A Colorful & Breezy Thrifted Home in Lisbon
Name: Marta, Tadeu and Spock the cat
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
The basics: 1 year, rented
Marta and Tadeu’s apartment is full of tiny bright surprises. It seems to be about 80% a super stylish neutral apartment with 20% colorful and quirky and delightful finds — perfect for a game of interior eye spy.
Tell us a little (or a lot) about your home and the people who live there: I’m a fashion designer and my boyfriend Tadeu is a photographer. We are very lucky to live in this beautiful apartment with tons of natural light, in a really great neighborhood, surrounded by amazing people — we are close friends with all the neighbors in the building! We live with our cat, Spock, who we adopted almost three years ago and he’s basically the king of the house. We just happen to live with him and are his peasants.
Before we moved into this house, we lived in a tiny apartment that did not fit a lot. So when we got this huge apartment, we where overwhelmed about how to furnish it with a really tiny budget — but it turned out to be really easy and fun! We both are very lucky to have parents who are “hoarders” (in a good way), so we gathered a lot of old stuff from them. Also, we spent a lot of time finding affordable things we loved on second-hand websites (in Portugal the most popular is OLX). There are also a few things we found in the garbage and renovated, after Spock’s approval, of course.
We honestly cannot tell you what we have in our house that is brand new, apart from some IKEA basics (Lack, Kallax..), small accessories/decorations and textiles. We also have a lot of DYI projects like the floating clothing rack Tadeu made for me the first week we moved in, the concrete lamps in our bedroom that took us more time to make than we thought they would, and the origami paper lamp Tadeu made when he had too much time on his hands!
What is your favorite room and why? Our living room. It’s where we spend more time relaxing, talking naps, entertaining friends, playing with Spock, watching our favorite TV shows, listening to music on our (old!) sound system. We normally keep the door to the balcony open and it really becomes the heart of the house. It’s also where we have one of our favorite buys ever, the old camel leather sofa we found on a second-hand sales group on Facebook, you would not believe how cheap it was!!
If you could magically change something about your home, what would it be? Maybe move it to the beach… We have a huge balcony, so we can’t really complain, but having a real garden would be the most amazing thing!
What’s the last thing you bought (or found!) for your home? There are two very recent things that we love: A chair that we found in the garbage that Tadeu’s mother reupholstered with a light gray fabric, and the amazing origami birds from Paperwolf, that we have on our entryway wall. They took us eight straight hours to assemble!
Marta’s words of wisdom: Surround yourself with things you really love. Don’t worry if they will fit together, or where you’ll put it, or if the colors will go well with one another. If you find something you absolutely love, just bring it with you, and eventually it will fit in your home and everything will merge together.
Thanks, Marta!
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