Styled Spaces: Our Breakfast Corner

There's a corner right outside our sitting room, reached through what we call our "conservatory" (it really is just an entrance hall, but a big window and a few good plants earned it the grander name). For years, that corner outside was nothing at all. Raw cement, never tiled, no real purpose except the shade the house threw over it every morning, which made it, without anyone deciding so, the best seat on the property before the day got hot.

The story of how it became something actually starts earlier than the project itself. Years before we touched that corner, we were given a batch of old cement tiles from a house here on Poros that was being renovated (the kind of material you can't bring yourself to throw away, even with no immediate use for it). So we kept them. In the garden, through more than one summer, waiting for a use we couldn't yet picture.

The actual project began for a smaller, more practical reason than any big design: we needed somewhere to store firewood that wouldn't be an eyesore through the warm months. That's all it was meant to solve. But solving it meant building a whitewashed cement storage right into that shaded corner, and once that structure existed, the rest of the space started asking for more. Cement bases went in for a run of wooden benches around the storage. And then, the way these things tend to happen here, we found exactly the right table without looking for it: a classic "φερφορζέ" (ferforzé) metal table, sitting in the rubbish, waiting for someone to want it again. (It's a lovely word to learn the history of: it isn't Greek, it's borrowed straight from the French fer forgé — literally "forged iron" — the same way Turkish also took it as ferforje. A little piece of shared Mediterranean vocabulary, hiding in plain sight.) A few linen cushions on the benches, and the corner was, finally, ready.

None of it happened on a schedule. The tiles waited years in the garden before they had a job. The storage came first, not the seating. The table found us, not the other way around. If there's a lesson in it, it's one I keep relearning: things arrive when they're ready to, and it's worth keeping what might matter later, even when you can't yet say why.

This corner is where we sit most mornings now, in the shade, before the island wakes up properly. It didn't need to be planned from day one to become one of our favourite places on the whole property. It just needed time, and a bit of patience with what wasn't finished yet.

With love from Poros,
Anouck

my perfectly imperfect way of curating.