Do you ever feel a bit of wanderlust and wish for a vacation? Who doesn’t want a vacation! Why not build a little bit of vacation travel right into your home so you can live with it every day? That’s what I do. Our living room has a Burmese rice god and goddess standing in it. Here’s one of them:
Now we haven’t yet gone to Burma (or Myanmar as it’s now called). But we did get pretty close by traveling to northwestern Thailand and Laos. This rice god reminds me all the time of our travels to that area of the world. We found it in a dusty old warehouse near Chiang Mai, Thailand.
And one of the side tables in our living room is a rain drum found in Bangkok (and there you can see the rice god in all its full glory near it):
The fruits on top of the rain drum are alabaster. They’re souvenirs from a vacation to Tuscany. We visited the village of Volterra and found the most realistic-looking stone fruits there.
Those are just small glimpses of travel mementos from our home. If you want ideas to weave global influence into your home, check out the Passport to Style Guide from One Kings Lane. They know global style! In fact, all my purchases from One Kings Lane are from the other side of the planet – a kantha quilt, a hot pink silk pillow from India – and there was the time I got so excited that they had a sale of things from South India. Probably way too excited for any normal person.
In Passport to Style, they take you to nearly every continent with suggestions to get the well-traveled style from Mexico to The Netherlands to the diversity of countries in Africa. I learned a few things, such as Japanese furniture-makers value wood grains and unfinished wood, and Scandinavian seating can look futuristic.