers’ Weekly (they were expecting our call), I looked for more springtime inspiration in May’s interiors magazines such as Good Homes and Ideal Home. And spotted something quite strange on their respective covers. See if you can:
Yep, they have both found exactly 987 ideas for improving your interiors. What are the chances of that?
Once I’d banished the images in my head of stylists in Burberry trench coats breaking into publishing offices at dead of night, it was time for a different kind of information gathering.
And what I found were some excellent projects that could be recreated using Jali products.
Take the dressers on either side of this fireplace, featured in Good Homes. Below is a shot of the matching pair:
This is exactly the kind of furniture we excel at; use our online dresser designer to create your own version, made bespoke to fit your alcoves exactly, even if they have different measurements.
We’ve been making amazing, individual, personalised furniture for years. And we like to think we’ve got rather good at it. It’s also a great privilege to have our products go into people’s homes and lives, into the heart of the family.
And we love it when our customers do something unusual or daring. As Yuko Shimizu says, “Your home is your space and is where you can take risks. It’s a bit like my work,” she adds. “I don’t need everyone to love it.” We agree – as long as you love it, nothing else matters.
