Wednesday 28 May 2014

Confessions of a TIGER Stores Hack!

Ok. I have a confession to make. I love Denmark (...even tho' I haven't visited yet!). I love Danish Design. I love TIGER Stores. How many confessions was that?!! One of the things I love about Tiger Stores is, apart from being affordable, they, similar to IKEA invest in different designers and they just, well, CARE about their design! Every time I pop in, I see something I want to buy and turn it into something else. On this occasion, it was these beautiful ceramics by Rebecca (I'm afraid I don't have her surname), that made me want to buy the lot. Monochrome is a trend that never goes out of fashion but happens to be still on trend. Her tiles caught my eye. I would love to place a few behind my kitchen hob but as I knew that would be a bigger job at the moment, I bought a few and placed the large one as a kind of centre piece on my kitchen table and the other, smaller one as a rest for my pasta essentials. I have another which I am still hoping to incorporate into my backsplash. Do you do this? Do you love Tiger Stores as much as me?



Friday 2 May 2014

The Casino at Marino, Dublin, Ireland

On a rainy first day of Summer, I bought my little daughter on her first visit to the Casino at Marino. This Neo - Classical building was created for Lord Charlemont by the Scottish Architect, William Chambers, finishing in 1775 approximately. When I visited this building for the first time as a young adult, I was blown away by the illusion that it seems to house but one room, when you see it from the outside, but actually it has several. 16 in fact. My little one was treated to a story about the white mice who built Charlemont! The lovely man who told it, whose name I didn't catch, had a little box of treasures. In it, were beautifully illustrated pictures to tell the story, by his brother, Aidan McDermott, and at the end of the story, he showed her a little instrument that the "mice had made". She was fascinated and found the building wondrous. I'm so pleased to have given her a first glimpse of this amazing architecture. We'll be back, but for now, I'll leave you with these photo's: the first two are taken from Wikipedia and The Casino's Facebook page https://m.facebook.com/casinomarinodublin?_rdr