My Little Corner: Women’s Personal Spaces

We all have our little corners… private spaces where we can relax, put our feet up and just be ourselves.  I asked a group of beautiful and creative women to post photos of their very own Little Corner.  Here are their contributions, each little corner unique, all equally beautiful.

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Apol’s Sofa

Apol Lejano-Massebieau lives in  the South of France with husband Pierre and daughter Lilou.  She is the woman behind La Pomme, an on-line shop where she sells her own hand-sewn creations and vintage finds. Here, she shares with us her little corner where she says a lot of her creative ideas are born.

In her words:

I need a lot of quiet and solitude so I sleep much later than my husband and daughter. While they’re in their beds, I park myself on this sofa until around 1:30 in the morning, thinking, planning, or just doing some awake-dreaming. I initially wanted a leather sofa, but my husband is a big fan of comfort and wanted a sofa that was, in his words, a giant pillow, so we got this from Ikea. I was initially not a fan, pero love ko na siya ngayon, some nights I even fall asleep here.

The table is a “pétrin” that we found in the flea market. It was used by bakers before, for kneading bread, and storing the dough. Those are all Lilou’s toys you see on the left. On the right is the rocking horse I bought from an artisan in the Jura, for Lilou’s second Christmas. The pillowcases I made myself from African wax fabric. The things on the wall are my found treasures. Sculpture by Jenny Cortes, the first artwork I ever bought, from one of my first paychecks ehem-ehem years ago.

Apol just recently launched her second creative business called 7100 Islands. Check it out here.

Elizabeth’s Sanctuary

Pilates Instructor, part-time painter,  and multi-sport addict, Elizabeth Siojo painted the walls of her old studio/home office with trees and birds.  She recalls just how much she loved  the creaky floors and the light flooding  into the room.

In her words:

(This is) my old studio-office, back when we had this lovely old 1940s-era house in QC. Second storey, wooden walls, floors, staircase of solid wood. Big garden, trees in the yard. Saw local birds in the branches outside the window, even a sunbird! The windows were 70s-era instead of the 40s shutter-type. There’s a papag in a corner where I put drawings. I painted and drew here listening to my cds and You Tube music. I did the trees and birds in the walls. There were boxes of my magazine collections, books and brushes . Its a nice mess. We’ve moved since late last year, when the house was sold. It’s been torn down when we drove by recently.

Elizabeth writes about her space here.

May ‘s Chair

May Tobias Papa,  a writer and illustrator of children’s books, bought this secondhand wing chair from a thrift shop in Kamuning for only Php 4,500. One can only imagine what went on in this chair  (*wink wink*) so let’s just let her do the talking.:)

In her words:

We are currently in between houses right now as we are having the house we had just bought fixed, and this photo was from our old apartment in Maginoo St. The teal blue velvet-upholstered wing chair is a leftover piece from a condo unit I rented as a single woman, which found new uses (well, not really, because we were just legalized) when as a newly married woman, the hubby and I felt sexy, hahaha, and when I got pregnant because it was so comfy when I put my feet up to rest and feel my baby throwing punches or kicking around in my tummy, or listen to him hiccuping. After I gave birth it became my breastfeeding corner, and then after that, my reading and TV watching chair… I love its very elegant lines and proportion, very unlike the squat and ugly wing chairs that are usually sold. The painting over it is a magical piece, my friends say, because I met my future husband just a few months after I painted it for my MFA painting class exhibit. I am having the wing chair reupholstered (in red or damask fabric perhaps?) as an accent piece in our new white living room. It’s a chair I wish to keep forever and grow old in.

Read May’s blog here.

Bernadette’s  Mansion

This is Bernadette Wolf’s  ‘mansion’,  perched on a steep incline somewhere in beautiful Puerto Galera. Originally meant to be a retreat house, she says she treasures the quiet and solitude here.

In her words:

A view of my mansion where I am the reyna and the aliping namamahay all in one. It really is a wonderful place to just sit quiet and make artworks. Socializing hereabouts is kept at a minimal…I do not have much to make tsismis about anyway. We do not have the usual TV but the windows around the house is enough.

Read more about Bernadette’s beautiful home here.

Watch out for Part 2 of My Little Corner! You can also share with us your own Little Corner. E–mail your photo (with at least 800px width) to adosimple@yahoo.com.  Don’t forget to write a short description!