Home Decor: Flyaway Home

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If it’s good enough for Christian Lacroix, it’s definitely good enough for me! In the summer of 2013, he came up with some amazing fabric featuring a flutter of brightly coloured butterflies on a turquoise background. It was called ‘Butterfly Parade Lagoon’. A large furniture retailer had some sofas upholstered in it, and the result was eye catching, breathtaking, and any number of other clichés you might like to apply here. 

Now, you may not be able to find anything quite so wonderful this year in a random range of sofas (please let me know if you do), but butterflies and birds have been a design trend for a few years now, and there are plenty of other, less gobsmacking ways of incorporating them into your home. 

Choose your weapon

The first thing you have to decide is whether you want just butterflies or just birds, or a combination of both. One of the things I slowly learnt as I decorated my first home was that less is generally more. Too much can really kill the style. 

As you know, I’ve been getting into the shabby chic trend recently, and there are so many cute accessories on both themes, it’s actually quite hard to choose between the two. However, I’ve decided that the safest bet is to link with my girly theme, but allow the gender-busting birds in too, for the sake of my men. Sorry, Christian! Butterflies by themselves are maybe just a little bit too girly!

Shabby chic mobiles

The most prevalent home accessories on the shabby chic front are little hanging mobiles, sometime with cute messages, in wood, metal or fabric. You can get bird-shaped ones, or with butterflies stamped on them; wood items sometimes have the images burned onto them. If you find a shop that does similar items in both bird and butterfly themes, buying one of each every time means that you can match without looking unimaginative. 

Decals and vinyl murals

One of the things we got for Ethan was a huge decal of butterflies. Some are silhouetted and others are in full colour. I wanted him to be able to recognise them in a positive way, even at his young age, and even at 9 months, I think it’s working. 

Motifs on everyday items

Because butterflies and birds are a known design trend, and they’ve been popular since about 2009 (don’t ask me how I know this), I’ve found that you can pick up quite a lot of everyday items with a butterfly or bird theme; everything from bed linen to mirrors (butterfly-shaped mirrors!), bookends to paperweights. Vases come with birds entwined around them, and designer wallpapers (read: very expensive) have incidental scenes of birds and butterflies together. Even candleholders for your tea lights, or curtain ties can be easily found with cute motifs, ready to snug their way into your home. 

The trick is not to max out on your chosen avian or insect, but to incorporate them gently into your home using functional items that look pretty.