Thanks for all the awesome comments about my new home, I feel like I’ve had you all over for a big housewarming party!

Here are the rest of the photos that I took for Design*Sponge along with captions. And now that I have let you in on my secret, I will be posting more photos of the boat from now on - as you can imagine, the stylist in me can’t help but change, rearrange and add things. And since I only moved in a few months ago, this is really just the bare basics of the space. I will be experimenting with new style ideas and I have a few great things to share with you in the months to come. The (blog)house and the houseboat have now fused.

Enjoy the rest of your visit my dear friends - I have the kettle on for you, and my choc & cranberry cookies are baking in the oven right now, awaiting your arrival…mind your step on the bridge…

Kitchen:

The kitchen is my favourite space in the boat - it has a great oven and stove top (hard to find in apartments here in Amsterdam), and the water reflections dance on the ceiling all day. It is very inspiring for when I am recipe testing and food styling. There are 7 windows in the kitchen and it is on a little mezzanine level as you enter the front door, then you step down into the main living space…

Can you see that it is all the same furniture that I had in the Paris apartment? See the wallpaper in the kitchen is the same, and you see the pallet bed?

My addiction is books. Mostly old books. and mostly about interiors, photographers, children’s books, and French literature. and French Boy is a comic fan - I also read his French comics as it is a really good way to learn and practice French I have discovered! You will notice some of my favourite books are listed in the library.

The bedroom is behind the screen that you can see in the loungeroom. It has a large storage space that is in the very front of the boat for clothes, and there are also lots of shelves. i will show you more of this space soon, it is quite interesting. It is very quiet, in the mornings we wake up to singing birds and ducks playing. This is me making the bed so that you see I do ocassionally make it. But that is the thing about being a stylist, you do get a bit lazy when it comes to doing your own ironing and tidying…

And the grand finale, the teeny weeny bathroom:

Yep, that’s the bathroom! Very tiny, possibly the smallest bathroom I have ever had, and I thought the Paris apartment bathroom was small! It was the only concern I had about living on the boat. But I have since fallen in love with it as the most beautiful light comes through the pothole and streams across the shower.

Here is the garden, and one of our neighbours below seeing “dag!” (”bye” in Dutch)…

PS did any of my regular readers guess already that I lived on a houseboat?

PPS the My Heart Wanders countdown will begin in the next post! So this is it, no more procrastinating, get your submissions in!!

It’s been killing me, but I was waiting for the tulips to bloom and the sun to shine before I showed you my home, and finally that moment has arrived.

I will post heaps more photos in the next post but for now, this is the little sneak peek on Grace’s site, and this is what I get up to , all exposed in Erin’s Dailies. …hmm, I am feeling rather naked at this moment.

(PS are you wondering why I didn’t make the bed for Design*Sponge? I’m wondering that too, what was I thinking?!)

Our next guest has finally arrived, and as you can see, it hasn’t taken him long to get comfy…

Yep, this friend of mine is über stylish. Contrary to what the above image suggests, my new guest is tall, blonde and handsome, and he knows how to play “eye spy with my little eye” better than the rest of us.

Haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about? Let’s see if some visuals can give us a helping hand…

Before my guest got his hands on this beautiful Tommy Hilfiger image, it looked like this:

And after he waved his magic wand, it turned to this:

before his golden touch, and after…

and again…

Isn’t this fun? It’s called image manipulation, and it is this incredible expertise that my friend is, well, an expert at. Okay, okay, I won’t leave you in suspense any longer. Welcome to the (blog)house my dear friend, Marcus Thyer.

Marcus runs a company called Cave, and although he is based in Sydney he has been coming to Holland every 6 months or so to work on the Tommy Hillfiger campaigns, and of course, to come play with me! He is the one who ’sold’ amsterdam to me - when I first arrived to check it out he showed me around, doubling me on my bike and taking me to all the best vintage clothes shops, bars and restaurants. He was also here for Queen’s Day, and he and I were busy snapping shots in between sipping rosé by the Prinsengracht and watching people fall into the canal. When with Marcus, I can’t help but have a fabulous time and his playful personality is evident in his work.

I have heaps more to share with you about Marcus, but all in good time, all in good time. We will also take a look at retouching, and image manipulation in television and print media while Marcus is with us. But for now, please welcome him to the guest quarters - go and sip a martini and watch the sunset or rise, depending on where you are in the world. Meanwhile Marcus, you sit back & relax, enjoy the view and the pampering. Would you like some more olives with that? Shall I top you up? I’ll just put the air con on, let me know if it gets a little too chilly in here…

All images courtesy of Cave.

but wait there’s more!

and then i saw the sign to wagga…

… and I realised I’d been tricked - for all aussies know that wagga wagga is nooooooowhere near the ocean. What wonderful witchery was this? It’s a place called zaandvoort and is one of The Netherlands beaches, complete with beachside cafes bearing Australian flags. French Boy and I took the half hour train ride and hung out here all afternoon, lapping up the sunshine + sea breeze, and sipping wine. It was just what the doctor in me ordered (yes I’m known to self-diagnose and self-medicate on a regular basis). The pipelette in me ran riot, telling sydney seaside stories, and creating crocodile dundee-style legends.

Needless to say a few friends back home got a few late night text messages from me. I’m (sort of) sorry if I woke you guys.

I also spotted this little photo shoot, which I thought was rather magical…

Yep, I am happy now everyone - I know exactly where I can go to get a dose of home. I just won’t look at that strange fomey stuff that wobbles on the shore, and I’ll imagine the water is blue and not brown, and that the waves roll high and that the sand is golden and nice to the touch. Yep, nearly there. Thanks Holland, for creating a little home away from home just for me…

…building sand castles. sweet dreams everyone.

photograph by sarah heinrich.

My friend Joe and I are a bit like Will and Grace. Except Joe is not gay, nor am I Jewish. But we love each other just the same, and when we were teenagers we used to play a little water game.

You see, Joe and I lived on the Northern Beaches of Sydney which is a strip of land that juts up and out of the Australian coastline, creating a series of beautiful golden sand beaches on one side of the strip, and a number of bays on the other (has anyone seen Home and Away? that is our home - even the school uniform is ours) - our high school was on the bay, our homes were by the bay, and so this is where we played.

We had a little run down runabout, and Joe and I used to take it out every weekend. We would visit out friend Sara across the bay, and we’d hang out by the edges of Scotland Island, or we’d go to one of the creeks and explore (sans funnel web spiders preferably).

And the other day, while I was out on David’s runabout cruising the canals of Amsterdam, memories of my time with Joe on the bay came flooding back.

While Joe and I were in our runabout going from a to b, we would spot the name on a moored boat, and try to come up with a very cool and funny sentence with this strange name in it, and the other person would have to find that boat with the mystery word. It seemed to entertain us for hours, and we would communicate like that for the whole day. Sometimes we would just float our boat amongst all the massive moored yachts, bath in the sunshine, and talk to each other using these boat names. And if we were feeling extra clever we would incorporate two or three boat names in one sentence, or come up with a poem. I’ve forgotten the many beautiful poems we used to create, but the memory of our time is still very vivid. And I remember that Joe was always better at the game than me.

So Joe, this one is for you…

“won’t you be my scialuppa…”

(check comments box for the meaning)

I love meeting new people.

It’s one of the things I love about my job - I am always working with different people, and although sometimes it can be a bit trying on such intense shoots, most of the time it is heaps of fun. And this is one of the things I love about being a blogger too. I’ve made so many new friends, all of whom I hope to meet in person one day. And some of which I am very lucky to have already met in person.

You already know I’ve met Danielle, from the ever popular Style Files, who I’m very looking forward to catching up again with in coming days. And just recently I had the pleasure of having drinks with gorgeous Mary-Laure and the oracle Benjy, from Aurea, and her sister Celine who has just moved to Amsterdam. Thank you Mary-Laure for posting about your visit with me, it made me chuckle and blush. And while in Paris I met the very talented Rachel who I will be writing more about very soon.

Josephine from Red Thread recently came to Europe as a 3 week birthday treat for herself and we were able to hang out in both Amsterdam and Paris while she was here. If you catch her now, she is writing some awesome posts about her time in Antwerp, she has already written about Stockholm, and she has just finished posting about Amsterdam, all complete with photographs. Click here for her floral fixation post (oh Josephine, I wish you were able to see my tulips in bloom!), here for Amsterdam’s gorgeous chinatown which I frequent often, here for her design and art walk, and here for her post about her time with me. Apparently she thinks I’m funny, and I couldnt be happier about that, someone who actually laughs at my humour! We had a fun time, both of us pipelette-ing away, the boys couldnt get a word in unfortunately. Tough luck boys.

And soon I’ll be introducing you to one of my friends who will be arriving in the guest quarters any moment now (he’s a bit late, he’s a very busy boy). But I can tell you this much - he makes me laugh, he loves my little piano concerts, and he is a hit on the dancefloor.

But here are some links I’d love you to check out in the meantime from my new blog friends. Also, please check my blogroll for new links as I always put new ones in but sometimes don’t have the time to write about them in a post.

Danielle just posted about Taschen’s new seaside interiors book here.

Felicity posted an AWESOME interior spread here.

Yoli continues to inspire me daily with her beautiful blog here.

Tiny K posts some really inspiring interiors here.
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All photographs are from the “Subaquatic Beauty” spread shot by Alix Malka via Nyla and Yoli