Court Chris - Nomad: a Global Approach to Interior Style

Vacations are too few and far between. To have a piece of that experience and memory reflected in your interior even the smallest incidental that makes you smile and takes you to another place is what its all about. This book is meant to excite and motivate you. Please feel free to borrow my ideas, or use them to inspire your own. There are no mistakes, only journeys. Every time I travel I find ideas and objects I want to bring home: For instance, in Japan it was the interconnecting internal rooms and gardens of houses changed by shoji screens. In Italy it was the Fiat 500! (cream with tan interior for me, please) and in India, it was overscaled formal photographs of mostly men, lots of them sporting magnificent mustaches, in safari hats and turbans in front of estates.

Although I cant bring all the things I really want back with me, I still find plenty of inspiration thats easily adapted and incorporated into my life and home. Im going to let you know how I do it with lots of my globetrotting inspiration pics and notes from my travels, and pages and pages of shots to show you how I adapt ideas from them, usually quite simply, for use at home. You dont have to follow these ideas exactly, but they should give you some idea of how my mind works, the sorts of things that inspire me, and the way those things can be shifted and shaken up, adapted and transformed, and still manage to capture experiences and memories.

To be able to share your laughs and travel frustrations (which are often funnier) in a remember that kind of way is a clever, emotive way to treat your interior and be surrounded by the things you love. Its about your stories reflecting your life.

You cant be expected to store all your travel experiences in your head - youll need a few photos to jog your memory. But you dont need to be a professional photographer to take a great pic. With a little confidence and some patience you can do it.

Its all about composition.

Consider whats in your frame, adopt a stylists eye for crop and angle. Work out what should and shouldnt be in the pic. Check, for example, where a wall or stair ends, or that youre getting in the top of an object. To avoid distortion, it can sometimes be a good idea to stand back and zoom in; likewise, you need to be careful not to hold the camera at an odd angle, otherwise things can look as if theyre tilting. Take your time a snapshot doesnt have to be snap, but it can still look spontaneous.

The beauty of digital photography is you can check everything and correct, right then and there.

Its important to edit; be ruthless and do it as you go along, before you download your pics. It makes for a stronger story at the end.

Dont store your photos away I have mine printed as soon as I get back. It keeps the globetrotting inspirations alive as well as lets me physically move the pics around, put them in a different order, and play with color and content. Youll find this plays a large part in coming up with a trip-based 10-color palette (more on that later), even if one wasnt obvious while you were gallivanting around.

I often think of pictures in pagination, i.e., how the pages turn and a story runs in a magazine. I like to make a strong picture story which can then be put into an album if I feel like it.

By doing all these things, inspiration and excitement from your trip should be at the forefront of your mind and you are ready to experiment with your own interior.

I hadnt traveled to most of the places in this book before, but they were all in my top fifteen (dont you have a list of countries you want to travel to?). The reason I chose these five for the book was that I thought I wouldnt be the only person whod want to go to them - - they were the sorts of places that other people would have on their wish lists or would have been to already. I picked countries/ or places that were diverse in culture, religion, adventure, and geography, the idea being that they would reveal themselves in very different ways. I was right: even in color terms, there were the desert tones of dusty Damascus, the serpent scale tones of the Amalfi Coast, the deep indigos of Japanese papers and textiles, the pops of reds and fuchsia in the flowers in Mexico City, the faded dirty pales of painted woodwork in India. Inspiration comes in many shapes and forms, and often not literally.

I did not go looking for existing interiors to re-create when I returned home, but I wanted to draw from all aspects of my trips: a street sign, a garden grate, a leaf on wet cobblestone, washing drying against a painted wall, a glimpse into a foreign kitchen, the mundane and the fancy.

Dont rule out the casual walk around a new town as a source of inspiration, as well as museums, restaurants, shops: experience it all and do as I do, and take lots of pictures. I am always attracted to the unusual and the curious, and hunt them out in daily food markets, monthly flea and antique markets (preferably the outdoor ones, with goods spilling out of the back of vans!), natural history museums, both small and large, artists ateliers, historic houses and traders workshops, etc. Old trades and crafts, including textile dyers and embroiderers, shell arts, wood turners and mills, paper makers, smiths and tinkers, foundries, leather workers and tanneries, felters, basket weavers, etc., are always at the forefront of any of my exploring both across the globe and in my local environment.

I shot all the styling ideas at locations around Sydney (thank you to all my friends!) with my brother Chris. It shows that you can use any decorative background and restyle and change it, according to your desires and recent inspirations. Any of these locations could have been styled to suit any of my travel inspirations. This book is not about theme but, rather, adding flavor from your recent globetrotting adventures.

Its about displaying your souvenirs and your memories through color, installation, and imagination to reveal your inspirations, nomadic spirit, and own personality. Note: if you are unable to travel physically, you can still take journeys and be inspired via reading, movies, magazines, books, and your general interests.