Recent travels: Surry Hills

From reading various Australian home magazines such as Home Beautiful, Real Living, and Inside Out, there were a couple of shops I'd had on my to-visit list for a while.  A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to toddle over to that part of Sydney - Surry Hills - and see them.

One was DavidMetNicole (?sp).  Often mentioned in the mags, with quirky vintage items.  Not a large shop; and to me, the prices were high.  The assistant was charming, and I enjoyed browsing, but $100 journals covered in bus destination blinds (much as I love bus destination blinds) are a bit out of my budget.  They had vintage Scrabble tiles, and vintage rubber stamps, and a bunch of interesting things to be inspired by, but I don't know that I'll be returning.  Love the aesthetic, but I think I can find a lot of similar sorts of things from other places, less expensively (they had an identical spice rack to one I'd found in an antiquey-junk shop a year or two ago for $30, marked in their shop at around $90).

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At Doug up on Bourke I mooched and browsed and mentally decorated more than one house I'd love to live in.  Industrial-commercial-rustic antiques/vintage items, and lots and lots of them - dozens of stools, tables, desks, all sorts of items, and at generally acceptable prices (according to my scale).  If I was decorating a house from scratch, this is the kind of shop I'd like to go to for furniture, rather than some shiny-new shop (well, Ikea excepted).  It's the kind of place where you enjoy observing the history of things, as well as the browsing.  They had bus destination blinds too (over $500 each - I'm so glad I picked one up for substantially less than that last year; part of my luck was that the route had historical significance for me but wasn't of much interest to others, as the places are not trendy locations - weren't then, aren't now).

Bird Textile was across the road from davidmetnicole and I invested in some of their scrap packs (which are sold by the weight of the fabric).  Lovely Australian designer original fabrics.

And then I went home, back from the inner city to its outskirts.  Some Saturday I'll plan more and do a bit of a Surry Hills trawl.  There are a lot of interesting shops there, homewares and also food shops in the Danks St area of Waterloo (I drove through that on this trip, but couldn't find parking so I drove on).  Bird Textile had a handy shop-crawl map of Surry Hills put together by local businesses; although it didn't look like they were all within walking distance of each other, and thus parking does become an issue.

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It was a good day, good to get out and about to somewhere different and see and be inspired by new things.

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