Domino Subscription Giveaway!

Warning: this offer is for U.S. readers only!

For Christmas, I received a lovely (and well-known) book called  "domino: The Book of Decorating" by the oh-so-talented producers of domino magazine.  I know that many people own this illustrious and delicious book, and if you do, you were lucky enough to receive a free subscription card to the magazine, tucked at the back of the book.  The card gives you a free annual subscription (that's 10 issues)!

But to my dismay, the subscription card is good for "U.S. subscribers only".  This seems to be the story of my life in Canada - we're your biggest trading partner, but no one seems to know that we exist here in the frosty un-decorated north.  Oh well, after drowning my sorrows in a pan of chocolate chip brownies, I've emerged and decided to re-gift my subscription card to YOU!

Above: Designer Windor Smith's (oh, I love her!) house in domino magazine 2007

Above:  Designer Schuyler Samperton's (I think - correct me if I'm wrong) own house in domino magazine

So, if you are a U.S. reader of this blog, just leave me a comment below (or send me an email) and I will draw a name next week and send YOU my subscription card.  You just mail it in and get a 1-year subscription to domino, for free!

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I will make the draw next Friday, Jaunary 23rd at 8pm mountain time. 

P.S.  If you're unfamiliar with domino, please check out the links or pick up an issue.  Domino is a very youthful, colourful, whimsical yet sophisticated version of your mama's decorating magazines.  This magazine has a ton of character and is steeped in decorating fundamentals, but takes an offbeat, and cheerful approach to the classics.  I promise you will love it whether you're a traditionalist, a modernist or somewhere in between.  And while there is a ton of colour, there is also a sacred love of white within its stylish pages.  It's lively style will totally rejuvenate your decorating!  

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To me, reading domino is like cutting in to a juicy fresh Florida orange after a long dark winter eating oatmeal! 

Leave me a comment and I'll put your name in the draw!  

Sorry to all non-U.S. readers - now you can be just as disappointed as I was!

A Gift from Sweden

Last week, I received a wonderful gift from Sweden!  I was so excited as I love gifts (who doesn't?), especially if they are from lovely new friends in lovely places!  My dear blogging friend Poppins decided that I should try a certain Swedish Christmas sweet (Juleskum) she had mentioned in a post (I have a very sweet tooth).  So she went to the trouble of sending me a wonderful and thoughtful care package!

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You can imagine how excited I was when I opened her parcel with all these things!

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Not only did she send me two packages of Juleskum (also called tomteskum), she also sent me a gorgeous Swedish decorating magazine called "Hem & Antik" (which means "home and antique" since it's a beautiful blend of contemporary and antique styles).  See, my Swedish is improving already!  And she sent me Christmas decorations and a lovely vintage postcard.

  The juleskum are very sweet pink marshmallow fruit candy in the shape of Santa Claus.  They are delicious, fruity, chewy, and very, very sweet.  So far I have eaten one every day (I am rationing) but really want to just keep them to look at and smile at!

Poppins also gave me an adorable set of felt ornaments for my Christmas tree - aren't they lovely?  They remind me of shortbread cookies and look good enough to eat. I love them because they are so thoughtful and pretty and seem very Swedish to me. 

Here's how they look on the tiny tree in my kitchen:

We're taking the decorations down tomorrow, but I'm happy I got to enjoy them for the past week.  They look just like cookies, don't they?

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I've also enjoyed reading "Hem & Antik" immensely.  Let me tell you, the Swedish decorating magazines are everything you'd expect and more (I wonder what they'd charge for a subscription to Canada?).  I took some photos of pages in the magazine, which is full of gorgeous and unique rooms, and lots of white!  I'm starting to pick up a few Swedish words too, but boy is it hard to read a magazine in a language you don't know at all!  I kept looking at the captions over-and-over until I realized it really wasn't helping!

I loved the bare branch Christmas "tree" in the photo above, decorated with old-fashioned things.  It is so elegant.

The white room above is picture perfect with its real winter foliage!

I really love this elegant room - the placement of a beautiful table at the end of the bed is such a wonderful idea.  Isn't this a perfect vignette?!

Thanks Poppins for your thoughtful gift!  

Your gift really lifted my spirits at a difficult time!

~ T H A N K   Y O U ~

Tablescapes: Vicente Wolf

First, let me apologize to anyone who doesn't like the word "tablescape".  I know certain folks in the decorating world prefer to call them "vignettes" or some such thing.  While "vignette" is a very pretty word, I think that "tablescape" is perfectly suitable, precise and more meaningful when used to describe these table-top compositions!  It's what they are, after all - little "scapes" (a scene, or view) situated on tables.  The name makes perfect etymological sense to me!

A scene from Vicente Wolf's home in a Manhattan warehouse - notice his beautiful collections, arranged as tablescapes in the background.

Now,  where was I?  

I wanted to talk about Vicente Wolf's tablescapes.  In case you don't know, Vicente Wolf is a renowned Cuban-American designer and photographer (self-taught) who I could have sworn I blogged about but guess I didn't feel I had the authority to - he is rather intimidating! He is one of my most esteemed interior designers - despite the fact that I don't always like his rooms!  

I'm only kidding - I do like many of his rooms.  But although Vicente and I don't share the same taste even half the time, I admire him enormously and appreciate his rooms immensely.  They have a very particular look.  They're modern but not really minimal.  They look very clean but still have pretty traditional elements (often a traditional chair).  There is plenty of white, Asian elements, and a sophisticated, uncluttered but collected-over-time look with lots of worldly art and photographs.  Oh, and plants, lots and lots of tall plants and flowers!

Wolf has a very distinctive point of view, informed by his extensive travels and his photographer's eye for detail, color, shape.  I would love to go for lunch with him and spend the afternoon walking around town with him teaching me how to see the world the Vicente Wolf way (the title of his first book is "Learning to See").  We could all learn a ton.  Vicente, are you up for it?

But to get back to the focus of this post - Wolf puts together a mean tablescape!

His compositions are so worldly and elegant and recall far-away places.

Vicente's tables look like they've been put together by a cross between a well-travelled anthropologist and a slightly crazy child.  I've never seen tables quite like Vicente's for delivering a point of view.  For one thing, he always uses  giant, crazy-looking plant material.  I never see anyone else using houseplants, but Vicente has them!  And his plants and flowers are often tall and jungle-ish and totally suit the scale of the room.  He doesn't let the fact that they dominate the table bother him!  

Then he has a few odds and ends on the table (often very small things next to ginormous flowers or plants) like you've never seen before. There are never familiar things - instead these beautiful things all look like they were hand-hewn by some undiscovered tribe somewhere.   Everything has provenance and you know  that each little thing has a marvellous story.  

I don't think Vicente shops much at mass market retailers, but I could be mistaken.  Instead, his tables have an accumulated-in-our-travels, genuine look that I adore.  They speak of "life beyond these walls", and clearly say "to Hell with what everyone else is doing".

I love Vicente Wolf's tables - they're like the decorating equivalent of ikebana- precise, novel, a little weird, and utterly beautiful!

Another photo of Wolf's lovely warehouse home - his photography from his travels, as well as his collected works, is very beautiful, and he displays it casually on chairs (to facilitate quick decor changes).

If you're interested in reading more about Vicente Wolf, you can visit his firm's website here. For a very funny interview with Wolf and a photo montage from his fascinating home, you can visit New York Social Diary here.  Wolf also has a blog that can be accessed through his company website.  He travels a lot, so don't expect updates often!

(All photos from these sources)

Tablescapes

Tablescape: An artfully arranged collection of objects placed on a table (or other flat surface) for decorative purposes.

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I love "tablescapes" and if you're reading this, chances are that you love them too. 

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Since I was a girl, I've been arranging my things to look more beautiful.  Every little precious object that seemed unique to me was collected and arranged on my night table, dresser, or window ledge as a girl.  I was a self-taught stylist, arranging old things, my mother's jewellery and ornaments, and organic things from the outdoors (like leaves and branches).  I would photograph my arrangements with my little Kodak Disc camera (the one with the round negative), and change them around on a regular basis.  I was constantly "dusting my dresser" and re-arranging everything.  You'd think I would have realized sooner that I had a bona fide decorating addiction. 

I had a beautiful and very old pressback chair in my bedroom, from my Grandmother's house.  It was the nicest piece of furniture in my room, and together with an old orange crate my Dad gave me, it became the central player in many early tablescapes and roomscapes.  These dreamscapes were inspired, no doubt, by "Country Living", the only decorating magazine I could find at my local drugstore, and upon which my teenaged self was utterly dependent (along with Duran Duran).

Tablescapes have evolved from the wee collections girls (and some boys) arrange on their dressers.  Decorators everywhere create painstakingly perfect tablescapes of rare objects, arranged and rearranged with obsessive care.  But there is nothing more beautiful than a casual collection of simple things that doesn't look too contrived nor too carefully curated.  

A highly organized tablescape can look refined and elegant, even with simple elements.  Symmetry and tasteful flowers makes this tablescape all the more regal and formal-looking.

Kitchen tablescapes evolve haphazardly and can be beautiful too.  I love looking at the food and table styling in magazines like Cooking Light, to which we subscribe.  The patina of copper pots and a weathered countertop create a perfect backdrop for a tablescape of classic kitchen objects.

I like very lived-in tablescapes.   I don't arrange my house too carefully, except for my sideboard, which is the most static display space we have.  Even it changes every couple of weeks, but my other tablescapes change almost daily as I move things around.  I am constantly moving books, candles, and flowers, and switching decorative objects from one spot to another.  It is almost compulsive.  Even at 11:00 at night, I sometimes leave my bathroom for bed, carrying a little object to another part of the house. Please tell me that you do this too...

I don't like overly contrived arrangements, but when you have beautiful artistic pieces, it's hard not to let them hold court and have a surface all to themselves!  The problem is, a too-perfect tablescape doesn't invite real life - like keys and gloves, newspapers and our copious electronic devices - to share space with the decorations.  Life must be allowed in, even if it means forcing it into baskets, trays, and pretty bowls in strategic locations!  

Tablescapes are best when they evolve and are not-quite-perfect all the time.  

Which also leads me to think of the thousands of tablescapes and roomscapes that we all see but that no one else ever sees - the way the light falls across your newspaper on a Sunday morning, with your coffee grounds in the bottom of your mug, and your egg shell still sitting in your bowl.  For me, I notice that I like my house best on nights when we have dinner parties and the guests have gone home.  Then, I sit with my last glass of wine, listening to classical music in the soft spell of candlelight and look at the debris of a beautiful meal on the table and feel spiritually full!  There is something about partaking in a lovely meal with good company that makes the table and the house almost more beautiful after the meal than before, because now it is imbibed with experience.

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 I see these ever-changing landscapes in my home and they make me very thankful for the beautiful stuff of life that only I can see.  

Next time I will post about designer Vicente Wolf who is, in my opinion, a master of the artful  tablescape.

Thanks to Shoot Factory for all photos except the 1st, 3rd and 4th photos from House Beautiful.

~ A Paris Calendar ~

One of my favorite gifts this year was actually a gift I made for David!  

In September, we went to Paris for two weeks and had a beautiful vacation - walking, eating, shopping, and photographing our way around the city of light.  I lived in Paris as a student and forgot how it was one of my first loves.  It also rekindled my love affair with photography: a tumultuous romance I've had since high school!

In case you missed my Paris posts, you can see snapshots here, take shop tours and see the things we bought here and here.

For Christmas, and to commemorate our trip, I made David a calender!  I thought you might like to see the results!

January:  The Eiffel Tower was decorated to honor Paris's role as current capital of the European Union (the role rotates to different cities every 6 months)

February shows our day at the Arc de Triomphe:

 The view from atop the Arc is one of the most beautiful in Paris!

March honored our days visiting the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay:

April showed some of our golden moments - inside the exquisite Saint Chapelle, atop the Eiffel Tower, and photographing the Pont Alexandre statues:

May is my favorite month. I made a luminous scene using photos of the ceiling inside the Conciergerie, a chandelier inside Notre Dame, and a candle scene inside the church of St-Paul in the Marais.

June featured our sunny day-turned-night visiting Notre-Dame:

My rarely-photographed office assistant, Biscuit:

Another Notre-Dame scene for August - this looks just like a pro calendar!  I shot this photo from the walking path along the Seine, peering up from under the bridge:

September commemorated our autumnal visits to Pere Lachaise Cemetery - we stayed in a hotel with views directly over the cemetery. One of the shots was from our bedroom window!  The cat was a common sight at Jim Morrison's grave.  The upper right photo shows Oscar Wilde's Art Deco-inspired grave, covered with lipstick kisses! 

October is another favorite - this is Napoleon's tomb:

Two shots of the Eiffel Tower, which we visited and re-visited:

Hope you liked the tour!  The missing pages are just photos of us...