The Journey of Scandinavian Style House
Hi, and welcome to our blog. We’re so glad your’e here! Let me start this off with a little introduction of myself and what the journey of Scandinavian Style House has looked like so far.
Who We Are
My name is Josefine Appadoo, a 32 year old Swede currently living in Northern California with my husband Kewyn. He is from Australia and Mauritius which is an island outside of the coast of Africa.
Yes, I’m well aware that’s a lot f countries. It is always fun and a little complicated to explain when people ask where we are from or where home is for us. We currently have 4 home countries, and our family is spread out in 7 countries. This is also the number of languages we speak combined. Sometimes we joke about that we just have to adopt one child from Asia and one from the Middle East. Then we’re basically covering all the continents in the world.
A Passion for Beautyseeking
As long as I can remember I’ve always been fascinated by textures, lines and light, and to enjoy the beauty in the simple things. If you ask me what some of my favorite things in life are apart from people is it will be about enjoying the early morning light. Another one is to watch the glitter in the ocean on a sunny day. I just LOVE to be surrounded by beauty and find spaces that are filled with peace. It does something to my soul and I always find myself more hopeful, creative and excited about life when I’m in places like that.
One of my best friends Kaysha, who also shares this passion started saying that we’d go beauty seeking whenever we just needed to go somewhere beautiful and enjoy the little things. I would say that’s a pretty good way of describing my desire and quest for surrounding myself with beauty.
Becoming a Photographer
Eventually, I wanted to expand my creativity further. A hobby I’d had for many years was photography, and although I had pursued a completely different career before, I felt a deep longing to explore this artform further. So I enrolled in Photo school in LA at Santa Monica College to study commercial photography for 1,5 years. Ever since then I’ve ha a side business as a Wedding & Family photographer. Pursuing photography gave me a deeper knowledge about different kinds of light, the beauty of working with textures and the importance of utilizing negative space. These are some of the things I can nerd out on all day long.
The Impact of Living Abroad
I’ve travelled a Lot and lived abroad for many years and never really cared too much about what it looked like. Not until a couple of years ago when I found myself really longing for some place to call home. As I finally got my first apartment a little later in life than most people I began a quest of trying to figure out what “my style” was.
After moving back and forth across the continents for many years I didn’t really have anything apart from some clothes and shoes. I owned however much could fit in my 2 big sturdy Samsonite bags when I moved across the world. I had learned to be really good at purging and downsizing my life into those two suitcases, and found a great joy in only keeping what I absolutely Loved.
A Minimalism Mindset Emerging
This minimalist mindset was something I wanted to bring with me as I settled into my new apartment. So I took my sweet time and went around to all the furniture and home decor stores in all of Stockholm before I bought something. I wanted to know all my options and decide on a theme for the tiny student apartment I moved into.
Somewhere around there was where my passion for home decor and interior design was born, and ever since then it’s been something I really enjoy researching, looking at and dreaming about.
Once I finally figured out what my style was, it turned out that it was a very typical Scandinavian one. I didn’t know quite How Much of a Scandinavian style it was though – until it was time to move abroad again, this time to Northern California which is where I live now.
Missing the Scandinavian Style
As I settled in to life here I found myself Really missing a lot of the great design that is just a part of the Swedish and Scandinavian culture.
As a remedy for missing that I started running our Instagram account @scandinavianstyle.house . I geared it specifically geared towards Scandinavian interior design and home decor. It has been an absolute joy to do that! But after doing it for a while there is really only so much you can write in a few lines under that photo. For the longest time I’ve been wanting to add another platform to this “brand” that started emerging. I wanted to find a way to dive a little deeper into this world of neutral interiors and minimalism.
Figuring out the Next Steps
It took me quite a while to figure out what that next step of the journey of Scandinavian Style House would be. Last summer I was working my tail off behind the scenes to build an online store. But to do it the way I envisioned it turned out to be a bigger financial investment that we were ready for at that time.
The next thing I tried was to start taking on doing interior projects for others, but it wasn’t the right timing to expand that way either. So I had to get back to the drawing board again and figure out another way to expand.
Hence why you are currently looking at our VERY FIRST BLOGPOST.
Once we started talking about adding a blog it was like all the different pieces just fell into place and it seemed like the most natural thing to do. Of course we have lots of dreams and visions of further expansions from here as well, but this is the perfect next step for us right now.
So now you know a little bit about the journey of Scandinavian Style House. In our next post we’ll talk more about what we will be writing about here so don’t miss out on that one.
We’re so excited to embark on this adventure, and we hope you wanna stick around for the ride.
Until our next post,
Hejdå!
(goodbye in Swedish)
Josefine from Scandinavian Style House
