Your Ideal Home: Inspiration for Where You Live Now?

Despite how we may live now, we all carry around in our heads a picture of our dream home, often based on someplace from childhood that made a big impact on us. For me, it was a loft apartment carved out of a warehouse space in NY's Soho that I watched take shape as my friend's father built it around us as we played. It was cavernous and empty with only a few pieces of furniture...

One day I hope to inhabit a similar space whether it's in downtown LA, NY or some other city. White walls, minimal stuff and perhaps a pool table/ping pong table and an old style videogame in one corner (Galaga anyone?). In the meantime, I've decided I've lived too long with the dream. It's time to bring some of its reality into my current life, so it'll serve as inspiration for the redo of the living room which is taking shape. While I don't live in a loft downtown yet, I know that I can translate some of that feeling to my current home. How about you? Can you bring some of the elements from your dream home into your current space and make your future into your present?

[images from LoftLife. For the complete set of photos of this rentable loft, click here]

Comments (9)

My apartment is becoming more and more my dream home for the city - Everything I do with my place is with the goal of making it that much more unique and special to me.

Now if we were talking about my dream home in Palm Springs - That's a different story...

posted by bepsf on April 14th 2009 at 2:24pm
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Every furnishing decision I make lately is framed with "Would it fit in this house?"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronniebailey/2230777139/

Admitting my geekdom, I first saw the house in this show...

http://img.funfry.com/landscapes-nature-architecture-realestate/battlestar-galactica-gias-baltar-blonde-six-new-caprica-lake-view-home-luxury-realestate-funfry.jpg

posted by Felosele on April 14th 2009 at 2:46pm
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While I'll never be able to buy or rent such a large space, I do dream that my bedroom is a cavernous space in which I feel like the proverbial pea.

I like this space and am wondering does anyone know what type of wood the floor is made from

posted by coco on April 14th 2009 at 2:55pm
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This loft could be my dream home.

posted by modernguy on April 14th 2009 at 3:24pm
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I'm with Felosele. If it won't look good in my dream home, it's not coming to live with me in my 1 bedroom vanilla box apartment.

posted by enmnm on April 14th 2009 at 3:26pm
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Ommigod, If I had a space like that, I'd take some green and white paint, paint a tennis court on the floor, call my friends over, and start serving it up!

Or, at the very least, turn one of the walls into a tennis backboard.

posted by justveggingout on April 14th 2009 at 3:33pm
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Love the Eames lounge chair. It's my dream to have one in my future home office!

posted by JG_Kitchens on April 14th 2009 at 4:22pm
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Do you mean "Galaga"?

posted by Kathryn on April 14th 2009 at 5:42pm
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I think the challenge here is to assess the architecture and the furnishings and decide which is actually impacting you when you look at your inspiration. From what I can see, you are loving the cavernous emptiness of industrial style space. The lack of furnishing forces you to dwell on the physical space, which is striking because of how "unhome" like it is. You can't furnish or embellish your way to cavernous, empty, or industrial, so the question is: is your current space large and/or industrial enough to pull this off? The same furnishings in an ordinary flat would have quite a different effect.

I love minimalism of all sorts, so this is a question I think about a lot. The smart thing to do, in a case like this, is to find a flat that has the architecture you love, even if its not large, and even if it costs a bit more, and work from there. Because you like the impact of empty space, you can take the money that most would spend trying to fill a space with furnishings and use it to live in a space you love with only a few select, but not necessarily expensive, pieces.

posted by RichardinLA on April 14th 2009 at 6:14pm
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