Shop New Orleans! Come to My Bed and Breakfast

Kevin Stone Antiques

Hazelnut

Juliet Home Furnishings

Villa Vici

Perch

New Orleans has the best shopping!
Decor, Furniture, Antiques, Cute Clothes, Shoes...

Magazine Street is described as the Soho of the South!
The French Quarter has many more wonderful shops
There are dozens and dozens and dozens of fantastic stores

When you get tired, there are tons of places
to have a cocktail and a bite to eat

Come and stay with us in our Bed and Breakfast
in our well appointed home just steps from Magazine Street

Weekend Package - check in Thursday check out Monday -
Up to 4 nights and 3 days - The perfect girly getaway!

Price $600. is for one or two persons

• Includes weekend stay
  
• With breakfast, and evening cocktails and nibbles
• Queen size bed in a fully decorated home
• With your own private bathroom
  
• I will take you around to all the best places to shop
• Guided tour of the prettiest places in New Orleans
• We'll even pick you up at the airport...

Book now: mizvtheb@yahoo.com
Or call me Valorie Hart 504 875-0526

These weekends available:

June 14-15
June 21-22

July 4th weekend still open! (July 4, 5, 6)

July 19-20
July 26-27


Payment:
Paypal - boutique@planet-tango.com

or a check made payable to Valorie Hart

please mail to:
Valorie Hart
808 Washington Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70130

Sex And The City - The Set Design by Jeremy Conway: Carrie's New Apartment And More...

Jeremy Conway's on trend set design:
Enid's office with Draper chest and
stunning brass bust of an antelope
with long Murano glass horns from maison21

Along with all there is to love about the movie Sex And The City, the secret co stars are The City of New York, The Brooklyn Bridge, and the interiors of the girls' apartments and homes. In fact all of the interiors are terrific. The set design made me cry as much as the big emotional scenes, because it makes my New York look so achingly good.
Carrie's place gets a major make over near the end of the movie to coincide with her emotional make over. In the TV series, Carrie's apartment never had the pulled together look of her wardrobe. It almost looked like a bachelor apartment, rather than a place where a girly girl lived. Even hard ass Miranda's apartment was better looking with expensive designer furniture and lamps (and I think she even had a decorator in one episode who stole her potential boyfriend and married him). No, Carrie could not care less about where she lived.
In the movie, she's ten years older, and on the brink of huge life changing events. Finally she gets an apartment befitting an adult woman of means.
These are just a couple of photos - I hope to find more - of the work of set designer Jeremy Conway who did the work on the TV show and for the movie.

Carrie's bedroom make over, with a view into the LR

So chic and as pulled together as one of her outfits

Early Carrie, brown and sad
and a bit of a mess

Jeremy Conway set designer
Sex And The City

Jeremy custom mixes all of his colors, but the brilliant, lovely ocean blue on Carrie's walls is very close to Benjamin Moore's Electric Blue. Concerning the dramatic change in Carrie's apartment, which was previously dressed in subdued, natural tones, and flea-market chic, Conway said, "Carrie had really grown up, but she wasn't living that life in her apartment yet." The challenge in the redecorating was designing an apartment that seemed like it could be a little more organized, lived in, and put together. One important change was to fit a dining table into the house, "so it could be a place that she and Big could have dinner together."
Conway said that redecorating the iconic apartment of Carrie Bradshaw definitely made him a bit nervous. "[Writer and director] Michael Patrick King didn't see the apartment until the day before shooting started. He came into the living room and said nothing, and I thought, 'Oh no,' and then he started to tear up, and again, I thought 'Oh no,' and then Michael said that it was fantastic."

From Casa Sugar

The Peony Report From G. Page

Of the many things I miss about living in New York, is Peony season. Now that I live in the South, there are no locally grown peonies. However, I have an old and dear friend Gary Page who owns the best wholesale flower store. And they will ship! There are also some nice hydrangea for your consideration madame...

Peony Pink Luau

Hydrangea Summertime

Peony Assorted

Peony Assorted

Peony Charles Burgess

Peony Baroness Von Schroeder

Peony Bowl of Cream

WEEK OF JUNE 2ND, 2008: Local Peony and Hydrangea

Peony season continues to roll as new varieties begin to emerge. Most are between $2 and $2.50 per stem, but box discounts can be had!

Summertime hydrangea is now available. This product is hardy, out door grown product that is excellent for both parties and weekly accounts. They cost $22.50 a bunch and $100 a bale. These are only around for a month, so use them while you can.

Please contact our representative Maria @ 877 472 4394 or maria@gpage.com for Ecuadorian imports and direct drop shipping.

Always In Style - Joni Webb

I am humbled. I made a little pen pal lately. Her name is Joni. She has a beautiful decor blog called Cote de Texas. When other bloggers have played mean girl to me, she has been welcoming from the start, and helpful too. As a newbie I make my share of awkward errors.
Anyhoo, as we are getting to know each other; Joni has been very, very humble. She never told me about her accomplishments per se. I just thought she was a way cool bloginista. I saw the word Webb design associated with her name, and silly geeky me thought she had something to do with designing web sites.
Oh lord, it just dawned on me today that Webb Designs is the name of her interior design company. Duh. So I goolged her and found a wonderful editorial in Houston House and Home. The stingy bastards only let you download a PDF file HERE
So you'll have to do a little work to see the photos. Do it!
In the meantime I went to her blog archive at Cote de Texas and found a few photos to tease you with HERE

Joni sent me this when I asked
readers to send me pet pictures with their decor
She never mentioned it is
the cover shot for Houston House and Home!

Just a little sitting room vignette

Her simple and sublime dining room

From her blog talking about textiles


The layered look done to perfection

What I really love about Joni, besides her talent, is her honesty. She doesn't hide her age. She doesn't hide photos of HERSELF. She let's you see who she is. She's not fake, she's not a fraud pretending to be an expert with a smart mouth. She IS an expert with a very smart mouth, and a big heart to mentor one very ignorant visual vamp.
She has lots of fans in the interior design world, espeically among bloggers. But I wanted to introduce her to my new readers, and keep her in my scrap book forever and ever.

Earthquake Cocktail For Fifi Flowers

In response to my post about the start of hurricane season, a reader, Fifi Flowers commented:

Wow... you live in hurricane season area... I live in never know earthquake season... I wonder if there is a earthquake mix or drink?

Yes dear Fifi there is an Earthquake Cocktail (try it out and let me know what you think):

The Tremblement de Terre (or "Earthquake") Cocktail has been attributed to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French painter. The name is derived from its effects, which tend to "shake up" the drinker.

In a wine goblet mix:

• 3 parts Absinthe
• 3 parts Cognac

• This is another version of the Earthquake. It is sometimes served with ice cubes (on the rocks in a rocks glass), or shaken (use a cocktail shaker filled with ice to chill it) before serving, and pour into a Martini style glass.
  
  • 1 part gin
  • 1 part whiskey (Bourbon)
    
  • 1 part Pernod liquorice liqueur

Send me your cocktail recipes for the disasters in your life.

Farewell Yves St. Laurent

As he retired, he said: "I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober."

Algerian born, Yves had many properties
in Marrakesh, including Jardins Majorelle

The 1970's

More recent photo, before he retired
with friend and muse Catherine Deneuve

In his studio with muse, friend,
and design assistant Loulou de la Falaise

One of the first couture designers to bring
high fashion to the masses:
Opium & Paris perfume; tuxedos for women; safari look;
rich peasant look; color block dresses-the Mondrian dress;
lately the Muse bag, and so much more...

Wearing the Safari look himself in the 60's
He created the idea of unisex dressing

At work with a friend

Boy genius

It was the sexual revolution

Yves Saint Laurent, who exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior and endured as one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his apartment in Paris. He was 71. HERE
Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house but soon after was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Berge were lovers, and, because they are French, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Berge sold the company for $600 million. Since his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent has spent much of his time in Marrakesh, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. From Band of Thebes:Fashion HERE
If you would like to see more terrific photos, go HERE

Today Is The Start Of Hurricane Season

Stock up on essentials

Get in shape - the plywood ritual is hard work

Seriously, refresh your memory with a guide

Pray for an easy season

Scrapbookin'

It's a hot Saturday afternoon
I'm on the porch ensconced in my happy place

Baby wants a sip
It's cool and yummy

It's a pretty good issue

I am cracking up! There seems to be a current burning issue about blogging: Oooooo what if all we are doing is computer scrap booking.
A scrap book defined in the dictionary is: an album for printed and written materials.
Mmmmmm. Photos would be considered printed material in the days before digital images on the computer. Bloginistas communicate by writing, thus producing written materials. So photos plus writing collected on a blog, might be a virtual album so to speak. Mmmmmm.
Decor blogs are eye candy for the most part. If you didn't have pretty pictures you would bore yourself and your readers to death. Decor blogs ARE home made scrap books. Unless something has drastically changed in the last ten minutes, scrap booking is a form of entertainment. Entertainment is light hearted. So what's up with making the words scrap booking something derogatory and dirty, and then flinging them in the virtual pretty faces of dedicated bloggers playing with themselves? What's wrong with an album of photos and writing? A scrap book?
I also like to think of blogs as the new magazines. Magazines are defined in the dictionary as: a periodical with covers. While we do periodically, well constantly produce our blogs, we don't have real covers. But I still think we could call a blog a magazine (and I need an updated dictionary).
Our blogs as on line virtual magazines are produced fast, and read even faster. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss blogs as not being as viable as hold-in-your-hand magazines (which really are just another form of entertainment), or to use the words scrap book as a pejorative description of any one's blog.
All decor-lifestyle blogs provide some kind of information. Some of them might be scholarly with its research and footnotes showing; some of them are smart mouth sit com writing with a pretty picture or two; some are PR outlets for the author; others are a heartfelt glimpse into the author's world; most are entertaining and inspire us in some way.
So who cares if a blog resembles a scrap book? If you don't like a blog or its scrap book of bits and pieces, of visual footnotes, of remembrances and stories, well that's okay. Bye bye.
And those bloginistas anointed by the press and doing personal appearances need to lighten up. We know you're special and important; we like you; we read you; we admire you; we like your scrap books - let us have our fun and our little scrap books too. Please.