Perfect Valentine's Day WE & a sneak peek of our house

The perfect Valentine's Day can have many shapes or forms...for us this year, it was a friends and family affair and in the 12 years Steve and I had been together, it was probably the most heart-warming, relaxing and loving Valentine's weekend we ever had.

It all started Friday evening when my stylish friend Mandy and Mila's Godmother - arrived to our home with her husband Acland....
On Saturday morning, we went for breakfast at one of my favourite delis: Chez Kristoff where we had an amazing, yummy breakfast. I highly recommend this place. It has a very long communal table located right in the middle of the deli and stacks of shelves with beautiful, exotic food packaging from each side of the room. You feel you're eating in a grocery and I love the atmosphere. It's very friendly, relax and visually inspiring and refreshing. The staff is also very nice...a lot of young Franco/English and personally I love their eggs benedict...sigh

So the plan for the day was that more of Steve's friends would come around to watch the rugby while Mandy & I would escape to Anthropologie for a bit of retail therapy.
Well it didn't quite worked out like that.....We started drinking some gorgeous tea I had brought back from my trip in Paris (see my little improvisation..using a French school blackboard as a tea tray) and chatting. While the boys went to get beers, wine, roast for the evening, we made space in the lounge and since for once since we moved, the lounge didn't look like Mila's playroom, I took a few photos...

But when the boys came back, Ackland, impressed by his earlier breakfast, had also gone back to Chez Kristoff and came home with lots of food goodies......to die for fresh bread, amazing cheeses, delicious honey-ham and...

arrgh.....the most amazing brownies so instead of going shopping, Mandy and I spent the whole afternoon chatting, munching and looking at websites like the two geeks that we are.

This incredibly chilled-out afternoon ended up with Steve's amazing roast and more food the day after on Valentine's Day and frankly I'm glad we didn't end up in a restaurant like most year and instead had the most fabulous weekend with our friends...plus I got the most gorgeous dress from Steve as a present which he got from Mandy's boutique...can't really get better than this!