interior design Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

If you’ve been following this blog, you might remember that my in-laws live in Beirut. I may also have mentioned that my mother-in-law (MIL) is an absolute whizz at designing and furnishing houses.

When I was 15 and dating DH, I stepped into their London basement apartment on Gloucester Road and knew immediately that I wanted to live in a house just like it. The Japanese screens, oriental ornaments, Persian carpets, silk cushions and golden Buddhas that adorned their flat conjured up images of far-flung corners of the world that I yearned to travel to.

My MIL’s uncanny talent for interior design has been unleashed on homes all round the globe (places they’ve lived include Kuwait, Thailand, Japan, Hawaii and Washington DC, to name just a few). Most recently, my in-laws have been renovating a property perched high above Beirut – a yellow-stoned, cavernous building that was a crumbling, derelict shell when they bought it.

What they’ve achieved is astonishing.

Next door to their home is a guesthouse that they’ve just finished, and I’m posting it on the blog because it’s available for holiday lets (and no-one knows about it yet!).

From my in-laws’ two-bedroom guesthouse, there are 360-panoramic views of the Mediterranean and surrounding olive groves. Nestled in the mountains just 30 minutes from downtown Beirut and 15 minutes from the airport, Casa Mia Shemlan is a tucked-away village retreat, located 700m above the city’s humidity.

On our first visit, I got a taste of the flair Beirut is known for while leaving the airport. Lebanese drivers were jockeying for position, edging forwards into the smallest of spaces to gain an advantage, and leaning on their horns.

As we climbed up to Shemlan via steep mountain bends, my father-in-law wound down the car window to pluck a fig from a tree and stopped to greet a neighbour in Arabic. There was an air of relaxed friendliness. But it was the panoramic view that stole the show. Beirut, laid out below, stretched alluringly across a headland jutting into the azure-blue, east Mediterranean sea.

A popular destination for Middle Eastern travellers, and a cosmopolitan melting pot of people and influences, Beirut is the most distinct of all Arab cities

From above, the city looked peaceful, almost sleepy. It’s anything but, of course. On the ground, Beirut pulses with life, glamour and hedonism.

Rising optimistically from the war-torn ruins of decades of fighting, Lebanon’s capital is a vibrant metropolis, inhabited by beguiling, beautiful people whose hospitality knows no bounds. Many are fluent in English, French and Arabic. “Bonsoir habibi, how’s it going?” someone asked me, using all three languages in one sentence.

You might spot a tank on the streets of Beirut, rolled out as a show of security, but these days you’re far more likely to see sports cars with their hoods down, or a Ferrari dealer next to a flat bread stall.

In the city, bullet holes stare, like unblinking eyes, and shelled-out buildings punctuate the landscape, but there’s a spirit of resilience that’s helped Beirut dust itself off repeatedly from periods of conflict. Once the self-proclaimed ‘Paris of the Middle East’, there’s still an outdoor cafe culture, and European architecture can be found everywhere. Hamra is full of smart boutiques and the downtown has been rebuilt, exactly as it was, with a series of elegant streets branching off from a central plaza.

Everywhere, the city’s jumble of history is evident. Sitting in front of the huge Blue Mosque is a tiny Maronite chapel, and there’s a perfectly restored Orthodox church next to a Catholic cathedral – all within yards of each other.

My favourite place to be at dusk is the waterfront Corniche, where at sunset it’s as though the entire city is out strutting its stuff along the wide, palm-lined seafront promenade. From here, you can watch the sky turn pink over Pigeon Rock, then head into Hamra to sample the city’s famed, vibrant nightlife.

Beyond Beirut, the scenery is stunning. Lebanon offers every type of recreation, from skiing to swimming, walking, ancient ruins and wineries. A famous, old Lebanese boast is that you can ski and swim in the same day. And don’t get me started about the food, made from the freshest of ingredients. Provided everything is peaceful politically, Lebanon gives the south of France a run for its money.

This post is adapted from a travel column I write for a magazine called The Source (click here). More travel posts coming up!

We drove to the mouth of the Dog River, where there are inscriptions that bear witness to more than 3,000 years of Levantine history

With visitors on the way (at a slow pace, by boat via Singapore, Mumbai and pirate waters), I’ve been doing a few last-minute things, including painting the spare room.

I love decorating. Not the doing it part, but the concepts, the colours, the shopping and the putting-it-all-together parts.

I can spend hours watching programmes like Changing Rooms and secretly wish I could be an interior designer and get paid to shop in home decor stores and play around with fabrics, cushions, lighting and layouts, before blindfolding my clients for the big reveal.

I long ago had to give up on hiring painters to do the work for me as my schemes started getting too complicated to explain to non-English speaking decorators.

Like these clouds on the playroom ceiling:

I took over and did the blobby clouds. The airplanes are stickers

I bought special sponges and asked the painters to do ‘fluffy white clouds’. They looked at me like I was unhinged so I pointed out the window, gesturing at the heavens – to no avail because the bright-blue desert sky was, of course, devoid of clouds.

So now I do the painting myself – with help from Catherine the Great, who’s much more nimble up a ladder than I am. We’re a great team and tackle the 10ft-high walls with gusto (and a little knee-creaking on my part). But the trouble is I never quite know when to stop. As I finish a wall, other walls start to look anaemic and so I carry on, mixing and matching colours, quite possibly on a paint-fume-induced high.

It all gets a bit experimentalist too. The boys’ room features a beach at the bottom, blue waves in the middle and desert at the top. Our home also has a marble-effect wall, a multi-coloured chessboard wall and an aquarium wall to rival The Lost Chambers at the Atlantis hotel – all done as tastefully as possible.

I don’t stop when I run out of walls inside the house, either. Here’s the fairy-tale castle Catherine and I painted to liven up the boys’ sandpit outside. They were enchanted by it for all of five minutes.

I simply copied the castle from a design online and used exterior paints

DH (who won’t let me touch his study) occasionally rolls his eyes, but is mostly pleased with the results. If he starts to look nervous, I quote my mother-in-law, who once told us: “If you have a creative wife, you just have to say ‘Thank God!’ and let her get on with it.”

(My amazingly artistic m-i-l is actually my inspiration when it comes to interior design and – being such a petite lady – never ceases to amaze me with the way she lugs huge pieces of furniture around like an ant carrying 10 times its body weight).

As for my latest project, the spare room, allow me to do a big reveal right here. It’s more fig-grove than jungle (my original plan), but more grown-up than the Winnie-the-Pooh theme I replaced. So, blindfolds off……. Ta-daaaah: