Inside Avenue Home Couture For Modern Living

Are you sick of The Pottery Barn catalog? Finally a catalog to get excited about. Inside Avenue is wonderful! Not only does it have a huge selection of very fashionable furniture, accents, lighting, etc., it has nifty decor tips too. They are based in Los Angeles. Shipping is FREE even for furniture, and the prices are competitive. Merchandise is not cheap, but not overly priced either. Take a look HERE
And they have a blog too!

Image from Inside Avenue blog HERE

Another image from the Inside Avenue blog HERE

This hanging lamp about $700. There is also a floor lamp with the same finish

This fab red mirror around $700. It also comes in white

They have a huge selection of luxury bed linens

Image from the home page of Inside Avenue

Lovely collection of accessories

What's The Big Diff Between These Two Mirrors?

From Pottery (Poverty) Barn for around $450.
online only at potterybarn.com

From Target for $69.99
At target.com or at your local store

Young New Yorkers The Working Poor

I just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the starting salaries of young New Yorkers right out of college. It was filled with sad little tales of no haircuts or manicures, or no shopping or eating out, of eating a $3.99 plate of rice and beans late in the night to stave off hunger until morning, of living in apartments the size of a closet, of not being able to have an iPod.
Some things never change. No matter when you land in New York and get your first jobs and first salaries, you never have enough money. You are one of the walking working poor.
I was for sure.
But I never was afraid, and never unhappy. I could literally be down to my last subway token (translate last trip on a Metro Card), and have a bag of pasta in the cupboard, and maybe a dozen eggs in the frige. I might have to walk alot until the next bit of cash would come in, but I never felt down and out. Living in the city was its own reward, and like all the kids in the article, you find ways to live a pretty interesting and full fun life. Being young, you can't really look bad, no matter how little money you have to spend on clothes. And there are a zillion ways to do things for free. You can never be bored.
The good news is that this part of life phases out as you find the next better paying job. But even if you make it to six figures, NYC is still expensive and you will always feel like you are living paycheck to paycheck.
In today's economy alot of moms, dads, and grandparents are doing some of the same money saving things the New York kids in the article are doing. Not everyone is rich, or planned wisely.
So hang in there kids. Money is just a thing albeit a useful thing, but not a value of measure of who you are. Everyone remembers their starving artist days with fondness, because life was precious and everything one got to do or have was really appreciated.
Read the article: Starting Salaries But New York Tastes HERE
Do you remember how much you made way back then?

Tell The Cleaning Lady About This...

White vinegar is cheap and great for cleaning
stainless steel and nickle plated faucets

It's so mundane, but the house must be cleaned. I was trying to clean a nickle plated bathroom faucet, and it was still looking dingy. I remembered my mother telling me to use white vinegar on stainless steel (long before so much stainless was in fashion), so I figured I'd try it on the faucet. And voila, shiny, clean, and it didn't hurt my skin, and it smelled like a nice fresh pickle.
So here it is in The New York Times, a whole article about raiding the pantry and using natural things for cleaning HERE
I'm sure any of you have heard this before, but take a refresher course, and get a refreshingly clean house without killing yourself or the planet.

Buenos Aires Style & At Home In Buenos Aires

I have added a new feature to the blog, a nice little widget from Amazon.com where you can buy a book I like straight from Visual Vamp! It's so cool! And I'm getting to be such a geek!
You know I love Buenos Aires. If you go to the travel label, you will see many postings with many photos. There are very few nice books with images of BA interiors, but I found two for you.
So click on at the new widget (My Favorites) at the left hand side of the blog, and buy one or both of these nice books!

This nice book is only $9.99!

I've shown you so many modern rooms,
so it's nice to see this mix of old and new
from Buenos Aires Style

Sex And The City New York Premiere Tonight!

Event planner Maria Ruiz says party will be saturated with crystals

To me, this is the one that counts! Seven seasons and four years later, the girls come back to where they started. All of them are are nearly ten years older, as are we. I look forward to seeing our collective evolution on Friday when the movie opens for everybody!

Sex and the City promises to be one of the biggest films of 2008, if only just for New York. As the continuation of a television series that came to define the way much of the world thinks of the city, the film demands a proper welcome. To see that happen, distributor New Line Cinema teamed up with Maria Ruiz, the founder and principle of MAR Events, to create a screening at Radio City Music Hall and a party at the Museum of Modern Art with a string of New York-centric touches for the May 27 premiere. HERE

Celerie Kemble - Look Book

Interior Design by Celerie Kemble
New York project

At the office - her web site photo

Yummy Mummy with her son Rascal

On site of an interior design project

With her dog Anchovie

With the hubs Boykin

Palm Beach job

Domino


Celerie Kemble has it all:

• She looks like Caroline Bisset Kennedy, or one of the women on Cashmere Mafia
  
• She has a cute husband who has a good job
• They have weird-cute names
  
• She has an adorable child and her pre baby figure
• She has a great wardrobe
• She's a socialite and a celebrity and goes to great parties
  
• She has a cute dog
• She has her own interior design firm in NYC and Palm Beach
  
• She has a merchandise line of furniture and fabrics
• She has a book coming out in November

Should we hate her? Want to be her? Love her?

Regency Rudux - Another Book On Pre-Order

Get this book in My Favorites

The Peak Of Chic wrote about it back in March HERE
Amazon just added it to its recommendations for me, so I pre-ordered it.
Published by Rizzoli with a foreword by Kelly Wearstler, how bad (or good) can it be?
So along with the other gals, Ruthie (The LA House, past its due date of March), and Debbie (Domino Book Of Decorating - also due out in October), I should have a pig out reading session in the Fall. Oh yeah, Celerie Kemble, another dahling of the moment also has a book coming too. Celerie - what a name. Reminds of being called Celery Valorie when I was a kid, for no apparent reason other than silly kid style playground rhyming.

The French Woman's Bedroom - The Book

Out of print, but sometimes a seller has it on Amazon

Madame Marie-Paule Pelle's bedroom in her NYC apartment
with a black wooden bed of her own design,
and the charming contrast of old fashioned lace sheets

World famous interior designer Andree Putnam's bedroom
Gray mosquito netting adds a colonial touch
to the bed area. Andree uses only white bed linen,
with a thin American quilt on top.

La Barrone Phillipe De Rothschild (Pauline)
designed the iron sapling bed posts,
to support a white ciel-de-lit. The simple
white embroidered linen sheets were
made especially for Pauline by Porthault.

Almost achingly simple bedroom of
the ultimate French woman, Marie Antoinette
at Versaiiles, done in Louis XVI style called
Meridienne, or chaise lounge - upholstered in
powder blue peau de soie. The cabinet
(bed chamber) is set into a mirror lined alcove.
I love the bare wood floors.

Mademoiselle Marie Beltrami
"If you can't find it, make it yourself..."
Marie's training as couturier
is responsible for her decorating style.

Mademoiselle Jacqueline Delubac
Former actress and art lover, a Leger painting
hangs over the gilded steel Jansen bed.
Porthault sheets, and Directoire style chairs -
Jacqueline sees the Roualt painting of Christ
first thing every morning: "Every time I
look at him, I feel I'm seeing a new painting."

Lady Ledwidge (Flora)
"A huge pinky-beige sharkskin bed...
to swim in every night," says Flora
of the bed designed by her father
Andre Groult in the 1920's.

La Comtesse Thadee Klossowski
(Lou Lou de la Falaise)
Assistant and muse to Yves Saint Laurent
Her bedroom is the ultimate hippie chic
with sky blue walls, yellow trim, exposed beams.
Indian bedspread, chintz curtains

This book The French Woman's Bedroom is an extraordinary volume I got in 1991. It was one of the first books on decor I purchased. We called them coffee table books then, and I bought quite a few in the first rush of success as a businesswoman with money to burn. Being from the working class, I was fascinated with beautiful rooms, and wanted to learn to make my rooms pretty too. I already had the knack, furnishing places with vintage and street finds, art, books, and flowers, but I wanted to understand furniture and fabrics.

I love this book because these titled and entitled women are unique individuals. I feel even if they were not from the world of celebrity and wealth, their bedrooms would be just as charming, romantic, sexy, and eclectic. There are reoccurring things such as luxury linens, art, color, unique furniture inherited or designed by the lady of the house, sensual romance in every detail (no matter what age the woman is).

This book is indeed a pretty coffee table book, and it is much more with its text about the history and habits of the French woman from 1500 to 1990. It presents lively portraits of 31 captivating women: aristocrat and artists, great hostesses and businesswomen, 20th century trendsetters.
In chateau or cottage, apartment or villa, the French woman's bedroom is much more than simply a place to sleep and dream; it is a special haven of imagination and sensuality, of intoxicating fantasy, whose mood and decor offer a vivid reflection of the inner self.

This book shows sumptuous rooms filled wonderful things, and provides a rare insight into the elusive nature of true style, and into the private fantasise of the world's most stylish women.
At the time of publication of this book, author Mary-Sargeant Ladd lived in Paris, Venice, and New York. She was a contributing editor to HG and Vogue. She is married to Frenchman, Baron Vernard d'Angeljan.

So check it out. It is the perfect antidote to the ho-hum Pottery Barn, West Elm, et al bedrooms that try to pass themselves off as sanctuaries and havens, but are tepid and contrived in comparison to The French Woman's Bedroom.

Under The Influence - How The French Woman's Bedroom Made Me Do It

The bedroom of Madame Valorie Hart
She makes her own bed...

Toile and coronets - what could be more French?

Romantic details

French interior design Valorie Hart bedroom

Oh I am so sick. The book, The French Woman's Bedroom has been in my collection since 1991.
The images always intrigued me. My last bedroom in New York City was tricked out in English country drag. The bedroom in California was tricked out in the hub's bachelor burgundy and black lacquer bedroom set. When we moved to New Orleans, our first apartment was in The French Quarter, in a house built in 1820. The bedroom walls were antique wood panelling, very much like Paris boisserie. I kept it simple, with white matelasse and black and white toile toss pillows. Our second apartment was huge - 4000sf center hall construction. The master bedroom was huge too. I didn't go all out Frenchy, because this was the first time we got all of our junk out of storage, a mixture of city and beach house stuff, so the bedroom was a mish mash.
We finally bought our little piece of swamp land and crumbling old house in 2004.
I got out my volume on the French woman's bedroom and started to think about how I would decorate our new bedroom.
First thing first. I have no real money to spend. I have no inherited family pieces. I have a few odds and ends and a big sick imagination.
I knew I wanted a blue room - I had never had a blue room. We were buying paint at Wal Mart. Sherwin Williams makes the Wal Mart brand Color Place, and it is very good paint for the price. I wanted that gray blue, like old French or Swedish walls. I chose Gray Verbena.
I wanted toile. I could not afford $15.99 a yard. I found 10 yards at Wal Mart for 99 cents a yard. I found a fragment of a crown for $3. at a flea market. I fashioned a coronet from an upside down metal shelf from Pier One ($12.99 on sale). My old white matelasse bed spread became the dust ruffle. I have two different toile duvet covers - one in the Wal Mart toile that my friend Sabina made for me, and one in a print from Ikea.
There are two bombe chests from my NYC apartment, (and two large mirrors). The chair (as-is) was a yard sale purchase for $20. The headboard is a Directoire daybed ($200. from an antique store in New Orlenas), the nightstands eBay French country repros ($90. for the pair). The pink lamps were a gift from my friend Miss Anne, and I added the oval shades. The shabby armoire is also from my friend Sabina, one of the few pieces she salvaged from her Katrina flooded home. She gave it to me, because she lost her house, and moved to San Francisco. She's still waiting for her Road Home money, and she and her hubs Joe are still living with friends, hoping to have their own home again one day.
We all love to look at books and magazines for pleasure and for inspiration, education, and information. If you like, send me a photo and your story of a room inspired by a book...

The French Woman's Bedroom -Toile

Madame Marie-Paule Pelle
"I make my own bed..."

"I have a wig stand with colored sand inside; it's blue, like a sky.
It makes me dream. And I listen to Richard Strauss.
With the blue wig ball and the music,
I can go to sleep in the blue bedroom;
in another bedroom, it's a different formula."

Marie-Paule calls another one of her bedrooms
her homage to America! The tolie is designed by Huet.

Chinoiserie inspired fabric with black Victorian papier-mache furniture
The bedroom of La Baronne Antoninette De Gunzbourg

Toile and coronets, what could be more French?
The book (The French Woman's Bedroom) continues to amaze, astonish, and inspire. It is chockful of choice personal intimate information:
Madame Marie-Paule won't let anyone touch her bed: "I make my own bed; I hate people touching my intimate things. I'm a maniac!" she laughs. "They can touch anything in the apartment, but they have no right to touch the bed. I don't want ANY stranger touching my bed. I HATE it." Special visitors are, however, welcome. "I like to watch someone sleeping in my bed," she says. "In fact, I adore it."

Happy Memorial Day

Thanks to all who serve, past and present...

Bed And Tango 3 Weeks Left In June - Book 4th of July Now

Private tango lesson with guests John and Judy
at Bed And Tango, in the dance studio

Tango, You, AND New Orleans - A perfect fit!

Bed & Tango (and Breakfast!)

The following dates in June are available:

June 6 -8
June 13 -15
June 20 -22
June 27 -29 (NA already booked!)

RESERVE NOW FOR THE 4th OF JULY - July 4 -6


Four Private Tango Lessons each day and unlimited practice time with tango masters and authors of the best seller book and DVD GOTTA TANGO

Weekend Package Price:
$600. for one or two persons up to four nights stay

OR

$225. per day

Includes: structured tango lessons and practice time, well appointed guest room with queen size bed, private bathroom, breakfast and refreshments.

Surrounded by the gastronomical offerings of the city. Ride the streetcar to the French Quarter, stroll the streets with to- go cups, catch a mid afternoon jam session, join an evening of music and more culinary temptations. You set the limits after you're done with your tango lessons.

Book your reservations for this personalized and discreet getaway:

Email, <mizvtheb@planet- tango.com>

Call, 504 875 - 0526

GOTTA dance more TANGO
http://www.planet- tango.com/ GottaTangoBook. htm

Types Of Small Tables Used In Interior Design

Tangier

The classic Saarinen - me wantee

A pair of citrus color Parsons - yum

Two types of garden seats, ceramic and wood

Small Jonathan Adler table

Flea market vintage from the 1960's

Colorful Moroccan

Mirror tables, Indian inspired

Asian nesting tables

Versatile, with a great variety of styles for any interior design, and at every price point, try using these to give any of your rooms a little lift...