heim sweet heim

A few requests for images of our apartment have crossed my desk from across the Atlantic, so I stole Ben's camera during a slow morning and tried my hand at a little architectural photography. I wanted to capture some of the best "moments" in our 60 square m. living space This is our sitting area, which is part of one large room that includes the kitchen. Our windows often fog up a because of the heat and humidity from all the living, baking and breathing that goes on. The condensation is my arch nemesis, and I am in a constant dance of wiping windows, adjusting heat and opening doors. We have huge flat screen Samsung in the corner that is not pictured. It came with the place and looks impressive, but it has neither channels nor a DVD player. My first "moment" is the kitchen window. I am always trying to nurse along potted herbs despite the lack of sunlight, but my success rate is low. On the sill are my three English cookbooks (New Moosewood Cookbook, Great Food Fast and Nantucket Recipes from the Fog Island Cafe), my Faroese cookbook (Lætt & Leskiligt) and my Danish design books from the library. Ben riffling through our fridge. Behind him is one of my favorite housekeeping sights--a clean counter. My favorite kitchen "moment". On the shelf is our glossy red Turkish coffee maker we picked up in Kosovo, our antique church bread stamps from Greece, my Danish Nise (nome), and the artisan salad tongs that my sister got at an Appalachian craft show. The large cork board above the kitchen table is a new addition to our home. The idea is to have a place to reflect what we are thinking about and what is influencing us currently. This could include quotes, photos, postcards, articles, questions and reminders. The lack of media going through our home right now (magazines are hard to get here) has made the concept launch a little slow, but we are gaining steam. My favorite bedroom "moment" is our orchid. It was a present from Ben in our early days in the Faroes. We have a comfortable room with nice down duvets and crescent shaped reading lights above our bed (which you can see), but it is fairly bare. Just the way we like it. The bathroom was hard to capture because it is a small space and Ben's camera has wide fixed lenses. The walls are textured and gray, water goes all over the floor when we shower and the fittings are new and shiny. Ben's office is a small room across the entry hall. The two pieces of furniture in the room are a futon with a cover that would look at home in the bedroom of a teenage boy in the early 1990's, and a white rolltop desk where Ben edits most of his photos. The most outstanding feature of the room after Ben has been working for a few hours are the piles--this one contains invoices, an empty candy box and mailing labels. Our apartment is the basement level of a large family home. Visible here is the front entrance, our trashcan and the two windows of the sitting area/kitchen. Faroese covet good views of the ocean from their homes, and ours is rather impoverished on that sliding scale. The white van on the street is on loan from Ben's cousin Josef. -a