Showing posts with label home decorating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home decorating. Show all posts

Saturday, September 9, 2017

See You at NYDC "What's New, What's Next" Finishing Touches Design Presentation at In House

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Garden To Glass Couture Cocktail from Finishing Touches: The Art of Garnishing the Cocktail - Homage to Hacienda Cusin Hummingbirds 

Next week, the glitterati from the worlds of design will gather for the annual “What’s New, What’s Next” event to kick off the fall design season at the New York Design Center (NYDC.)

I’ve attended this decor limned gathering to learn and report on the many showroom brand introductions, talks, and the inspired, creative juggernaut of materials and products, as well as design concepts and trends.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am this year to be co-hosting an event at the In House Kitchen, Bath, Home showroom!

I’m over the moon to work with the creative forces that make up the In House team of Dave, Leah, and Mary and to share top billing with the extraordinary interior design talent of Toni Sabatino - who recently launched her own Retro Collection line of vanities to great success with the Italian design brand, Baden Haus.

In House’s Dave Burcher told me he’d been waiting for my book, Finishing Touches: The Art of Garnishing the Cocktail to work together again. (We collaborated on the Food of the Future NKBA talk, where I was honored to be a featured speaker).

I am honored to work with this extraordinary team again -- everything they do is top-drawer (had to go for the pun -- In House showcases closets, drawers and cabinets!), quality, and well, just so artful and glamorous.

With those qualities in mind, I choose two cocktails and their food pairings that I think are especially suited to the design motif:
  • Heart of Gold


  • And Sweater Weather cocktail, created by mixologist Jessica Wohlers.




We’re having lots of synergistic fun tying in the twin themes of ingredients, design, and finishing touches embellishments!

I look forward to seeing you September 14, at In House. Thank you In House and Wood-Mode.

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Friday, July 13, 2012

Home Renovation Diary Update


The stairway to heaven was cursed. 
In fact, it was driving us to hell in a hand basket!

The spiral staircase was an inspired, gateway to the new loft office/ atelier/guest room. 
It was to be a visual, cinematic gesture: custom black iron work, stairs we’d stain to match the kitchen’s new wood floor, copper-painted spindles to better match the copper floor insets that randomly punctuate the porcelain tile floor in the renovation’s dining and sitting room.
It was a good design concept. 
Bill engineered the specs, found a Pennsylvania craftsman to build it and the railing.
What could be better? Simpler. 
The builders and literature said “Two people, Two days.”

Umm, unless they had a super hero in mind, this is unrealistic and was never going to happen.
But we didn’t yet know that.

As gal Hilary often admonishes, “It takes a village…” and in this case, we did reach out for help. 
With optimism, we had an extended-circle friend come to help install and we were most grateful. 
In just one long day, the spiral stairs were up! 
Thanks to Bill, the point of first-stair entry matched up to the dining room carpet with the precision of a German-engineered Porsche fanaticism. 

Next is the railing.

Not so fast.

The steps we learned have an ordinal pattern that needed to be followed.
Yikes!
The stairs were up and winding and twisting with all their sinuous charm but it was not meant to be.

Solution? 
Not unlike those Apollo astronauts, Bill came up with an original, “duct-tape” remedy that he’d thought about, worked out and re-worked out a gazillion times in his head and on paper.

The plan was brilliant. The jack wasn’t. 
After some stroke-inducing attempts between the two of us, he reluctantly agreed we could use some help.

Yeah!
In came our brother-in-law, Gerry, the mastermind of all things good, family, and construction; along with our fireman-hero nephew Brian and friend, who had the brain muscle and muscle-muscle – if you know what I mean – to get these bloody steps aligned properly. 

Success was celebrated with lots of grilled hot dogs, beer and fair-thee-wells.

Now the “easy” part.
Just needed to get the rail up and banister up.  
Bill painted the spindles a copper color to match the copper in the insets in the floor.  Here they are painted and looked not unlike those terra-cotta Chinese soldiers!  

Bill and I were steeling ourselves for the task ahead when miraculously, the extended-friend circled back ‘round that very morning. 
Brilliant you say.
I did too.

The stair railing was up in less than half the time.
Only trouble was, now the railing  had to be painted in situ.  Sigh.
The question was to spray or to brush paint.  Each was fraught with issues.

Soon, after some trial and testing, all was resolved and we were back on track to completion.
Not without some painful “Holy Smokes” and “Oh for the love of Pete” and some sailor-style cussing.

And there was more, I assure you while putting in the railing. 

Was it worth it? 
Yes.

Decorating the Loft with Furniture

I’m not embarrassed to say, it came to me in a yoga moment.

We had listed our black lacquer furniture that was oh-so-courant in our previous townhouse and as a placeholder in this house on eBay and Craig’s list. (beware that Craig's List, I say)

I had been totally seduced by the sexy Koket day bed while walking the Architectural Digest show earlier this year. http://www.bykoket.com/catalogue/prive.php

(I have been trying to do a feature story on the designer, Janet Morais, ever since I fell in love with her “Love Happens” romantic, design approach.  And will do when we are not so both over the top crazy. But don’t miss her designs simply because we are oversubscribed.)


Feature story to follow, accordingly.  Morais possesses a passionate attention to detail, customer service and an enduring romantic, feminine perspective.
Plus a wicked sense of humor.

It doesn’t get any better.
Plus you get to glam it up.  From the moment it arrived in it's own sarcophagus
My nieces couldn’t resist. 


Neither could I.  
It’s a longer story for another post and while fraught with its own can-you-believe-it-moments, the designer and I never lost our sense of humor and dare I say, glamour. 

The daybed is quite sexy, no? And it has black lacquer sides.
So while I can’t remember if it was a downward facing dog or plough or a triangle pose, it did indeed hit me that hey- I can re-purpose and use the glamorous furniture we have to complement the outrĂ© daybed.

Ask me how much satisfaction it was to “shop” in our garage and basement for long-forgotten furniture and I will tell you it was over the top hilarious.
The price was right. Free!
It cleared out the garage so we could actually put the car back in after almost two years of having my wonderful mother move in with us and accommodating all those boxes and then moving all our stuff there for the repairs and renovation.

It was just so great
And in that meditation moment, it came to be.

The only challenge was we sorely needed that manpower yet again.

To the rescue was nephew Brian aka superhero fireman and friend.

I held my breath twice in spite of their careful, homecrafted attention to hoisting the two furniture pieces up, up, and ally-oop over the loft balcony, prior to the railing going up.  

And then, just like that, it looked like it had all been planned from the get-go.  

In some way, perhaps it was.  All that good karma cannot be a mistake.

Cheers.

Almost there.

Wait till you see the Parisian-like ball-gown silk drapes… 
And the beginnings of the garden design will break your heart with hope…







Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Home Renovation Diary





The color composition was finally coming together:  

We’d tried close to a dozen different color chips/swatches on the walls.  
And re-tried a few more -- and still more.  










I adore that Dorothy Draper at the Greenbriar look. 

  


The decorating diva recommended thinking about the way a room looks from within – as well as from adjoining spaces.

So I did.
I viewed the passages as frames that make each successive wall area pop – especially when viewed as a whole composition.
Getting there with the Draper inspiration


We changed the color of the dining room and sitting room area to a Martha Stewart paint.  Martha Stewart  

Truth was I was trying to match the view from our perch overlooking the water in the Highlands.  
We are blessed to see the sun rise on the northeast, right side windows and the sunsets, often looking like a low hanging, giant orange, on the left side. 
The gorgeous sunrise was the image I shared a few blog posts back.

I was also inspired by a Tiffany bracelet– you know – the new Rubedo Tiffany & Co. line the storied jewelry maker introduced this spring that touted the sunrise, saying it is a “Tiffany metal that captures the rose luminescence of a sunrise.”  Ahhh, be still my heart.
It’s a blend of gold and rose.  Sounded divine. 
While Home Depot couldn’t match the bracelet on the spectrograph, I did find the Martha Stewart Precious Metals line there. The color Sherbet is perfect I thought – goldish with spice/orange smiling through.  Very nuanced. Very rich. 

We loved the way the sample punched up and complemented the other colors and the heroic mirror I purchased from the Cosa Nostra, Genovese family estate sale.  

This paint decision would prove to “controversial.”

Troubles started with the color finishes! 
Most of the painters we interviewed wouldn’t go with anything other than a flat Benjamin Moore. Don’t get me wrong, I am enchanted by their Benjamin Moore Color Stories  and will attend the BJ Colour webinar this week.
I just wish the painters would embrace the full palette of colors and finishes as opposed to the oh-so-common flat, safe colors. 

Repeatedly, I kept hearing the house painter’s admonishment, “You have to have this or you won’t be able to wash the walls.”
This seemed so odd and jangled with my lifestyle but couldn’t put my finger on it.
Finally when I repeated this Painterly Commandment to my girlfriends, the one exclaimed, “Who the F--- washes their walls?!!”
Enough said.
I was back to asking for a paint with a higher sheen – around 7% or so.
I am in love with Farrow & Ball – their high depth paint colors and quality because they use natural pigments and low or minimal VOC.

The super, sensitive painter Roy, Royal Painters, was initially cool to the idea of working with paint sheen like this – but did agree.
And so we agreed to work with him.  (For other reasons too, of course, but this was key.)
He also agreed, reluctantly but adventurously, to working with the Martha Precious Metals paint.

He also eyed me somewhat suspiciously (or was that malice in his eye?!) when I told him I was going to be putting up a swath of skeletal leaves on the wall.
Under the paint.
To give the wall the illusion that leaves had just blown in. scattered-like effect.

The thing is the paint is so thick (later I learned there is a kind of “glue” in it, according to the artist who is doing an original, artful wall color transition).

The garden dining room and sitting area and loft were first up.

The BJ blue-green of the loft turned out perfect right out of the gate. The color seemed to pull in the see and the sky just beyond.  

The Martha Precious Metals paint, on the other hand, had a rather difficult birth.  
It was thick, yes, but dried quickly and the small, special roller that was recommended didn’t allow Roy to move fast enough to get the paint on without long roadway lines up and down the architecturally soaring walls.
Further, after the first coat, the color was Bright orange: pumpkin!  Yikes.
This wasn't even the same family as the Pantone color of the year!  Where was our princess?

Later, while discussing the issue with Roy, we determined the color was “puddling” due to the concentration of color ¾ the angled ceilings were painted the Sherbet color too, you see, probably causing the intense color correction. 

Soooo, I thought and thought about this while looking up.  I suggested we paint those angled walls/ceilings with the same Gypsy Moth, light, light salmon color – looks whitish in some light.
We’d been “told” to paint only the flat-topped areas as ceilings so the angles were considered walls, not ceilings.

So, the primer went back on, the Gypsy Moth ceiling color went on. 





Then we tried two of our earlier paint choices on the wall to see if the change in paint would in fact be better - especially in a room with so much natural light.  

Yuck.  The terra-cotta and gold I initially liked looked so lifeless and drab compared to the Sherbet Precious Metals - even in its comprised state.  
It Glows! Precious Metals Sherbet on Wall & chip

"Roller Roy" has the advantage!
Further, Roy determined it was time to make an educated, professional decision and change the roller.  I agreed. We had to try.  Roy secured an 18” roller that had similar longish lamb’s wool threading that help make the fauxish finish. 

I was upstairs writing and working while Roy and Herman worked downstairs.  On the day when we expected that room to be finished, it was like waiting for the birth announcement.  Nerve-wracking.
When Roy called me to come down, I was nervous. This was almost our last ditch effort to make it work.  My husband had thrown up his hands long ago on this issue saying, “Just paint it all blue.” 
But I had faith – there had been those glimmers on the shorter wall and I believed we could overcome the problems.  Sort of…

When I walked into the room, Roy was looking at me for the reaction, much like the TV show Home Improvement where the host yells, “Move that truck!”

I looked.  I held my breath and my heart.  It was glorious!  The light was streaming in from all sides, rendering the walls a burnished gold, spice color! 
There was depth, nuance, and a richness.  It reflects and refracts, and changes throughout the day and evening. 

Oh happy day. 
Good things come to those who wait….

And to those who have a good, patient and fellow home dĂ©cor explorer as a partner. 
Roy was justifiably proud. 
And now, he recognized that he could add to his portfolio of color and texture treatments for other clients…
Win, win, win.

I love it.

The other colors went on with no battle scars. 
The creamy yellow looks classic and happy next to the dark wood of the kitchen cabinets.  
And I can’t wait to see it next to the reupholstered living room furniture fabric. 
The Farrow & Ball Organery next to the fireplace stone is stunning and so spot on.  
The Dix Blue in the hallow captures the filtered light of the front door, offering a sky-like backdrop for the sparkling stars that dance on the walls there.  
It’s very special…