2020 Holiday Home Tour {Day 2} – Christy’s Dining Room

Welcome to the 1st of December and 11 Magnolia Lane! Along with our friend Jenny at Evolution of Style, my former college roommate/blog partner of 10 years, Amy, and I organize this tour every year (read more about our story here). Jenny did all of the heavy lifting with the tour this year and we’re so appreciative of her hard work!

If you’re coming over from Summer Adams, welcome. I love her style although mine is nowhere near as picture-perfect! But I suppose that’s why we all enjoy these holiday tours; we get to see a wide variety of homes and they’re all lovely in their own way.

The quick background on our family is that we just moved from North Carolina to Stuttgart, Germany in late July. My husband is active-duty Army and so moving frequently is a fact of life for us, but I will say that moving overseas with a high school senior, a dog, and a cat during Covid has not been for the faint of heart! We also left our oldest back in the States at college and are hopefully going to be reunited this coming weekend (it was up in the air for awhile if that would be able to happen).

After two months in a hotel with the above-mentioned family members (also not for the faint of heart!) we found an apartment in downtown Stuttgart in mid-September, so I’ve had a few months to get us settled. Our place is great, though (you can see a full video tour from when we moved in here), and believe it or not, this is our view:

Our living room and dining room are open concept, which is not the norm here in Germany. It’s so you can close off rooms and decide which ones to heat in the very cold winter (we have radiator heat over here). By the way, we’re supposed to get snow tonight so winter is already here!

I left about a third of our furniture in storage back in the States; homes are much smaller over here and of course I wanted to leave room to hopefully find some great European antiques.

Since we use 220V electricity over here, my 9′ prelit tree wouldn’t have worked, so we left it at home and I am using my daughter’s 6′ tree until we buy a live tree next week. I think it’s a great size for an apartment, though.

I also left more than half of my Christmas decorations at home since we don’t have a lot of storage (German homes don’t even come with built in closets, interestingly enough). There are only a few things I miss–most of it I haven’t thought about once!

Our flat is in a building with three other apartments and it’s about a hundred years old, with great high ceilings and beautiful hardwood floors.

The light fixtures are art deco and while I’m hoping to find some great French chandeliers to hang, they’ll have to be pretty special to replace this one.

One thing I did risk bringing over was my set of monogrammed vintage Limoges china; fortunately it made it safely.

(My sources are below and then more photos)

My first fun antique purchase was this riddling rack from France; it’s used in the production of champagne but we’re using it to store some of our wine collection. It weighs a TON.

I also took a few photos of the room at twilight so you could get a better idea of the view.

I will be honest that I’ve struggled a bit with whether or not it was even appropriate to do a holiday home tour this year; it seems so frivolous. Our family has had a challenging year, but I know that it doesn’t compare to what others have gone through. If it wasn’t for my unshakeable faith in Jesus and the knowledge that everything in our world is proceeding according to the plan laid out in the Bible, I don’t think that I could face the future with hope and peace. I felt led to share this short video with you in case you don’t yet know that peace:

Thank you so much for sharing a few minutes of your day with me and letting me show you part of our new home. Thanks for stopping by, and Fröliche Weihnachten!

Now, be sure to head on over to see Home by Heidi; she is a beautiful soul with a beautiful home and you will love getting to visit it!

Here are the rest of this week’s tour participants, be sure to visit all of them and prepare to be inspired.