The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

Now I’m a “grown up” with my own home, I have been trying desperately to steer myself away from the easy option of furnishing our home  in Ikea pieces. Although I love the brand, I want our home to slowly develop it’s own character and personality which Ikea furniture with it’s distinctive look doesn’t always allow.

However, putting a spanner in my quest to move on – is Ikea’s super exciting new PS2012 collection launching in store this May with 60 new pieces inspired by vintage Ikea designs. With PS2012 Ikea have updated retro forms with innovative functions functions, and sustainable materials like bamboo, recycled PET plastic, wood plastic composite and linen.

The piece that first grabbed my attention was the retro three seat sofa above. If I had a NYC loft style home then this would be the first piece in it – i love it’s rounded edges and the contrast between the hard metal and super squishy piped seat pads. It looks so comfortable for an afternoon snooze!

Another key piece in the collection is a stripped wood milkmaid style chest of drawers. These wouldn’t usually be my thing but its over-sized wood grain surface gives the piece a contemporary folksy edge which is really interesting.  I also love the collection’s new angular wall lights [available in white black and red] which borrows from vintage Anglepoise silhouettes. These lights actually have an LED source of light which allows them their unusual flat shape.

As always the brand has released a plethora of cute side tables and chairs in covetable colours but my star piece has to be Ikea’s series of geometric pendant lights. Actually I am unsure as to how this product taps into Ikea’s past as it is so very of the moment in terms of the trend for geometric design – and it’s for that reason that I love it. At a very reasonable £93 these black, yellow and aqua lights are probably the cheapest of this style on the market and are just so un-Ikea like that they might just make the cut for my new grown up home!

Are you excited for the new PS2012 collection – see more new introductions here.

Back from a wet Milan Design Week my experience was slightly tarred with the memory of feverish weekend following trudging in the rain – however these memories were combated with the delights of design week staples like; a visit to  iconic galley cum shop  Rosanna Orlandi, numerous exciting pop-up’s like an appearance from Paris’s famous design store Merci on the rambling streets of the Totrona and those magical chanced upon experiences that can only be found in a city during a design week. I thought i’d share some of my highlights and a few snaps of inspiration found along the streets of Milan…

The Front Room was an exquisite exhibition/shop we chanced upon inside a listed Milanese house. Showing things like fringed room dividers and oxidised mirrors, I loved it’s simple vibe.

Lots of magical items to be found at Spazio Rosanna Orlandi

Foam stools designed to look like sliced slivers of multi-coloured marble…

Laminated planks of dyed wood…

Glittering mirror plated wall hooks…

Cosmic mirrored boxes…

Tom Dixon juxtaposes modern design against the background or Milan’s history at the National Museum of Science and Technology.

Woven Marni chairs

Merci’s glorious pop-up shop at the Tortona

Cubes of brass on the gridded streets of Milan…

Curious religious buildings…

I know i’ve been quiet on the blogging front lately but we’ve been buried under the rubble of restoration – our hands are raw from hard work and our hair is perpetually covered in a fine layer of dust and i think we’ve lost or put on weight [i cant really tell which as we've been eating anything we can lay our hands on but working hard enough for ten people?].

As Spring begins and I write this with the sun streaming through the new gauzy curtains in our bare bedroom, I feel like I am sluggishly emerging from a long dream – those awful days of late night wallpaper stripping seem a world away and the frantic time sensitive evenings making a hundred trips in David’s VW Beetle to transport all of our belongings and my hundreds of books seem… well not so far away… but the memories are fading.

The place is far from done – the windows still need painting – they will all need at least a whole weekend’s attention. Some fixtures still need fitting in the bathroom. The whole spare room had to be re-papered because the walls were so bad and still needs painting, the hallway needs a floor and the living room is waiting for more furniture! But I thought i would share a few up to date pictures with you [I am in love with the lights in our bathroom]… more soon!

If you haven’t heard of the inspirational phenomenon that is Pinterest then you have been living under a rock and are missing out! Pinterest is a genius pinboard-style social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The exciting service is basically the progressive version of browsing your favourite blogs and sites and dropping inspirational images into a desktop folder – however with Pinterest you can group them and refer back to their sources – whereas to be honest how many of us ever re-explore or make use of our desktop image folders?  I know i am guilty of hoarding for hoarding’s sake!

Anyway I thought I’d share a few of mine with you… you can see more at pinterest.com/rohiniwahi

I moved from India to the UK with my parents when I was seven years old – but thanks to frequent visits to a wonderful family home in Calcutta, loving grandparents who impacted my life despite spanning continents, my grasp of my own culture flourished and appreciated as I amassed a multitude of rose-tinted memories of my homeland.

The Indian Memory Project will resonate with anyone with ties to India – be it a native, a visitor or a far flung on-looker with borrowed memories. The project is the response of an online call of Mumbai based photographer Anusha Yadav who wanted to give a virtual voice to the mesmerising photos and stories amassed by Indian families pre-Facebook and Flickr era. The pictures, which range from formal portraits to casual holidays photos, are fragments of life in India between the 1890s and the 1980s.

“We don’t really know much about our own country,” said Ms. Yadav. “It’s so diverse but all we see are clichés.”

The project is a growing online archive that aims to trace India’s history through the intimate lens of family pictures [which I plan to contribute to one day]. The submissions are so multi-layered and absorbing – I found myself falling in love and investing in these characters of India’s past – for example the WSJ writes “In one picture, dated 1953, an army officer poses triumphantly next to a tiger after a hunt. This was just one of the 13 tigers Captain Prabhakar Raj Bahuguna killed in his lifetime, explains his daughter in the text that comes with the image. She goes on to say that her father, filled with remorse, became an active conservationist later in his life. He even blamed his failing eyesight on the tigers’ revenge.

Another picture, taken in Delhi around 1923, shows two teenagers shortly after their marriage. “It was unusual for couples in our family to be photographed, especially holding hands,” writes Sreenivasan Jain. It “turned out to be an indication of the unconventional direction their lives would take.” They went on to become Gandhians and freedom fighters. Their activism meant both ended up spending months in jail. Ammaji, the woman pictured above, later gave up her Rajasthani choli, or mirror-work embroidered blouse, and wore only hand-spun cloth.”