Qatar

Local Specialities…Qatari Wooden Benches

With Qatar National Day fast approaching, I thought it would be fun to write about one of my favorite home-grown crafts – the Qatari wooden bench. Found everywhere all over town, but particularly in Souq Waqif, the main shopping and eating artery where we recently devoured the cheapest most delicious meal with some of our very best friends visiting from Japan (all while sitting on some of these benches)…

…and Katara, the stunning cultural village out towards The Pearl. The benches are charming, surprisingly comfortable and visually arresting.

It was a wonderful surprise to discover that they are readily available, customizable and very inexpensive to have made by local carpenters tucked behind Al Rayyan Road along Al Shagab Street – I’ll call it the “bench souq”. This is definitely a spot you’ll be hearing about in my “Doha Design & Decor Directory” that will be added to the blog in the new year, but more about that another time. With an empty back patio to fill and gorgeous weather for sitting outside, I have been desperate to furnish my garden space but didn’t want to spend a lot of money (nothing lasts in the summer sun for long) nor choose something out of context. The space is square, with lots of fuchsia Bougainvillea hanging over it.

Looking back towards the house I have started to find plants for my blue and white hibachi and planters (post on those coming in the new year as well). As this brick patio lines up directly with the living room/dining room, the view of what is out here is quite important.

On my first visit to the bench souq I saw numerous varieties of this traditional seating of varying style and quality. Most of the benches are designed to be painted and there is a large roster of bright colors. I am super tempted to go with a color, but worry that it will be too distracting from inside the house. Instagram friends have suggested going with blue or green for the benches, and even coral, all of which sound appealing, but I’m not sure I want to pull that much attention from the interior.

I left that first visit full of ideas while a friend here went ahead and ordered the simple benches above. They were finished within the week and when we went back today they were loaded up on a truck and delivered to her house.

Another carpenter had a few more unusual choices including this bench with finials similar to the green one I love in the top photo from Souq Waqif. This blue is also dreamy color!

But I fell in love with a more finished (and thus more expensive) bench featuring a traditional dowel musharrabieh (or moucharabieh or mashrabiya, the myriad of spellings is endless) the latticework so often used for window coverings in Arab architecture. It’s often said they are used to allow women to see out, but keep others from seeing in. I’m not sure that this is really true but I loved it as a decorative feature in these benches.

The carpenters are looking into getting me a white stain, instead of paint, as I think it is the paint that has trouble holding up against the extremities of the elements here. I have been planning on a lush blue and white backyard oasis for a while now, which was utterly confirmed when Vogue published Rebecca de Ravenel’s gorgeous NYC terrace recently. Ticking, Indian block prints from Brigitte Singh and blue and white porcelain. Need I say more? I keep finding inspiring things in her apartment (as in this post) and I’m sure you’ll be seeing more of it.

White with a bit of wood grain peeking through will be soft against the white garden walls and it gives me the perfect backdrop to mix blue and white with the bright pinks, greens and yellows found elsewhere in the garden flowers. It is pretty standard to get long cushions made to soften the hard seat of the benches, usually in a traditional red Arabic fabric. I decided to buck the trend and look for something a little more western for contrast. I think the cushions will only last a year or so, so budget was key. I could not have been happier to find this new IKEA fabric called Angsrutta for about $5 a meter. It works on so many levels!

Not to forget to mention that I am having a giant coffee table made to sit between them, much like this one, perfect for casual dining and hors d’oeuvres. This also gives you a peek at how bright the paint colors can be and the traditional red fabric used for the seat cushions.

So I bit the bullet and placed my order today. We will have to see what gets lost in translation – surely something will – but I can always have them repainted if necessary. Here’s to cocktails in the garden in the new year!

Dec 17, 2013 By tokyojinja in Doha Move, Furniture, Gardens 12 Comments Tags: benches, Doha, garden, garden furniture, garden seating, Qatar, Rebecca de Ravenel, Souq Waqif

A Clean Slate and a Lot of Volume

Sorry to have been MIA, but you can imagine the chaos of the last week. Today is Day 6 (I’m still counting) and I am coming up for air for the very first time. Since I can’t seem to think about anything else other than getting the house in order, I’m hoping you might like to come along with me this week and give me a hand.

For any latecomers, we have just moved to Doha, Qatar after 9 years in Tokyo, Japan. As international locations go, they are as different as night and day in every way, including housing, and in particular the actual houses we chose. Where my Tokyo house was small, with low ceilings, as you might expect, it was also wallpapered and carpeted (like absolutely every other expat dwelling) with an off-white/beige color that was simply unchangeable. As the urban density is so great in central Tokyo, houses are tightly packed, thus dark, and while my deep brown wooden floors were lovely, they positively absorbed light. Now there were plenty of houses in Doha that matched this same description, but we held out for a house in our favorite compound – an older one of course, it is me after all – with high ceilings, gracious lines and a very white palette in lieu of beige. I had 24 hours to pick paint colors and I have to say I did pretty darn well!

A quick photo tour of the house just prior to the movers arriving will give you a sense of what a lovely clean slate we had. The house features arches everywhere, from the front doors and entryway…

…to hallway pass throughs. Tile floors are de rigueur here because of the heat and I am enjoying the luminescence they give the interiors. Ours is actually whiter than it appears in these photos.

I think it was the arched windows that sold me on the house. I can’t wait to take down those curtains and hang new ones up at the ceiling’s edge. Thank goodness I chose the Benjamin Moore Balboa Mist for the living room/dining room. It is the perfect gray, with no shading in either color direction, although ironically this photo of the living room makes it seem blue…

…while this photo facing the opposite direction towards the dining room looks green. In person it is utterly perfect. I can’t say that enough times – perfect! If you have been following along, you’ll notice the can lights have been changed to small frosted glass covers and I am not actually sure I like them any better in terms of looks, although they are definitely an improvement in terms of function. You can see the small walled garden patio is an absolute clean slate as well.

The master bedroom has the most charming windows…

…and an arch leading to the dressing area and bathroom.

The other bedrooms are all bright and sunny and their paint colors are perfect.

You get a real sense of the tremendous sun coming in all the windows from these photos – I have not played with the exposures at all – and the need for cool colors inside.

What these empty room photos don’t demonstrate is the huge volume of the space. If you are sitting reading this in a giant new house in the USA, it won’t seem like a big deal at all, but I have never had space like this. The TV room downstairs has this nook, which didn’t seem that big…

…until we unpacked this antique shop tansu. It took up almost an entire wall and almost reached the ceiling in my Tokyo house and in my mind’s eye I had imagined it would fill most of this space.

I ran and unpacked some silkworm trays and baskets (the movers thought I was a bit wacky!) to help deal with the volume, but you can see that even they don’t fill it. I am excited and a bit daunted by the opportunities this creates. It certainly will make the fabric bill big – the curtains need to be very looooong!

The real compromise in choosing this house (besides the through the wall Japanese air conditioners – Argh will I ever escape them?) is the kitchen. Older properties are designed with the assumption that kitchens are for maids. We can’t imagine why the ceiling is dropped so low or why it has to have panel flourescent lighting, but it does. The dishwasher is out because it is getting replaced (yay!) as are the washer and dryer. At least this compound seems to be very responsible about making repairs. A plus is brand new white cabinetry (some of it illogical) and black granite counter tops, but there are the most awful terracotta-ish tiles on the walls, which ruins the space as far as I am concerned.

My sweet husband tried to fool me into thinking the tile was only really on the back splash – not! – and thus inconspicuous.

You can see that is not the case. So as I stew on the conundrum of what to do, I ask myself WWJD?

Before you go and think I’ve gone religious on you, it stands for “What Would Jenny Do?” as in Jenny Komenda of Little Green Notebook. She has just left NYC and moved home to Arizona where in the space of less than two months she has already radically transformed her house mostly doing all the work herself in such a fashion that I cannot imagine she ever sleeps for a minute. She took all kinds of uglies and made them fabulous – as she always does – especially when it comes to doing impossible things like painting tiles!

She turned this faux brick floor to this in her laundry room…

and this same floor to this in her kitchen.

And I know Steve at An Urban Cottage painted his backsplash tiles, from this to this. Steve, if you are reading this, how did the paint hold up?

So the question is what should I do? Paint? Wallpaper? Re-tile? Unlike Japan I think there is some flexibility in what you can do to the houses here. Something has to be done and I have a visual idea that would tie the space together with my antique pine table and Hitchcock chairs, but no sense of how to accomplish it. I think that will need its own post!

Please bear with my self-centeredness in these coming weeks. I do have upcoming posts on porcelain hibachi coming as well as a new Provenance post on bone inlay over at Cloth & Kind. I’ll be updating the shrine sale schedule and have a few new spots to tell you about. I’ve already found my first great antique shop here so there will be a new Shop Talk coming too. And while we are at it, remind me that I need to update the About Me page on this blog!

Aug 27, 2013 By tokyojinja in Doha Move, Expat Life, Interior Design, Kitchens 29 Comments Tags: Doha, moving, paint, Qatar

Major Life Changes Ahead…Shall We Let the Architecture Decide?

I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
“But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?”

-Emily Dickinson

Sometimes I wonder if I jinxed myself with that Emily Dickinson poem – it was the featured item on my college yearbook page, representing all the possibility I wished for. Or did I actually bless myself, and lay the ground work for actualizing a life so different from the one I might easily have led? Either way, adventure in the form of living abroad has come my way numerous times, culminating in my almost (!!!) 9 years here in Japan. I wouldn’t trade any of it, even the days that were hard, but we have been away from “home” for a very long time. Which brings me to my point…

I am at a crossroads – a huge one. And I have a major decision to make.

In the past years I haven’t had much control over what happens to me at the macro level – that “trailing spouse” tag is trite but true. But at the micro level, I have been able to build a life for myself and my family wherever we have lived. I like to think of myself as a “grow where you plant me” kind of person, but it always takes hard work to make that come true. So I can continue trailing or I can push back and say it is time to let go, time to have a “regular” life again. Either way, there is a major good-bye at hand, a good-bye that I find painful to write, a good-bye to one of my great loves.

Good bye Tokyo. Good bye Japan. (It looks so scary and real in type)

I’ve been musing about the way a physical place can have a personality and what that means for those who live there. So humor me and come on a bit of an architectural journey, from where I am, to where I might be…

As my compass and my North star, the Tokyo Tower is an iconic beacon of the city skyline at night. Whenever I am not sure where am I, a glimpse of it will help set me to rights, although I don’t get lost very often these days.

With two school-aged daughters, one of whom is entering high school next year, school is another major compass point in our family life. We have been part of a very special international community.

Have you ever wondered what my house in Tokyo looks like? Have you had visions of a modern architectural gem, as almost all my family and friends from the US do until they actually visit me here? Everyone seems to have an idealized vision of Japanese design chops and then…they see my house, which for Japan, is actually pretty good.

Not much to look at from the outside, but it has housed us well.

My choice then, if I actually have one, which I may not, is between the familiar, the familial, a place I already know so well, one that hardly needs a nighttime beacon…

…and a place so different from any I might ever have imagined I would live in. The idea of it scares me, but also excites me with the possibility of the new. The Torch is not quite the architectural icon that the other two towers are, but nonetheless, in my two short visits I’ve used it just the same way to help me orient myself.

School for the girls could be the fulfillment of a long-held dream of mine, although repatriation may have many unexpected bumps and lumps.

Our other choice is a continuation – and it does feel almost like an adjunct campus of their current school – of a life filled with other global nomads (that “Third Culture Kids” tag is another one I hate), possibly a much easier transition. And the chance to continue living an experiential life, instead of one where everything single thing done is really just to put on their college application, feels appealing. Palm trees and amazing facilities don’t hurt either.

Two different sets of fantasy housing. The first has real neighborhoods, with seasons and stately sycamores overarching, near old friends and family.

My 12-year-old suburban self determined that she would one day live in a brownstone.

My grown-up city self thinks a brick Greek Revival would do as well. I’m not picky.

The other choice is a bit of a scary word, a “compound.” It certainly sounds a bit off-putting and I’m not sure my city self thinks the American lingo, a “gated community,” would be any better. But it comes with beautiful warm weather all year, too hot at times, but swimming possible almost everyday and an abundance of Bougainvillea.

But on the other hand, the word “villa” has the best of connotations, charming and elegant.

Imagine sunset over the desert, bargaining at the souk, arches and jalis screens at the windows…

…and tea under the loggia in the garden.

Where am I choosing between you may ask? Well, I am sure you recognized New York and perhaps even the leafy tree-lined streets of Brooklyn. The other may not be so familiar, in fact I am sure it is not. Tropical, desert, city and oh so different, sitting smack in the middle of the Middle East. Doha, Qatar.

We won’t be leaving until the end of the school year and after that we will do our usual summer at the beach in New Jersey. As for Tokyo Jinja, it will go on, just the same, with maybe a slightly expanded horizon. Tokyo Jinja is, after all, a state of mind and I am a global antiques warrior no matter where I land.

Apr 8, 2013 By tokyojinja in Doha Move, Expat Life 35 Comments Tags: Doha, expat life, Japan, moving, New York, Qatar, Tokyo