House of H and G Designs in Home Beautiful
When I received the call from Home Beautiful’s Kylie Jackes about potentially featuring our house and H and G Designs in Home Beautiful Magazine my elated joy and eagerness quickly kicked in, “sure our house is finished, styled and totally up for a photoshoot” as the words burst out of my mouth I’d written the longest mental to-do list in my head.
The excitement that HB wanted to feature our house was pretty amazing but we’d moved from a small unit which we had renovated and built most of the furniture into, it had been quiet a slow process filing our house with furniture and décor over the year and a half we’d being living in there.
Confidently agreeing to have the house shot within a 2 week timeframe, panic set in!
Top of my To-Do List rather ” If this doesn’t get done my design career is over list” was a big ugly UGLY blue couch in our upstairs living area. It was one of THOSE couches that had been passed down the line, any new home owner/ renter knows “this” couch, you know the one. Kylie kindly suggested maybe we could just cover it in throws and bulk pillows as a disguise, I thought not. I’d contemplated buying a new couch but I’d been trying to only buy things I really love not just for the sake of filling a house. The only option was to make one.
With my vast experience of…well never making a couch before I got designing, had plans, ordered material and organised an upholster before Glenn had got home from work and actually had an option of saying no. Building a couch in two weeks was a massive stretch, finding supplies, powder coaters and so on…. 3 weeks from Christmas A STRETCH! But when there is an ugly blue couch (and an impending photographer coming) there is a way!
Couch done. Now left on the hit list was adding a gallery wall to our master bedroom, easy. Not easy! We’d spent the day before the shoot installing a large gallery wall behind our bed, we’d decided to use adhesive hooks as we didn’t want too many holes before we worked out it was 100% what we wanted, gallery wall in and looking good. We were up to about 2am cleaning and adding the finishing touches , which was the norm at this stage (hello Christmas time orders pre employing Mel, thank you lovely customers you rock but certainly love a Christmas buy!!). Around 4am the world came crashing down well rather our gallery wall but it was equally as dramatic, 3 frames smashed and some sore heads later we were now without said gallery wall 🙁 We spent the rest of the wee hours of the morning gluing, screwing and trying to re-make the gallery wall until Kylie the stylist and John the photographer arrived. Did I have time to brush my hair? No I did not.
Besides the hectic lead up we had an amazing day shooting with Kylie and John. Despite our tiredness we were determined not to mention we were tired as Kylie who was two weeks off giving birth was running rings around us styling up a storm, super impressive.
What an experience! It was really interesting to see the styling and photography process that goes into making these features come to life. Thank you to Kylie Jackes and John Downs for their impeccable eye for details and a fun day.
See the feature in the May edition of Home Beautiful Magazine- 10 pages of our house!- available online and in newsagents.
H and G Designs in Home Beautiful Magazine.
