Lady Sadie's Emporium: It's All About Chevron

We have been living in our current house for 18 months now. When we first moved here from Abu Dhabi, Mr D and I both felt we wanted to live in a small compound as we had come from an extremely large compound in Abu Dhabi, you couldn't even really call it a compound it was it's own mini city of sorts and we LOVED it but wanted a change in Doha. Big mistake....huge!

Our little compound here in Doha is TERRIBLE! We live in a brand new house but you'd think it was built circa 1982, the finishes are shocking, we have huge power outages every other week, the house is ruled by a large tribe of ants and really I could go on and on but I won't, otherwise I might start to cry!

So for the last 18 months, pretty much since the day we moved in I've made it my hobby to go house hunting! And let me tell you I've found some absolute shockers in my journey and some beauties! One of my all time fave houses here in Doha you can rent for a mere $20,000 a month!

You may ask why we haven't moved out? Well it's really hard to do that here in the Middle East, you see you pay your rent in advance and you have to sign on for a 2 year lease which means we paid 2 years rent in full the day we moved in and unless we leave the country and our visa is cancelled we'd never see that money back again so we're stuck here for another 6 months.

But that's ok, I can live with it because I have something much nicer to look forward to! A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a new compound being built on the other side of Doha - about 20 minutes drive from where we are currently. The house is brilliant, very modern, great finishes, you can tell that a westerner has designed it and it ticks all our boxes! There are 200 currently for rent and Mr D and I have all our fingers and toes crossed that there will still be some available when it comes time for us to move.

What gets me most excited about this new house is 1. it's literally a 2 minute drive to Sadie's new school and 2. it means I get to RE-DECORATE!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!

We are keeping our furniture because I love the pieces we have collected over the last 3 years which I mix up with pieces we bought from Ikea (yes Ikea sells more than just ugly pine furniture!) but I'm going to re-do the soft furnishings...new curtains, rugs, sofa covers, throw pillows, paint the walls etc...

My current fave trend at the moment is Chevron stripes, they are very in vogue right now and I love it because it plays to my obsession with stripes and my love of mixing both traditional and contemporary. I've been collecting images for inspiration and hope that by this Christmas my new abode will resemble the following...