When we bought our house in April last year, a big attraction was the two entrance rooms. We have a downstairs mud room which opens off the garage and is home to school bags, baskets of shoes, junk mail and all the things that get carted in and out of the car everyday. It often looks like a dump, but only we get to see it! Our front door opens into a much calmer entrance room and is thankfully the room visitors see first. It is actually one of my favourite rooms in the house. It has a lovely green aspect and is one of the brightest rooms in the house with windows on two sides.
We have a big comfy armchair here and a bookcase overflowing with everything from Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, and French Women Don't Get Fat (mine) to J.R.R. Tolkien, Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Principle Centered Leadership (my husband's).
This room is also where my antique school desk has ended up in one corner as a quiet place to do homework and where my
clip boards have made their home with their ever changing display. It looks very bare in the photo below, but usually has one or more children perched on the seat and paper and pens everywhere!
One of my favourite things about this area is that it showcases many reminders of some of the places we have been lucky enough to live and visit. You can see the orang-utan painting which we bought when we visited a centre for orphaned and abused orang-utans in Sabah, while we were living in Brunei - we had one come right up to us to say hello which the kids loved. There are also 'coffee table books' from Budapest, Sydney and Melbourne which bring back so many great memories when we flick through them. And did you spy the pile of Pottery Barn books? I've spent many pleasurable hours leafing through those!
