YOU MOST LIKELY have seen photos of this place floating around the interwebs. They are evocative, and they'll make you want to drop everything and travel to the Amalfi Coast, if for no other reason, than to visit Felicia's Home Restaurant, housed in the Tramonti farmhouse where your chef, Felicia, was born.
Increasingly, we’re surrounded by fake people. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we don’t. They offer us customer service on Web sites, target us in video games, and fill our social-media feeds; they trade stocks and, with the help of systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can write essays, articles, and e-mails. By no means are these A.I. systems up to all the tasks expected of a full-fledged person. But they excel in certain domains, and they’re branching out.
Kindness and niceness, though both excellent personal qualities, are not the same thing. The former is to be good to others; the latter is about being pleasant. They don’t even have to go together. Some say, for example, that New Yorkers are kind but not nice (“Your tire is flat, you moron—hand me your jack”), in contrast to Californians, who are nice but not kind (“Looks like you’ve got a flat tire there—have a good day!”).
LAST WEEK I spoke about a need for change, to declutter and move away from maximalist tendencies and bright colours to a more subdued, neutral palette. Well, I may be changing my mind again, after seeing this bedside table (above) with its pile of books, bright pink table lamp and goldenrod-hued headboard in English Interior Designer Luke Edward Hall's Gloucestshire country home.
WHEN I WAS little, I would tell anyone who would listen that the my favourite colours were pink and purple. My little sister (who was always by my side) would chime in that she liked blue and black. Being unabashedly girly, I never favoured those colours and wore a steady wardrobe of preppy pink for as long as I could. Fast forward to the future and black would be a firm wardrobe staple, but blue, well I never ever really took to it⏤that is perhaps until now?
A FEW MONTHS ago I turned a tall shelf on its side to use a console, leaving the now vertical shelf spaces below for storage. It looked good on top, but the spaces below looked cluttered, so I thought about getting a curtain made to hide everything. I was thinking about how, in European kitchens, the lower cupboards are often covered using curtains instead of cupboards, and always liked the idea for its versatility: just change up the fabric from a stripe to a floral for an entirely new look, or swap linen for silk to go from casual to formal ...
ON AN ESPECIALLY grim day around here, there will always be someone who mutters well you don't live in Britain for the weather. And while that may be true, it's definitely cosy when you're sitting in someone's home for tea where it's bright and warm.
WE RECENTLY discovered London-based interior design firm Salvesen Graham on Instagram, and immediately fell for their quintessentially British style. Founded by Mary Graham and Nicole Salvesen in 2013, the duo focuses on creating Future Heritage interiors with a sensitivity to historical and traditional interior schemes.
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...
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.
THE LAST TIME we featured the 1928 Hollywood Hills, California home of interior designer Mark D. Sikes was in 2016 (see how it looked here). It was the second iteration of the place, we believe? Three years ago, in 2019, the designer embarked on a third redesign that was featured at Architectural Digest that we only discovered now, and quite a lot has changed. New fabrics have been brought in, most notably the blue white Brunschwig & Fils check that ensconces the dining room from floor to ceiling. ...
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 ...
IF YOU'RE wondering how we came across the work of Gregory Mellor, it is through the Bobbejaanskloof Private Nature Reserve in South Africa that we featured here last week. The Cape Town-based designer was behind that wonderfully decorated travel resort and you may see similarities to this home in the Karoo, a semi-desert natural region of South Africa ...
The Château de Versailles, the royal residence where Marie Antoinette lived, was once a modest hunting lodge built by Louis XIII in 1623. His son, Louis XIV, extended and transformed it when he installed the Court and government there in 1682, creating a magnificent palace that is now renowned throughout the world. Over the course of more than 100 years, a succession of kings—including Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI—continued to embellish the palace up until the French Revolution. Now considered one of the finest achievements of French 17th century art, the Palace of Versailles remains a cultural symbol of royal splendour that has been listed as a World Heritage Site for 30 years.
FELL DOWN a beautiful internet rabbit whole on my way to this place, the French country home of Cordelia de Castellane, the artistic director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior. Located an hour north of Paris, the five-acre estate dates back to the 15th century. de Castellane and her husband used to rent a small cottage on these grounds from the family friends who owned the property, long before it became their very own.
