NEW HOME INSPIRATION

For me, it is very important to play with different modern materials such as metal, natural wood, concrete and real stone.

Building a new home from scratch is exciting, but also intimidating! Especially if it’s your first home and all you have done the past 10 years was traveling around the globe chasing a golf ball. Home decor is very subjective but it is also very trainable. Like in fashion, interior design is something you can learn. Granted there is always going to be someone with more knowledge than you, mainly because they live for that. So their eyes are trained for it: they have seen more options, designs, patterns, and can eye out flaws and mistakes faster than you. Obviously! 

I came to the idea that I was going to be able to decor my entire house from scratch. My main obstacle was budget. You spend so much money building a house, that you try to save on things that you think you can do on your own. And of course, I will never be able to build my windows, carpentry, flooring, etc;  but at first, you think you can manage to choose a color palette and manage to assemble couches with carpets and coffee tables. But if interior designing was mere that, every one of us could be an excellent interior designer! 

One day, after many moodboards and Pinterest pinned photos; we ran into a Colombian architect/home interior design company on Instagram. They built and decorated J. Balvin’s home in Medellin and we felt in love with the structure of the homes and the minimalist and natural accents of their interior designers. So we decided to hire them and invest in adding real value to the house. 

We went back and forth with the color palette. I wanted something very modern, minimalist and cool, but they convinced me to add a little warmth to the house with selective touches or real oak wood. 

Living Room

Spotless right? This reference photo sums up our main idea for the house. We are using natural oak wood to add warmth to the house. I prefer oak with its one of the lightest woods in color. And even though I like it lighter than that, I prefer not to modify its natural appearance.

As for the layout of our living room, we decided to have a full couch area. Modern houses have an open layout for the living room, dining room, and kitchen area. But there are two things that I dislike in houses: crowded spaces and inefficient areas. So we decided to go without a dining table in our living room and just have our one and only dining table out on the terrace. The temperature here in Pereira is always between 25-30 degrees. And out terrace is covered, so we can dress it up and dress it down to fit whatever scenarios we want.

Terrace

The terrace is going to be the most used area of the house. Because temperatures are so great here, even on hot and sunny days; our home gets really got shadow and great ambiance from the bamboo field. We do not have a TV in the living room, but we managed to build a floating wall on both sides of the terrace to install a TV unit outside and a comfortable couch area. I call it a floating wall because it is not going to be attached to either the ceiling of the terrace or the corners of the living room, to create this feeling of amplitude.

We are going to build the same floating wall on the other side, but this time to embed a badass grill station, with an ice machine and a beverage station!

This all sounds amazing but you are not going to believe how hard was it to find an outdoor black rug!

TV area

We decided to build a very comfortable TV are, away from the living room and kitchen area. This will be a part thsst my family and I will enjoy. It will be our getaway, and we mostly designed it for our future kids. So we can spend time watching Frozen and Lion King together.

Who has done interior design on their own house? Were you overwhelmed at any moment? What were the things you felt you needed most help with? When we hired 5 solidos, is when I truly learned how hard and complex it really is. Measurements, cohesiveness, ambiance, walk spaces, and even budgeting! Here in Colombia, we are probably going to have everything custom made. In my opinion, it is a big easy on your pocket and also on your brain, I cannot imagine how it could be trying to buy a chair from this place with a rug from this other and a couch from another store.

Wanna see how our first kitchen draft looked like? Read All about the kitchen and let me know your thoughts on our refrigerators!