Interior design and a game of life & death
My sister’s beach villa is in a constant state of transformation. Features are appearing or disappearing, pictures have been hung on walls or taken down again and bits of furniture shifted around every time we visit. Architect’s plans are taped to the walls in the lounge. The place is slowly evolving into an interior design showhouse – all washed floor boards and pebble walls. . .
There are plants everywhere: small trees, pots of foliage submerged in tall glass containers full of water, colourful blooms (on at least one occasion I watered an artificial flower – I couldn’t tell the difference), pots of herbs in the kitchen, orchids in the bathroom.
Everything is bright and made from natural materials. Pine furniture, wood and ceramics, hand-crafted futons. Towers of shelving against the white walls of the living room. Driftwood in the garden, brushed wood against the stone walls inside, a wooden bench in the bathroom, facing the orchids. If this was a holiday villa, it would fall into the four star category (alas, no pool) with an interior design award pending. But scattered everywhere are the periphenalia of work: books, papers, hardware, junkmail. It is weird how similar my sister is to me, even though we haven’t grown up together.
We even share a love for the traditional metal toys you can buy on German Christmas markets. There is the usual elephant on a bike with a ball spinning on its trunk, a waddling Santa and several quacking ducks. But my favourite has to be the big red-and-gold koi with the large mouth out of which you can pull a smaller fish, both of them on wheels and connected by a steel wire. Let go and they follow their wriggly path to the inevitable conclusion. A tragic game of life and death that will make small children cry.
Everywhere as well is the sea. The gentle rushing of the waves over the pebbles is audible through the windows, there is a little heap of sand on a discarded sweater, a damp wetsuit dries in the utility room.
Last Sunday there were dolphins in the bay just off the beach. Yesterday evening I looked longingly out to sea from the living room, but it was too dark to see anything and the wind whipped up the water to Beauford 4 or 5. Besides, this was the first time dolphins have been seen from the beach in Borth in the last couple of years or so, it doesn’t happen often.
If the climate was any better, this place would be perfect. But today dawned on a grey sky and a barely diminished gale. There is a questionmark over the barbeque.
Tags: Travels on my Doorstep, Tag Index
Denni