Archive for May, 2009

Well, now that summer is officially here, I am obligated to write about the beach.  It’s on my mind for two reasons.  The first is that once again, my family is not going to the beach this summer.  I say once again because every summer, my sweet husband promises after our non-beach vacation that we will go to the beach NEXT summer.  And somehow that next summer never arrives.  My sweet husband is allergic to the sand, somehow.  The rest of us love it, but the salty air, the sand between your toes, the wonderful hush and swish of the surf just doesn’t do it for him.  So, we are going to show our youngest guys the nation’s capitol instead.  I know it’s close to the coast, but close only counts in horseshoes.

 Which brings me to my second reason for thinking about the beach.  Here in landlocked Dallas, we still see lots of accessories and decorative touches that relate to the sea.  And in many ways, this is a Southern city with Southern traditions.  I would not be surprised to find that some of the grande dames of Dallas still use seasonal splipcovers, draperies, and pull their rugs up for the summer.  How wonderful it would be to have the resources to do that!  Of course, the current trend of neutral linens, slipcovers, and seagrass give that effect, but for most of us that is a year round look.  But I love to add a touch of the season to my home, so what’s a girl to do with 4 kids, a golden retriever, and a husband who, while very dear, would not understand the need for white linen slipcovers in every room in the house, to do? 

 I add accents everywhere I can.  Replace the firewood in my French basket with ivory and white candles that sit on top of it.  Ditch the woodsy potpourri in my huge trophy cup with some beachy potpourri from Pottery Barn.  Add sand and shells to my hurricanes instead of stones, coffee beans, and black beans.  And, do a little shopping at Mecox.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bark chargers filled with starfish, silver rimmed seashells, and bisque tortoise shells, vintage wicker flask, they all evoke summer to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I wandered across the street to Pottery Barn, and they have some fun ideas, too.  Wonderful embroidered pillows. These baskets whisper summer to me – you can put pillows, magazines, and throws in them. Or just a simple vase filled with sand and maybe a shell or two could do the trick.  Wouldn’t this tray look great with shells and candles?  Why Pottery Barn?  Well, they are affordable, which is huge right now, and they are on trend.  For a quick and inexpensive summer fix, Pottery Barn fits the bill.

 

 

 

 Well, I’ll be waiting another year before I get to feel the sand between my toes - but that’s OK.  I’ve got my beach sounds on my Iphone and Sonos system, I’ve got the shell thing going on, the faint scent of salt air in my potpourri, and hey - our pool is salt water - so what more do I need?

 

Kristin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I noticed a trend in perusing design magazines over the last year or so.  It’s a book trend.  The colorful jumbles that graced bookshelves in the past have been tamed, neutralized, and stylized.  J Randall Powers may have been the first designer to be associated with this trend, although I am certainly no expert.  If you see this photo above, you can see the bookshelf in this bedroom has perfectly aligned books, all in the same proportion, and similar mellow, aged color.  It turns out that for this photo, he reversed the books to face pages out, and the art hung on the shelf is highlighted beautifully.

 

 

 

Also becoming popular are shelves in which the books are color and size coordinated, accessorized with beautiful found objects.

My favorite decorative books are vintage books, especially vellum.  Unfortunately for me, they cost the earth.  There are some great reproductions out there, but they are not inexpensive either.  I do own a wonderful old French ledger book with entries in the most elegant script imaginable.  The pages range from a lovely ivory to a pale blue in color, and the ink has faded to a chocolate brown.  I decided to create bookcovers for my family room books with color photocopies of the ledger pages.  

 

Do you remember book covers from school?  Well, I used the same folding principal, except I didn’t bother with the cutting part.  I had over 450 books to cover and couldn’t countenance the notion of all that angle cutting, so I just folded the ends on all four sides and slipped the book in. 

 

 

 

I love the clean yet detailed look that this treatment give my bookcase.  It also highlights  my favorite finds and treasures from over the years.  You’ll notice above and below that I mixed in brown kraft paper covered books, too.  Two reasons?  My larger books would not accommodate the 11 x 14 photocopies and those copies got darned expensive!

 

 

 

I found another application for my wonderful ledger pages, too.  I rolled them, wrapped them in a variegated silk ribbon and created my own vintage scrolls.  Next up – I am going to decoupage them in a frame in my powder bathroom.

 

 

Have a wonderful Memorial Day!

 

Kristin

 

 

 

So, my intention was to be coy, keep you guessing, and do my next post on something else.  However, things have gotten so incredibly busy with end of year activities that I find myself doing that which comes easiest – telling you more about my home.  The entry and hall of my house were dubbed the “gallery” by my architect.  Not because there are any priceless paintings there – far from it - but because of a story that I told him about my vision for it.

 

 

 

When we were living in London, The British Museum opened a new wing, called The Enlightenment Gallery.  It is truly spectacular in every way.  It is meant to reproduce on a large scale the library of a gentleman of the Enlightenment – sad to say that none of us ladies likely had the wherewithal to afford the books or objects therein.  But I digress.  The library is a collection of books, yes, but also objects of nature, architectural models, cultural artifacts, maps, skeletons, etc.  It is like a Cabinet of Curiosities on steroids.  And the architecture is stunning.  My vision for our entry was to tell the story of our lives, to integrate the various things that we had gathered in our travels, along with natural objects to create our own Enlightenment library.  My wonderful architect promptly renamed the space the gallery.

 

So here we go.

 

 

As you can see, the gallery morphed into something a bit different.  As it turned out, many of the things that we had gathered in our travels had disappeared through various moves.  And the bits of shell and lava rock that the kids had gathered were rather paltry in comparison to what we needed.  So, I began to think of the gallery as an opportunity for my kids to become enlightened.  It started with a trip to Roundtop, the amazing antiques market, where I found a series of educational prints ranging from different cloud formations to the skeletal structures of amphibians and images of toadstools. 

 

I found a fantastic bookcase from one of my favorite Dallas antique dealers, Nick Brock.  As it was being moved in, I decided to have the movers remove the doors and hang them in the alcoves behind the matching dressers from Aidan Gray, found at Mecox.  Here are the niches that flank my dining room french doors.  The two chocolate and ivory toile slipped chairs are Victorian his and hers chairs that used to live in our master bedroom.  The bench with loose cushions sat in our perennial garden in New Jersey for years.  I love the patina that it acquired, and the contrast in texture with the wainscoting. 

 

 

But I had the most fun gathering the accessories that fill the bookcase and top the dressers.  My one eared deer was another Roundtop find, the parchment scrolls are color photocopies from an antique French household accounting book, the seashells were garnered from various stores and stalls, John Derian plates were found at the shop 4510, and I have the ubiquitous book The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, but it’s distinctive cover is never seen as we always have it open to some wonderful page or another. 

 

My favorite part of this space is the sunshine that flows in from the steel French doors that line the space.  And the view is toward my backyard, which my dear friend Daniel Houchard has turned into serenity itself.  More about Daniel soon. 

 

 

As you may have guessed, this story is going to have many parts, and my hope is to intersperse writing about the house with posts about people, places and things that I find irresistable or inspirational or both.