Life & Style | Home & Interiors
A home filled with texture in the Meadows
Join InsideOut on a tour of this texture-filled home in the Meadows and find a haven of inspirational decor
- By Naheed Akram, InsideOut magazine
- Published: 00:00 February 15, 2012
- Image Credit: Kishore Kumar/ANM
- The ground floor of the home is spacious and airy and has lots of interesting vintage furniture, statement accessories and art.
Toni and Stuart Ramsay have had their fair share of moving from country to country, so it's no surprise that their home is a treasure box full of interesting and unique finds from across the globe. The family has had stints in the US, South Africa and Russia. They recently moved from the UK to Dubai into a four-bedroom villa in the Meadows where they immediately started decorating.
"When we first moved in, the walls were bare and every room looked the same," says Toni, a freelance interior designer. Thanks to her years of design experience, the villa has now been transformed from a regular Meadows property into a beautiful home with plenty of tribal references, stunning attention to detail and colour.
"Much of my furniture and art has been collected from around the world. This, combined with the open-plan living and fantastic light quality that a Meadows villa has to offer provides all the inspiration I need," she says. "However, I do feel that a home has to be a home not a design set, so giving it the comfort factor, above all else, inspires me," she says. "From a young age I was constantly painting my bedroom weird and wonderful colours and rearranging the furniture. I went on to do a degree in art history, but only got into professional decorating when we lived in the US."
The villa has a spacious entrance, hallway and living room so it is perfect to accommodate the couple's art. "We still have a lot of things that we left behind in the UK; I selected items that worked best in this set-up," Toni says.
As with all the things in the home, her favourite vintage pieces - such as the Victorian armchair from a flea market in the UK and the Spanish colonial chairs from New Orleans - complement the fusion of rustic and contemporary, and together they create a natural and seamless visual flow throughout the ground floor of the villa. Toni has arranged the furniture and accessories as if they were pieces of art. In doing so, she has achieved a great balance between comfort and style. The large and airy living space has been divided into three sections. Toni has used colour on the walls to highlight accent pieces to give each a focal point and make them stand out within the home's open-plan layout.
Some of the highlights include a papier mâché bull's head mounted on a moss green accent wall in the TV room; an antique stone-head sculpture offset by a mustard-yellow wall in the dining room and an old-gold Spanish mirror contrasting with duck-egg blue walls also in the dining area. The living room has several animal prints and textures on display that are complemented by a splash of orange and moss-green fabric, most of which was picked up on the couple's international travels.
There is a similar theme in the hallway upstairs but here there are Oriental and African art works on the walls as well as floor rugs from South Africa - adding to the old-world charm. In the master bedroom there are many animal textures and prints while the furniture is kept to a minimum, allowing vintage pieces, such as the rustic chest of drawers, to take centre stage. Toni has sourced pieces from Russian flea markets, Ikea, high-end design stores and markets in the US and the UK while locally she has purchased items from Marina Exotic Home Interiors. "Design isn't about how much you pay for it but how you put it together," Toni says. "Seeing and having access to design from all around the world allows you to take the best from each continent and combine it to create something beautiful, eclectic and unique." The couple shares similar interior tastes and it helps that Stuart is well travelled. This allows him to pick up unique accessories for their home on his trips. "Stuart is very interested and has a good eye for unusual objects and furniture that I might like to use in my interiors. He travels the world with his job as chief correspondent for Sky News and he often returns with pots and art... Invariably he gets it right," says Toni.
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