Grand Designs Live 2015 – Part Two

Hello there lovely Buttoneers! Welcome back for Part Two of my adventure to Grand Designs Live this year at Birmingham’s NEC. Did you catch last week’s Grand Designs Live – Part One? 

If you caught Part One then you know just how many photographs I took and how much inspiration I came back with after a full days adventure into design goodness. I couldn’t just leave it at one blog post so here we are with Part Two! 

I think my favourite part of Grand Designs, bar the wonderful talks by inspiring people on the theatre stages, is the smaller booths of handmade and independent sellers (I know…I know…totally predictable!) So many bits and pieces caught my eye so I was eager to share them with you!

I have never really watched The Great British Bake Off but these wooden egg holders were fabulous! They are from a company called Culinary Concepts, London and are hand-crafted from solid beech wood. The ‘Bake Off’ one grabbed my attention to begin with but I think my favourite is  ‘Crack On’! How much fun would it look in the kitchen…

…Hell, I could do with it as a friendly reminder to stop procrastinating doing valuable research on Pinterest when I am supposed to be making and creating in the Eliston Button Headquarters!

Smeg filled my heart with 1950’s style and a dreamy pastel colour palette all over again from last year! I fell in love the ballerina pink coloured stand mixer – pretty sure I could also deal with having the matching fridge freezer, kettle, toaster….okay you get the point! 

The most innovative design I found from Smeg was their creative bird stove tops – what a great idea instead of the boring rings that you normally find! I have an electric hob at home because I used to hate cleaning around our old gas one in the old house – I think these could swing me back to gas! What a talking point they would be! 

The Meile Live kitchen looked great too and held a good range of interactive cookery demonstrations, kitchen design talks as well as fun ‘cook off’s’.

We actually stopped to talk for a while with the people behind Wine Cellar Pods because they were so darn cool looking! It is basically an underground wine cellar that is installed into the floor of your kitchen! (Where do I sign up!?)

Unfortunately I don’t think it came fully stocked! It is a really clever design of just three circular shelves that hold up to 81 bottles of wine (who has this much wine still sitting in their house!?) and a clever mirror on the bottom that makes it look as if you have an actual well of wine in the floor!

Grand Designs Live 2015 – Part One

Hello there lovely Buttoneers! As promised last week in my ‘Around Here…September 2015‘ post, I am going to share with you my adventure to Grand Designs Live at Birmingham’s NEC this month. Did you catch last year’s Grand Designs Live Part One and Grand Designs Part Two? Well, this year I went with a blog post or two in mind so found that I went with an agenda to capture all of my favourite parts.

Armed with my camera and a very (VERY) patient Fiancé (I seriously stopped to photograph everything!) I grabbed the complimentary tickets I had won last year in a photograph competition and snapped away taking it all in and soaking up the vibrant energy of all of the design goodness that Grand Designs Live had to offer.

Did you catch some snippets on Instagram or Twitter? 

I took a grand total of 358 photographs and a few videos so that I could steal some quotes out of some of the talks on the theatre stages. Don’t panic! I am not going to share them all! Can you imagine!? I have, however, whittled them down to some of my absolute favourite things I found during my adventure and will be sharing them over the course of this post and another post next week, so keep your eyes peeled for further excitement!

I have to admit that when we arrived, parked up and took the little bus ride to the NEC, I was beyond excited and when we walked the tunnel to the main hall I was a little overwhelmed at the pure amount of exhibitors (over 500 according to their website!) Luckily this was all broken down into smaller sections that branched off from a circular hub in the middle (where you could also grab a coffee and breathe for a while before adventuring into the next section!) which consisted of ‘Interiors’, ‘Gardens’ ‘Kitchens’ and ‘Build’.

On of the first stops for us was the Grand Theatre to watch a fantastic talk called ‘Luxury for Less’ by Sophie Robinson and Dan Hopwood from The Great Interior Design Challenge. They demonstrated “how to get the very best interior effects on a budget” –

It was so lovely to see them both in person after being a fan of their TV programme and I found myself nodding along and taking in everything they talked about – not to mention Sophie’s fabulous outfit!

I felt like I picked up a lot of great tips to try out at home and loved that I shared a very similar outlook about adding colour to your home and not just sticking with neutrals. However, I know that when we were renting, colour wasn’t much of an option on our walls so playing around with textures and fabrics is a great idea. It is definitely something to bear in mind now we have bought a house too before we start getting adventurous with the paint and wallpaper! This was by far my biggest takeaway from the talk…