A FEW WEEKS ago we featured Villa Arniano, interior designer Camilla Guinness’s house in the Tuscan Hills, and by some wild coincidence we happened upon Zara Home's latest online catalogue, shot at this very place. It appears that they restyled everything, filling the rooms with their new product line-up and created these beautiful photos which make the villa look perhaps even lovelier...
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THEY SAY all good things must come to an end, and that is now true of our bestselling Windsor Bamboo Top Handle Wicker Handbag. Introduced in 2018 while we were living in Spain, and it has been a runaway bestseller ever since. Like many of our other wicker and rattan items, the Windsor is completely handmade by artisans in sunny Spain, about an hour by train outside of the city, past acres of sweet-scented orange groves and a castle ruin nestled high in the side of a mountain ...
THIS WEEKEND WE screened the 1983 film Risky Business on the projector. P has seen it many times before, but it was my first time, much to his horror⏤a classic in his opinion. On Monday we awoke to the chaotic madness of the Oscars slap and is it just us, or is the world getting weirder?
IF FEBRUARY IS a transitional month to spring, then March is its realisation: the daffodils and warm breezes, cherry blossoms and forsythia let us know for certain that springtime is on its way. And while it may still be a little bit too cool to wear a trench coat just yet, we know that trench season is also on its way and we couldn't be happier to leave our giant puffy coats behind ...
P HAS BEEN teasing me about writing my New Year’s Resolutions in mid-February, but that was before I’d told him about all the messages I’d received from you asking after them. It’s so nice how much you love these yearly lists, and to be honest, wasn’t sure I was even going to do it this year, as so far, this new year has been particularly difficult to define...
JUST FINISHED Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown and have decided to reread Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera because I needed something engrossing and fantastical as a break from the daily news cycle. I'd forgotten what an all-consuming (love) story it is and how beautifully written ...
WAS SPEAKING to P today about how these little musings are becoming more and more difficult with everything that has been going on in the world over the past while. After seeing all the horrific images that come out of Ukraine this weekend, feel like I've finally seen too much. That I know too much to still be optimistic. And yet, can't help but still believe in the beauty of this world, of this life⏤even if we have to look extra hard these days to find it ...
LAST WEEK WE featured the Hudson Valley home of Deborah Needleman and while we were researching her place, we came across Villa Arniano on Needleman's Instagram: "Back from a week at the house of my dreams—the Tuscan idyll of @camillaguinness. Spent a few days with @jacobwe, @skyegyngell, @davidprior, @holly_gore and my daughter Lily Weisberg who doesn’t bother herself with social media, and then a few days with #camillaguinness, @amberguinness and @macmillandavidmb languorous, long summer days eating (really well) reading, chatting , swimming and napping. I was so blissed out I didn’t take any pictures, so these are lifted from Camilla and Amber’s Instagram as well from @arnianopaintingschool the week-long painting workshops Amber runs here with her friend @willropercurzon"
THE BIO ON Deborah Needleman's Instagram page says, "Baskets, flowers, other people’s houses, the occasional dog, things like that". And for the most part, that's true, except that recently, she began posting images of her own home, a country house in Garrison, Upstate New York, which was published in Architectural Digest about a week ago, and we couldn't help but be absorbed with every last detail.
JUST FINISHED booking a hotel for another quick trip to Edinburgh in a few weeks. It feels strange to continue with ordinary things when the world feels anything but. It's the same reason why you probably noticed that we've been a little quiet on all of our social media channels lately. On the first day of spring, our little niece turns three, so I had the pleasure of spending some time ordering tiny clothing, books and toys to send as gifts ...
THE TROUBLE with having so much storage on my phone is that it has inadvertently become a digital hoard of images that have been all but forgotten, the favourites already printed and framed, or made into polaroids. The rest are meant to be sorted at some point, but there are so many of them that it's become a tedious task to be avoided ...
ON FRIDAY, March 31, 2022, French fashion & portrait photographer Patrick Demarchelier passed away in St. Barths of cancer. He was 78. Patrick Demarchelier was born in 1943 in Le Havre, a major port in northern France's Normandy region. As the story goes, he got his start in photography when his stepfather gave him his first Kodak camera on his 17th birthday. He became enchanted with photography, taking pictures of friends and weddings and learning how to retouch negatives and develop film
THE BEAUTIFUL sunshine streaming through the windows is at odds with this morning's news of more shelling in Ukraine and a plane crash in China. Every night for the past week, I have been falling asleep to dreams of war. The nights are frenetic and uneasy, the mornings much more calm with lucid thoughts over coffee, at least until the news cycle begins again ...
CAME ACROSS this quote by Dr. Seuss yesterday morning: “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.” And it struck a chord because it feels like lately, that we're always waiting/hoping to move past current situations and times and on to better ones ...
RATHER THAN sit around watching the terrible progression of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and waiting for the awful news that seems all but inevitable, we're keeping ourselves busy with work as the distraction of choice. It's also made us realise that we've haven't had a chance to visit any places in Eastern Europe yet, despite the fact one of our writers was from Ukraine...
