#these are many of my favorite interior decorating motifs

[dreamcrow]

vibe: impeccably-preserved tomb with exquisite examples of ancient woven textiles, faience, bronze decorations, and with extensive hyper-detailed "Bird-God" and "Storm Deity" motifs recurring on walls of tomb interior. maybe dried oryx in a small pot somewhere

i 100% genuinely want to print this out and frame this, thank you

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Welcome to the home of the founder of Rice, a colorful home accessories company, Charlotte Gueniau. I’m so glad that they sell to the USA now, b/c they have bright Melmac! I love Melmac (aka Melamine) and used to admire their things, but couldn’t get them. Look at how large her house is- they call it “church house,” b/c that’s what it reminds them of. 

When she bought this house, it was stripped down white. Not anymore. This is the center hall. Most of the decor comes from her own company, such as the dull pink wallpaper, basket, ceiling lights with colorful pompoms, and rugs. The bureaus, on the other hand, are ancient.

Charlotte, who has written two books about living with color, does not want to tell you what to do or not to do in interior design. But balance is something she advocates.

She says if you work with colors, it's good to think about keeping it clean. Do not overfill. You have to find a way where the color does not give a disturbing impression, but a calm.

Sometimes you see homes with all the colors of the rainbow matched a bit, and she doesn’t advocate that. Charlotte likes balance in the color scheme.

Charlotte's favorite colors vary. Sometimes she is into bright and clear colors, sometimes in the more dirty tones. Pink and mint are two of her favorite colors. Several of the rooms also feature expressive art.

I need to lighten up my kitchen with colorful dishes b/c it’s small and dark- medium stained wood cabinets w/a gray glass tile backsplash and brown floor. 

The light green wall color in the fourth living room of the house highlights the white stucco.

Humor is present throughout the home. Everywhere there are motifs with animals and small words and messages.

A daughter’s room on the first floor has light blue painted floors. She chose to decorate with pastels and simple touches of strong colors, such as the red lamp.

Wallpaper, colors, and a slightly skewed combination of personal things gathered over a long period of time. A typical detail of the way Charlotte loves to decorate.

This hall is so cheerful.

In the guest room are long curtains with a pink cutlery motif.

Even the bathroom has a round of Charlotte's urge for colors and wallpaper. Here, there’s humorous wallpaper with book stacks

There are so many rooms in this house, and you can see that Charlotte has fun with the decor.

The conservatory is also bathed in wonderful colors and lights up during even the most cloudy day.

https://husohem.se/artiklar/20200417/fargsprakande-och-funktionellt-hos-rice-grundaren/

[mcmansionhell]

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1973

Howdy, folks! I come to you with a special salve to soothe the ache of social isolation and general societal turmoil: a particularly cursed house. Our 1973 house comes to us from Jackson County, Michigan, and, frankly, if you put the term “1973″ into an ugly house generator, this is most certainly what would come out: 

What we have here is a classic “Mansard” style house, named for exaggerated form of the type of roof (the mansard), a variation of hipped roof characterized by a steep slope punctured by dormer windows extending into or forming another story. This subgenre of house was popular in the 1960s and 70s, especially so in the Pacific Northwest and in vacation towns around the country.  This lovely estate is currently on the market for around $800,000, and boasts a remarkable 6 bedrooms and 5.5 baths. 

Lawyer Foyer

This house is what is colloquially referred to as a “time capsule” house in that it literally has not been touched since 1973, the year it was built. There are several interesting 70s motifs here, including the wallpaper and carpeting. We have an early example of a fully-formed “lawyer foyer” - a full two-story entryway featuring a curved or otherwise showy staircase and a chandelier that can be seen from the outside via a transom window larger than the door above which it sits. The furnishings are original; note the intricate, heavy front door featuring Orientalist motifs that were particularly popular in the 1970s. That being said, it’s ugly. 

Dining Room?

During the 1970s, Colonial Revival furnishings and architectural motifs were especially popular due to the influence of the American Bicentennial, which was apparently a huge deal. In general, there was a lot of brown furniture that was very heavy because people wanted to buy one piece of furniture that would last until they died. This was because Ikea was not yet a thing. (In all seriousness, there is a great Collector’s Weekly article about this.) 

Kitchen

Honestly, this is probably one of the better kitchens on this website, and it’s interesting to see such a modern-styled decor in a house that, despite its contemporary exterior is otherwise rife with traditionalist decor. 

Wet Bar

As far as McMansion wine bars go, at least this one somewhat approaches a weird architectural metaphor for, like, deconstructivist philosophy or something else people in graduate school study. 

Master Bedroom

One has to applaud the photographer for their artistic decision to make every room in this house look as cursed as possible. Also: apparently the sunroom later on in this post is what’s behind the bed, which is very, very strange. 

Master Bathroom

My question is: how is this room simultaneously grey, brown, and beige all at the same time. Scholars around the world are baffled. 

Sunroom (behind bed for some reason)

I don’t know what one does in a space like this? It’s behind the wall of the master bedroom, so it’s not a public-facing space. There are no plants or books or other activities. There is just brown furniture, weighing heavy on my isolation-addled brain. 

Basement Bar

Ok, so these folks really enjoyed drinking. We all used to laugh at people who had bars in their house but now that all the bars are closed, who is laughing now?? (It’s me, I’m still laughing.) 

That does it for the interior - now, our favorite part:

Rear Exterior

Personally, as ugly as elements of this house are, I definitely see it as one of the most fascinating to ever end up on this blog. I kind of have a soft spot for houses like this, simply because they are so strange. Anyways, speaking of strange architecture, stay tuned for another installment of the Brutalism Post coming soon! Stay safe and be well! 

I know that these are economically uncertain times, but many creators including myself depend on Patreon for most of their income, so if you have a minimum of $12/year to spare and are into bonus content, then do I have some good news for you:

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!

There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including: good house of the month, an exclusive Discord server, monthly livestreams, a reading group, free merch at certain tiers and more!

Not into recurring donations but still want to show support? Consider the tip jar!

Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store! Proceeds from the store help protect great buildings from the wrecking ball.

[reh-sa]

الفرنسية؟: Middle Eastern influence in Vere

So, the thing is, I’m a nerd when it comes to the Middle East. I love the history, culture and aesthetic so much! Now we all know and love our fantasy version of France called Vere, but while I read Captive Prince, I couldn’t help to think that Pacat might have been influenced by the Middle East in her worldbuilding as well. I think it fits incredibly well into the Captive Prince world, so I decided to make a list of the things that drew my attention. I’m by no means an expert and I’m not refering to a specific country’s history here; of course, the “Middle Eastern culture” doesn’t exist, just like there is not a single “European culture”. Instead, I wrote down all the things that reminded me of certain aspects from different Middle Eastern countries.

First, I think the most obvious hint is the fact that “Vere” was originally called “Rabat” in Pacat’s first livejournal version. The real-life Rabat is the name of the capital of Morocco. And fun fact: French is actually the official business and education language in Morocco.

There is also the architecture. This is how Damen describes his first taste of Veretian architecture:

» As for the room, everywhere he looked his eyes were assaulted with ornamentation. The walls were overrun by decoration. The wooden doors were delicate as a screen and carved with a repeated design that included gaps in the wood; [...] The windows were similiar screened. Even the floor tiles were parti-colored and arranged in geometric pattern. Everything gave the impression of patterns within patterns, the twisty creations of the Veretian mind. «

Now, compare that description with pictures of the interiors of famous mosques and palaces. Here are some examples of ornamental walls and tiles, and here of doors and windows (and many more to be found on pinterest!). It really fits Damen’s description well. You will realize very quickly that geometrical starbursts (Laurent’s symbol) are a very popular motif in these patterns, too. There are also the floor baths in Vere, something that wasn’t a thing in France, and the chambers where Laurent’s pets are supposed to reside (if he had any) are literally refered to as “harem”...

As for the culture, the strong seperation between genders is another thing that reminded me of the Middle East, which has been practiced for many centuries and partly even today. 

There is a line at the banquet where Damen notices that all of the servants are attractive looking pages. I had to giggle a bit about that, because the Persians were known to choose servants for their looks, to have at least a bit of an eyecandy, as women weren’t allowed to men’s gatherings at all. And speaking of Persians: They were hella gay. They were so gay, that the topic of same-sex love was the favorite kind of poetry in the Persian and later Ottoman Empire (who copied a lot from the Persians). In fact, they considered poetry adressed to a woman to be immodest. And even better: One of the most popular themes was the love to a slave soldier! *wink* 

Even though homosexual relationships were officially forbidden, it was something that was rarely pursued. There are many Middle Eastern historical figures that openly had male lovers. In fact, having a male lover was sometimes easier than a relationship with a woman (without being married to her):

In Ottoman society, sexual or erotic relations between men or men and boys were seldom punished, especially if they were carried on in private, and homoerotic relations were in a much less serious class of crimes than illicit sexual contacts with women, which could, in theory, result in death by stoning. (Source)

Sadly, this is an aspect of Middle Eastern history that often gets erased nowadays, but I can recommend this website and this blog if you want to know more! (Also, while it is sad that a lot of these same-sex relationships were pederastic, please note that this wasn’t something exclusive to the Middle East and you could find the same ideals of pederastic love in Ancient Greece and many other cultures.)

In general, a culture based on Persia fits the setting in the Captive Prince world really well for a different reason too: Ancient Greece and Ancient Persia pretty much hated each other, were constantly at war, and liked to refer to each other as “barbarians”.

I’m not too sure if there is an equivalent to Veretian pets, but they did remind me a bit of Turkish Köçek dancers. Here is a quote from wikipedia:

» The youths, often wearing heavy makeup, would curl their hair and wear it in long tresses under a small black or red velvet hat decorated with coins, jewels and gold. [...] They were said to be 'sensuous, attractive, effeminate', and their dancing 'sexually provocative'. Dancers minced and gyrated their hips in slow vertical and horizontal figure eights, rhythmically snapping their fingers and making suggestive gestures. Often acrobatics, tumbling and mock wrestling were part of the act. The köçeks were available sexually, often to the highest bidder, in the passive role. «

Mock wrestling and acrobatics is something we see in Veretian pets too, as well as the extravagant makeup!

As for Veretian fashion, while I don’t know about any laces in ancient and medieval clothing (I think Damen is exaggerating here anyway), Middle Eastern fashion is and was known to be very non-revealing, and often, multiple layers and layers of clothes were worn. Definitely something Damen would hate!

Another hint is Laurent himself. He doesn’t look like a typical Middle Eastern person at all, but don’t forget his mother is a foreigner. As Pacat once said on her twitter, Laurent is supposed to have his mother’s look (the Kemptian side of the family), while on the other hand, Damen comments on how he doesn’t look like his uncle at all (the Veretian side of the family). On top of that, his blond hair was rare enough to recognize him by it. So rare that Laurent’s pursuers simply searched for somebody blond, and so rare he hid by covering up his hair. Or, as Damen put it:

“You stand out in this light. Your mousy hair’s like a beacon.”

The same goes for Ancel: In the “Pet” short story, the Regent refers to his red hair as “exotic” in Vere. It made me question if the Veretian population is really as light as the fandom thinks.

And, last, orientalism was a huge thing in real-life France. With the alliance to the Ottoman Empire, their curiosity raised and French paintings depicting a romantized version of the Middle East sprouted like weed. They fancied the aesthetic so much that the nobles would have themselves potrayed in Turkish clothes! I often have to think of how in the early chapters, Damen is lying stretched out on silken pillows all day, or how he sees a woman smoking a long pipe (a hookah?), holding her beautiful pet...if that isn’t a cliché from an orientalist painting!

So, was Pacat partially inspired by the Middle East when she wrote Vere? Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts! But I think this whole aesthetic fits Vere incredibly well, if only for Laurent stuffing Turkish delight into his mouth and Damen’s frustration over learning all these ornamental letters…!

[embarktodenmark22]

May 27th, 2022

Today was kind of a rough one. Not because of anything we did, but because my foot pain is becoming debilitating. I can’t tell if it’s normal to be in this much pain because my body simply isn’t used to walking 5-10 miles a day, or if something is genuinely wrong. Either way, it’s really taking away from my enjoyment and I hope it stops.

Anyways, we met at the station again this morning, and I finally tried this popular chain, “Joe and the Juice-“ it was alright. It’s basically their version of Starbucks (there are zero Starbucks downtown as far as I can tell, by the way!). I probably just didn’t order the best thing- Idk I got some sort of “Energizer” drink, it had ginger and some sort of omega-3 ingredient that left a fishy aftertaste for a long while. Definitely gonna try something else if I go back to another one of those.

Anyways, we met up with the group in some light rain at the train station this time, rather than the courtyard. Our destination today was Hillerod, to see the castle and explore the town. We hopped on our train and rode it to the end of the line. I don’t know what it is about train rides (it could still be jet lag) but they make me oh so sleepy. It went by relatively quickly, as I spent most of the ride editing photos for the May 26th blog post. Once we got there, we set off on a lovely walk through the town and surrounding nature. Slowly, the castle in the distance grew closer.

Surrounding the castle is this gorgeous, scenic lake- full of lush greenery and friendly birds, ducks, and swans (and baby swans). We established a later meeting point, and set off to the castle with 4 hours to explore whatever we wanted to explore in the town. The castle interior was gorgeous. In hindsight, now that my feet aren’t eating me alive, it was so, so rich with Art- hidden decor or paintings in every corner. We entered into this gorgeous room/hall with walls covered in deer motifs (With presumably real antlers) and one cat (sorry, I will always notice cat themed things wherever I go). There were also some funky decorations that didn’t really have an explanation- they were just… bits of taxidermied birds jutting out of fake cake? Bizarre, but interesting nonetheless.

The first part of the exhibit was an incredibly ornate chapel- again, art on literally every possible surface. On the walls, 10 or so ginormous Christian paintings in a gorgeous art style. On the pillars, paintings of saints- the ceiling, elaborate ornamentation and extremely pink, fleshy relief sculptures. It was a maximalist delight for the eyes that I really, really, really wish I could have been fully present and engaged with (frowny face). (Guess I need to learn how to cope with my pain… or go buy stupidly expensive comfort shoes that may or may not work. Shrug). Anyways- absolutely gorgeous. I also noticed I keep seeing this symbol of a C with a number inside of it everywhere- This chapel had one with “IX” inside of a C- I’ll have to look into what that means, as a similar symbol is on our dorm BaseCamp building.

The next room after the chapel had gorgeous windows with tiny paintings adorning it around the borders. So, so cool. From there, we walked through room after room after room of elaborate art and portraiture of royal families and important historical figures- I really regret not having done historical research prior to coming here. Maybe I’ll research up some of the other places we’ll be going to. But, anyways, there was so, so, so much art that I saw that was either as good as or better than the art I’ve learned about in my art history courses, all of it just sitting there crowded on walls together, within touching distance- some of the paintings sitting right next to open windows (hello, preservation, anyone? The windows had a nasty glare that ruined so many of my photos, too :P)

Of the rooms I paced through, my favorite was of some ceiling art. This entire ceiling was covered in monochromatic portraits of the different Greek deities, and in the center was a raised dome in bold blue and gold, featuring constellations and zodiac signs. Looking back on some of my photos of this room now, I realize they are blurry and I didn’t take enough. Man does that make me die inside a little. Whoops.

Anyways, I eventually got separated from everyone and was, essentially, walking alone through these large rooms filled with fancy portraits and furniture (so many chairs, none of them could I sit on….. my poor feet. Sorry, I’ll shut up about the pain now haha). After seeing most of the portraits, I meandered up to the next floor to the modern/contemporary art collection they had- saw some cool portraits of contemporary figures, some funny portraits of contemporary Danish culture, some sad (like one about the realities of war), and I saw a Warhol piece that I never knew existed!

After roaming the castle’s collections to the extent I desired, I limped out and slowly made my way back around the path of the lake, stopping to photograph friendly birds, to go find a bite to eat. I made it back to the Main Street area with only an hour left to kill. I didn’t want to risk going to a sit-down place, so I popped over to a hotdog shack. Only after I ordered did I realize that they didn’t take card and I was down to the last of my cash before I hit the ATM some time in the next few days. Luckily, I had just enough coinage to cover the 30 DKK cost. It was a DAMN good hotdog- especially after hours of being starving and in pain. A damn good hotdog. I ate it like I hadn’t eaten in days. It had bread and butter pickles, standard ketchup/mustard, and some sort of yummy crunchy breading. So. Good.

After that, I tried to shop, but things seemed pricey. I went into a shoe store feeling hopeful, then less hopeful after seeing 1,000 DKK price tags ($150). It’s really hard to put a price on my comfort, not going to lie. But I don’t feel comfortable dropping that much on shoes that 1) I won’t use for anything when I get home, 2) might not even help the pain. I tried a couple other stores, but they were mostly either home goods, full of clothes for teeny tiny skinny human beings (most only went up to a size L at most- and definitely not an American style size L. Could maybe fit one arm in those shirts, and that’s being generous). Yet, I wound up with about 45 minutes to kill. So, luckily, I found a delicious looking gelato store. I walked in, saw this cool pistachio ginger flavor that my family would probably call me weird for ordering, and asked for a large scoop of it, happily chowing down while I walked back to our meeting place.

I was first, others joined. I saw a guy eating a sandwich get attacked by this bird that looked like a crow but with a silver chest (cool birds here ngl), so that was funny. I’m pretty sure the bird only attacked him because they were getting too close before and he did some jerk move to scare them off, so it was funny watching them get their justice. Smart birds. Eventually some of my trip mates and I ducked into a store to get shelter from the cold, cold wind. Not long after, the rest of the group met up and we went back to the train. By now, the pain had me exhausted so the moment we hit the train, I popped an earbud in (I’d gone almost a whole week without listening to my music- isn’t that strange?) and passed out. So sleepy. I was barely sentient when the train ride ended and we all walked back up to street level, got tomorrow’s meeting time, and walked home. Obviously, I wasn’t done resting, so I took an hour long nap back at the dorms. Wasn’t enough sleep- and I’m yawning as I type (even after drinking a red bull a few hours ago. What a scam) so I am so looking forward to bed tonight.

The original plan was to go to a club tonight in a different part of town with a big group. But most of the girls went out to do more shopping (I had some good finds) after I got up from my nap. We spent some time going in and out of a few different stores, but, same problem as earlier, they were not plus-size friendly so I really was only looking. But that was okay, because some of the clothes were strange- like a trench coat that looked like it was made of tin foil, a leather vest straight out of How to Train Your Dragon, and several bold green and neon orange statement pieces that were easily 1000-3000 DKK (again, 1000 is $150). Even at the two affordable stores we visited, there wasn’t really any particular style I was vibing with. I just got a tote bag and a mug. Not easy being a big gal in Copenhagen if you want fancy clothes, I guess. (Which is so bizarre to me- there are definitely plus size people here, I’ve seen many, but not a single store I went to today had literally anything over XL… at BEST. Makes me angry).

Oh, anyways, the clubbing. We collectively decided (pardon my French) fuck that. None of the gals had the spirit to go- it was so, so cold, pretty rainy, and none of us had time to get ready after we’d get back because the guys wanted to go immediately after the club opened. So we grabbed a nice 7/11 dinner (and, listen, I know 7/11 food in the states is scary, but here it is honestly just as good if not better than cafe food. And cheaper) and walked back to BaseCamp through the park. It was nice having a break from the testosterone- we just sat in the basement lounge, eating and discussing our lives and our time in college. Eventually Kelsey wanted to leave to dye her hair, so we split ways- which I’m not mad about. These blog posts take an hour, I honestly want to go to sleep right now, and it gives me enough time to do both. Gods am I exhausted.

Well, I hope tomorrow is easier on me! We go to Sweden for the day!!! So, so, excited.

[mariajustinteriordesigns]

Bring Nature Indoors With Textile Prints + Curtains

Hello and happy Friday, let’s fill our imaginations today with some lovely ideas for the home with botanical curtains and textile wall hangings. I loved reading about how artist, Pernille Folcarelli in Denmark, uses both to, “create a soft home style and a calm, harmonious atmosphere.”

I personally love the first image shown above, handmade by Pernilli, because it speaks to my personal aesthetic so very closely. Everything about it, from the rosy wall color to the calmness in the display, and of course the wall hanging, tugs at my heart. The books on the cart, the ceramics, dried flowers, it’s very feminine, calm, and modern.

Aside from looking beautiful, it’s also important to note that textiles reduce disturbing room acoustics or that “hollow” echo that so many minimalist rooms have.

I know this isn’t a trend in the states, but did you know that many northern Europeans have ditched curtains for simple blinds or shades, or nothing at all? I vote to please BRING THE CURTAINS BACK! I love how they both frame a window and absorb sound so a room loses that annoying echo which is so extremely cold. Also, I love how, in the evening, windows are no longer big black boxes - you can close the drapes and enjoy your cozy, warm nest.

Above is another example of warm and beauty, which speaks to my heart as well. I love the vintage-inspired lamp and the printed drapes because they give this otherwise bare room a bit of a soul. I also like seeing patterns. For very long now, pattern has been outed a bit here in northern Europe - passed by for solids, tactile things like faux fur, velvet, “teddy bear” chairs, leather, etc.

In America and the UK pattern seems to be forever a thing - they LOVE their patterns. It isn’t as common here these days to see printed drapes in the homes of local Instagram influencers or even in your favorite design books and magazines. Everything is very solid and tactile, which is super lovely, but when I see this room above I definitely vote YES on prints done right.

The Dutch are starting to move prints into the interiors world again, and the Danish are giving it a go, so let’s see where we end up.

I gladly welcome back patterns BUT in a very controlled fashion, as shown above. The example below is a bolder version of the one above that maybe would appeal to someone who really LOVES pattern and color combined - someone BOLD! Both examples are just lovely.

BUT on the flipside, I can’t imagine living in the 80s or 90s again when everything was printed including wall-to-wall carpet. Do you recall those days? Here’s a fun thing to try so please google it: do you remember the floral sofa from the Golden Girls’ home? WE HAD THAT SOFA in our home for 10 years. Yes, really. My mother was a massive decorator, totally full-blown into it. She had all the latest and loved color. We had macrame, dried flowers, gold embellished everything, ficus fig-trees, pampas grass, and rattan chairs long before they came back in vogue in 2018.

I still remember when our Golden Girls apricot sofa moved in - heavily patterned, I knew the 80s had arrived and my mother was giddy over it. And if you’re wondering what our sofa looked like before the Golden Girls sofa, it was a super plush lime green velvet sofa (70s) which I was perfectly happy with, combined with gold metallic bamboo-patterned wallpaper and Chinese hand-painted porcelain in the cabinet with red dragons painted all over it. In the corner, a large vase filled with very tall pampas grass. In the windows, macrame planted hanging from hooks filled with plants.

This view below may appeal to the monochromatic fans out there, or fans of the handmade minimalist modern movement where everything is very sculptural and rooms are extraordinarily edited. The patterned wall hanging offers something more than a mirror or framed art.

I like what Pernille, the maker behind these patterned textiles, has to say about our innate connection to nature,

“In an unpredictable and uncertain world, we turn to nature. It brings calmness and grounding. Studies show that we relax and feel less stressed when looking at nature's motives. This also applies to images and imprints of plants and nature. But having lots of nature outside is not a given for everyone. Therefore, plant motifs on the walls are a unique opportunity to surround ourselves with botany and green colors. Like an indoor garden, which requires neither watering nor care.”

I want to wish you a wonderful weekend, thank you for stopping by my blog to visit me today!

Love,

Holly

Photos: Pernille Folcarelli

[connorrenwick]

DMTV Milkshake: Aimee Wilder on Sharing the Beauty of Pattern

This week’s DMTV Milkshake guest is Aimee Wilder, founder and creative director of her eponymous line of home decor and accessories.

Native New Yorker Aimee Wilder founded her brand in 2009, after reworking her fine art illustrations as wallcoverings that took the design world by storm, ultimately landing her staff positions with big-league names like Martha Stewart, Dwell Studio and the Gap. She now makes editorial-ready wallpaper, tile, rugs, cushions and more, many of which share her trademarked sense of playful exuberance – emblemized by print-centric wallpapers like the monstera-leaf Deliciosa Bungalow and the giant gold automatons of Big Robots.

In this edition of DMTV Milkshake, we talked to Wilder about Martha Stewart’s color library, Wilder’s ideal wallpaper and her favorite era of wallcoverings: “I like all of the eras – I love the ’60s and ’70s, but the one that resonates with me the most is the 1920s,” she tells us. “In the ’20s, you can see a huge change from what was going on before, with the use of deco motifs and metallics. It lends itself to what we do with metallics, and also clean motifs. The shapes help me think of the applications and shapes that we have now.”

Wilder also shares her thoughts on where her brand will head next. “I’m definitely into fashion – I think it’s really fun,” Wilder says. “With the brand, I think the best thing for us to do is to focus on home decor – it was my first love and it’s what the brand was supposed to be, so we want to expand as much as possible into home decor before we move into fashion. It could be a licensing project that helps us get into fashion.” For now, though, she’s focused on the release of the Apogee collection of floor coverings: “The idea of offering products to outfit the entire home, rather than just the walls, is super exciting to me.”

Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.

Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.

via http://design-milk.com/

from WordPress https://connorrenwickblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/dmtv-milkshake-aimee-wilder-on-sharing-the-beauty-of-pattern/

[fromherlips]

the secret gift exchange - a brooklyn boy drabble

hope you guys don’t mind getting introduced to a few characters a bit early before the story is posted! this is just a little insight into their lives, so i hope you enjoy the kind of sneak peek into the story with a canon drabble. <3

There were few people in their circle of friends that would willingly go shopping with Rowan. Even her best friend and roommate Dominique refused to go to any store besides their weekly trip to grocery shop. Even a trip to Duane Reade was risky and required at least twenty minutes of browsing, hemming and hawing over whether or not she should pick up a load of new drugstore beauty products to try out. For the blog, of course. That was always her excuse whilst shopping and nobody could argue.

With the promise of a nice lunch, Rowan managed to convince Niall to go holiday shopping with her on a Saturday afternoon. A few days prior, they were lounging on her couch while Dominique was out of the apartment on a date with her boyfriend Liam. Niall was a few beers deep, distracted by the movie that they’d somewhat agreed on watching (though Rowan spent most of the time copy-editing her blog posts for the next week to ensure there were no errors and everything was linked properly).

While he was relaxed and his guard was down, Rowan took advantage and asked if he would tag along so she could pick up gifts for her family when she went home for Christmas. She watched him hesitate, his mouth agape while he surely tried to think of any excuse to give to get himself out of it. Before he could say anything, Rowan then reminded him that he had blown her off the week before for a date, leaving her to attend an event alone. Reluctantly, he agreed, but at least he showed up at her apartment the morning of their shopping excursion with a smile on his face, albeit a forced one.

“Why are you even buying gifts?” Niall asked, incessantly touching items on the shelves as they walked through Anthropologie. “Can’t you just re-gift some of your PR samples?”

“That, Niall, would be rude,” Rowan scoffed, picking up one of the monogrammed mugs. “I don’t re-gift the products I don’t use. I happily give them to friends and family without any ulterior reasons.”

Niall pouted. “I never get anything,” he whined.

“I’ll give you some skincare next time,” Rowan commented, staring at the mug in her hands for a few more seconds before placing it back on the shelf. “You could do with a little bit of a routine.”

“You already have me on a routine!” he argued, no doubt furrowing his brows at Rowan. Her back was faced to him as she examined a different mug that was eye level with her on the shelf. “I cleanse, exfoliate, and do those dumb masks too.”

“Do you use your serums and moisturize?” she asked, smirking before she even heard his loud groan. “I’m only joking. Niall. Your skin is great. I’m just helping you try to prevent any early on-set aging. I’m merely trying to keep you glowing and youthful forever.”

Rowan jumped when she felt the back of Niall’s hand smacking her in the back of the shoulder. She craned her neck to look behind her, narrowing her eyes at Niall while he grinned back at her. “You’re a menace,” she finally said, walking away from the mugs to a new section of the store. “C’mon, I need to get some bits for my sisters.”

“All of them?” Niall asked, his footsteps not far behind Rowan’s.

“Just Chloe,” Rowan replied. “Kennedy and Fallon are a bit too young for Anthro.”

“What about Sammy and Porter?”

“Porter is still going through his gaming phase, so I’ve already ordered four games to the house for my mom to hide,” Rowan explained. “And then I have another order with some cool joggers that he and Sammy basically live in.”

“What’d you spoil Sammy with?” Niall joked. Rowan didn’t have favorite siblings, but Niall always teased her that her brother Sam was her favorite. She’d deny it, of course, but she couldn’t lie that she was closer to Sammy than the rest of her younger siblings.

Rowan mumbled something under her breath, trying to avoid answering the question. She had spoiled Sammy, but she hadn’t gone as over the top as she could have. Rowan had, admittedly, started to go a little overboard for the holidays and birthdays in the prior couple of years. She was torn between feeling lucky and not wanting to diminish all of the hard work that she had put into her blog she started as a hobby her freshman year of college as her creative outlet and digital diary.

“I only got him a hoodie and sneakers,” she finally said, realizing Niall wasn’t going to take her silence and mumbles as an answer.

“Was that the Supreme hoodie that I saw in your room the other week?” Niall asked. Rowan didn’t answer, merely nodding while she sorted through a rack of blouses. “You’re a generous older sister.”

“He’s my brother,” Rowan replied. “I know gifts aren’t important, but when I can’t be with them all of the time, I have to do something.”

“You could call him more,” Niall pointed out.

Rowan winced, her hand freezing as she grabbed onto the shoulder of one of the shirts. “You know my schedule, Niall,” Rowan mumbled, letting her grasp on the top loosen on the top before she turned on her heel and away from the display. Rowan wandered through the store with the bridge of her nose pinched between two fingers, keeping her head down while she tried to find an isolated corner.

“Rowan, come back,” Niall said, keeping his voice as low as he could so he didn’t draw attention to them. They found themselves sandwiched between a display of doorknobs and a dish towels, face to face even if Rowan spent more time staring at her feet. “Rowan, I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, trying to snap out of her mood. “No, no, it’s fine,” she assured him, letting out a long sigh before she looked at him. “Sorry, it’s just…I must be tired, that’s all.”

“Alright,” he said. “Do you want to stay here?”

“I’m not seeing anything for Chloe,” Rowan replied. “I think that I’ll be able to find something for her at Bloomingdale’s. And if I can’t, then one of my girls there will!”

Niall snorted. “Alright Rowan, well at least we tried here,” he said. “Where else do we need to go today?”

“Just a few more places,” she replied. “I need to get more gifts for Fallon and Kennedy, a couple of more things for Dominique, and one little thing for Liam.”

“Already picked out your gift exchange present?” he asked. “It’s next Friday, you know.”

“Of course I know,” Rowan replied. “I’ve had everything for my gift exchange since I found out who I got.”

“Really?” he asked, raising his brows. “Who’d you get?”

“As if I’d tell you,” she replied. “It’s supposed to be a secret. All I’m going to say is that I knew exactly what I was going to get when I found out who I got.”

Niall furrowed his brows, lines creasing deep into his forehead. “Louis told me who he got,” Niall complained. “Why can’t you cave?”

“Because I cherish the element of surprise when it comes to gift exchanges, especially when that was rule number one,” Rowan replied. “Now stop pouting and maybe if you’re lucky, you can help pick out outfits for some upcoming blog posts.”

“I thought we were gift shopping?” he asked.

“I deserve gifts from myself, too,” Rowan replied with a casual shrug.

***********

Rowan stayed up until three o’clock in the morning working to ensure that her schedule after noon (or at least two) was free to clean her apartment for the gift exchange. Other than the usual group of Niall, Rowan, Dominique, and Liam, Rowan had also included their favorite bartender from the pub near her apartment. Louis, a few of her blogger friends that had gone out quite a few times with the group, and her main photographer Harry. It made the whole secret element of the gift exchange that much more exciting, expanding the pool of possible gift-givers.

Beyond tidying the apartment and clearing it from all of her props from a few photo spreads she set-up throughout the apartment for various posts about interiors, Rowan had the exciting task of adding decorations. She and Dominique kept the decorating to a minimum, mostly because Rowan preferred simple gold and silver motifs and tiny touches through home décor. But for their miniature party, she scoured Etsy for as many cute and crafty décor pieces she could find, filling in the gaps where her normal decorations lacked.

Dominique and Liam were going to pick up the food when they both got out of work, Harry was bringing his camera to capture the moment, and her friends each offered to make some kind of dessert or drink (no doubt as an excuse to do a post about it, an ongoing joke every time they got together). All Rowan had to do was make sure that the apartment was ready to host the gift exchange and holiday party before everyone dispersed to go back home with their families or significant others.

She had festive music on the set the mood while she put the finishing touches on the apartment before everyone arrived. There was about an hour until Dominique got back and two until everyone would start to arrive (assuming they wouldn’t come late, which was also a common occurrence). The music drowned out the silence, Rowan’s go-to to make working from home more tolerable. This was no different, the soft hum of music filling the gaps where Dominique’s chatter or their favorite television shows would be. Sometimes she put on shows that she’d seen a dozen times just so she could hear familiar voices, but that was typically when she was absolutely swamped with deadlines and didn’t have as much leniency with her free time.

Dominique and Liam added the finishing touches to Rowan’s set-up when they got back to the apartment, giving her about thirty minutes to get ready. She rushed through her foolproof ten-minute makeup routine, leaving her hair in its natural wavy state to avoid the hassle of trying to curl it. She’d had an outfit picked out since she suggested the gift exchange party, pulling the garish red turtleneck sweater dress from its section in her closet. It complimented her opaque black tights and white and silver embellished statement headband, one that got her called Blair Waldorf every single time she wore it.

Rowan was in the middle of choosing a lipstick color when she heard a knock at her door. Before she could even turn around to respond, she heard her door creak open followed by footsteps on the hardwood floor. “Dom?” she asked, plunging her hand into her lipstick drawer to find a suitable shade of red.

“Sub?” Niall replied, cackling at his own joke. Rowan rolled her eyes, continuing on her hunt rather than turning around to face him. “Whatcha doing?”

“Looking for lipstick,” she replied, pulling out two of her possible choices. She held them up towards the light, examining which would be the perfect match for her dress. “Which one?”

Niall took a few steps forward, squinting his eyes to look at the two tubes of liquid lipstick that Rowan chose. “Well, don’t you always complain that these ones dry darker than they look?” Niall asked, pointing to the tube in her left hand. “I like the one on the right anyway.”

“Thanks, Niall,” Rowan replied, turning around to put the losing lipstick away. She sat down in front of her vanity, scooting closer to the mirror so she could apply the lipstick precisely around her lips. Neither of them spoke as Rowan perfected the edges, ensuring that there wasn’t a line out of place. She used her hand to fan her lips after she applied a second layer, waiting for it to dry before she let her lips touch.

“The apartment looks great,” Niall said, sitting down on Rowan’s bed while she fixed her hair in the mirror. “I’m assuming it was partially for the blog?”

“I do things that don’t have to do with the blog, you know,” Rowan scoffed, rolling her eyes at Niall’s reflection in the corner of her mirror. “I just wanted to spread the holiday spirit a little more, that’s all. Jerk.”

“Not sure how Santa is going to feel about the name-calling, but to each their own,” Niall said, pushing himself off of her bed. “I’m going to go keep Liam company because you know how he gets when there’s a lot of people that he doesn’t know.”

“It’s only a few girls!” Rowan argued.

“It’s eight girls,” Niall corrected Rowan. “They’re all very sweet, but I think Liam would appreciate the extra familiar face.”

Rowan sighed. “Thank you, Ni.”

“Of course, Row,” he replied. “Now come on, can’t spend your gift exchange party in your room.”

In retrospect, having eight of the girls over along with their usual group was probably not the greatest idea. It made the gift exchange a little more thrilling, but fourteen people crowded into the apartment in the presence of alcohol made things a little hectic. Rowan felt like she was on her feet the entire time, trying to clean up and organize while everyone else mingled. The first time she sat and chatted for more than a few minutes at a time was when they finally decided to gather around in the living room for the main event: the gift exchange.

Everyone went around in a circle, choosing the boxes or bags from the middle with their names on the tags. It was fun watching everybody’s reactions, especially to who got the gift for them. It involved a lot of squealing and hugging, acts of pure excitement that nearly caused four wine spillages on Rowan’s carpet. Niall was one of the last people to go, leaving Rowan’s knees knocking together as she sat on the couch across from the chair he was sitting in.

Rowan chewed on her bottom lip as she watched Niall open the small box. She knew what was in the box, of course. She was the one who’d spent far too long trying to pick out the perfect wrapping paper for the gift. Or rather, the fake gift. She abided by the $50 limit, filling the box with new strings, picks, and a book about Bruce Springsteen that he had been eyeing in the bookstore two months before. But she also knew that there was a note attached inside written in her sloppy attempt at calligraphy that told him to hang around after everyone left for a fourth part to the gift.

Niall tilted his head to the side as she folded the note back up, tucking it behind the cover of the book. Rowan merely shrugged when he looked across the table at her, turning to her right so she could see what her friend Marisol got. She could feel his stare on the side of her face, but she ignored him for the time being, trying to remain blasé about the entire situation.

After everyone got their presents, the party seemed to die down. The girls started to leave one by one, hugging Rowan tightly before they exchanged wishes for a happy holiday and vague plans for the next time they would hang out. Even Dominique and Liam left, choosing to spend the night at Liam’s apartment before they split up for the holidays. Niall was the last person to leave, busying himself by picking up glasses from around the living room and kitchen, dumping whatever liquid was left in them before placing them in the dishwasher. Rowan was scrubbing down surfaces and mopping up some of the muddy snow that had melted near the door from people’s shoes.

They worked in silence as if they were too scared to acknowledge the note in Rowan’s gift to Niall. Sometimes they just functioned better in silence.

“Rowan.”

She looked up from the kitchen table where the food had been laid out, quirking her brows at Niall as he leaned against the closed dishwasher. “What’s up?” she asked, her hand stopped mid-wipe, hands clenched around the cloth.

“Not to sound greedy, but what was that note about?” he asked.

“Oh,” she breathed out. “I suppose the apartment is clean enough now. C’mon.”

She abandoned the cloth in the center of the table, motioning for Niall to follow her down the hall to her bedroom. She wrung her hands together, hiding her nervousness from Niall. It was silly to be nervous about giving him a present, but she could easily imagine his reaction. It didn’t seem fair to not treat Niall the same way she’d treat her family. She didn’t see him as a brother, not like she saw Dominique as a sister, but he felt just as much a part of her family as her actual siblings did. It seemed wrong to not do something extra for him, especially during the season of giving.

“Rowan, please tell me that you’re not going to wrap a bow around yourself and declare yourself my present,” Niall commented, stopping in her doorway while Rowan continued to wander inside her bedroom.

“Oh my god, get over yourself,” she groaned, spinning around to flip Niall off. “I should revoke your final present.”

“Row, what you got for me was plenty,” Niall said, leaning against her doorway. “I don’t need anything else.”

“I know,” she replied. “But I couldn’t help myself and I think you’ll like it.”

“Rowan, what did you do?” he asked.

She shrugged, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “Check inside my closet,” she said, pointing towards the set of doors to her right. “Look, I’m leaving to go back home in two days and I wanted to make sure you got your present before I left, that’s all.”

Rowan wiped her sweaty palms on the comforter, her knees jittering in anticipation as Niall walked from the doorway to her closet. Dominique would’ve told her it was an impulse buy if she had known that Rowan got it for Niall. She was shopping on Broome Street between meetings when she wandered into Rudy’s Music Shop between Isabel Marant and James Perse. Her eyes locked on the guitars in the window and all plans to shop for herself disappeared.

She spent nearly an hour talking to a few of the employees to try to find the best option for Niall. She told them what he usually played, what he did, and what he’d probably want. She tried to recite some of his exact quotes about his guitar, but it wasn’t her strong suit. They’d all settled on the Martin Black Smoke with a bigger body, the clear winner out of their final three choices. Rowan didn’t care what it cost or that she’d somehow have to lug the guitar from the store back to her apartment in the Upper West Side after her meeting. She could instantly see it on display in Niall’s apartment, a guitar far different than the few he already had. He would say it was too much, but she shook his reaction out of her head as she told the employees that she’d take it.

“What the?” Niall asked, clearly spotting the guitar case sitting on the floor of her closet. “Rowan, what is this?”

“Just open it, Niall,” she said.

She swallowed the lump in her throat while she watched him kneel down, anticipation setting in as she heard him fumbling with the lock and closure on the side. The hinges creaked quietly as Niall opened it, slowly revealing what was hidden beneath the top of the case.

“Rowan…” Niall breathed out. “This is too much.”

“No it’s not,” she replied. “I hope it’s okay. I try to listen to you when you talk about guitars, but you’re just so much better at musical knowledge than I am. So I asked the people at Rudy’s to help and I spent like an hour in there but that one really seemed like one that you’d like so–”

“Rowan,” Niall interjected, keeping her from rambling further. “This guitar is amazing, but I can’t take it. I know it must’ve cost a fortune and it’d be wr–”

“Niall,” Rowan sighed, sliding off the edge of the bed until her feet were flat on the ground. “This is my gift to you, my best friend and favorite musician.”

He snorted. “You have some shit taste in music,” he commented.

“Hush, my music taste is just an impeccable as my taste in handbags, shoes, and coats,” Rowan replied, walking up behind Niall so she could flick him in the back of the head. “So it’s okay?”

Niall shut the top, locking it back up so the guitar was secure in its case. He stood up slowly, turning around on his heel so he was finally facing Rowan. “It’s incredible, Row,” he said, locking eyes with her. “I…don’t even know what to say.”

“That’s okay,” she replied. “I’m really happy you like it and I cannot wait to see you playing this at your next gig.”

“Are you my official biggest fan now?” Niall joked.

“I’ve always been your biggest fan,” she replied. “This isn’t a recent thing.”

Niall pressed his lips together, immediately wrapping his arms around Rowan. He hugged her close, making it easy for her to tuck her chin into the crook of his neck. She could feel his arms squeeze tighter around her waist, holding her closer for a moment. “Thank you, Rowan,” he murmured as he let go, taking a step back. “I…just thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Niall,” she replied. “Can you stay tonight or do you need to go back to your apartment?”

“I have tomorrow off, I can stay,” Niall replied. “Plus, I’m not going very far for the holidays so no packing necessary.”

Rowan snorted. “Another Christmas in Brooklyn for Niall and Maura,” Rowan commented. “You two are always more than welcome to go across the state to spend Christmas with the Walshes.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the…sixth year in a row? Does that sound right?” Niall asked, his lips curling into a smirk.

“Shush, I’m just trying to offer my obnoxious family to you,” Rowan replied. “Just for that, I’m picking the Christmas movies we’re watching tonight.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” he asked.

“It’s a few days until Christmas, of course that’s what we’re doing,” Rowan replied, rolling her eyes at Niall. “Now c’mon, I know exactly which one we’re going to start with.”

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Bear with me, if I repost something, but I really don’t remember when I see one of my favorites, if I posted it on my old, defunct, blog, or in the early days of this one. But, I love Lyudmila’s  funky, colorful, unique Russian apt. with Jazz motifs.  In Soviet times, all large apts. were turned into communal apts., and as a result of further redevelopment they were divided in two.

So, Lyudmila's current home is essentially a half-apartment with a corridor, two rooms, a kitchen with a bay window and a large bathroom. Her small kitchen is in purple & lime with whitewashed exposed brick and large wall-sized murals. She came up with the wonderful design for the space, herself. 

Since the ceilings in the apartment are high, the furniture was made to order- the standard models would look too short here.

Home appliances and a gas water heater were hidden behind the profiles.

Lyudmila made a backsplash from cans of various brands of beer and cola.

The kitchen is separated from the living room by a work area.

The table and bookcase were custom made.

Lyudmila brought the painting over her work table from the Vietnamese city of Ho Chi Minh City.

The trunk, which serves as a coffee table, was presented to Lyudmila by a friend who went to study in the USA.

The living room is bordered by the corridor and the bedroom. There are no doors between the rooms, and Lyudmila plans to make stained glass instead of the clear window openings.

She brought the Spanish settee in the living room from her previous apartment.

To make the furniture fit better with the new interior, the frame was painted with dark paint.

Strands of jewels descend from the ceiling.

The wall in the bedroom at the head of the bed, was covered with photo wallpaper. The bed was custom made, and the vintage bedside tables and wardrobe came from the previous owners.

The suitcases, which now sit on the closet, were brought by Lyudmila’s grandfather in the 1960s. In addition to decorative, they also perform a direct function- the suitcases contain many things that could not find another place in a small apartment.

Lyudmila brought the painting over the fireplace from Hong Kong, large round clock is from a boutique, lamps - Laura Ashley. 

Authentic brickwork has also been preserved on the wall in the corridor. White figurines of angels are from a decor store in Metrograd.

The fireplace is tiled. They were removed from the fireplace in a neighboring house, which was just about to be demolished. The vintage cabinet under the clock remained after the previous owners.

The area of ​​the bathroom was reduced by half, when the corridor was enlarged. Love her choice of mosaic tile and the color of the sink vanity. 

https://www.the-village.ru/service-shopping/apartments/122877-kvartira-nedeli-kiev-dzhaz

[spoonsthings]

The White Lion Pub and Shops are designated as a Local Watering Hole, as the pub is the only part of the build that requires a special lot designation in order to function. But there is also a boutique (that can be made functional with minimal to modest adjustments, depending on which direction you want to take this in), and a “radio station” that serves no in-game function, but contains a lot of activity / skill-type objects that make it perfect for a photoshoot or storytelling purposes.

There is also a “blank space” which Martine actually decorated to look like a real vacancy to let, and not just an unfurnished extra space. You can put an extra shop or restaurant there if you like, but I rather like the way Martine added those quirky touches, and it seems more realistic to have some vacancies somewhere in the town, so I like to keep it empty in my own game.

Originally I wanted to keep the WCIFs all on one spreadsheet, but 1) there are so many objects AND so many different rooms that it was getting unwieldy to cram them all on one sheet, and 2) there was very little overlap of items used between different "sections“ of the lot, so there wouldn’t have been any point on insisting on a single sheet, anyway.

This lot is one of my personal favorites, even among the many beautiful builds @martinessimblr has done for this world, and I hope my WCIF efforts will help you enjoy this lot as much as I do!

WCIF List (for the White Lion Pub)  - Updated 2018-03-05

WCIF List (for Indigo Boutique)  - Updated 2018-03-05

WCIF List (for WCWH Radio Station + rest of lot)

Notes:

Just in case it wasn’t already obvious, the Late Night EP is required for the lot to retain the “Local Watering Hole” designation, as well as for the pub games (dartboard, foozball, etc.) and the actual bartending bar in the pub. The Ambitions EP is also required, if you want to turn the boutique into a functional clothing store (more on that later).

I have listed some individual items that are from EPs and SPs, when I thought they might be easy to mistake for CC items. I have also listed all Store content, where identifiable.

Feel free to send me asks / messages at this tumblr (or contact me at the Pixelated Puddings forum) if you feel I have left anything out, or if a link turns up broken.

Update (18-03-05): I realized I’d mistakenly attributed the wrong texture to the interior paneling of the White Lion Pub... I’d previously said it was Around The Sims’s “chestnut” wood pattern. It’s not, it’s the “elm” pattern by the same creator. I also managed to find two previously unattributed wood patterns (one for the picnic tables outside the pub, one for the countertops in the clothing boutique) and have updated the files and links accordingly.

Tips about missing CC + notes about playability:

Pub:

Often, most of the decor on the counter behind the bar (see this image to see what exactly I’m talking about) will spontaneously “disappear” when the lot is placed. Don’t worry, it hasn’t actually disappeared... it’s just that all the OMSPs used to place the clutter have sunk back to ground level, below the counter where they can’t be seen. You have to temporarily move the counter aside, and manually raise the OMSP values. Just remember that counter height in TS3 is 1 m high, give or take a few cm, while the lower shelf is approximately 155 cm.

The booths look like benches built into the wall, but actually behave as dining chairs. This is probably the easiest option in terms of hassle-free gameplay, but I don’t like how weird it all looks (plus the benches for the table opposite the stairs on the ground level are just impossible to use, this way). So I use the “disable snapping to slots on alt” cheat to place the booths however I like, then use this chair item (registration required to download, sorry about that) CASted to match the booths, and place them where I think the sims should actually be sitting. Luckily, the overlapping booth footprints don’t seem to interfere with sims using the table to sit and dine properly.

I have replaced the Store Bistro Oven with Ani’s modded version of the same item, as I prefer her version (still requires the Store item to function, as it contains the necessary scripts). And for menus I actually use neither the file given by Ani nor the Store, but the menu recolors by aa6x7 (versions are provided to work with both versions of the Bistro Oven).

Clothing Store:

This shop can be used as a playable boutique with the Shop for Clothes mod by Ani. If you have the Into The Future EP installed, and would prefer to use the Shop for Clothes Pedestal, Ani’s newer clothes shopping mod, you can simply replace some of the deco mannequins with the functional ones that come with the EP. For use in this particular store, I would recommend using this modified mannequin base by @aroundthesims​ instead, as it’s much less bulky and less likely to clash with the decor.

Most patterns used on this part of the lot have actually not yet been identified and/or found... the floral print on the dress hanging on the rack, the muted fabric on the mannequin, the striped pattern on the sliding curtain “doors”, etc. The wall textures also default to white when recolored, so I assume some pattern must have been used on them originally, despite them appearing solid in Martine’s previews.

The only pattern I still have my heart set on finding is the one on the University EP awning out front (the one with the motif of blackbirds / ravens sitting among birch trees), shown just above. I have still not given up, however! Any tip-offs will be greatly appreciated

For my personal use, I replaced the floral pattern on the hanging dress with the Fool’s Parsley pattern by Awesims (can be found backed up at TehSims here, or included in their “Mid-Century Mid/Mod Bathroom” set here). I also added an accent wall to the interior of the shop using this pattern of egrets (”Leaves 6″ by Pilar, and believe it or not, fully CAStable) on it to almost make up for the lack of the bird print for the awning. I use this fabric pattern by Djehmli on the mannequin.

The floorboard pattern I tend to replace with a textured wood pattern that looks like a single large slab of wood. I’ve tried both oak and pine patterns by Madaya74, and usually have trouble deciding which looks better: they both work well with the atmosphere of the store.

Radio Station:

None of the wall patterns have been found for this part of the lot. For my own game, I have replaced the missing concrete / sheetrock textures with modern, sleek wood paneling, using the “Chestnut” wood patterns by Sandy at ATS3, as quite often birch wood paneling is preferred for the interiors of recording studios.

CC from Karas Watching Society (the standing record sleeve decor in the recording studio) does not show up in my game as placed, for some reason. You will have to place the decor item used on this lot manually.

The wall lights used in the antechamber / waiting room area have been lost forever, and I cannot find any backups.

However, I have included notes in the spreadsheet about the best replacement for the missing items. I promise you, my tips will result in the exact same effect!

The light colors will also have to be set anew, after being replaced. Setting them “red” and “green” and both “0.8″ for brightness seems to work fine, but I prefer to set the brightness at “0.6″, and custom colors for the lights: “215,35,5″ and “35,215,5″ respectively. But everyone’s game looks different, so play around until you find a result you are happy with.

[jccamus]

The 25 Rooms That Influence the Way We Design

The 25 Rooms That Influence the Way We Design https://ift.tt/38uI6hs

Continue reading the main story

Credit...Video by Scott J. Ross

The 25 Rooms That Influence the Way We Design

Three designers, two journalists and an interiors photographer gathered at The New York Times to make a list of history’s most enduring and significant spaces. Here are the results.

On an October afternoon, our six-person jury — Tom Delavan, the design and interiors director of T Magazine; Gabriel Hendifar, the creative director of the Manhattan-based lighting and design studio Apparatus; the architect Toshiko Mori; the architect and designer Daniel Romualdez; the veteran design journalist Suzanne Slesin; and the interiors photographer Simon Watson — assembled in a featureless conference room at The New York Times to discuss the most influential rooms of all time. By that, we meant “influential” in its truest sense. We wanted the jury to identify the spaces that not only changed the way we live but also changed the way we see, places — whether pleasing, provocative or completely novel for their eras — that not only informed our panelists’ individual practices as designers and documenters but also challenged how we all, as humans, think about beauty, strangeness, originality, décor, proportion, furnishings, art and the multivalent connections therein that define memorable rooms: ones that, above all, offer a new kind of visual lexicon. These are rooms, in other words, that have influenced and inspired interior design throughout the decades, shaping how our mind identifies and assesses a space, any space.

Image

From left: Tom Delavan, Toshiko Mori, Daniel Romualdez, Suzanne Slesin, Gabriel Hendifar and Simon Watson, photographed at The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2019.Credit...Sean Donnola

No one was expecting unanimity; if taste is individual, then discord among this cohort was inevitable. And yet we had asked each of them to nominate their 10 to 15 favorite rooms ahead of time, which the group would whittle to a list of 25. The overlaps were obvious front-runners: Four people chose the soaring, glass-walled sitting area of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, built in Paris in 1932, while Cy Twombly’s objet-filled 1960s living room in his Roman apartment, Rem Koolhaas’s elevator-cum-office built in 1998 for a disabled client in Bordeaux and Yves Saint Laurent’s art-covered 1970s Parisian salon were also submitted by several panelists. A lively conversation ensued for nearly three hours: What’s more important, the architecture or the design? Are the best spaces dictated by the people who inhabit them? The designers who create them? The period they reflect? Or some magical alchemy of all those things? Should public areas like hotels and restaurants be given as much weight as private, residential ones? And, actually, what is a room?

That last question animated the conversation from beginning to end, as each of our experts made arguments both concrete and philosophical about the human need to gather and connect in enclosed space, sometimes with the intimacy-creating aid of walls and ceilings, but other times not. (We drew the line on gardens — even ones with hedge walls — which everyone decided didn’t qualify.) By the end, we had narrowed upon a mutually satisfying definition of what makes a room and a list of about three dozen worthy examples, the images of which we laid out on a massive conference table, assessing them for final inclusion: Do we have too many museums and, speaking of, is the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim more of a room or a building unto itself? Is the living room of the Finnish furniture designer Alvar Aalto a better representation of midcentury Scandinavian Modernism than that of the Danish furniture designer Finn Juhl? Where are all the female-led projects? (“We have to remember that architecture, like many industries, was male-dominated for much of history,” Delavan said. “And the field of interior design — while originally led by women, though now more evenly split between genders — is only a century or so old.”)

Eventually, consensus was reached, though that doesn’t mean the list is necessarily finished or complete: The royal “we” in this story’s headline was, in many cases, applied by our panelists to their own work, the way that they think about design while largely practicing in North America and Europe, which unfortunately means that entire continents such as South America and Africa weren’t under consideration as much as they would have been with another group. There’s a heavy emphasis on contemporary projects, places that everyone had seen with their own eyes. (“Just blame it on the editors,” Romualdez joked, to which Slesin responded, “What’s amazing, if we had to do this tomorrow, is how different it would be.”) So the result that follows — which is ordered chronologically, from oldest to newest — is, at its very least, one history of design in the West on one day from one group of highly opinionated people, all of whom would probably have rather found themselves in any of the rooms below. — KURT SOLLER

This conversation has been edited and condensed. The room summaries are by Nancy Hass.

1. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England (circa 1600 B.C., architects unknown)

It took Neolithic builders nearly 1,500 years to complete Stonehenge, the outdoor enclosure of nearly 100 enormous upright stones on Salisbury Plain in the south of England. The origin of the structure, which is thought to have been a burial ground or perhaps a place of pilgrimage — the stones are aligned to frame sunrise during summer solstice and sunset during winter solstice — defies logic: The iconic 30-foot-tall three-piece sandstone pillars that stand in the center can be traced to local quarries, but how did a civilization without the wheel transport the inner ring of bluestones, some weighing four tons, from their origin point 200 miles away in Wales? Thought to have been finished around 1600 B.C., over the eons Stonehenge has been attributed to the ancient Celtic high priests called druids and the Arthurian wizard Merlin. But modern historians and archaeologists largely agree that a series of indigenous British tribes worked on the site in stages, over hundreds of years, each culture gaining technological sophistication through the centuries, creating an open-air chamber that stands as an indelible template for enclosure, space and ambitious monumentality.

Tom Delavan: My colleague Kurt and I were discussing what qualifies as a room, and we thought, “Well, a room has walls, or something that could define a wall. But does it need to have a ceiling?”

Simon Watson: For me, a room is a place for people to inhabit together in solidarity, I suppose.

TD: So residential, you’re saying?

SW: Not necessarily. It’s a place where people can gather; it’s what we humans do. I tried to go back as far as I could, and Stonehenge seemed like an obvious choice. I’m not sure if we know much about it, but what we do know is that it was a space where people gathered: Whether they prayed or whether they had conversations about their day, it was a place where people came together. And, for me, that was the definition of a room. It doesn’t have a ceiling. And I don’t think the difference stands in the make of walls, but it creates a space.

Gabriel Hendifar: Or is it just about some spatial organization that communicates intention, whether that intention has a ceiling or not? A room is something that’s been organized to serve some function, whether that is spiritual or shelter, residential or commercial.

SW: And you can go forward in history from Stonehenge to the Pantheon, which is one of the greatest rooms in the world. I’m not suggesting that the Pantheon came from Stonehenge, but rather that the circle is a humanist form we understand. It is the shape that creates a togetherness, in a way. It’s instinctual.

Toshiko Mori: Well, also, Stonehenge has a reference to astronomy. It’s human enclosure, with references to the world outside earth. So, the ceiling in this case is a sky. I think that’s the beauty with it, that it actually exists between ground and sky.

2. The Pantheon in Rome (125 A.D.; architects unknown)

The Roman Pantheon is not only the world’s best-preserved Classical building — it was completed by the emperor Hadrian on the site of an earlier structure of the same name that was probably a sanctuary — but is also likely the first in which the interior, not the exterior, is the focus: It was a precursor to the elaborate decoration of public spaces in later centuries, as well as a model of perfect balance. While its portico, reached by wide steps of Numidian yellow marble, was made in classically Greek style (squared off, with granite columns) once you enter the circular part of the building, you find a shrine to the motifs and mathematical obsessions of the Roman Empire. The rotunda is 142 feet in both diameter and height — a perfect hemisphere — with a 27-foot-wide oculus at the top of the domed ceiling. The dome itself is made of a porous type of limestone, like pumice, mixed with concrete, and has five rings of 28 rectangular coffers. Altered over the eras by successive rulers, including Pope Urban VIII, who in 1626 removed the original bronze girders from the porch roof to make them into cannons, the Pantheon’s architectural and decorative influence cannot be overstated: Thomas Jefferson’s 1826 library at the University of Virginia is one of many obvious homages.

3. The Shokin-tei tea pavilion in Kyoto (circa early 17th century; architects unknown)

The Katsura Imperial Villa near Kyoto, built in the early 17th century, profoundly influenced architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, both of whom spent time in Japan. And with good reason: The 16-acre property, with many outbuildings and exquisite gardens, is a clear expression of how Zen Buddhism’s graceful influence is woven through Japanese culture and design — and is a vivid illustration of why those aesthetic codes still feel utterly contemporary. There are several free-standing tea pavilions on the property, all made to amplify a sense of pureness, reverence and isolation (each celebrates a different season and allows the gardens to be seen from various angles), but Shokin-tei, the tribute to winter, is the one that stands out for its unexpected modernity. With a thatched roof and three sides that face the property’s large pond, it’s notable for the blue-and-white checkered handmade paper that covers a central alcove and sliding doors. The loggia is held up by three oak logs, left natural with their bark intact. Rustic and bold, the teahouse is pleasingly geometric, a hallmark of traditional Japanese architecture.

Kurt Soller: How many of your choices were influenced by having seen these places in real life? Tom made this great point about how, for many people, most of these spaces only exist through pictures.

Suzanne Slesin: That’s why I included the Katsura teahouse, because I’d been there. I went on a tour, and I think we were the only Westerners. It was pouring rain. You’re wearing this translation earpiece, and you go around and the guide was talking, talking, talking in Japanese, and everybody was taking it very seriously, and then the translation was just: “teahouse.” So I just took the picture and I stood there and I thought, “It’s really beautiful, but I’d like to know more about it.”

TM: It’s incredibly influential. A literary reference. So that’s why the Japanese guide would go on and on and on to talk about —

SS: We understood nothing. But to me, this was extraordinary: Of course, Japanese interiors are influential, but this blue and white, I mean, anybody could do that today. And it would be amazing.

TM: The Bauhaus school [in early 20th-century Germany] had seen it. I have to be a little careful about this immediate link because it’s been an argument, a scholarly argument. But it’s very interesting to think about.

4. The parlors of Georgian homes in the United Kingdom (circa 1714-1830; various architects)

There is no perfect room, of course, but the parlor of the typical Georgian home — built throughout London and Edinburgh during the reigns of King George I through King George IV — may come close. The rooms are large, but not in the cavernous, ill-planned way of a McMansion or a billionaire’s high-rise penthouse on Central Park: They are, instead, models of proportion. Usually square, with ceilings around 16 feet high, the parlors’ symmetry was based on the Classical architecture of Rome and Greece, filtered through the lens of the Renaissance but scaled down to accommodate a single family. Unlike the neo-Gothic revival, which began as early as the mid-18th century, or the late Victorian period at the end of that century, both of which prized ornament, there was a spareness to Georgian style, which makes it feel modern today. Windows, placed with mathematical precision, were large and often shuttered — Georgian builders seemed to understand that in the late afternoon, taking tea, one might want to ease gently into the dusk.

SW: The Georgians started this idea of creating very livable proportions in rooms. When you go through them, the scale is huge, with vast windows, but you feel completely comfortable, because the proportions are so perfect. So these big spaces become calm, wonderful places to be in, to live in and socialize with your family or your friends.

KS: Has it influenced how people live now?

Daniel Romualdez: I think they bring the influence.

SW: I think people miss it. I’m looking around me [here in Midtown Manhattan] and I happen to see these vast skyscrapers going up and people living in these enormous spaces. I’ve been in them. You walk in and you think, “How could you live here?” The proportions are wrong. First of all, you need sunglasses all day long.

DR: All that glass!

5. Pierre-François-Henri Labrouste’s reading room at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris (1851)

The Sainte-Geneviève Library, in the Fifth Arrondissement, has roots dating back to the sixth-century manuscript collection of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, though its soaring reading room was built over 13 years, starting in 1838, by the Beaux-Arts architect Pierre-François-Henri Labrouste, who had spent his early career mastering the use of iron in grand railway stations and thus was a virtuoso at evoking grandeur. The nearly 20,000-square-foot, two-story structure is defined by exposed cast-iron arches, suspended over iron columns like parachutes billowing above a giant classical arena. The room, which is now part of Paris’s university system, stands as one of the finest neo-Classical interiors in Europe, influencing the Gothic Revival that swept late 19th-century France as well as the innovative spirit of the architect Louis Sullivan, who at the turn of the 20th century pioneered the use of iron and reinforced concrete in the American skyscraper.

TD: I bet it’s such a nice place to be, between the light and the space.

SW: But it’s also so delicately supported.

TM: Yes, because of the cast-iron work. So it’s a new technology, but within tradition. The motifs of all the cast-iron elements are plants, so it refers to nature, which softens the technological aspect: Otherwise they could have made it look like trusses, but they didn’t. There’s also a visual relationship to the books’ paper, which comes from plants. This influenced the Boston Public Library, the Butler Library at Columbia University, the Doe Library at U.C. Berkeley and others, so this whole idea of a collective reading room is an important example.

6. The Bloomsbury Group’s studio at Charleston in Sussex, England (circa early 20th century)

Inspired by the bright, fluid figuration and sharp abstraction of Post-Impressionists including Gauguin and Matisse, who led the way to High Modernism after World War I, the visual artists of the Bloomsbury Group ran wild at Charleston, the Sussex, England, farmhouse where the married painters Vanessa and Clive Bell and Vanessa’s lover Duncan Grant lived for decades. Virtually every surface in the house, a way station for intellectual bohemians including Vanessa Bell’s sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf, is covered in joyous drawings. In the living room, barely clad classical figures dance across the hearth, and books spill out from shelves. The house, preserved after Grant’s death in 1978, is the embodiment of the revolution that shook the art and design world, its handcrafted ethos driven by the class-driven conflict that took root in England between the wars.

SS: The Bloomsbury rooms combined all the arts together, and this was both unique and very influential. They also represent a coming together of all the arts in a place and time that, although it has passed, is very current in terms of how people engage with design.

KS: And the craft of it all, too, the idea that [the Bloomsbury-adjacent guild known as] the Omega Workshops seems so visually relevant now.

SS: Exactly. I think that’s something people are talking about now. [A few decades ago,] I remember knowing about this and thinking, “Oh, it doesn’t suit my Modernist sensibility. It’s cluttered.” But now I’m looking at it very differently, and I think it’s both charming and bohemian, which is very attractive.

DR: Why did that change?

SS: Well, things happen in life. Some of the things that you like 30 or 40 years ago, you’re less interested in, or you get bored with them. Even well-known designers, like you, Daniel, your style changes. It depends on your clients, but also the way you feel.

DR: Yeah. What persists for you?

SS: I still love Minimalism and Modernism.

DR: Do you think the Modernists’ influence is waning? You know, 30 years ago, when I was in architecture school, that’s all we talked about.

TD: Since I started working at magazines [in the early 2000s], Modernism has basically been watered down. It’s sort of softer; it’s not about an absence of decoration, or anything similarly social or political. It’s just about simplicity.

SW: It’s become more cushy and comfortable.

DR: But don’t you think it’s also, like, a status symbol? A buzzword?

SW: Yes, in every single place in the world.

DR: And you just think, “Oh, I know about Modernism. I’m going to do that even though everything about this room has nothing to do with it.”

7. Jean-Michel Frank’s living room for Marie-Laure de Noailles’s hôtel particulier in Paris (circa 1925)

The Jazz-era Parisian arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles blithely disregarded convention. She and her husband, Charles, underwrote the Dada-inflected films of Luis Buñuel and Man Ray and bought arms for the anti-Franco forces. Their 16th Arrondissement apartment sparked the career of Jean-Michel Frank, an interior designer who stripped away the early-18th-century moldings from the vast rooms and squared off the giant opening between them. The walls of the apartment (which was returned to its ornate origins by the designer Philippe Starck in 2003 for the Musée Baccarat) were covered in parchment panels hung with paintings by Dalí, Picasso and Miró. And the severe living room furniture that Frank made for the couple continues to inspire contemporary design; created from lush materials including shagreen and mica, the pieces combine geometric discipline with the mark of the artisan’s hand.

8. Pierre Chareau’s salon for Jean Dalsace’s Maison de Verre in Paris (1932)

Bathed in sunlight during the day and lit at night with a phosphorescent lantern glow, the Maison de Verre may well be Paris’s most radical residence. Resembling a box made of glass blocks capped by a single traditional apartment, it was commissioned in the late 1920s by Jean Dalsace, a gynecologist who bought an 18th-century Left Bank hotel, determined to reinvent it as a Modernist mansion. Unable to evict the top-floor tenant, he built around her. The architect, Pierre Chareau, conceived the edifice as a series of interlocking forms, with the doctor’s office on the first floor and two private levels above. Simultaneously labyrinthine and airy, with several sets of stairs and a double-height salon behind the monumental glass wall, it has been compared in impact to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Villa Savoye (1931) on the outskirts of the city. But unlike that imposing International Style monolith of reinforced concrete, the Maison de Verre possesses a lyrical delicacy owing to the work of the iron artisan Louis Dalbet, who created such touches as perforated mechanical screens to separate spaces and a rolling steel-pipe library ladder with wood inlays. After remaining in the Dalsace family for more than 70 years, the house was bought in 2005 by the history-obsessed American collector Robert M. Rubin, who meticulously restored it.

KS: The Maison de Verre was the most submitted project among our panelists: Four of you chose it —

DR: If I remembered, I would have put it on my list.

GH: Me too.

SS: I mean, it has everything: It has a new structure, it looks to the future, it has furniture that is not just traditional but also modern. Everything about that house — the traffic patterns, the materials, the siding of it, the way it’s used — is really a 20th-century development. And it’s beautiful. I mean, I think it’s beautiful.

DR: It changed the way we designed, you know, these glass-wall houses. The coziness. The multilevel living room.

TD: It’s very comfortable, which isn’t always the case for things that are modern.

9. Finn Juhl’s living room at his home in Charlottenlund, Denmark (1942)

The Danish designer Finn Juhl, along with his countryman Hans Wegner, established the vanguard of Scandinavian furniture design in the 1950s and ’60s with pared-down yet softly contoured pieces made largely of oil-rubbed walnut, maple and teak, and seats and backs covered in nubby upholstery. They were a complete break from the fussy neo-Classical style that preceded them and, because of new manufacturing processes engineered at the same time, were instantly copied. Trained as an architect, Juhl used the ultramodern house he built for his family and lived in for close to 50 years in a suburb north of Copenhagen as a laboratory, tweaking the setting to accommodate new volumes and contours. The house had an open plan — radical for the time — and each ceiling of each room was painted a different color to create different moods. In the living room, where Juhl placed one of his Chieftain chairs and Poet sofas, the beige was intended to evoke the feeling of being under a canvas, especially when sunlight hit it.

SS: I first saw it published in the October 2012 issue of Marie Claire Maison, and I thought, “The art, the furniture, the space, everything is of one mind and very, very simple and modest, but extraordinary.”

TD: The proportions are so nice, even though it’s not grand.

SW: Typical Scandinavian mind-set.

SS: But really, I love the palette and the tile work. The hearth, it’s like a little carpet. I think this has a lot to do with the way people think today.

KS: How so?

SS: Well, I tried to think about the trends — I’m not talking about grandiose houses, like what’s happened to the Hamptons — that can influence the ways people want to live today. One of them is smaller, more modest spaces. But still quality, not cheap in any way.

10. Le Corbusier’s Le Cabanon in Côte d’Azur, France (1952)

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the Swiss architect known as Le Corbusier, loved the Mediterranean, with its incomparable light, rough-hewn local architecture and rocky shoreline. In 1952, he built the one-room Le Cabanon for his wife, Yvonne, to use as a summer getaway. Merely 12 feet by 12 feet, it had no real bathroom, just a toilet near the bed, nor a kitchen; the couple took their meals at an adjoining cafe reached by an internal door. With an exterior that resembles a Canadian log cabin and interior plywood walls, it was constructed using Le Corbusier’s so-called Modulor principles — an anthropomorphic scale of proportions based on the movement of the human body — down to the built-in furniture, making it a diorama of the architect’s revolutionary worldview.

SS: I visited this about two years ago, and I could not believe how perfect it was and how it was really the most modern. I mean, it’s one room that allows for sleeping, eating, relaxing and more clever things, too: Guest rooms that pull out of a box, a bathroom mirror that slides open to become a window.

TD: Just that you could live in such a compact —

SS: One of the most important architects of the 20th century conceived of this in the most modest, most beautifully done way, and that was his choice. And one shouldn’t need anything else.

DR: Super functional. Do you know how he lived in it? I mean, was it meant to be a retreat?

SS: I think he spent every summer there.

SW: Yeah, and that’s where he ended up dying [in 1965]. He went to swim and never returned.

11. Nancy Lancaster’s living room at her flat in London (1958)

Among the great paradoxes of the influential style widely known as English Country — a dotty dishevelment characterized by cozy sun-bleached chintzes, antiques from various periods and brightly hued walls — is that it was brought to Britain from the American South in the 1920s, by the Virginia-born socialite Nancy Lancaster, who owned the Mayfair design firm Colefax and Fowler. Inspired by her romanticized memories of plantation houses (including her grandfather’s) that had fallen into disrepair after the Civil War, Lancaster, who lived in England virtually all her adult life, tapped into what her biographer Robert Becker called a corresponding “abstract nostalgia” for a British way of life that had been obliterated by the wars. While she lived largely at Ditchley Park, an estate in Oxfordshire, it was the lacquered egg-yolk yellow living room of her flat above the firm’s Avery Row showroom, completed in 1958 (she died in 1994 at the age of 96) that stood — until just a few years ago, in fact, when the firm moved — as a shrine to her aesthetic, with its barrel ceiling, faux-marble baseboards, braided swags, oversize chandelier and array of comfortable seating. The room has been a lodestar to a generation of American collectors and designers, among them Sister Parish, Mario Buatta and Mark Hampton.

DR: I think you all must think I’m nuts to have chosen the butter-yellow room. I just know that you all would have thought that was weird. But I honestly think design goes in waves, and clients are actually looking at chintz again, which is surprising.

TM: I’m not so sure about Nancy Lancaster. I don’t get it.

DR: I’m going to stand up for her. I just think we are living in a bubble. There’s a lot of stuff being done now that looks like this. Many things I see on Instagram are using similar materials and creating a similar atmosphere.

12. Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons dining room in New York City (1959)

When the Four Seasons restaurant — the epitome of the steel-and-glass International Style, created on the ground floor of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram Building — opened in the late ’50s, it was a tourist trap. Not until the late ’70s, when, under new owners, its Grill Room (one of two dining areas connected by a corridor hung with a massive Picasso tapestry) was named the ultimate power lunch spot by Esquire, did Philip Johnson’s extraordinary feat get its due. But it is the Pool Room, now operated as a seafood restaurant called the Pool, that stands as the most vivid reminder of the architect’s commitment to tranquil austerity. Other fancy restaurants of the time were fussily French with cushy banquettes, but Johnson embraced a brash, unadorned rectangularity, with 20-foot ceilings and massive windows shaded only by curtains of rippling, undulating chains. Although the classic midcentury furnishings — not accorded historic status when the building was declared a landmark in 1989 — were auctioned off a few years ago, when the current owners took over, the room’s combination of hushed chicness and uncompromising discipline endures, a testament to the relationship between Mies van der Rohe and Johnson, master and student.

SW: I never ate there [in its original incarnation]. But the pool just struck me as something that functioned very well in the space. Also, it was outrageously chic, it was glistening. It just seemed so refined.

TM: And civilized.

SW: And civilized. Even though half the people in the room were probably crooks.

Everyone laughs.

SW: But it worked, it definitely worked.

13. Cy Twombly’s living room at his apartment in Rome (circa 1966)

The Virginia-born abstractionist Cy Twombly came to Rome in the late 1950s, and soon after, he married the Italian portraitist Tatiana Franchetti, sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti, with whom he bought an apartment in a 17th-century palazzo on the Via di Monserrato; it had been built for the Borgias. He immediately had the place stripped of generations of old paint to reveal whitewashed walls and pale blue doors with gold moldings; the large rooms and abundant light became a perfect setting for his enormous oil paintings, with their calligraphic graffiti on pale backgrounds, punctuated with phrases from classical allegory or from poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and John Keats. Particularly in the main sitting room, the artist had an intuitive sense of how best to punctuate the works in his home: He offhandedly mixed them with slightly run-down gilded antiques upholstered in bleached shades, plaster busts that could be found in flea markets throughout the city and bits of silver. The effect is ethereal yet unpretentious, airy, elegant and livable.

DR: To me, Twombly created a whole new atmosphere. Think of all the rooms on Park Avenue today.

TD: It’s a certain “I didn’t try too hard,” which I feel is kind of its own design aesthetic. Even his art, which was super edgy, was not considered great art at that time.

GH: It’s like, “I just happened to be in this palazzo.”

TD: The antiquities were not expensive then. He was buying stuff at the equivalent of a flea market.

SW: I mean, those big busts aren’t antiquity. They’re 19th century. And no offense to Twombly, but they’re a dime a dozen in Rome, and everybody has them. You know?

TD: But to his credit —

SW: To his credit, it all works very well. I’m just trying to break it down. The room itself isn’t outstanding. It’s what’s in it.

DR: To me, it’s all about atmosphere. And you can have a perfect room with no atmosphere, and it doesn’t succeed. So where does the architecture of that room begin and where do the objects and the installation and the installation designer fit in? Which comes first?

TM: Because of those questions, I actually chose extreme examples. Like the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which was designed as a completely universal space. It’s spectacular: It’s just a ceiling and then there’s continuity of interior and exterior. To me, this was the definition of the conceptual idea of a museum. In a sense, as a space, this is a room that is essentially universal and infinitely transformative. As a concept, it’s amazing.

14. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s main exhibition gallery at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968)

As Mies van der Rohe’s last major building (he died a year after it was opened), the massive structure embodies the legendary architect’s preoccupation with open, flexible spaces with minimal enclosure — a radical notion for a museum hall at the time — and complex engineered solutions that seem virtually invisible. With a nearly six-foot-thick steel flat roof painted black (a grid ceiling inside holds lighting) and an architecturally austere presence, it comprises two distinct levels. Visitors climb three flights of stairs to the entrance and the main special exhibition gallery, a hangar-like space supported by cruciform columns on either end, where the art, mostly from the 20th century, is often hung on temporary walls and other innovative structures, revealing the space’s flexible nature. The building is currently undergoing a massive restoration by the British architect David Chipperfield.

15. Stanley Kubrick’s suite in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)

A room does not have to be realized to be seminal: The final, indelible scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is set in a huge suite meant to be a luxurious zoo environment for the film’s protagonist, the wayward astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman. Stanley Kubrick, a notorious perfectionist, said it was intended to look as though created by a master race that wanted to observe Bowman in a comfortable setting through the remainder of his life: He ages, dies and is reborn in the room in a few cinematic minutes. Kubrick resisted what might have been an obvious trope of the time — making the room a neon pop palace of blobby plastic furnishings — instead positing what an alien race might consider soothing and elegant to a 20th-century human. The result is a mixture of inaccurate replicas of Louis-era French furniture and neo-Baroque statuary set into alcoves, all gently illuminated by floor tiles lit eerily from below.

DR: Watching that movie, I didn’t remember the plot, because all I did was obsess about this room.

SS: It’s outer space. I mean that’s really a definition, to me, of Modernism, of originality. I mean, it’s terrifying.

GH: It’s sort of atemporal, it’s about the future and the past.

SW: It’s kind of Philippe Starck-y in a way.

TM: I think one can trace nearly everything he’s done to this movie.

16. Donald Judd’s master bedroom at his loft in New York City (1968)

In 1968, Donald Judd, then 40 and fresh off a Whitney Museum retrospective, bought a derelict five-story SoHo factory built in 1870 to use as his home and studio. Although by the late 1970s he was spending much of his time in Marfa, Texas, he lived and worked in New York off and on until his death in 1994, punctuating the loft’s vast rooms with art and objects, creating a template for late 20th-century American Minimalism. After a restoration by the Judd Foundation, run by his son and daughter, the building — which opened to the public in 2013 — remains intact, as pristine as one of the sculptor’s welded metal boxes. Works by Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre, Marcel Duchamp and others remain in the exact positions that Judd placed them. But the top-floor master bedroom best encapsulates the residence’s style: On the wall hangs an early Judd piece in wood, Oldenburg’s “Soft Ceiling Lights at La Coupole” (1964-72) and a John Chamberlain crushed car fragment known as “Mr. Press” (1961). The bed, on a low plinth, is counterpoised with a 19th-century Italian settee, and the angles of a Flavin fluorescent work echo the cast-iron windows overlooking Mercer Street. The neighborhood may no longer be recognizable as the postindustrial wasteland that Judd found in the ’60s, but in the fifth-floor chamber, his vision of SoHo — raw, hand-forged, radical — lives on.

TM: When you talk about someone’s personality driving a space, it’s iconic.

SW: I went there with a friend of mine who is an architect in, I think, 1992, when Judd was still alive. He was still using it then, and what really struck me were these simple elements: the way the floor and the ceiling were the same, and how the objects were placed in this beautiful loft. It seemed so pure, so perfect.

TD: For some reason, I always thought it would be a difficult place to live.

KS: But specific to the person that lived there, right?

TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TD: Yeah, but then his children lived there.

TM: I have to say … I lived in the Maison de Verre, and it’s a horrible place to live.

KS: But should livability be a criteria here?

DR: To keep my business sustained — to have clients come back: yes.

SW: I agree.

DR: I mean, I’m not an artist. I went to architecture school. I ended up decorating, even though I wasn’t trained for that. But the only way my practice will continue is if my clients come back, and most of that is about livability and practicality. You don’t want things falling apart. The last thing you want to get is a phone call about how the air conditioning points at the shower.

17. Yves Saint Laurent’s salon at his apartment in Paris (1970)

The couturier Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his partner in life and business, bought a nine-room, nearly 6,500-square-foot duplex at 55 Rue de Babylone in Paris’s Seventh Arrondissement in 1970 and spent the following decades perfecting it. The designer, who died in 2008 at age 71, layered it with Renaissance bronzes, paintings by Goya and Picasso, the severely modern furniture of Jean-Michel Frank and Eileen Gray and witty anthropomorphic sculptures by Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne. His eye for combining old with new — he took elements from the classically minded Rothschild clan and was inspired by the ultra-minimalist Paris hôtel particulier that Frank decorated in the 1920s for the family of the art patron Marie-Laure de Noailles (see above) — remains remarkable, especially in the before-and-after of the double-height salon, its paneled walls the color of burnt sugar. It’s a master class in creating a room that is beautiful from the start yet flexible enough to evolve over the years in tandem with one of the greatest collectors of all time.

KS: Daniel, when discussing Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment, you wanted us to consider it before and after his art was installed, right?

DR: Yes, when I work with clients, I know they’re going to collect art — but they don’t have that art yet — so we need to make the room beautiful for when they first move in. So I show them pictures from the YSL living room when it was empty, more or less, and when it was laden with works by Picasso and others decades later.

GH: What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s wildly chic, but it expresses a certain sort of internal psychology. This room to me is about addiction. It’s about being compelled to collect, to fill space with objects that say something to you about who you are — and about how that affects how we design the spaces we live in, how these spaces communicate something about our psychology.

SW: Or who we think we want to be?

TD: Right.

TM: This relationship of art and life and intimacy — the way the paintings are placed in strange ways, the proportions of the objects — is really interesting to me.

GH: It’s beautifully manic. There’s something about addiction here. I want to get into his head to understand.

18. David Hicks’s living room at his estate in South Oxfordshire, England (1973)

The courtly, charismatic British designer David Hicks grew up amid the chintz and antiques that characterized English interiors of the early 20th century, but at the dawn of the 1960s, he shocked the system with supersaturated clashing shades (red with violet, chartreuse with deep forest), octagonal patterned carpets and a daring mix of 19th-century furniture, Asian objects and Pop abstraction. His taste quickly became synonymous with upper-class cool, and it was he who coined the now-ubiquitous term “tablescape.” In his own red-and-pink living room on his South Oxfordshire estate — which has since become an enduring influence on contemporary designers including Miles Redd, Vicente Wolf and Steven Gambrel — black lacquer accents, layered patterns and oversize objects underscore his lasting aesthetic legacy.

TD: I was always impressed that Hicks could take these 18th-century antiques and bring them to the present.

SS: I don’t think he was afraid of mixing — you know, I wouldn’t talk so much about eclecticism, but that was really it. He was very sure of himself, and I think people may have questioned it, but he just did it. And it was bold.

DR: I mean, when we think about how long his influence has been, it’s been going for like —

SS: This is from the ’70s.

TM: I think his idea of pattern on pattern on pattern is super interesting.

GH: I think that’s the defining character. It’s the graphic nature — even the way he outlines the wall planes. That feels like a very Hicks thing.

19. Paul Rudolph’s living room for Halston’s townhouse in New York City (1974)

If there is one photograph that conveys the essence of the 1970s — at least its louche, glamorous side — it’s the Harry Benson shot of Halston in his 32-foot-tall living room on the Upper East Side. The fashion designer’s stylishly gaunt frame may be burned into the collective memory, but it’s arguably his house — that sharp-edged, almost extraterrestrial abode — that will forever haunt us. Designed in 1966 by Paul Rudolph, who was for years the dean of Yale’s architecture school, and remodeled once Halston bought it in 1974, the 7,500-square-foot townhome was famously a locus for celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli. Rudolph, widely credited for bringing Brutalism to the United States, eschewed comfort, practicality, even safety in much of his work, opting instead for maximum minimalist drama. Although Gunter Sachs, the Swiss industrialist who was an owner of the house after Halston’s death in 1990, mitigated some of the Rudolphian details, including the ubiquitous gray industrial carpeting, the vertiginous floating staircase to the mezzanine still shocks, especially when imagining the partygoers who must have tried to descend it in stilettos: It has no handrail. That’s just one of the defining details that the designer Tom Ford, who bought the house earlier this year, is likely to leave alone.

DR: In some ways, it’s influenced all these glass-tower apartments. I can’t think of anything more glamorous since then.

SS: It is glamorous. And I think right now we’re in a glitzy period but not a glamorous period. And this was glamorous without being glitzy. It had this “wow” factor for its time, and yet it was pretty tame in a way.

GH: Everything comes up from the floor, with that wall-to-wall carpet drawing you down. I find it very earthy and sensual and grounding in a way.

DR: Your point is fantastic. I was feeling uncomfortable with these super tall rooms.

SS: Also, isn’t it really a portrait of Halston? It’s exactly him. I couldn’t separate that house from him: the way he looks, the way he was, what he represented, the clothing — everything.

20. Ricardo Bofill’s living room at La Fábrica in Sant Just Desvern, Spain (1975)

Architectural postmodernism, which became prominent in the 1980s, combined classical elements with Brutalist materials like cement and iron, often pumping up details to cartoonish proportions. But La Fábrica, a 32,000-square-foot former cement factory outside Barcelona that Ricardo Bofill, now 80, converted into a home and office in 1975, illustrates the style at its most inspiring. With over 30 concrete silos, cavernous machine rooms and nearly 2.5 miles of underground tunnels, this reimagining of a complex that had been built during Spain’s postwar boom was a mammoth undertaking that is, after nearly 50 years, still in process. By keeping many of the original details, including massive if narrow arched windows and exterior metal staircases, Bofill — whose firm Taller de Arquitectura is known for Barcelona Airport’s Terminal 1 — has transformed the space into vast public areas, expansive libraries and cozy bedrooms, some tucked into the formerly abandoned silos. The central living room, with two stories of arches, exposed pipes and oversize billowing white drapes, reflects the inherent dynamism of repurposed spaces.

GH: To me, this represents this idea of reclaiming industrial space and rejiggering it for habitation, putting a human-scale softness inside a space that is not meant to do that. I think this says so much about how we live now — how much of Manhattan and Brooklyn, for instance, are being developed.

SS: The outside of this is the scariest building you’ve ever seen. It’s all turbines.

GH: There’s this tension between the building’s past life, which was really industrial and felt anti-human, and its current use as a backdrop for domestic life.

21. Andrée Putman’s office for the French Minister of Culture at the Palais-Royal in Paris (1984)

Jack Lang, who became France’s Minister of Culture under François Mitterrand during the 1980s, brought with him not merely a stylishly shaggy haircut and custom-made jewel-toned shirts that he wore beneath a well-cut suit but a fierce passion for interior design. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he hired Andrée Putman — then the doyenne of Parisian design, who had conceptualized Morgans Hotel in New York and redone the interior of the Concorde — to reconceive the ministry’s ornate offices in the 17th-century Palais-Royal in the First Arrondissement. She paired the elaborately gilded boiserie walls and outsize chandelier with a pale-hued suite of geometric postmodern furniture, including barrel chairs and a half-moon desk so aesthetically significant that it was kept by at least five successive French presidents. Her fearless mixing of styles and periods — unheard-of at the time — led the way for designers to introduce modern, even minimalist, furnishings into historic structures, weaving a new, more layered narrative

GH: This room speaks specifically to what furniture does, and about how the intervention of nonnative pieces to a historical room completely changes what you see. I just think this is incredibly genius.

22. Vincent Van Duysen’s living room at his house in Antwerp (1993)

Sensual minimalism might seem oxymoronic, but if there is a signature style of our era, that may be its proper sobriquet. In the 1990s, the Belgian designer Vincent Van Duysen, now 57, pioneered such environments — unfashionable at the time — which are both under-decorated and gracefully patinated. They take from early 20th-century Modernism a sense of lofty proportion and a lack of color and embellishment but avoid the coldness of steel and tempered glass. Instead, with raw, textured fabric and wood to bring out the soul in sparingly arrayed and geometrically precise furniture, Van Duysen’s interiors evoke silence and calm. Nowhere is this truer than in his own Antwerp living room, where light illuminates elemental shapes and defiantly plain bleached linens in shades of oatmeal and pure white.

KS: Tom, you had chosen very pale rooms, very white rooms. How come?

TD: I saw Van Duysen’s early apartment when it was published in the early ’90s; it still feels like so much of what’s happening now is based off that sort of linen-and-oak-floor look. It’s not overly polished, but it has a sort of fanciness.

23. Philippe Starck’s lobby for Ian Schrager’s Delano Hotel in Miami Beach (1995)

The Delano, on Collins Avenue in South Beach, was not the first boutique hotel (that title likely belongs to Morgans, also an Ian Schrager brainchild, which debuted in New York City a decade earlier), but it remains simultaneously archetypal and original. Born of a collaboration between Schrager, the Brooklyn-bred impresario of Studio 54, and Starck, the Harley Davidson-riding Parisian designer, the interior renovation of the 1947 hotel, with its historically protected pink stucco facade, was intended to, in Starck’s words, reflect the “deep elegance of a poor people who have a very clean house.” His approach contrasted vividly with the neon-adorned Art Deco hotels that were then being modernized along the strip, and helped give birth to the contemporary Miami aesthetic. The 14-story hotel currently has 194 sparsely furnished, white-on-white rooms above a cathedral-ceilinged lobby corridor with gleaming dark floors and semi-sheer floor-to-ceiling white curtains that billow in the breeze. In niches along the way sit a Salvador Dalí chair and the iconic overscale banquette from which countless guests have started taking selfies.

SS: Starck’s whole philosophy was influential both in other hotel lobbies but also in the way people looked at their bedrooms, their entryways and particularly their bedrooms. I mean, this was one of the first all-white projects, with the whole idea of creating excitement of being in a hotel versus the fear of being in a space that you don’t know, that’s not comfortable. That whole dichotomy of thinking in terms of designing spaces — and in how that changes how people experience their own homes — was very interesting. Visiting the lobby of the Delano was like entering a classical temple.

SW: I remember walking in in the ’90s, and I had the same feeling as you have when walking into a gothic cathedral. It turned everything around.

TD: It was sort of breathtakingly beautiful, but the proportions are also very functional.

24. Rem Koolhaas’s elevator office at Villa Lemoine in Bordeaux (1998)

In the late 1990s, the French publisher Jean-François Lemoine and his wife, Hélène, were in the midst of planning a hyper-modernist family villa overlooking the city of Bordeaux when he was in a car crash that left him partially paralyzed. Undeterred, they hired the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose firm OMA built them an elaborately engineered house to enable Lemoine unparalleled mobility without sacrificing the couple’s desire to push beyond conventional volumes. Instead of keeping things on a single elevation with openings wide enough for a wheelchair, Koolhaas created three levels partly wedged into the hill, centered around a 10-foot-by-11-foot elevator platform set up as an office for Lemoine. Powered by a hydraulic lift, the platform moves freely between the floors. It can hover between, lending spectacular unobstructed views, or become flush to the kitchen at the base or disappear into the glassed-in center-level living area; at night, it rises to become a corner of the cantilevered top floor expanse that holds the bedrooms, which have porthole-like windows punched through weathered metal cladding. Lemoine died in 2001, and the house remains in the hands of Hélène. Their daughter, Alice, and her husband, Benjamin Paulin, son of the legendary furniture designer Pierre Paulin, have recently transformed the home into a temporary exhibition space showing Pierre Paulin’s furniture.

DR: Would you say the room that’s the most influential in the home is the office that goes up and down?

TM: That whole idea of a room itself. Since the entire study is an elevator, the owner could access his whole home, which makes the person who is disabled become the most empowered person. It’s an ongoing issue: How do you make a disabled person not a secondary citizen within their own environment?

25. Ryue Nishizawa’s Teshima Art Museum in Teshima, Japan (2010)

The Japanese island of Teshima, about an hour and a half south of Okayama in the Seto Inland Sea, is a place with chaste beauty, a population of barely 1,000 and, since 2010, a nonpareil one-artwork museum. Shaped like a flattened droplet of water straining to return to the sea, the Teshima, designed by the Pritzker-winning architect Nishizawa (co-founder of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA) is rendered in pale concrete, with no structural pillars, just curved walls that slope to meet the canopy of ceiling and two elliptical openings that allow in the elements. But as you stand in the vast space in your bare feet (shoes must be removed at the door), it’s the interaction of the structure with the subtle and strange environmental sculpture, “The Matrix” (2010), by the elusive artist Rei Naito, that makes the room seem so otherworldly. Water trickles down from a ribbon dangling from the rim of one of the apertures; at first, you think that this alone is creating the small pools on the floor. But as you look more closely, you realize that water is scooting across the roughly textured surface like a wriggling family of salamanders. The floor itself, it turns out, is the matrix, pocked by the artist with pin holes that allow groundwater to filter upward, animated by unexplained physical forces, creating a perpetually changing canvas.

TD: How high is the ceiling?

TM: About 15 feet. Not so high. It’s very intimate; only limited numbers are allowed in. It’s a very personal experience because you’re not allowed to speak and you’re kind of restricted.

SS: It’s also freezing.

KS: Is this a room to the rest of you? Just to play devil’s advocate.

SS: It is! I think it’s a room.

DR: I think it’s a sculpture.

SS: This is comparable, I think, to the “Space Odyssey” room.

TM: It’s got one oculus. So it seems influenced by the Pantheon.

TD: Going back to our original definition, a room is an enclosed place where people gather for a reason.

KS: This is contained in some way.

SW: Look, here’s what I think we’re learning today: There’s no one definition of a room.

https://ift.tt/2RKumsG via The New York Times December 10, 2019 at 02:22PM

[samuelmmarcus]

Interior Design Ideas: Classic Coastal Home Design

  Hello, everyone! How are you doing today? We have been busy with our kids… my eldest son is graduating and we couldn’t be any prouder! This is a happy month!

Talking about that, I am honestly very happy to be featuring this classic coastal home designed by AGK Design Studio (recently featured here, here & here) on the blog today. I first saw this home a few years ago and it has stayed in my mind since then. I usually only feature homes that are recently finished but I had to open an exception for this home because of its classic details and many inspiring interior design ideas.

I hope this home brings you some joy and a moment of happiness. Feel free to pin your favorite photos and thank you so much for being on Home Bunch!

  Interior Design Ideas: Classic Coastal Home Design

A black front door is always a classy and timeless choice. Paint color is Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black.

Entry

A house only feels like a home when you add your personal touch to it and this home exudes personality.

Doormat: Welcome Estate Doormat – Others: here, here, here & here.

Beautiful Planters: here, here, here & here – similar.

Entryway

The entryway features brick flooring and a stunning staircase with Ebony herringbone hardwood flooring. Jaw-dropping, right?!

Flooring: Prosource Prestige Oak Noir – similar here.

Chandelier: Visual Comfort – Other Beautiful Lighting: here, here & here.

Flooring

Brick flooring is Thompson Building Materials, Belden Brick – similar here & here.

Foyer Bench

Foyer Bench: Redford with custom cushion – similar – here – Other Beautiful Foyer Benches: here, here, here & here.

Green Pillow: Custom – similar here.

Pillow: Caitlin Wilson.

Foyer Decor

A beautiful chest with coastal decor complements this welcoming foyer.

Chest: Wayfair – similar here, here, here & here.

Dining Area

This dining room and butler’s pantry layout is classic and very practical. Notice the incredible millwork that this entire space features.

Butler’s Pantry Backsplash: Unique Stone Imports; Maharaja Stripe – similar: here, here & here.

Hardware: Top Knobs Appliance Pull & Latches.

Dining Room Table

Dining table is custom and available through the designer – similar here – Other Beautiful Dining Tables: here, here, here, here & here.

Side Dining Chairs: Ballard Designs – similar here.

Rug: Pottery Barn 9×12 Fibreworks Bound Seagrass – Grey Bound.

Buffet: Redford House Lawson Hutch French Grey – Others on Sale: here, here & here.

Beautiful Hurricanes: here.

Mirror: Wayfair.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is Thibaut Trellis in Grey and White wallpaper – similar here.

End Chairs: Restoration Hardware – similar here.

Lighting: Visual Comfort.

Kitchen

The kitchen features a classic design with white perimeter cabinets and a large grey island. Notice the beautiful ceiling and herringbone hardwood flooring. Cabinet paint color is Sherwin Williams Pure White SW 7005.

Kitchen Island

The grey island paint color is Sherwin Williams Mindful Gray SW 7016.

Hardware: Top Knobs Appliance Pulls, knobs & Latches.

Counterstools: Serena & Lily with Diamond fabric, navy.

Pendants: Rejuvenation – Others on Sale: here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Faucet: Rohl with side spray.

Sink: Rohl.

Backplash

The backsplash is AKDO Staggered Calacatta – similar here. The countertops are also Calacatta marble.

Other Beautiful Tiles: here, here & here.

Breakfast Nook

This happy and inviting coastal breakfast nook features comfortable wicker dining chairs and a white dining table complemented by a custom banquette.

Dining Table: Custom – available through the designer.

Banquette Pillows: Serena & Lily Lattice Fabric – in green – no longer available.

Green Stripe: Custom – Others: here, here & here.

Blue Pillow: Serena & Lily Navy Diamond.

Bench Cushion: Custom in Sunbrella Navy solid fabric – similar here.

Pendant: RH – similar here.

Whale Art: Etsy.

Chairs

Nook Chairs: William Sonoma – Other Coastal Dining Chairs: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Nook Chair Pillows: Custom, Etsy – Other: here.

Topiaries: here – similar

Layout

You can get a really good idea of the layout of this home with the picture above. Notice the dining room and butler’s pantry and a grey barn door leading to the pantry.

Sofa: RH 8′ Belgian Track Arm Slipcovered Sofa in Perennials Classic Linen Weave – similar here & here.

Pillows: Custom – Other Navy Pillows: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Coffee Table: Wayfair – discontinued.

Paint Color

Walls and millwork are Sherwin Williams Pure White SW 7005.

Round Side Table: One Kings Lane.

Millwork

The fireplace is flanked by custom built-in cabinets with shelves.

Ottomans: Custom with Serena & Lily fabric – similar here – Other Beautiful Stools & Poufs: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Rug: Pash – similar here.

Fireplace Tile

The fireplace tile is AKDO Calacatta – similar here.

Coastal Bookcase Decor

The bookshelves carry the same coastal motif found everywhere else in this home.

Sconces: Visual Comfort.

Window Treatment

Window Treatment: Custom, using Schumacher Geyer Stripe. Cornice is also custom.

Powder Room

The powder room features an unique chevron wainscoting. Get inspired!!!

Washstand: Pottery Barn – Other Beautiful Vanities: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Mirror: here & here – similar

Wallpaper: here – similar

Laundry Room

How dreamy is this laundry room with a dog shower?! Having a raised pet shower is ideal because you won’t break your back while washing your pet. Luxurious? Yes! But also very practical.

Dog wash Tile: here.

Flooring: 2×2 Hex Carrara Polished Tile.

Backsplash Tile: here – similar.

Wall Sconce: Rejuvenation.

Paint Color

Wall color is “Mindful Gray by Sherwin Williams”.

Countertop: Amazon Stone.

Landing

Custom grey cabinets give personality to the upper landing.

The sconces are Visual Comfort.

Paint Color

Built-ins are Mindful Gray SW 7016 by Sherwin Williams.

Hardware: Top Knobs.

Master Bedroom

Featuring a navy blue and Kelly green color scheme, this master bedroom exudes a timeless and far-from-boring approach.

Windows Treatment: Custom with Schumacher Jade Trellis.

Bed: Custom, in Sunbrella 5439 Navy fabric – Others: here, here & here.

Duvet Cover: HomeGoods – similar here.

Accent Pillows: Custom.

Nightstands

Nightstands are from Pottery Barn.

Beautiful Blue & White Table Lamps: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Euro Pillows

Euro Pillows: Custom with Schumacher Jade Trellis.

White Pillows

White Pillows: Ralph Lauren Home.

Recommended Bedding: here, here, here & here.

Girl’s Bedroom

Featuring a coral and yellow color scheme, this girl’s bedroom is pure happiness and sunshine!

Bed: Serena & Lily – on sale!

Back Pillows: Custom, Schumacher Fabric – also here.

Yellow Pillow: Kravet Hits the Spot Lemonade – available through the designer.

 Rug: Wayfair Yellow Quatrefoil Rug.

Sunshine

Paint color is similar to Benjamin Moore Sundance.

Bedding: Serena and Lily in Pink Sand.

Dresser: Redford House – Others on Sale: here, here & here.

Artwork above bed: Custom – similar option: here.

Girl’s Bathroom

The girl’s bathroom features custom shower curtains with cornice. Cabinet is painted in Pure White in Sherwin Williams.

Hardware: Top Knobs Pulls, & knobs.

Stool: Serena & Lily.

Flooring: here – similar

Countertop: Silestone White Zeus.

Faucet: Rohl.

Kids’ Bathroom

Featuring a soothing color scheme, this bathroom feels relaxing and timeless.

Mirror: Serena & Lily.

Shower Floor Tile: Unique Stone Imports Trellis Thassos & Azul Celeste Dots – similar here.

Flooring & Shower Wall Tile: 12″x12″ White Thassos Tile – similar here.

Outer and Inner Border of picture frame: Akdo Azul Celeste Mosaic Tile

Inside picture frame: here – similar

Lighting: here, here & here – similar

Hardware: Pulls & Knobs.

Faucet: Rohl.

Nautical Shared Bedroom

How fun is this kids’ bedroom? This bed set is perfect for a small space!

Bed Set: Pottery Barn (on sale!).

Navy Quilt: Serena & Lily.

Bedding: Serena & Lily.

Striped Pillow: Joss & Main.

Lantern: Pottery Barn – discontinued – Others: here & here.

Rug: Chandra – Other Nautical Rugs: here & here.

Wall Art: Etsy.

Backyard

What a dreamy backyard! I love the white fence, the landscaping and that inviting pool/spa!

Patio

A black Dutch-door opens to a private side patio with outdoor kitchen.

Black Patio Doors

Black metal patio doors contrast with the white exterior.

Lounge Chairs

  How inviting are these chaise lounges?! I wouldn’t mind spending every sunny day reading a book in one of them.

#Staycation

This interior designer is truly incredible. She transformed this backyard into a vacation spot!

  Many thanks to this talented interior designer for sharing the details above!

Interior Design: AGK Design Studio (Instagram).

Photography: Ryan Garvin.

Builder: Redline Construction.

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[dawnjeman]

Interior Design Ideas: Classic Coastal Home Design

  Hello, everyone! How are you doing today? We have been busy with our kids… my eldest son is graduating and we couldn’t be any prouder! This is a happy month!

Talking about that, I am honestly very happy to be featuring this classic coastal home designed by AGK Design Studio (recently featured here, here & here) on the blog today. I first saw this home a few years ago and it has stayed in my mind since then. I usually only feature homes that are recently finished but I had to open an exception for this home because of its classic details and many inspiring interior design ideas.

I hope this home brings you some joy and a moment of happiness. Feel free to pin your favorite photos and thank you so much for being on Home Bunch!

  Interior Design Ideas: Classic Coastal Home Design

A black front door is always a classy and timeless choice. Paint color is Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black.

Entry

A house only feels like a home when you add your personal touch to it and this home exudes personality.

Doormat: Welcome Estate Doormat – Others: here, here, here & here.

Beautiful Planters: here, here, here & here – similar.

Entryway

The entryway features brick flooring and a stunning staircase with Ebony herringbone hardwood flooring. Jaw-dropping, right?!

Flooring: Prosource Prestige Oak Noir – similar here.

Chandelier: Visual Comfort – Other Beautiful Lighting: here, here & here.

Flooring

Brick flooring is Thompson Building Materials, Belden Brick – similar here & here.

Foyer Bench

Foyer Bench: Redford with custom cushion – similar – here – Other Beautiful Foyer Benches: here, here, here & here.

Green Pillow: Custom – similar here.

Pillow: Caitlin Wilson.

Foyer Decor

A beautiful chest with coastal decor complements this welcoming foyer.

Chest: Wayfair – similar here, here, here & here.

Dining Area

This dining room and butler’s pantry layout is classic and very practical. Notice the incredible millwork that this entire space features.

Butler’s Pantry Backsplash: Unique Stone Imports; Maharaja Stripe – similar: here, here & here.

Hardware: Top Knobs Appliance Pull & Latches.

Dining Room Table

Dining table is custom and available through the designer – similar here – Other Beautiful Dining Tables: here, here, here, here & here.

Side Dining Chairs: Ballard Designs – similar here.

Rug: Pottery Barn 9×12 Fibreworks Bound Seagrass – Grey Bound.

Buffet: Redford House Lawson Hutch French Grey – Others on Sale: here, here & here.

Beautiful Hurricanes: here.

Mirror: Wayfair.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is Thibaut Trellis in Grey and White wallpaper – similar here.

End Chairs: Restoration Hardware – similar here.

Lighting: Visual Comfort.

Kitchen

The kitchen features a classic design with white perimeter cabinets and a large grey island. Notice the beautiful ceiling and herringbone hardwood flooring. Cabinet paint color is Sherwin Williams Pure White SW 7005.

Kitchen Island

The grey island paint color is Sherwin Williams Mindful Gray SW 7016.

Hardware: Top Knobs Appliance Pulls, knobs & Latches.

Counterstools: Serena & Lily with Diamond fabric, navy.

Pendants: Rejuvenation – Others on Sale: here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Faucet: Rohl with side spray.

Sink: Rohl.

Backplash

The backsplash is AKDO Staggered Calacatta – similar here. The countertops are also Calacatta marble.

Other Beautiful Tiles: here, here & here.

Breakfast Nook

This happy and inviting coastal breakfast nook features comfortable wicker dining chairs and a white dining table complemented by a custom banquette.

Dining Table: Custom – available through the designer.

Banquette Pillows: Serena & Lily Lattice Fabric – in green – no longer available.

Green Stripe: Custom – Others: here, here & here.

Blue Pillow: Serena & Lily Navy Diamond.

Bench Cushion: Custom in Sunbrella Navy solid fabric – similar here.

Pendant: RH – similar here.

Whale Art: Etsy.

Chairs

Nook Chairs: William Sonoma – Other Coastal Dining Chairs: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Nook Chair Pillows: Custom, Etsy – Other: here.

Topiaries: here – similar

Layout

You can get a really good idea of the layout of this home with the picture above. Notice the dining room and butler’s pantry and a grey barn door leading to the pantry.

Sofa: RH 8′ Belgian Track Arm Slipcovered Sofa in Perennials Classic Linen Weave – similar here & here.

Pillows: Custom – Other Navy Pillows: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Coffee Table: Wayfair – discontinued.

Paint Color

Walls and millwork are Sherwin Williams Pure White SW 7005.

Round Side Table: One Kings Lane.

Millwork

The fireplace is flanked by custom built-in cabinets with shelves.

Ottomans: Custom with Serena & Lily fabric – similar here – Other Beautiful Stools & Poufs: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Rug: Pash – similar here.

Fireplace Tile

The fireplace tile is AKDO Calacatta – similar here.

Coastal Bookcase Decor

The bookshelves carry the same coastal motif found everywhere else in this home.

Sconces: Visual Comfort.

Window Treatment

Window Treatment: Custom, using Schumacher Geyer Stripe. Cornice is also custom.

Powder Room

The powder room features an unique chevron wainscoting. Get inspired!!!

Washstand: Pottery Barn – Other Beautiful Vanities: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Mirror: here & here – similar

Wallpaper: here – similar

Laundry Room

How dreamy is this laundry room with a dog shower?! Having a raised pet shower is ideal because you won’t break your back while washing your pet. Luxurious? Yes! But also very practical.

Dog wash Tile: here.

Flooring: 2×2 Hex Carrara Polished Tile.

Backsplash Tile: here – similar.

Wall Sconce: Rejuvenation.

Paint Color

Wall color is “Mindful Gray by Sherwin Williams”.

Countertop: Amazon Stone.

Landing

Custom grey cabinets give personality to the upper landing.

The sconces are Visual Comfort.

Paint Color

Built-ins are Mindful Gray SW 7016 by Sherwin Williams.

Hardware: Top Knobs.

Master Bedroom

Featuring a navy blue and Kelly green color scheme, this master bedroom exudes a timeless and far-from-boring approach.

Windows Treatment: Custom with Schumacher Jade Trellis.

Bed: Custom, in Sunbrella 5439 Navy fabric – Others: here, here & here.

Duvet Cover: HomeGoods – similar here.

Accent Pillows: Custom.

Nightstands

Nightstands are from Pottery Barn.

Beautiful Blue & White Table Lamps: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Euro Pillows

Euro Pillows: Custom with Schumacher Jade Trellis.

White Pillows

White Pillows: Ralph Lauren Home.

Recommended Bedding: here, here, here & here.

Girl’s Bedroom

Featuring a coral and yellow color scheme, this girl’s bedroom is pure happiness and sunshine!

Bed: Serena & Lily – on sale!

Back Pillows: Custom, Schumacher Fabric – also here.

Yellow Pillow: Kravet Hits the Spot Lemonade – available through the designer.

 Rug: Wayfair Yellow Quatrefoil Rug.

Sunshine

Paint color is similar to Benjamin Moore Sundance.

Bedding: Serena and Lily in Pink Sand.

Dresser: Redford House – Others on Sale: here, here & here.

Artwork above bed: Custom – similar option: here.

Girl’s Bathroom

The girl’s bathroom features custom shower curtains with cornice. Cabinet is painted in Pure White in Sherwin Williams.

Hardware: Top Knobs Pulls, & knobs.

Stool: Serena & Lily.

Flooring: here – similar

Countertop: Silestone White Zeus.

Faucet: Rohl.

Kids’ Bathroom

Featuring a soothing color scheme, this bathroom feels relaxing and timeless.

Mirror: Serena & Lily.

Shower Floor Tile: Unique Stone Imports Trellis Thassos & Azul Celeste Dots – similar here.

Flooring & Shower Wall Tile: 12″x12″ White Thassos Tile – similar here.

Outer and Inner Border of picture frame: Akdo Azul Celeste Mosaic Tile

Inside picture frame: here – similar

Lighting: here, here & here – similar

Hardware: Pulls & Knobs.

Faucet: Rohl.

Nautical Shared Bedroom

How fun is this kids’ bedroom? This bed set is perfect for a small space!

Bed Set: Pottery Barn (on sale!).

Navy Quilt: Serena & Lily.

Bedding: Serena & Lily.

Striped Pillow: Joss & Main.

Lantern: Pottery Barn – discontinued – Others: here & here.

Rug: Chandra – Other Nautical Rugs: here & here.

Wall Art: Etsy.

Backyard

What a dreamy backyard! I love the white fence, the landscaping and that inviting pool/spa!

Patio

A black Dutch-door opens to a private side patio with outdoor kitchen.

Black Patio Doors

Black metal patio doors contrast with the white exterior.

Lounge Chairs

  How inviting are these chaise lounges?! I wouldn’t mind spending every sunny day reading a book in one of them.

#Staycation

This interior designer is truly incredible. She transformed this backyard into a vacation spot!

  Many thanks to this talented interior designer for sharing the details above!

Interior Design: AGK Design Studio (Instagram).

Photography: Ryan Garvin.

Builder: Redline Construction.

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  Best Sales of the Month:

Thank you for shopping through Home Bunch. I would be happy to assist you if you have any questions or are looking for something in particular. Feel free to contact me and always make sure to check dimensions before ordering. Happy shopping!

  Wayfair: Up to 70% OFF – Clearance!!!

  Serena & Lily: Up to 30% Off on Bedding & Beds!

  Joss & Main: Warehouse Clearout – Up to 70% off!

  Pottery Barn: Huge Sale! Save Up to 75% Off!

  One Kings Lane: High Quality Design Decor for Less.

  West Elm: Up to 70% off clearance!!!

  Anthropologie: See the super-popular Joanna Gaines Exclusive line!

  Urban Outfitters: Hip & Affordable Home Decor.

  Horchow: High Quality Furniture and Decor. Up to 30% off the entire site!

  Nordstrom: Up to 40% OFF. New Decor!

  Posts of the Week:

Reinvented Classic Kitchen Design.

Empty Nester Townhouse Design Ideas.

Small Lot Modern Farmhouse.

2019 New Year Home Tour.

Modern Farmhouse with Front Porch.

Florida Beach House Interior Design.

Small lot Beach House.

Coastal Farmhouse Home Decor.

Beach House Interior Design Ideas.

Home Bunch’s Top 5: Cabinet Paint Colors.

Tailored Interiors.

Florida Home with a Cottage Farmhouse Twist.

Dark Cedar Shaker Exterior.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Fixer Upper.

Classic Colonial Home Design.

Family-friendly Home Design. Grey Kitchen Paint Colors.

Follow me on Instagram: @HomeBunch

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See more Inspiring Interior Design Ideas in my Archives.

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If I am wrong, right me. If I am lost, guide me. If I start to give-up, keep me going.

Lead me in Light and Love”.

Have a wonderful day, my friends and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

with Love,

Luciane from HomeBunch.com

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[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/lifestyle/the-fix-how-to-choose-the-right-rug/

The Fix: How to Choose the Right Rug

For a living room to feel pulled together, most designers will tell you, it needs a rug.

But rugs can be expensive. And because a large-scale item like that is going to have a big effect on the way a room looks and feels, choosing one can be intimidating. The right rug may live in your home for decades. The wrong rug will serve as a daily reminder of the money you wasted — and the money you’ll have to spend if you want to replace it.

And getting it wrong is all too easy, given the range of materials, colors, patterns and sizes available. Finding the ideal rug, observed the New York-based interior designer Celerie Kemble, is a “complicated puzzle.”

To help you solve that puzzle, we asked Ms. Kemble and other designers and rug manufacturers for advice.

Use One or a Few

There is no rule that says you have to limit yourself to a single rug in the living room. Designers often use multiple rugs in larger rooms to define different areas. So how do you know whether one or a few is best?

Smaller spaces, and living rooms enclosed by walls and doorways, usually benefit from a single large rug.

“I’m often dealing with apartments where the goal is to expand the sense of usable space in a living room,” Ms. Kemble said. In those cases, “I usually want to use one rug, and make it as big as I possibly can.”

Sprawling, open-concept spaces, like lofts, are more likely to benefit from multiple rugs, which help ground disparate groupings of furniture and can be used to separate a living area from a dining or media area, in the absence of walls.

Can’t Decide? Then Layer Them

Another option is to layer rugs on top of each other, with a single large, plain rug on the bottom to cover most of the floor, and smaller decorative rugs on top to anchor different seating areas.

“One of my favorite tricks is to use a very big sisal rug, which is relatively inexpensive, and then layer softer, plusher kilims or dhurries on top at the seating areas,” Ms. Kemble said. “It tells everybody, by the enormity of the sisal, that you’re all at the same party.”

Determine the Size

It is important to work around a room’s obstructions when planning a rug purchase.

“We always start with the practical and then get to the decorative, while considering the architecture and mechanics” of a home, said Jesse Carrier, a principal of Carrier and Company, a New York interior design firm. “Are there doorways and door swings to consider? Is there any floor grille for HVAC that you don’t want to cover? Is there a fireplace where you have to deal with a hearth?”

After taking these details into account, consider circulation around the seating areas.

“There’s nothing worse than being forced to walk on the perimeter of a rug,” Ms. Kemble said, with one foot on and one foot off.

Choose a size that either completely covers the walkway or leaves the floor exposed where people need to pass by. Then decide how far beyond the furniture the rug should extend. A common way to size a rug is to ensure that it reaches underneath all four feet of all the furniture.

Or you could use a smaller rug that runs under the front feet of the sofas and chairs, and stops there. Just make sure that smaller objects at the rug’s edges, like end tables and floor lamps, are completely on or off the rug, Mr. Carrier said: “You don’t want unbalanced, rocking end tables every time you put something down.”

What about small rugs that float in the center of a room, untethered by sofa and chair legs? Many experts advise against them.

“Small rugs look a little bit lost and unfinished,” said Susanna Joicey-Cecil, the marketing director for the Rug Company, in London. “It can feel like a postage stamp, which is not so pleasing for the eye.”

Choose Patterned or Plain

A boldly patterned rug can serve as the defining feature of a living area, but because it has so much impact, it’s a choice that requires courage. Deciding whether to go with a graphic statement rug or something more understated comes down to personal preference, as well as your overall design vision and where your home is.

“In the city, oftentimes clients will want to invest in an antique carpet from an auction or one of the great rug vendors as a showpiece,” Mr. Carrier said. But in country homes and beach houses, “we’ll often do some sort of sisal, sea-grass or coir carpet, because it’s a little more informal and rustic.”

If you decide to shop for a patterned rug, there are endless choices available, from free-form contemporary designs to more traditional ones. But if you’d rather keep it simple, there are plenty of opportunities to introduce pattern at a smaller scale.

“For more laid-back, Zen environments, there are fantastically beautiful sisals with patterns in them, like herringbones and subtle stripes,” said Richard Mishaan, a New York-based interior designer. “To dress them up a bit, add a fabulous binding in leather or suede. It doesn’t increase the price enormously, but it’s very chic and beautiful.”

Pick a Material

Rugs come in many materials, including plant-based fibers like cotton, linen, sisal, jute and allo; downy, natural fibers like wool, silk and mohair; and synthetic materials like nylon and solution-dyed acrylic. There are also nonwoven rugs made from stitched-together materials like cowhide.

Each offers a different look and feel, with varying characteristics related to how well the materials wear and how easy they are to clean. They also range widely in price.

Rugs made from plant-based materials are often among the most affordable and offer an easy, casual look. But different fibers have different durability: Cotton and linen, for instance, age fairly quickly, while sisal and allo can take more abuse.

“We’ve had some disasters with linen,” Mr. Carrier said, “which is very, very beautiful” — at least when it’s new. But because it is easily damaged by wear and spills, he added, “we’ve had to replace a lot of linen rugs in our time, and now avoid them like the plague.”

Allo, on the other hand, is “very cleanable and doesn’t retain stains,” he said.

One of the most popular materials is wool, which can offer a range of looks depending on how it’s handled, from thin, flat weaves to hairy, hand-knotted shags. Wool tends to be more expensive than most plant-based materials, but it is stain resistant, softer underfoot and durable enough to last for centuries.

“Wool has lanolin in it, which makes it a very cleanable, stain-resistant fiber,” said Bethany Hopf, a sales manager at the House of Tai Ping carpet company, in New York. “When you spill, it sits on top for a little while before it will actually absorb,” which gives you time for cleanup.

Even when a spill soaks in, she said, “we have a lot of success getting stains out.”

The same cannot be said for silk, which is generally more expensive and delicate, but has a softer feel and a lustrous sheen. Some upscale rugs are made entirely from silk, while others combine wool and silk to create various effects.

In patterned rugs, “very often we have a wool background and then highlight the motif with silk, because it helps it pop,” said Ms. Joicey-Cecil, of the Rug Company. “You can have lots of fun playing with those two textures, because the silk has a lot of sheen to it.”

But Ms. Kemble cautioned that mixed-fiber rugs can be difficult to clean: “Silk can’t take water, but wool needs water to be cleaned. So when you have silk-and-wool mixes, it creates hard-to-sort problems once there’s a spill.”

Consider Indoor-Outdoor Options

If spills and stains from children and pets are a concern, it may be a good idea to choose an indoor-outdoor rug made from a synthetic material like solution-dyed acrylic, polypropylene or PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which are now often so soft and appealing that they can be hard to distinguish from indoor-only materials.

“They’re impenetrable: You can’t stain them; you can’t ruin them,” said Mr. Carrier, who replaced a wool rug with a nylon one in his own home when his children were younger, then switched to sisal when they grew up. “In certain applications, that’s the way to go.”

Don’t Forget the Rug Pad

It’s tempting to bring a rug home and put it down immediately, but there’s a step you shouldn’t skip: putting a nonslip rug pad underneath.

Cut the pad to a size slightly smaller than the carpet. A general rule is that it should be trimmed about an inch shorter than the rug on all sides, to provide maximum grip while preventing a visible change in level where the rug transitions from pad to floor.

Rug pads offer a touch of additional cushioning, Ms. Hopf said. But their real utility is more “about keeping it in place and preserving the life of the carpet,” she said.

In other words, it ensures that your new rug won’t slide like a banana peel.

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[vintagedolls]

Discovering Geneva: Hotel Beau Rivage

Returning to my hotel room is often the best reward after a long day of exploring. This is especially the case during my trip to Geneva, Switzerland- my stay at Hotel Beau Rivage was certainly unforgettable.

Hotel Beau Rivage has been a prominent establishment in Geneva since its opening in 1865. The family-operated hotel continues to awe and amaze guests with its lavish atmosphere. Each generation has been able to maintain the hotel’s rich history while progressing to compete with modern hotels. 

Many notable guests have resided at Hotel Beau Rivage. The hotel was a favorite of Princess Sisi, a beloved Duchess known for her beauty. The rooms that once hosted royalty, diplomats, and aristocrats are now available to everyone. The boutique hotel has a unique charm, cultivated by its many years of operation. 

Each of the rooms (along with paintings and decorations) are embellished with priceless items from the family’s extensive art collection. The perfectly puffed pillows, Victorian Era motifs, and captivating chandeliers are reminiscent of fairytales.  

The marble bathrooms set the mood for a relaxing bath full of bubbles. The modern interior of the bathtub sink is a distinct contrast to the bedroom. 

Now, let’s talk about the views from my room. My first Geneva post was dedicated to all the photo opportunities in this city. Hotel Beau Rivage is easily one of the most photogenic hotels I have visited. So much so that the breakfast view from my room was featured on Forbes Travel Guide. 

The trapezoidal layout of Hotel Beau Rivage allows for a panoramic view of Geneva. Jet d’Eau is in clear sight along with a sweeping mountain range that separates Switzerland and France. Some rooms also include a balcony for guests to fully appreciate the scenery. Amongst the silhouette of the mountain range, the tallest peak belongs to Mont-Blanc. For those unfamiliar with geological formations, Mount Blanc is the tallest mountain in Europe and the namesake for the luxury brand Mont Blanc. 

Photo of BonTraveler via ReadySetJetSet

With its historical origins, distinguished guests, and unparalleled views, Hotel Beau Rivage holds its position as one of the best hotels in Switzerland. Even with so much to do in Geneva, you may find it difficult to leave your room. Check out Hotel Beau Rivage’s website and Instagram for more! 

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Material Light on Substance, Heavy With Dick Pics

Jesse Harris at Toronto’s Cooper Cole.

MEXICO CITY- Is a bigger fair necessarily a better fair?

Having doubled in floorspace since last year, Material Art Fair feels like a totally different beast. The fair has moved to two lower floors of Expo Reforma, with larger booths arranged around “courtyards” for conversation and concessions. There are plenty of new exhibitors, and much of the work looks far more market-friendly than the wares last year.

Opinions remain divided over whether or not these changes are a good thing. Several people praised the new layout and expansion. Last year’s fair felt chaotic—construction workers were still putting the finishing touches on the build-out as the doors opened—with a labyrinthine booth layout squeezed between a bar/performance area and panoramic windows looking out over the city. It was cramped but intimate, with a relaxed, party-like atmosphere. Importantly, I found this complimentary to (rather than distracting from) the artwork itself. One of the things that impressed Paddy and I so much was the sense that artists and galleries were here to network and the culture of display felt peer-oriented.

Nathalie Du Pasquier at the joint Sala Seis by MARSO & Apalazzo Gallery booth.

This year, though, the atmosphere was tense. During the VIP preview, it didn’t seem like much was happening in the way of sales or conversation. Exactly two gallerists seemed eager to talk about the work they were showing. Not looking like a collector (apparently), even simple inquiries about artists’ names were often met with exasperation. Several exhibitors were so unenthused about their booths they seemed downright embarrassed. And honestly, I can understand why—a majority of the work here is kinda boring. Most people I spoke with conceded that they found this year underwhelming after how much everyone enjoyed the last iteration. My friend described many booths—characterized by decor-friendly small paintings and ceramics—as akin to an interior decorator’s trade show. We joked that so many booths with faux-naïve paintings of flowers or “kooky” pottery looked like set dressing for a late-90s sitcom episode wherein the comic relief gets her “big break” with a show at a local coffee shop.

Maybe that assessment is unfair—looking back through my photos, there were plenty of good booths, but the majority of pieces don’t lend themselves to much discussion. The fact that they’re dispersed amongst so many unengaging booths doesn’t help—maybe last year’s smaller, more crowded presentation distilled the art-viewing experience? It doesn’t help that some of our favorite galleries from last year didn’t return. But no one seems quite sure of why the mood and quality is so uneven. One gallerist I spoke with (who asked to remain anonymous) praised the fair’s new layout and centering of project spaces, even as they conceded that the show leaves a lot to be desired:

“I think some of the booths fell flat—I’m not sure why exactly but I think it’s a combination of the distance some galleries traveled, getting work across the border/customs (which is notoriously difficult and problematic) or if it was just a weird year”

And a weird year it is. Perhaps the near-total lack of acknowledgment of current events weighed awkwardly over the fair (some friends have said they spotted Ivanka-Trump-inspired art, but I must’ve missed it). It seems so strange to have an art event (which we once praised for being more discursive than commercial) almost completely avoid political topics, particularly one where pieces are sold in US Dollars as the local currency plummets, with a majority of exhibitors from two countries threatened by a militarized border wall between them. Contrast this with Zona MACO, where discussion of Trump and socio-economic crises where never more than a few meters from polite abstraction.

Birgit Megerle at Vienna’s Galerie Emanuel Layr

At Material, I felt almost guilty for the escapism of pieces I liked—which, predictably, mainly comprised some combination of wigs, dicks, plants, and neon. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of genitalia and houseplants (really, though, aren’t we all?) but it bothers me that these age-old, lowest-common-denominator motifs are the highlights of a fair with an artist-centric reputation at such a politically fraught time and place. Gleefully snapping pictures of crude dick-and-foliage paintings, I had the sudden impression of an ancient Roman libertine—drunkenly admiring a bathhouse orgy fresco while the Republic burned outside.

Joani Tremblay, “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics,” 2017 at Projet Pangée. Of all the plants-and-ceramics booths, Projet Pangée stood out as the best curated group show (and nicest!)

That being said, two booths stand out for their engagement with politics: Tijuana’s Periférica and Miami’s perpetually-on-point Michael Jon & Alan. Though technically, neither the curators nor the artist behind Siebren Versteeg “Fake News” at the latter had control over its political content. The piece is an algorithm which grabs images from trending topics online and assembles them into surprisingly nice “paintings” in real time. These are displayed in stock-photo-looking white rooms that evoke pristine domestic spaces, displayed on a monitor that refreshes every few minutes. It felt like a ghost in the machine was reminding us of the awful world outside Expo Reforma, despite everyone’s collective best-effort to ignore it.

Siebren Versteeg “Fake News” at Michael Jon & Alan.

Periférica is showing prints by Omar Pimienta, who works with passports and notions of nationality. Here he’s reproduced his childhood passport as an editioned screen print, stamped with the name of the fair as if it’s a visa for exhibiting the work. The artist also invites people to trade in their old passports for new “Free Citizenship” ones he fabricates, so anyone can call his invented nation-state home. The gallerist showed me a photo of his collection of passports, which is in itself an inspiring image: I like the thought that so many people would trade a symbol of their national identity for a piece of artwork.

Omar Pimienta at Periférica

Also at Periférica, Juan Villavicencio. There’s something so satisfying about how snuggly these wigs fit these ceramics.

Wickerham & Lomax, “The Ginevra” and “The Deana” at Springsteen.

I loved these Wickerham & Lomax purse-shaped prints before I even realized they’re named after two of my favorite people in Baltimore: The Contemporary’s Artistic Director Ginevra Shay and outgoing Director Deana Haggag. The whole booth is great, including abstract pieces by Sofia Leiby.

Chelsea Culprit at Mexico City’s Yautepec.

Another random/personal highlight: I was immediately drawn to this mobile of a dancer in platform shoes. Then it struck me: I once stayed in a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment here in Mexico City and snapped a photo of a massive painting that looked similar because I loved it so much. The artist happened to be in the booth and overheard me telling this story, and told me that piece was actually a “sketch” to plan this! What a small, great world.

Mario García Torres at josé garcía.

The excellent Mexico City gallery josé garcía also has this wig on display, from Mario García Torres. It’s flattened and framed, and convincingly looks like a delicate painting from a distance. I also recognized this José León Cerrillo from a show Paddy and I loved at josé garcía’s brick-and-mortar location last year:

José León Cerrillo

A model being covered in band-aids, for Ryohta Shimamoto’s “Adhesive Plaster Man,” also at eitoeiko.

Chez Mohamed’s booth, featuring Ren Hang (photo), Thomas Mailaender (ceramics), and Luka Arbay (neon).

This Parisian gallery is named Chez Mohamed, but what they’re serving is anything but halal. I respect the fact that they’ve fully committed to obscenity with such gusto, including a Ren Hang photo, titled “Little Buddha,” which features a naked man ashing into an ashtray that he’s using to cover his anus while reclining at another person’s feet in an unhuman-looking pose. Also, a giant neon dick from Luka Arbay. This is what I imagine the anti-NEA Republicans think all big-city, taxpayer-funded art museums look like.

Celia Hempton at Sultana.

Sultana presented a solo show of paintings by Celia Hempton, each one of a blurry man’s crotch, with titles such as “Romania 25th of May, 2016” and “South Africa 5th November, 2015.” The names and distorted quality of the images evokes homemade webcam porn, buffering as it traverses international boundaries. These are really nice paintings, each with their own mark-making vocabulary that suggests haste but thoughtful color palette.

Ryan Patrick Quast at Wil Aballe Art Projects, of Vancouver. This cigarette is made entirely out of paint (no surface). So it’s technically a “painting”.

Nando Alvarez-Perez at Oakland’s City Limits.

Pablo Ravina at Lima’s Ginsberg Galería.

Kevin Rhinehart at L.A.’s Grice Bench.

I’m ending on this Kevin Rhinehart painting because A) it’s one of my favorite pieces from the fair. Rhinehart is an architect who paints things that are a little fucked up, like these ruffled Venetian blinds. It’s so quiet but so lovely up close—down to the care with which he physically embroidered the thread running down the canvas. And B) because it’s a bit of a caveat: I almost totally missed this until a friend pointed it out to me.

I’d like to head back to Material, because I’m sure there are more small highlights I’ve overlooked due to fair fatigue and how generally stressed the vibe felt opening day (several acquaintances remarked that many people were concerned about lack of collectors, a noticeable difference from last year). Maybe those of us complaining about the fair are just disappointed that last year’s magic is impossible to reproduce. At any rate, there’s good art in there—it’s just in a bigger playing field now.

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