The Roving Home sty lebook

inside the march stylebook...

Styling & GraphicsSarah Kelly lives in

Rockport, Mass & is the mind behind The Roving Home. The

items featured on these pages can be found on The

Roving Home’s website www.therovinghome.com

March

PhotographyEsther Mathieu is a natural light photographer based in Rockport,Mass. Contact her at www.esthermathieu.com

Big events are still underway for The Roving Home. We have our upcoming gallery show and pop up shop in April at the Tusinski Gallery, some great Stylebook photo shoots lined up with photographer Esther Mathieu, a few art-related events we’re planning and styling for...And then there’s the fact that (on a personal note) our family is expanding - due this month!

To stay in touch, follow us on facebook and twitter, or sign up for our e-mail newsletter. And you can always get in touch by e-mailing therovinghome{a}gmail.com.

I hope your Spring is full of good weather, growing things and the best of old and new!

click for more information about our upcoming show!

When it comes to our interiors, how we live, the incredible advances in technology have altered domestic life in ways previously unimaginable, whether this means laser-cut wallpaper patterns with an amazing precision of detail or having a screen imbedded into your refrigerator that can call up a recipe at a single touch. Yet in another sense, there is nothing new under the sun. The influences we have always felt in our homes - just a few of  which are the natural world, domestic necessity, the intense human desire for beauty and self-expression - are the same as they have ever been. Now we just incorporate an expanded sense of what it means to be human, to inhabit a space. In this way we are always recycling the ideas of our ancestors, connecting with them through our interiors - the primitive beauty of prehistoric cave paintings translated into hand-painted chinoiserie wallcoverings, to name just one example.

Home (re)Cycled aims to highlight this connection to our inhabited past while allowing us to see some of these influences, specifically the natural world and the desire for beauty, in new ways. Home (re)Cycled opens on Saturday, April 21st at the Tusinski Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts and runs through May 13th.

upcoming events...sneak peek!

The Dollhouse Project is a small-scale depiction of the way in which interiors reflect the details of our lives.

Our detritus - the pictures we surround ourselves with, the decorative items we bring into our homes - is evidence of a sort of narrative, telling the story of the lives lived within the confines of four walls.

The Dollhouse Project will be on display at the Home (re)Cycled show, giving viewers to the opportunity to discover the story of the home’s absent occupant.

Vintage Shadowboxes, handmade in 1946 and measuring just 10” by 5”, have been repurposed with small scenes of domestic life assembled from old photos and books.

Viewers will look through the glass as though through a window, gaining a glimpse into a scene of former lives.

interiors...this month the roving home opens own house for a tour!

The house we live in was built in 1987 and architecturally-speaking, leaves a lot to be desired. So how to customize our interiors without spending (any) money? of course, paint is always a cheap fix, but I wanted to go beyond that and add a few features that speak to where we live right now, both geographically and in terms of our stage in life, which is pretty much about raising small children and dealing with the accompanying budget. As far as where we live, our house is located on the rocky east coast, a quarter-mile from the ocean yet juxtaposed against a wooded area covered in rhododendron, pines, birch and beech trees. So our interiors have turned out to be influenced by the natural world and the flea market in equal measure. Which is a good thing, as both sources are timeless wells of inexpensive inspiration.

our house...

A simple, low-cost solution to window treatments in our boys’ bedroom? We used spray adhesive to attach a thin piece of fabric to roller shades from our local hardware store.

The bathroom: both the woods and the ocean are an influence in the bathroom. The wooden valance is actually made up of sun-bleached pieces we found out in the woods, though it is so reminiscent of driftwood it could just have easily have come from the beach. We also incorporated an oar with the same gray finish and bottle green vintage glass floats and pieces of sea glass that came straight from the ocean.

The upstairs landing: we replaced a recessed light with a vintage punched tin hanging fixture and painted the walls a slate gray. Eventually I’d like to cover the stairwell with a photo gallery in black-and-white. (Just as soon as I send off a decade’s worth of pictures to be printed...)

In the kitchen: removing the upper cabinets with their yellowish oak finish was first on the agenda. White shelving and walls work out well since our (nearly indestructible) vintage diner dishware is also white. The ubiquitous (yet awesome) chalkboard wall, a handmade twig coat hanger, a vintage school clock and handprinted dish towels as cafe curtains are a few more inexpensive ways to customize what is inherently an unexciting kitchen.

A personal favorite of mine is this vintage 1970s light fixture in our dining area, especially as it contrasts with the antique table that my grandmother recalls sitting at when she was a small girl at her grandmother’s house.

...Mixing old and new, inherited and found, the trend-free (along with a bit of high design if you can), is what makes a house feel personal. Even if our spaces are not necessarily the ones of our dreams, hopefully we all feel at home in our own interiors...

thanks for taking the tour!

what’s new in the store?

vintage map seriescollages made from the pages

of a 1961 vintage atlas.

vivid nature serieshandpainted designs inspired

by the natural world in vivid colors.

vintage book serieshandcut collages taken from the pages of vintage books

with simple messages written in script.

go to w w w . t h e r o v i n g h o m e . c o m for more details & prices.

until next month...