Bellevue

For quite some time, if one wanted to address a letter or a postcard to somebody living in our house, they would have written "Name Surname, Bellevue, Åkarp".
Back then the houses were identified with a name, not with the street and a number.

I don't know why, but Axel Ingemansson baptised his house to Bellevue (french for beautiful view), maybe because it is a bit higher up than the rest of Åkarp and one could enjoy a nice view?

1909. Bellevue

Said this, for several decades the house name had been on the front facade, also the side facade had the name on it, but that was not from the start, from 1906. It came later, possibly around 1915.

Work is ongoing. The line has been filled in and now it is being putty

Having the house name on the facade has been one of my obsessions from almost the very beginning (I don't know why). And after got the opportunity to check the pictures from the first years of the house, we got the right font and we started the process for it.

The weather gods had been merciful to us, for once, during the work

Bellevue is now written back on the facade. Sadly, it was not an immediate thing to do (apart that we had a very talented painter who managed to get out from a picture the text and the proportions) because, possibly during the 60s, the upper windows got a decorative line in the plaster and that had to gone off again. The "filling up the line over the windows" operation turned out to be more painful than expected.

Work in progress. Picture of Maria Attström

What wonderful details!

 On top of that the scaffold had been mounted in a very peculiar way, so that Maria, our painter, could not reach the right top most corner. I improvised myself her pupil and I have probably messed up forever her work...

Putty on the plaster. The first painting attempt without it turned out to make the line too visible

It is freshly painted. Mmm. I am not very convinced of the result.

 Nevertheless, the result is amazing. The facade has gained so much with such a relatively small detail. I love to stare at it against the nice sky we can enjoy these days.

We just need to remove the scaffold

2016, Bellevue.

Bellevue, spring 2016. 

It's "home"

Although, its home has been in Italy until two days ago, I am finally reunited with my (baby grand)piano after 14 years.
I can't describe how it feels - not that when I was studying/playing I would have thought it would have felt like this and not that I have ever played that incredibly well either.
But every day, for many years, I was glued to the chair (not very willingly) and now I wished I would have not stopped. Because now I can't play not even the pieces that I could consider "easier" to digest.

Its new home is in the tower room

The transportation was another piece of history. From a wrong "order" (in English one says baby grand piano and not generic piano specifying the length of the tail), to pure rain when the piano went out of the house.
Of course, it arrived the only day I was away (quite far off) for the whole time.

Essie Freeberg, with her grandmother and the pianist Jack Bagner

I wonder how many of the previous owners had put the piano there. We know that a grand piano was there during the 52-58 period (when the house was owned by Kathleen Cook Freeberg).

It survived transportation quite ok. Just some bumps on a side that hopefully will be fixed without too much problems.

Now, I just need a rehabilitation course...

The crown

Finally the chimney got back its crown!

Villa Bellevue, 1909. The chimney on the front has some sort of crown

We have been looking at old postcards and pictures of the house and we saw that there was something on top of the most southern chimney. Exactly when it disappeared from the house, we don't know yet.

April 2015. This is our chimeny looked like just few minutes before the crown got back.

We then consultated Klingströms Plåt who showed up a template before acting upon it. 

You can read about it here.

Then, the day arrived and we got the piece home.

The chimney crown, side view. It looks a little bit shorter (especially the top part) than what we can see from the picture. 

"Inner view" of the crown. 

 After about one hour of work, the chimney got its crown back in place.

Villa Bellevue with a little crown over the chimney

 

It almost looks like an hat :)

Juggling with many balls at the same time

This is how I currently feel. There are - as the Swedes would say - too many balls in the air (Italians would never dream of saying something like this).

These are some of the ongoing projects right now...

• Balcony door renovation. The door needs to be painted on the outside from green to red. So far, I have fixed (or tried to) a nasty rotten part in the most left corner of the lowest glass. The white side has been painted. Now, I am working on removing some horrible glueish synthetic putty from two glasses.

The balcony door 

Get off!!

• Pool roof. We have finally the pool roof in place. Pity though the jetstream pump still needs to be fixed and all the tiles around the pool need to be cut and put back in place.

Work in progress on the mounting

• Curtains in the veranda. Since every spring the veranda becomes a sauna and if we sit in the dining room, the person facing the veranda needs sunglasses to survive, we decided to finally put up some curtains. First we had to think of how to put them up. We made a blacksmith produce some hooks, then we got the design of the curtains in place (sort of, we had another design presented but we then decided to the current one). Few things still ongoing, one curtain to be adjusted, one wooden stick to put in the bottom of the curtain got lost, the rods need to be painted white (I wonder how to do it), hooks need to be adjusted and screws to be changed.

The first curtain up

•  The chimney crown. That has been made. It has just to be delivered and mounted. Doesn't it look cool?

The chimney crown

• And more... :-)

An empty wall

What do you do when you have a lot of books (in Italy) and you notice that your floor and walls are not straightish and the wooden lists are so big that no IKEA furniture will be in place properly ever?

You take a big wall and decide that it will all become a bookshelf, handcrafted, in massive wood, personalized for the room and the house.

The wall in our studio

The idea is that our studio will host not only our desks, but also a small "library" with armchair (the Jetsons) where one can (we will when we are 70) rest and read a book.

So, this is how this project started. The bookshelf is now under production, after few years in finding the right carpenter (Lodrätt) and define all the details.

Inspiration: an handmade library painted with linseed oil paint. 

What we are after is a bookshelf where there are open shelves and some doors so that some stuff can be hidden there. 

Our bookshelf will not look exactly like this. There won't be the "wings" on the sides and it will not go up to the roof. It will follow the lines of the wooden lists from the windows frame and the lines of the floor wooden list. We will have also small decorations taken from the stairhouse wooden panel to keep the jugend style.

The jugend decoration from our staircase. Picture, Gunilla Carsten

Color test. Natural, Ottosson Linseed Oil Paint White cream, Ottosson Linseed Oil Paint Titanvit, Osmo Dekorvax Snow, Picture, Gunilla Carsten 

As color we decided to use linseed oil paint (from Ottosson) because we like better the white nuance, and of course, we like linseed oil paint.

Then, we got a lot of help (we would have been lost otherwise!) from our carpenter, to choose the right accessories that are needed in this kind of furniture.

The hinge, from Kleelux (German website)

Eschutcheon (Nyckelskylt) in Jugend style, from a German website

The slide, from Specialbeslag

The lock mechanism. From a German website

The key. From a German website

 All these details are going to be in brass.
Now, those are chosen, the wood has arrived, the color is decided. We just have to await the final result :-)

Massive wood for our bookshelf

A chimney head (?)

I don't really know if this is the right translation for the word "skorstenshuvud" or "skorstenskrona" but that is what we had when the house was built.
And since this is becoming a "let's move into 1906" project (yes, I definitely have openings for a maid) we are of course trying our best to reproduce that detail.

The chimneys as they looked 1909

Already when we did the roof renovation, we were aiming at getting back that piece of metal sheet. Luckily, we didn't do it at the time and that was a wise choice. From other pictures it looked like there was one piece on each chimney, but we got this picture later on and it turned out clear that that was not the case at all. 

Anyway... we finally got an hang of some proper tinssmith and we discussed design and function. 

Hence, few months ago we got a template for giving us an idea.

Out template, a section of how the "chimney head" should look like

Now, after the ok. We are just waiting that we will get the real thing....

View of the template from under (in theory at least)

We do take it easy...

We definitely do. It takes forever sometimes to do some small improvements in our home. But then, all of a sudden, few things happen.
Today was one of those days where there was a good flow.

The biggest action was to buy a desk for Isabella. Not that she is planning to study there right away (and, based on my experience, I guess it will take more than few years before she will do her homeworks up in her room), but considering that we had a quite unsuiting IKEA bookshelf (an old Expedit with 25 compartment) and she showed some interest in the matter, I decided to prioritize the search and I was lucky enough to find a very good bargain for a desk from 1936, with a nice patina.

The desk. Work is still ongoing

We also took the time to finally put up few things (yes, I do realize my photography skills are beyond redemption. Now that I load the pictures here I think I should take better ones...).

Oscar's name on the door (we got them 24 months ago)

Isabella's name has been there for a while. 

Oscar's birth wrath has been finally put up inside. Maybe not the perfect thing to put on a door, but it was such a pity to just put it away

Some Elsa Beskow's reproductions that comes with Mattias. They are now in Oscar's room.