SENGTAI X MAKE MY LEMONADE = YUZU

I see you coming... Lemonade jar HemaButterfly DeyrollePepper and Salt shakers Urban Outfittersand DIY Handbag, available here. 

Hello my little cats! Happy Monday my darlings! Lovely start to July my little dolls... 

It's been a week since I dropped off my bags at home, and I can tell you that there's going to be a lot of decorating going on around here. I'm so excited, I took my do-it-yourself to a whole new level this weekend: I laid tiles all by myself, peacefully. Chisel / gravel / rubble / plaster in my kitchen, Kiloutou / Leroy Merlin have become my new must-have addresses and Youtube my guru. I'd like to tell you how I ended up crouching in my living room, cutting subway tiles in my knickers (without lobster), wearing heart-shaped glasses for protection. Lolita Lempicka. At the height of glamour, I could continue to send you dreams by telling you how yesterday, Sunday, I got up at 7 a.m. to grout my credenza with my trowel and my pastel blue manicured nails (thanks to the semi-permanent varnish). 

So you see, I'm as excited as a kid about redecorating my apartment, finding my marks and feeling at home. I'll start by showing you a small section of my living room, with my piece of furniture between the two windows. YUZU by Sengtai. What do you mean MY piece of furniture... Well, yes, for a first, the project began a year ago when Manon from chez Sengtai contacted me to design a piece of furniture. A fan of the brand and its ethical values, I was so happy to be offered the chance to shake up one of my ideas. I wanted a library, it was a fixed idea. I couldn't stand the piles of books piling up in my living room, and I didn't want to buy Swedish temporary furniture that was becoming permanent.

Blue jewelry box Kyoto by Sengtai, vases with bookends unearthed at a garage sale, Pierrot bottle of vintage Avon perfume, "I will have a good day" by Mister Wonderful and Totoro adorable brought back by Bao on his last trip to Japan, and HAY design box.

I wanted a piece of furniture that was as modular as you could hang, stack and stand upright, all at the same time. I even made a little paper model, as I hadn't mastered 3D yet. But we soon realized that bamboo, the material from which all Sengtai furniture is made, would prevent us from modulating as much as I would have liked. Yes, bamboo is a very dense and heavy wood, and hanging it up would have been a real pain. What's more, putting books on it would have been a real mess. So the designers at Sengtai and I turned the problem on its head. The first thing we thought was, okay, this is going to be a low piece of furniture, but yes, it can be placed upright, on a corner of a wall, or stacked with two facing each other. I wasn't really convinced, because at first glance, my hanging bookcase, when turned upside down and placed on the floor, looked more like a TV stand than anything else. My ears almost bleed as I imagine customers saying "that would be great as a TV stand for our bedroom". I don't have a television and I'm quite proud of it, so making a piece of furniture that could have been associated with it (satan) was out of the question. Well, I'd need another whole post to tell you about my positions on television, which are becoming more and more virulent as time goes by.

So here we are, at this point in the story, at an impasse, with my suspended fantasy bookcase now, for a few 3Ds, a piece of TV furniture. And we thought: what if we made legs for this bookcase, to give it some height? And better still, what if we made a table for it, a sort of sideboard that would naturally suggest that it should be placed against a wall?  

Well, I present to you YUZU my modular piece of furniture for Sengtai, to be used as a high bookcase, or as a sideboard and TV stand, because after all, I'm not the gestapo of the small screen. A two-in-one piece of furniture, in white or yellow, to better serve my children. 

I love you! And see you tomorrow, I can't wait to read your impressions! I'll leave you with a bit of the making of and I invite you to read the post on our collaboration on Sengtai's blog.

My initial mood board, and here are a few steps, including the famous cardboard model... very DIY.