ALL CHANGE
Blogger Amy Tennent is a master of the art of rearrangement
‘Oh god, what are you doing now? It looks fine as it is,” Rob Tennent has been heard exclaiming more than once. The cause of his half-amused exasperation? His wife Amy’s penchant for rearranging their Dannevirke home.
It’s not surprising that Amy has an obsession with styling. As an interiors blogger she spends her days poring over the world’s most beautiful homes. Amy started her Milo & Mitzy blog seven years ago while studying online to become a teacher.
“I was reading a lot of blogs when I should have been writing essays and thought, ‘I can do that.’” Always keen to find an excuse to put off her study, she did it.
Despite her tendency to procrastination, Amy finished her qualification and now teaches three days a week. With two young children to look after, Frankie, four, and Patch, three, time is always tight, so she’s transitioned from blogging every day to twice a week and Instagramming daily.
“I think my style has changed so much because of the internet,” she says. “It’s so easy to get ideas online.” Once a devotee of country style, Amy says she’s now leaning towards “industrial with a flash of country”.
When Amy and Rob moved into their Dannevirke home four years ago, Amy was thrilled that the previous owners had taken care of all the renovations; adding a master bedroom, en suite, office and large deck to the house, which had been moved onto the site 25 years ago. All it needed was styling and furnishing to make it their home.
The 18m-long open-plan living area is perfect for entertaining and big enough for energetic kids, especially Patch, who, Amy says, doesn’t understand the concept of walking and prefers to use the long space as his sprint track.
Amy loves to cook and the kitchen too was just what she was after. “The kids love to watch me cook, they sit up at the breakfast bar and it’s like I’m running a cooking show with them, they want to know everything I’m doing.”
Amy initially furnished their home in a monochrome palette. “I cringe thinking back to that black and white stage,” she says. Disliking how bland it all was, she introduced textures, neutrals, warm woody tones and dashes of colour. “I’m very fortunate that my job as a blogger does see me get sent a lot of stuff for our house,” Amy says. One of the tasks is working out how to fit these all together with her own second-hand finds. >
Amy prefers to stay away from the cheaper “fast fashion” items in favour of vintage homeware with character. In fact, on trips to her parents’ place in Havelock North she can often be seen screeching to a halt and rifling through the various second-hand stores en route.
The dining table bench, with scratches and names carved into it, was picked up from the “old hall down the road” and the desks in Frankie and Patch’s rooms were sourced from second-hand stores on Facebook. “I grew up in Hawke’s Bay, I’m a staunch local girl,” she says, so she always tries to support local businesses.
Frankie and Patch’s rooms are where Amy has had the most fun. “I’ve been into kids’ rooms that are so styled that their parents won’t even let them play in them. I think it’s important that kids can play and have their own little space,” she says.
Patch’s room was designed around the artwork above his bed. Frankie’s pale pink duvet inspired Amy to experiment with test pot paints in her room. Test pots also came in handy when mixing a colour for the front of the bench in the kitchen.
Dipping her toes into the craft pool isn’t unfamiliar territory for Amy, who used to design jewellery for stores such as Kilt. In fact, she’s been designing jewellery since she was seven when she tried to sell friendship bracelets to her friends.
At home, she’s just as creative. Old pieces often get the Amy spruce-up and even though the kitchen was the perfect spot for pretend cooking shows the grey glass splashback had to go. Amy ordered subway tiles and she and Rob tiled the new splashback themselves, arranging them in a herringbone pattern. “It was a bit of a nightmare,” she says. Forgetting to put the edging in first, they realised their mistake halfway through and ended up banging the edging into half-dried grout. A bit stressful maybe, but it worked out fine: “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” says Amy.