So guess what?

No seriously, you have to guess?

Okay, I’ll give you three clues.

1. It has something to do with a summit
2. The summit has something to do with my passion and my livelihood.
3. I have something to do with the summit

DING….DING….DING….you got it!!!

I, the one and only Jordan Awori, is a speaker at THE PAN-AFRICA INTERIOR DESIGN VIRTUAL SUMMIT 2018.

What will I be speaking about, you may ask? Well, I have more clues for you (I’m just joking!!)

I am excited to announce that I will be part of a panel speaking on THE MAGIC OF SOURCING, together with the amazing NANA SPIO GARBRAH (Creative Director Blueprint Africa from Tunis) and CHRISSA AMUAH (the creative director of Africa by Design and  AMWA Designs). So if you want to know all about sourcing for design and decor items in Africa then this talk is just for you.

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I clearly remember where I have been every time, for the last five years, when I found out what the colour of the upcoming year was. That’s how obsessed I am with the Pantone colour of the year releases.

Last year I found out about 2018’s colour choice while sitting in art caffe in Westgate going through the Pantone website. I kid you not when i tell you that I let out a loud sigh of disbelief.  Purple…really! A fancy name like ultra violet wasn’t going to impress me. This was plain and simple purple to me, and if you know me you know how much I hate purple, so you can understand how disappointed I was about this colour choice.

In typical Jordan dramatic style I was literally in despair and from the compassionate looks the people at the table next to me were giving me, I think they thought I’d either been dumped or lost millions of dollars. But thirty minutes later the mature me came back to the surface and I decided to read up more on Ultra Violet 18-3838 to find out why Pantone chose it.

Here’s a look at how I went from hating to understanding, and miraculously, to loving Pantone’s 2018 colour of the year.

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Happy New year (I told you on my last post that you’d have to get used to me wishing you a happy new year till mid-February). Is it just me, or this year is flying by so fast? We’re already 30 days in. Next thing you know you’ll be walking into a store and they’re playing Christmas songs.

Now as I promised in my last post RECAP OF MY 2017 TOP 15 DECOR ITEMS I’ll be looking at design styles that I believe we should have left behind in 2017. Seeing that one of my resolutions (yes, Im a resolution kind of girl) is to be more positive, thats why I had more to say about what I liked about design last year and only 5 negative things that we should leave behind. Other than my being Ms.Positive I believe that what matters most when it comes to interior design and decor is to show your own personality and make the space a representation of who you are so I would be a hypocrite if I gave you rules. Come to think of it I guess I should have titled this post DESIGN STYLES I’M SICK OF BUT YOU CAN GO AHEAD AND DO THEM IF THEY MAKE YOU HAPPY AND MAKE YOU FEEL AT HOME.

With that said here are the styles you can choose to leave behind with me in 2018:

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Happy new year! Yes, 27 days in and I’m part of that irritating group of people who’ll still be wishing you a happy new year till Valentine’s day.

Speaking of starting a new year, there’s no better way of doing so without reflecting on the best parts of the last one, and it goes without saying that my highlights would be decor related. Looking back at 2017 and all the projects I undertook what really stands out are certain decor items that were true gems. Decor items that not only gave spaces that extra oomph that completed them, but were still able to stand out on their own.

Think of a fruit salad, every fruit in it can be eaten on its own but there’s that one fruit that you love way more than the others and ever time you take a scoop of the salad you have to make sure there’s a piece of that fruit (Bear with me here, this is still an interior decor blog.) Now lets say the fruit salad is a completed-well-designed space, each individual fruit would be an item in the room, a chair, painting etc,  and that one fruit you love would be the items I’m referring to as the true gems of my 2017 decor experience.

Now if you’re anything like me and any mention of food gets you craving it then why dont we both go get a fruit salad before we start on the list. I’m starting to sound like the fruit salad ambassador 2018, aren’t I? Well, forgive me for that, and let me just dive straight into it. Read More

“Hi I’m Jordan and I’m addicted to the Christmas holiday season.”

My obsession begun when I was six years old and my aunty got me the HOME ALONE series VHS tapes. Since then I start preparing for Christmas from right after my birthday in August, I kid you not.

These are the significant times in a year for me;

January to March is the new-year-new-me phase, April is easter, May my mum’s birthday month, June to August mentally preparing and then celebrating my birthday,  September to December is Christmas season. Yes, I’m those people who start playing Christmas songs by the end of September the latest, putting up Christmas decorations by mid-October and attending every Christmas themed event I can throughout November and December. There just seems to be a sense of peace, serenity and acceptance during this holiday season and what’s not to love about that.

The best part about this season is definitely the feeling of togetherness. Friends and families come together to celebrate and it goes without saying that this always involves food and drinks. Now this brings me to the focus of this post, holiday table settings.

One of my clients is hosting three dinners during the holidays and wants to have very unique and impressive table settings but unfortunately, she doesn’t care about all the effort that comes with it. She would rather do what she does best, make the food, and leave the decor to the experts. And that is where I come in.

Something a lot of you may not know is that I also do table setting decor for private dinners/lunches. Food presentation is just as essential to the success of a dish as its taste and flavour and I personally believe that the presentation goes beyond how the food is laid on the plate but also how the table is set.

My client gave me full creative freedom with the three looks but only had a couple of things that were important to her:

1. She has a wood table that she loves and insists that it has to be in full view. So absolutely no table cloths!
2. The food shall be served to the guests as they are seated so no serving bowls at the table, and if any just one at most. She wanted it to feel like they’ve come to dine at a restaurant. So I should concentrate more on decorative centrepieces at the centre of the table.
3. She only wants that restaurant feeling when it comes to how the food is served but not how the tables are set and would therefore prefer a more casual take on how the silverware is arranged.
4. The three looks should be very different from each other.

Armed with that information here are the three table setting sample looks I prepared for her to approve before the dinner parties coming up next week. I used four place settings because I was working with a smaller table and as my clients table shall be bigger their numbers shall be adjusted to fit the number of guests.

I’ll let the images do most the talking and let you judge for yourselves whether each setting perfectly depicted the desired theme I was going for. Have a look and tell me what you think:

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