A little about me, and why I started writing
Hello. My name is Nhu. I live somewhere quiet in the south of England with my husband and our two children, and this is the small corner of the internet where I write about the things that make our home feel like ours.
Why Huou and Nhim
Hươu is a deer and Nhím is a hedgehog. They are the nicknames my husband and I gave each other long before we had children, back when we were still learning how to be a pair. He is the deer, all long limbs and quiet watchfulness. I am the hedgehog, small and particular, slow to let people close but loyal once I do.
When I was trying to think of what to call this website, nothing else fit. The two of us built this home together. It felt right that the name would come from the two of us too.
Where I have been
I grew up in Vietnam, in a house that smelled of rice and lemongrass. We were not wealthy, but my mother kept the house the way some people keep gardens. She noticed things. A loose hinge, a chipped bowl, a cushion turned the wrong way. She taught me, without ever saying so, that a home is a living thing and that looking after it is a quiet kind of love.
Life since then has moved us around a few times. A couple of countries, a few cities, one or two homes that never quite had time to feel settled. We live in England now, and we have been here long enough that our younger one does not know anywhere else. I have been slowly making this house ours ever since.
Why I started writing
I did not start this site to build a brand. I started it because I kept finding things that made our life a little gentler, and I kept wanting to tell someone.
A mattress topper that finally let Thành sleep through the night. A container that tamed the flour shelf. A lamp that made the corner of the living room feel the way I wanted it to feel but could not quite describe. When I found something that worked, I would want to write it down. Not as a review. More like a letter to a friend who had asked.
So this became the place for those letters.
What I write about
Small things. Mostly for the home. The kind of objects that you do not think about until they are suddenly better than they used to be, and then you wonder how you lived without them.
I try to write the way I would talk about these things if you came over for tea. Honestly, with the good parts and the awkward parts. I will tell you if something has a strange quirk, or if it took me a week to figure out how to close the lid properly. I will not tell you that anything is going to change your life, because most things do not, and the ones that do rarely announce themselves in advance.
A note on the links
Many of the products I write about link to Amazon. If you buy something through one of those links, I earn a small amount at no cost to you. It helps keep this site running and it lets me keep writing without having to turn it into something it is not. I only write about things I have actually brought into our home, or things I have researched carefully enough to recommend with a clean conscience. If something did not work for us, I either say so plainly or I do not write about it.
Thank you for being here
If you have read this far, you are the kind of person I had in mind when I started. I hope the things I write help you make your own home a little softer, a little warmer, a little more yours. That is all any of this is really about.
With love, from a small house somewhere in the English countryside,
Nhu
