Beaverbrook Hotel is a late-nineteenth-century mansion set in the Surrey Hills, the quintessential British Country Estate. Decorator Susie Atkinson was tasked with designing something essentially British and romantic, "current but not trendy, comfortable and completely individual" (House & Garden). It is something she achieved brilliantly with tufted velvet and (Bowood) florals, dusky pink walls, cane chairs and Louise Bourgeois gallery walls...
IT'S NEARLY THE WEEKEND and we're ringing it in with shades of black & white, noir & blanc. Classic and elegant and always chic, there is a quiet sophistication about the combination that always feels right at this time of year, just before the long languid days of summer float in ... There are art-filled sitting rooms, glittery tops and champagne; convertibles, gallery walls, and lacy underthings -- scroll through for perfect inspiration on this sunny Friday.
IN THE NEW living room, there is a marble fireplace with a large mantel that we're still trying to figure how to decorate. Currently, there is a large pelargonium in a terracotta pot on the lefthand side, as well as a tiny cutting from a larger epipremnum pictum argyraeus in a pot next to it.
JUST FOUND OUT about Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo)'s divorce today and was completely shocked. She has been running her site for nearly as long as TIG and Alex has been a part of the narrative for as long as can remember. Thirteen and a half years and two children later, and it's all over. Began making a tally of all the bloggers I knew of who were now divorced and it's a lot. Occupational hazard? Perhaps.
ON SATURDAY we were out celebrating something special and about 10 to 15 minutes into searching for new vinyl at the record shop, I reached into my coat pocket to reply to my sister’s text and realised that my brand new phone wasn’t there. I had left it on an outside table the tapas bar where we’d just had patatas bravas and we were a ways off by now. I found P happily browsing in the electronic section and told him what had happened. His first words were, It’s gone.
TOMORROW is already the last day of the first month of this brand new year⏤how has your new year been so far? Have you been a whirlwind of new goals and accomplishments, or have you been having trouble getting motivated? Tomorrow is also the day that a new phone and tablet are set to arrive, just one part of some life admin tasks getting crossed off the list.
THIS WEEKEND we watched Aftersun, the 2022 drama written and directed by Charlotte Wells, starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio and Celia Rowlson-Hall. We talked about it for quite a while after it was over, analysing what it could mean, discussing our own interpretations, processing the feeling of sadness it left in us afterward. It's about memory⏤more specifically, our memories of those we love after they are gone, the people we remember them as, sometimes as opposed to how they really were.
WE'RE TRYING out one of those food services that deliver a huge box of fresh ingredients to your home⏤enough to make five different meals from scratch, all packaged in separate numbered paper bags with recipe cards for each. It arrived on Saturday and the first meal we (actually just P) made was Cauliflower Mac and Cheese with Blue Cheese Crumb and Sriracha Drizzle. It was actually really good.
GIVE ME coffee to change the things that I can and wine to accept the things that I can not, read a quote on a portable sign that I saw on someone's account this weekend. It's sunny and just after 6:00pm on what began as a very dark and rainy Monday, but has since turned into a beautiful mid-May day ...
THE INTERNET is a funny place—it can be both stifflingly small and a place so large, that we can all be "known" in our own little corner of it without ever running into each other. I only discovered Pia Baroncini, the Creative Director of Los Angeles clothing label LPA, today and loved the little glimpses she gave on Instagram of her Spanish colonial home in Pasadena, California ...
WE ARE UTTERLY charmed by John Galliano's 18th-century country house in Gerberoy, a quaint village 50 miles northwest of Paris. Galliano, the creative director of Maison Margiela since 2014, shares the home with partner, Alexis Roche, and it's a bohemian eclectic marvel filled with bright colours and flea market finds, all juxtaposed in the most cosy and comfortable way ...
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER of time before we happened upon Julia Amory's Hamptons home in all its chintz-y splendour. Amory, her husband and their daughter split their time between New York City and the Hamptons, and it is this, their summer home, that we are in love with. Decidedly grandmillennial in style, it's a little new traditional with a healthy dose of grandma chic thrown in for good measure.