Sex and the City movie to premiere May 30th

Continuing on my pop-culture theme for today, what is that thing attacking SJP's neck?

Um, the year 2000 calling and it wants its stupid flower-trend pin back. Thanks.

Nevertheless, despite the flower attacking SJP, I am actually very excited about the movie. Very. Right near the end it started to mean something, like when Miranda had to take care of her disoriented mother-in-law. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Credit to PerfecctBound.blogspot.com. that's the first place I saw that crazy-ass flower...

Cashmere Mafia - new fall show

IMDB bills the show as: "A group of successful female executives who have been friends since college turn to each other for guidance as they juggle their careers with family in New York City."

With the official ABC site announcing on a ticker at the top of the page, "65 Days, 07 Hours, 07 Minutes, 29 Seconds till the Season Premiere..." this shit needs to be better than Sex and the City. That's all I'm sayin'.

Of course it won't, because it will be on ABC, so it's going to be some watered down version of something we've seen before, right?

Things That Are Wrong. Now, Always and Forever.

Yep. This here house number sign makes my shit-box look so fancy!

One thing that drives me fiance totally fucking nuts about me is that I have very definite opinions on certain topics, and I don't just think I'm right... I *know* I am. So, I was thinking yesterday about a few things I know for sure and was thinking you Decorno readers might have a few more to add to my list. Seriously. I want to do one long entry on 50 things that are wrong... now always and forever.

Here's a start:

1. Lace. Lace is gross and tacky. Even as an accent, it's always foul. I saw a woman yesterday wearing a lacy/sheer top (skin tight) over a camisole. It was such a desperate 40-year-old-couger-in-a-bar look. Lace is vulgar on your person and just lame in your home.



2. The fake-fancy house number plaque thingies people have made for their home (see photo above). Your McMansion or your McTract House are not glorious estates. You don't need a fucking plaque proclaiming YE OLDE GRAND ESTATE ON CHERRY STREET. This is what house numbers are for. For the uninitiated, they are little numbers that go on your house. Not a plaque on your front lawn or inset on some large boulder anouncing your home as though it's on the National Historic Register.

3. Calling your babysitter a nanny. Unless she lives with you, she's not a nanny. Quit trying to elevate yourself through language. It's desperate.

4. Car ranching. We live in a cute neighborhood that lacks garages in many cases. Our new-ish neighbors have taken to parking on their lawn when they have big parties so that (I am assuming) they can offer more street parking to their guests. Why don't the neighbors simply park a block away? Car ranching is bad for your lawn and worse for your self-respect. It's about time someone lets them know.

5. Matching "work suits" in poly-blend fabrics from Macys. My massive office building shares space with a government agency and the women who work there are like extras from Working Girl. A woman in the elevator had a khaki-green skirt/jacket combo that was wrong on a few levels, but was also skin tight and waaaay short. The whole look was clearly purchased as a set. Matchy-matchy is always trouble. Ill-fitting matchy-matchy is worse. Said government agencies should just let people go business casual... most people look better in jeans than when they are trying to play dress up and miss the mark.

6. Non-leather stretch boots. If you really need a weather-proof boot, buy Hunters or something similar. But if you must wear a bitchy, zip-up, knee-high point boot, it should be leather. Anything else looks like it's part of your naughty nurse costume.

7. Fake-fancy pronunciations. I have a friend who pronounces Aberdeen with an "ah" as in avacado, rather than the more down-home and correct "a" as in apple. This friend should know better, but likes to fancify words unnecessarily. Come on. It's Kurt Cobain's white-trash home town. There isn't anything fancy about it.

8. Having no proper sidewalks in an incorporated area. I get it if you live in the sticks, but I just get creeped out in neighborhoods with no sidewalks. My first house growing up was like this. There were probably some people car ranching, too. I'll never live like that again.

9. Fake flowers. I know that Miles Redd or someone recently said in domino that it's ok in certain occasions, but he's wrong. Fake flowers are always a bad idea. Always.

10. Target art. I don't care how lovely the B&W framed photo is, it's not very original and you'll be staring at the same thing 100,000 other people will have in their homes, as well. Just because it's a lovely birch tree photographed amongst the fog doesn't mean it's not this decade's Nagel. Take it down, call your local art school, and buy something original.


11. Tiffany. Ok, I am bending the rules here because Tiffany isn't wrong now, always and forever. Just now. Everything Tiffany you have (we have, that is) that actually says "Tiffany," let's put it back in the little blue pouch and gently let it go into hibernation in the jewelry box. Too much conterfeit, too many locations in bad malls, the Tiffany brand is just "mall luxury" now. Like Coach, it has lost its appeal. It's too out there, too common, too much a uniform now of a certain conventional look. And to the woman wearing the noisy bracelet or the necklace, she thinks it's this awesome badge and we just yawn.


12. Juicy anything, especially these little numbers. If you have 'em, admit it. Walk to the closet and throw out. You know they are over. Go ahead and let go. You'll only make space for better weekend wear.


13. Buying books ONLY for the cover. I know we've seen this book in Decorno rags and on blogs for months and months now, and I don't want to step on the tender hearts of my blog friends, but I don't get it. It's totally ok to buy books for shelf-appeal. I love the idea of organizing your books by color rather than topic, etc., etc... but even the books I have because the cover seduced me, only made it into my life because the content was also of interest. Having I Married Adventureon your coffee table and not having read it is just the designer-y version of fancy-ing up your suburban ranch home with a house number plaque. :) You know who you are, ladies and you're on notice! You'd better read that damn Adventure book now, huh?

There haven’t been any dust-related technological breakthroughs, damn it.

Very interesting (or "inneresting" as my fiance likes to point out is the favored pronunciation by idiots):

Today's NY Times article on the "happiness gap" between men and women.

Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?

The Happiness Gap Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there were also a number of activities that produced very different reactions from the two sexes — and one of them really stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team, figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Mr. Krueger, who, when not crunching data, enjoys watching the New York Giants with his father.

...Mr. Krueger’s data, for instance, shows that the average time devoted to dusting has fallen significantly in recent decades. There haven’t been any dust-related technological breakthroughs, so houses are probably just dirtier than they used to be. I imagine that the new American dustiness affects women’s happiness more than men’s.

...Ms. Stevenson was recently having drinks with a business school graduate who came up with a nice way of summarizing the problem. Her mother’s goals in life, the student said, were to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I sort of want all those things, too,” the student said, as Ms. Stevenson recalled, “but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”

Good luck. There's just not enough time in the day to be perfect. Read the whole article. It's quite good.

Arts & Crap.

I was a little late to the look-at-me-I-am-Stephanie-Klein party. (Very late now, given that this post I actually wrote a year ago on an old blog...)

Steph blogs about her life. Her blogs are a lot like Sex & the City episodes. Not as charming and a bit rip-off-ish, but whatever. Her blog gets a ton of hits, as I understand it, and her fans are cheery women who respond to Stephanie with the usual you-go-girl fawning that you'd expect. Her detractors, well, you can guess what they are about. They pretty much think Stephanie is just whoring her life out to get a book deal and all that. Which she's done.

Good for her. I mean it.

But here is really the only thing I have the time, interest, or inclination to criticize on her blog. It's the entry describing the scrapbook that her fiance, whom Steph pretentiously and annoyingly calls The Suitor, made for her.

AMERICA. YOU ARE ON NOTICE.

No more scrapbooking. Doesn't Stephanie find it a little creepy that her man spent time with craft glue and fancy parchment and cut pieces with little ric-rac shaped scissors and assembled this saccharine ode to her?



Maybe this is less about Stephanie and the photo-corner-weilding Suitor as it is my disdain for people attempting homey creations when something more elegant might exist to express your love and tenderness. Like jewelry. Or maybe a Katy Grannan monograph (ok, *I'd* like that and that may be be a minority position in these matters).

NO MORE CRAFTING. And for the love of god, PLEASE, no more homemade wedding invitations. This is what the fine art of engraving is for. Too broke for that (I know I am...)? Then go ahead and fire up the ol' Mac and print out something elegant. But if I receive another card with different pieces of robin's egg blue, baby pink, and chocolate paper glued together with grommets or ribbon affixed to an invititation, I am seriously marking it "Return to Sender."

This is life. We're not at summer camp. Put the scissors down. Back away from the craft glue. And if someone creates for you a tender handmade scrapbook for your 30th birthday, kindly thank them for this sweet but misguided jesture. But don't post it on your blog. You'll only shame your Suitor. And yourself.

Greek Tragedy - Stephanie Klein

Oh, and while we are on the topic, I need more than one hand to count the number of shower invitations I have received in the past year with "So and so is registered at ______." Are you serious? Do you really have so little faith that I will come with a gift that you have to violate the one rule of invitation ettiquette that I actually know? That one really bothers me.

Any etiquette horror stories from you guys? I want to collect them all and see who has the worst...

Ha. Double Ha! I have been saying this for years...

Portland is a place where you can afford to make your dreams come true:

NY Times article on Portland's food scene.

If you want to know other reasons why Portland, Oregon is one of the finest cities in the US, you can read this old post.

Get dressed to shop. Get free stuff. Simple as that.

I am a big believer in getting dressed to shop. There is no question you get better service. Plus, if you pull yourself together and have a great "try on" outfit, you can slip in and out of pumps easily in a fitting room, and since you kind of have your game on, you have a kind of aesthetic and emotional armor against the "boy I am a fat fuck in this 3 way mirror" feeling.

My point is this: Nordstrom, which has its flagship store in downtown Seattle, is remodeling pretty much every portion of the first floor one section at a time, which is creating quite a mess. I ran in this weekend to buy MAC "Capricious" lipstick (Nordstrom was out of stock for the 3rd time in a row... Note to Nordstrom, go ahead and stock up on lipstick. It's offensive that you can stock 20 YSL bags and not keep enough $15 tubes of warpaint on your shelves. Get it together.)

Anyhoo, I got cornered in construction area and tried to make a break for it in the perfume aisle. I just wanted to get the hell out. No such luck. I was blocked and cornered by 2 perfume ladies.

I know what you are thinking... "Argh, pesky perfume ladies." But, no. This is the part I love. The Nordstrom perfume ladies** - if you look like you are even *kind* of trying to pull your look together - they SHOWER you with samples. Not "I am going to attack you with my sprayer" action, but seriously grab handfuls of those little sample vials and keep shoving them in your shopping bag.

I love that. I really do.

I got a stash of Hermes, Chanel, Hanae Mori (too vanilla-y, but oh well), and, finally, Bulgari Rose Essentielle.

For the 9 of you who loved my ode to Jil Sander, I have something very, very serious to confess: I just found my new favorite. I can't even describe this Bulgari business. It's not bitchy like Jil Sander and it's not rich-bitch/ball-buster-smelling at all. It's just really elegant and classic and not like overly commercial scents you catch an overwhelming whiff of when you open the bulging fall issues of fashion magazines.

It's just... perfect.

Moral: I was glad I got dressed up to shop. I don't think the Nordstrom girls take the time to load you up with samples when you're rocking a tragic Juicy tracksuit circa 2000* and schlepping around in flip flops.

_______
*For the record, I have never owned Juicy anything. This is a point of pride.

**People like to bag on Nordstrom service these days, but I don't get it. I called ahead to have them bring some recently-altered jeans to me curbside on a weeknight so that I wouldn't have to park downtown and all I got was a "yes ma'am," and perfect service. NORDSTROM AS A DRIVE THROUGH. It doesn't get better than that.

Decorno turns 100!

Yeah, that's right. 100 posts, that is.

And even though in May when Decorno started it was all about acrylic tables and zebra fucking rugs, guess what? It's BORING writing about that all day long. I wish I was disciplined like my other favorite decor blogs, and kept my posts to just the decor facts. I might be freelancing for House & Garden, too. But you know what? This is what I do for fun and for free. Therefore, I shall rant.

And these days, my list of "likes" is longer than Miles Redd interiors and giant clam shells used as ice buckets at outdoor parties. I like booze, politics, hot shoes, fur stoles, schadenfreude, Britney's extensions, good poetry, better art, kickass books, yummy lipgloss, bitchy handbags, my awesome job, NYC, and travel to exotic lands where I don't know the language and tend to lose my passport.

So, happy 100 (posts) Decorno. And a big thanks to my lurking readership which is growing by leaps and bounds, but doesn't really leave comments. (...Weird, but I am glad you visit, anyway. Maybe you have no fingers? Or no keyboards? No matter...)

So here's the thing:
What should the next 100 posts be? More photos? More decor? Or more pop culture? Or more fashion? If you read this blog regularly (and the numbers tell me a few thousand do every month...) what would you like to see more of?

Because Decorno loves you. Yes, that's right... Decorno loves you.

You'll have to excuse me now. I have to go blow out 100 candles.

Assouline dreams, courtesy of Habitually Chic

http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/2007/08/i-heart-assouline.html

I superduper love Assouline AND the blog Habitually Chic. It's so consistently good I read it every day.

I want to buy a dirty old brick warehouse in Georgetown in Seattle (my city, yo) and turn the place into a dark, stark, book-filled fantasia JUST like this Assouline store pictured here.

Are you fucking kidding me? This girl is for real.

Somewhere in NYC this kickass girl rides around on her bike, carting her, i dunno, portfolio of beautiful fucking art, and then she stops at some cafe to smoke a Marlboro with her friends Ang and Guillermo and then she rides off into the night and has wild art-student-sex with her hot classmate who transferred from Bard College. Or something.

Her life is full of magic and unicorns and awesomely red hair and fashion. Total, fucking, this-shit-comes-easily-to-me fashion.

I give up, man. I simply give up. Hand me an acrylic sweater and elastic pants, because I can just never get to this level.

Yeah, I stole this photo from The Sartorlialist. Can you believe this shit? He snapped this photo on the street.

Go ahead and click the photo to enlarge. Don't be shy. You've gotta see this one up close.

The Rachel Zoe discussion continues...

Read this post to join the fun and see other photos of Zoe before and after this alleged facelift...http://decorno.blogspot.com/2007/09/rachel-zoe-this-cant-be-face-of-36-year.html

Do we think she's had work done? I think there is a whole lotta something going on there. I think it's been pulled back and I also think she's gotten both Botox and Restylane. We love to hate her, but she does look better. MUCH better.

I am totally getting Restylane for the wrinkles between my eyebrows. Smooth that shit out, my friends.

Lust List: Most Wanted for Fall 07

Lanvin bag:



Louboutin Glitter Slingback
At Barney's.


Pierre Hardy Snipped Toe Knee Boots:
At Barneys.



A gold compact... I need to quit applying lipstick by braille.

Real, future blue-chip art. Photo from Katy Grannan.

Rachel Zoe - This can't be the face of a 36 year old.

***Update***

Reader comment from Habitually Chic told me to go see Rachel photos from style.com... that *maybe* RZ had some work done. I think so. What do you guys think? I think she is looking more vampy and pulled-back. They eyes are more catlike and weird. But she looks better smooth than like the wrinkled old bag she was before. Here's the allegedly new face:





*****



I actually thought her moment was over, and then the NY Times Magazine prints a 5-page article on Rachel Zoe, celebrity stylist.

That face. It's the face you get if you've chain-smoked Lucky Strikes since middle school and used your head as a catcher's mitt. (Confidential to Zoe: It's called sunscreen, La Mer, and eating a big fat burger every now and then, Rachel... as you age you can either keep your ass or your face, and you should pick door #2, my friend.)

She says she's 36 and I could hardly pay attention to the rest of the article because there is NO WAY your face can look like this at 36.

Harvey Weinstein, the former Miramax honcho who is sleeping with one of the designers of Marchesa, bought the rights to Halston and now Zoe's on board trying to resurrect the disco-fabulous brand. Good luck. Her style is so specific and so 2.5 years ago, she's going to have to get people to buy into her drippy, coke'd-up look all over again and then make us swallow Halston. Not so sure about that.

I do want her shoes & jewelry, though. Bitch has closets that will make you weep with envy.

To fur, or not to fur? What to do with a vintage fur stole?

I was craving a very vintage mink stole, so I got one on Ebay last year. I have to say, I love it. I think it's chic and retro and the perfect thing to throw on this time of year when it's not bitterly cold, but certainly cold enough.

But, you know, it's fur.

I don't believe in new fur. I won't buy it. As a buyer, I am not interested in carrying it for my customers, either.

But vintage, I keep rationalizing, is already dead.

My friend JJ, a lady lawyer I might add, isn't buying it. I think her point of view is that I am still creating a market for it (chime in here, JJ, if I am misrepresenting you...).

And yet, I still love the fur. I wore it to Sun Liquor the other night with my bitchiest Guiseppi Zanotti shoes and I felt very glam. Luckily, no one threw paint on me.

Wondering what you all think of fur, real or fake, new or vintage, on your body or in your home. Sometimes fashion needs an ethics class, I suppose. Let's discuss.

Edward Bess, lipgloss savant.

I was at Bergdorf Goodman in NYC recently, cruising the cosmetics buffet that is the lower floor, and I happened upon this smartly dressed kid who was standing Vanna-White-like in front of this killer display of lip glosses. Lo and behold, this young guy is Edward Bess, beauty entrepreneur and incipient cosmetics titan.

He has an exclusive deal with Bergdorf to sell his lipsticks and glosses there. He gets points just for totally having his act together at the tender age of 21, but the product, I must say, puts him over the top. I hate gloss as a rule (Nars was my favorite, but it leaves a bad taste). The Edward Bess lip gloss, however, is perfection. Gorgeous, shiny color and just a hint of flavor. Not chemical-y at all. Plus, the logo, the packaging... it's all modern perfection.

I was sold.

I bought the red gloss and had him sign it with a Sharpie. Makes me smile every time I pull out that autographed tube of gloss and gussie up my kisser.

You go, Edward Bess.

How to Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff
people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man’s mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let’s go to sleep. Let’s lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he’ll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.
Let’s not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

-Stephen Dobyns, from Cemetary Nights

I posted this the other day, then deleted, thinking that my posts get so far off course anyway. Well, diligent and fabulous Patricia Gray called me on deleting it, and asked me to repost. So here it is.

Photo by Ethan Hill EthanHill.com

Oly Studios makes everything you want.

I can't even imagine working for them. Getting this stuff at cost? My head would explode. I particularly like this alabaster-ish sconce. And the chair. And the mirror. Pretty much everything on their site.

www.olystudio.com

New shoes.

With platform, they are 4 1/2 inches. These should have come with ski poles or a walker to assist me in keeping upright in these tall badboys.

These are "sitting" shoes, for sure.

What's next for travel:

Montenegro
BudgetTravel.com

Great photos and article here in Budget Travel magazine.

You know, I mever went anywhere until I was 30. It was just a few weeks until my birthday and I thought, crap, how provincial am I? I didn't even have a current passport. I bought tickets, got an emergency passport, and the fiance and I landed in the city of lights on my 30th birthday (last year, for anyone keeping track). Now I want to go everywhere. Argentina and Uruguay were this year. And next year it's either Montenegro, Turkey, or Italy.

What's on your list? Where does everyone want to go? What's your favorite place to go on vacation?

Color in Buenos Aires

This last one is actually Colonia, Uruguay, just 50 mins from Buenos Aires by the speed ferry, Buquebus.

Most wanted:

Just scored this Serpui Marie bag. Yum.


Must have these YSL shoes.

Most of you know my position on the Tory Burch Reva (her signature flat). It's been over for a long time. And Tory's fall like was like a vomit-y palatte of 70s neutrals. Ick. But spring? That's when Tory does her thing. I want this whole look:


Also, this bag, I am telling you, everyone in NY will be carrying it next June. Except me. Because I don't want to carry it if everyone else has it. That's just how I roll, yo.

Britney, that doped-up, train-wreck, poster child for Schadenfreude

Sure, the papers and blogs and Perezes and and TMZs and Breitbarts of the world posted pictures this morning of this train-wreck has-been with the paunchy gut, the mushy thighs, and the extensions that look like she bought them at Rite-Aid and installed them with bobby pins.

And sure she danced like an octegenarian stripper with low energy and painful corns on her feet, kind of sluggish and just not moving quite right because "one false move and I'm gonna pull a muscle!"

And yeah, she kind of didn't bother to actually mouth all the words in the songs she was lip-synching to.

But she still has a body I have never had. And I swear to god, if I looked like her in a funny little bra and hot pants and fishnets, I would totally rock this look at the office. I would walk up to people and slap my half inch of muffin-top and say, "You like it, huh? You like that? Well, get me my TPS report, stat!"

Yes, if I had her body (even in its current state), I would rejoice, my friends, because Britney's diet of Quaaludes and Red Bull tonics has done a body right, y'all!

If I could get this body as a result of hard-livin', Cheeto-eatin', pill-poppin', coke-snortin', stranger-fuckin', well, count me in!

Normally that kind of life yeilds a more zaftig-like physique, yet our little Brit shows that there is some weird math in this universe where TOTALLY-FUCKED-UP is on the Y axis and KINDA-KEEPING-IT-TOGETHER-AND-NOT-GETTING-TOO-FAT is on the X axis, and at the point of intersection, you can still see your ribs when you suck your stomach in, you can still wear hot pants and not look too digusting, and you still...somehow, magically...net $700k a month in royalties. It's really not a bad deal at all.

Until you decide you want to live with some dignity.

Sand Point Antique & Design Market dates announced

******

Update - next show is Sunday April 5th, 2008. Should be awesome with great vintage and antique garden stuff. I can't wait!

******


The elusive Sand Point Antique & Design Market show dates have been announced. Next show is Sunday Oct 14th, 2007.

The following show wil be Sunday, Dec 2nd, 2007. I cannot wait.

Early buyers get in for $10 from 8 - 10am... admission after that is $6.

The Sand Point show is the best antiques show in Seattle. Pay more to go early and get the good stuff. In the past I got a beautiful painting, a long, narrow antique wooden box with dovetail joinery that I now use under a console table to hide sneakers and flop flops and other "go-to-the-store" emergency shoes and whatnot. I also got an excellent and weird coin counter thingy... sounds dumb, but it's a flat piece of wood and is very graphic and hangs on our walls. Anyway, Sand Point is great, great, great. If you live in the northwest, it's really worth the early wake up call to check it out.

Cool rooms from this month's O At Home magazine.

I am showing you these since I am pretty confident you won't see them. Why? Because the cover of the latest issue of O At Home is so hideous, I am pretty confident you won't pick it up at the newsstands. (It looks like Laura Ashley got drunk and made sweet, sweet love to Maria Buatta, the prince of chintz, and gave birth to the room on the cover.) And that's where I, gentle reader, come in. This is the public service I continue to provide to you day in and day out. No need to thank me. I do it because it warms my heart.

Alright, these rooms aren't perfect. The story is about an uptight DC couple who needed to shake up their conservative living & dining rooms. So they brought in a stylist (which the article actually refers to as a "fluffer" which makes me think the gay copy assistant is playing a funny, funny trick on all the Bergdorf-blond editorial assistants. So clever! They'll never know a fluffer is a person who keeps a guy hard while waiting to shoot his next scene on a porno! Brizilliant.)

Anyway, I like the rooms because they aren't to matchy and they are a little funky. *Plus,* I don't know about you, but you can troll Craigslist here in Seattle all day long and find sorry little settees and chairs like the ones features and get them recovered and dress up your room in a cool way on the cheap. I also love that the uptight console/table thingy on the right side of the dining room is balanced by the acrylic console on the other side, so that symmetry is achieved not through matchiness, but balance.

Not to mention that massive gigas clam shell on the floor under the console. It's been on my wish list forever. I think I am about to break down and get one.

Montlake walk.

The cutest house in Montlake. No, it's not mine. I love the colors, and those copper rain chain thingies. Plus, this house looks amazing every day of the year. You can click on this and all images below to see the huge photo and all detail.

I snapped a few photos in my neighborhood today to get ideas for some landscaping improvments. Montlake, a neighborhood in Seattle, has pretty casual landscaping. Everything grows a little too well in the northwest, so yards can get a little overgrown. I think we like them that way. We can't grow really lush grass under our massive cedar tree because the soil is highly acidic and the trees drops cones and weird seeds all the time. It's a nightmare. So, I wanted to take a picture of some moss (in Maggie's yard... she's a landscaper, no less) that I like. Here are other highlights:


Although my fiance is doing a pretty amazing job fighting the odds and growing grass under our massive cedar, I think someday we should give up and grow this moss.



Some Montlakers think the parking strip is just a p-patch for community supported agriculture. Today I was surprised to see pumpkins growing next to a telephone pole.



Everyone is a Mariners fan in Seattle.... Montlakers, especially, since we have a recently retired and beloved Mariner living in our 'hood. This car, though, is a fixture and to see the sun gleaming off of it in summertime just makes me so happy. Can you even imagine riding around in this, taking your grandkid to Safeco Field to see a game? Dude, *that* is why we all work so hard, so we can enjoy this kind of easy living. I love it. I am getting a classic car when I turn 40.


This dahlia is sponsored by Miracle Grow. Holy fuck, the thing is seriously as big as a volleyball. I had no idea you could grow them this tall and large.


I love these. There are 2 in the neighborhood. Someone just nailed it up one day, a gentle, neighborly way to say, "Oh, did you forget your doggie bag? You don't want to leave that shit right there, do you?? We didn't think so. Enjoy!"

I like their parking strip. I am not sure I have the energy to make this happen, though. I would be content to just be able to get gree grass to grow on ours.

You will be mine. Oh yes, you will be mine:

My life will be complete once I have this and it's hanging in our living room.

You have to see "2 Days in Paris" & "Once"

OK, I am really picky and weird about movies. I've seen two movies recently that you have to see and I don't really ever say that...

First, you have to see the movie 2 Days in Paris. It's a smart, talky little movie that manages to deliver incredible laughs without ever pandering to you. If your smart, cool, art-school older sister wrote a classic comedy and plopped it in the middle of beautiful Paris, this would be it. If you've ever had a kind of tortured, I-don't-know-why-I-love-you-but-I-do relationship, the main character, played by writer/director/editor/songstress/bi-lingual-fabulousness herself Julie Delpy, utters a line near the end of the movie that explains why we stick around for love. It's really, really great. Oh! And Vanessa Seward makes a cameo...she is apparently great friends with Julie Delpy. I featured here in this post: http://decorno.blogspot.com/2007/07/vanessa-seward-of-azzaro-is-chicer-than.html



Second, (why do people every say secondly? Drives me fucking nuts. It's an abuse of a cardinal number... so very wrong...) you MUST see Once or else your eyes will bleed, your breasts will deflate into nothingness, and you will grow hair on your palms. No, seriously. Don't let these troubles befall you, just trust me and go see Once. It's the most beautiful little movie you will see in many years. Street musician meets girl, they fall in like, they make beautiful music together (literally) and the soundtrack will break your heart and you will be singing these near-perfect pop-confections for weeks after you see this.

Swap meet, blog-style.

What if a package arrived from a stranger and it contained adorable trinkets and books and souvenirs?

Martha at Martha Writes arranged a Back2School swap for bloggers. People emailed their contact info to Martha, and then she paired everyone up and gave them the adorable theme (travel, school/art/crafty little supplies). At first it seemed like an odd idea and then I thought, how cool... it's like a Christmas gift swap, except everyone will generally have the same design-y aesthetic and you will get stuff you are really charmed with. Plus, who doesn't love real mail? It's like pennies from heaven, kids.


So what would Decorno people swap? Maybe vintage photos, an old design book you can part with to share the love, vintage keys, a cool champagne bottle stoppers. Maybe the theme is "bar & cocktail." Who knows... any ideas?

Read all about it here. Clever and cute. martawrites.blogspot.com

Fresh, casual LA cottage by Bobby Ralston & Michael Lee

Totally loving this house featured in Sept 07 Cottage Living.

Make it work! Tim Gunn's new show debuts tonight!

Fire up the Tivo, kids! Our hero returns to TV land.

10/9C on Bravo.

Get your pyth on.

I am a little obsessed with this Latico python wallet, computer case and overnighter. So fun.

Link swap. Let's get totally rich & famous together.

That's ok, my little birdy... Apartment Therapy rejected me, too.*


Do you have a design blog? Is it on my blog roll? If not, please leave a comment and let me know who you are and where your blog is.

I would love to have a link swap so we can discover each other's blogs and increase cross-readership.

I tried to get listed on Apartment Therapy's site during their July Link Swap to no avail. Then again, I break the rules with non-decor rants like the Jil Sander post and I probably use the word "fuck" more than they care to see. So.... I guess I'll just host my own damn link swap, thank you very much.

Today's post inspired by blog Brilliant Asylum which I *love* to read and just realized it wasn't even on my blog roll.... until now. Her Thursday post is just total eye candy. Enjoy.

*No longer true. A blogging friend let me know a few months after posting this that Apartment Therapy SF finally added me to their links. I like how before I was all.... "well screw them!" and now of course, I'm all, "Those people are brilliant and have great taste!" I am shameless.

More White Hot Rooms

Random clippings of more great white rooms.









PS - I still want to be Sophia Coppola.

Victoria Hagen. Who knew?

Maybe it was that weird, kinda-smug, practiced smile she gives the camera in every portrait related to features about her work in mags like Architectural Digest or Met Home, but I was always a little turned off by Victoria Hagen. Then she launched her Target line which made me more skeptical. If you live in Portland, you suffered with a huge Michael Graves monstrosity in your lovely little town, so by association, it makes you nervous of the Target designers. Nevertheless, I picked up Country Living (I know! The horrors!) But like Cottage Living, they have smart ideas for your mythological, someday-I-will-have-it vacation home, and every issue they have at least one worthy spread to make up for the kind of scary make-it-yourself-from-and-egg-carton craft idea.

Anyway, in the current issue they feature Victoria Hagen's Hampton's home and it's a casual stunner (if I can mash up the two words, that is). Truly a perfect getaway. Below are images of her residential work (as seen on her corportate website) as well as images from the current issue of Country Living.









I was totally wrong to judge Hagen so harshly and prematurely. Her style is clean & strong and she is the master of the White Hot Room.

Home!

Ah. Finally. I love central Oregon, but one week is about 3 days too much for me. So happy to be home, my home, my stuff, my neighborhood.

I spoke too soon telling someone it would be the first summer there with no wildfires in sight. There was a bunch of lightening that set off a 1300 acre fire near Black Butte. Ash, literally, fell from the sky (a tiny bit, but still...) while people were golfing, swimming and basically ignoring the smoke-induced eclipse.

(Um, not the real fire. Just a super-dramatic representation ripped off from the web.)

The house is somehow a wreck, even though it's been empty all week. Dog hair seems to have created a union because it's all magically clumpted together along the sides of the hardwood-floored rooms. Flies have also taken over. We have a swarm of about seven. What were they all doing here while we were gone. Probably watching cable and drinking beer. Or something.

Time to open the windows, put golf clubs and board games away, light a candle to mask the must until the open windows do the trick. And then it's off to get fresh flowers to replace the ones that died (I was pretty lazy not to toss them before I left), and then settle in for fall. After tomorrow, summer for all intents and purposes will start to come to an end.

I might even water the lawn tonight to get a head start. Don't tell the Sierra Club.