How I turned my Astana rental into a cosy home

What I liked about my new rented flat in Astana was that it was almost new and neutrally decorated — not easy to find in Kazakhstan — but it still needed a few touches to turn it into a home. 

My removal from Almaty went smoothly. The movers boxed everything, wrapped it lavishly in reams of paper, weighed it and drove it off to Astana in a small truck, in time to deliver to me on a Monday morning. 

With the 13 huge cardboard boxes stacked in my living room, I had the great satisfaction of knowing that all my things were in one place. 

Mystery deliveries

There was plenty of room for the boxes since the furniture in the flat was minimal. I liked it that way, but it seemed my new landlord Arsen had though that was ample for his previous tenants, his new foreign tenant needed special treatment. 

“I will bring you a divan,” he told me when he rang later that day. 

After a rather frustrating time trying to pin him down to a delivery time, we eventually established that he didn’t know when the divan would be delivered, and would call me in advance. I knew we had widely different ideas of “in advance” so wasn’t surprised when there was a knock on the door shortly after 9pm one evening.

“Who is it?”

“We come with the divan!” shouted an unfamiliar male voice. At that moment my mobile rang. It was Arsen to say the divan was on its way. 

Unfortunately for the delivery guys, the lift in my building was switched off between 9pm and 7am, which meant that the two skinny youths who had brought the divan had to carry it up 10 flights of stairs to my flat on the top floor. 

The divan turned out to be a huge modular sofa (requiring two trips up the stairs) that filled up half the room. I was contemplating the enormous brown sofa in dismay when I realised the two youths had gone back for more. 

Homing the poufchik

Two trips later I also had a matching brown armchair and a large padded rectangular object that swallowed up the floor space altogether. 

“What’s this?” I asked, indicating the rectangle. 

“Poufchik.” 

However, when I woke up the next morning, I saw that although the sofa and chair were old and had dark brown pleather arms, the rest of the upholstery was a not unpleasant golden brown.

 I pushed the divan so that it fitted neatly into the corner of the room under the windows, and when I paused for a rest I also found it was marvellously comfortable. The armchair went in the opposite corner under the wall-mounted TV. 

Accessorising my home

There was no room for the poufchik so that went under the window in the bedroom, draped with a white embroidered wall hanging. I strewed the sofa and armchair with the woven cushions I’d bought at the big TSUM department store in Almaty, made from pieces of old yurt hangings, which created a pleasing splash of colour and covered up the cigarette burns. 

The views from the windows – one towards the Baiterek and other Left Bank buildings, the other across to the White Mosque – were decoration enough, but I had a few more accessories to add.

With my books in the bookcases, framed photos on top, and a mixture of my photographs of Central Asia and some old Soviet prints friends had brought me in Kyiv, it looked wonderfully homelike. 

After another frustrating conversation about timing, my landlord came back with a friend and put up venetian blinds in the main room, though perplexingly not in the bedroom, whose bare windows looked out across the building sites and the Esil river to the new town. 

I was grateful that he had chosen tastefully white blinds, even though they were cheap metal ones that quickly became tangled as the Astana gales howled through the windows. 

Finishing touches

Shortly afterwards, I discovered a nearby stationery shop that was also selling a few pieces furniture. I bought a new bookcase and a bedside table from there. 

The final touch was some greenery. Outside the Eurasia Centre — a huge warehouse that was halfway between an indoor market and a shopping centre — was a kiosk selling plants, where I bought a trailing spider plant and a huge cheese plant (called a monster plant in Russian) that I put on the windowsill in the kitchen area. 

Nodding in the breeze that blew into the apartment even on warm early autumn days, it cast a dappled light into the room as I sat at my computer working. 

The next morning, I was woken early by the first call to prayer from the Nur-Astana mosque echoing over the empty land to my block. As I lay in bed in the pre-dawn darkness, I felt contented to be in my new cosy home.