I have a date with Javier Bardem tonight.

I know I am not breaking any news here...

but I just wanted to make sure everyone has seen blogger Abby Nova's apartment. It's envy-inducing, so be warned.

You can see it all HERE when it was featured on Design Sponge a while back.

And you can check out Abbey's blog HERE.

Cottage Living

So much cuteness in this month's Cottage Living.

I want those kitchen windows.

I am BOOT CRAZY.

THESE Botkier boots are on fire. I have to have them. I have no idea what I will wear with them, but I will figure that out.

You know, I always wait too long to get boots and then the best styles are sold out in my size blah blah blah and I miss my window of opportunity. Not this year.

So, as my ongoing commitment to shoe-ing you all up, here are my favorites for this fall:



BCBG
You know that totally awesome Loeffler Randal flat boot (the Matilde) that you don't feel like shelling out $650 for? Good news, here's that boot for less.


Pour La Victoire
That is a whole lotta boot for the price.



FRYE
Oh Frye, you kill me. You really know how to make a boot. You make those classic styles that I would never wear (they are too rugged for me, and I would look so phony in them), but then you pull a few fashiony boots out of your bag of tricks every year and just make my heart melt. This is something else. It's *almost* too much with that snake print, but the roomy looking shaft and the slightly snipped toe softens the bitchy edges and makes this perfectly cool. They're pricey, I know. But Frye boots last. You'll be able to keep wearing these.




Dolce Vita
Like the PLV boot, it's a lot of boot and a lot of look for the price. The heel and the toe - perfect.




VINCE CAMUTO
I know this is so fashiony (I can't imagine pulling it off), but if you're young and fabulous, please get this so I can live vicariously through you.



POUR LA VICTOIRE bootie. 

Sigh. I show you this in teal, but you know I would get it in black. The woven patent leather delights me. Yum.

Arrrrgh.... just stop with the blurry-people/slow-shutter business.

Photographers, take note. Shelter mag photo editors, also take note.

Photo from NYTimes.com.


In other news:

Did you see Hillary? So good.

Are you watching convention coverage on MSNBC? It's like a big catfight over there. I think Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann are going to start pulling hair and wrestling around in oil soon.

I CANNOT WAIT for the Rachel Zoe show on Bravo. She was born to be on trashy reality TV. I hope it dosn't disappoint.

Is fall over where you are at? 'Cuz it's totally fucking over here which is driving me mad. We got about 3 hot weeks and that was it.

I went to Whistler, BC last weekend for the first time. Canada, WTF? Serioulsy, BC is one of the most stunning places. Naming your highway "Sea-to-Sky" just rubs it in.

We stayed in Whistler Village. Sooo many cougars! Cougars as far as the eye could see. I can't wait to go back in winter and see them in full force.

That's it for now. Let me know what we should all be gossiping about. Sorry the posts have been light on text lately. A girl's gotta work, you know. It's been busy.

More House Beautiful porn.

A better kind of man cave.

John Demsey's apartment designed by BIBI MONNAHAN.

Photo from Elle Decor.

Diamonds.

I am obsessed with diamonds lately. This comes and goes, but diamond lust has hit me with full force recently.

Must. Have. Diamonds.

I like the silly little ring up top.

I could pay $3,700 at TIFFANY.com, or $1,075 at BLUENILE.COM, or $895 at NORDSTROM.COM.

Of course, when I see price differences like that, it's just a reminder what a total racket the diamond business is. Maybe I will just buy a little CZ and save up for THE ONE I really want.

Dear homeowners,

I think Dara at Domino said it recently and I will repeat:

There is generally nothing special about the wood in your home. So paint it. For the love of god, just paint it, already. Paint it or stain it dark, but don't leave it like this.

Brad Ford.

God, I love these rooms. Love.







More HERE.

Photo from HERE

Company's coming. What do you make?

Do you have a go-to dish or appetizer that you make in a pinch? 

I have a few dishes that I do well enough to please my own people, but when it comes to feeding the masses, that's tricky. It's too easy to boil up pasta and call it good. 

On vacation, since we happened to be there this year at the same time as the man's ex-wife, her husband, her identical twin sister and their family of five, my fiance's brother and his clan, we banded together on the last night for a dinner of "mustgo" (as in, everything must go). It's was a buffet of leftovers and not too shabby. Of course, that's a pretty easy meal when you're (a) emptying the vacation pantry and (b) not interested in impressing anyone. 

But what do you make if you're maybe kinda hoping to make the guests happy? Let me know. I am looking for new food to make this fall. 

In other food news, I still love THIS cookbook and would recommend anyone who doesn't really cook but wants to start. It's perfectly designed, graphic, glossy, colorful and witty. And it's also only .86 cents on Amazon from used sellers. What a bargain. 

Photo from gourmet.com.

Plaster and a few other items.

So, our dining room has a very weird texture to the walls. We have a 1929 house with mostly plaster walls (as far as I can tell). But in the dining room, it's as if they applied plaster and then pulled the plaster-spreading-thingie away from the wall, creating this menacing-looking popcorn-y texture. 

Needless to say, it's bugs the hell out of me. Not to mention, it makes the walls look darker than they are because all those little bumps create tiny shadows. The walls look like they have some kind of plaster acne. 

How does one repair this? Plaster over it? Would anyone suggest this might be a DIY project? If I were to hire someone to fix this, does anyone know what this might cost? 

Next item: When searching for a plaster repair person, I found a website featuring this unbelievable plaster work above. I can't believe this is someone's home. Please tell me that have giant stone lions on either side of their front steps. This place is insane. 

Next to last item: I've said it before and I will repeat myself: House Beautiful magazine is ON FIRE. The latest issue just has the biggest, plumpest, juiciest photos. With so much detail in each photo you really end up learning more about how the room is put together simply because they are so good at giving us what we want: bigger, better photos of pretty rooms. Yum. Good work, kids.  

Last item: Is there a homeowner's equivalent to The Joy of Cooking? I often look around my crumbling house and don't even know where to begin and have no idea if certain projects are worth tackling on my own or not worth the headache. If you have any basic home repair books you would recommend, please leave a comment. 

Top photo from House Beautiful.

Cute.

Gimme.

That porch. (Minus those silly stars.)

Pretty pictures for the people.

Something nice to look at today.
All photos by ROLAND BELLO.

Bookish.

In book news... Celerie Kemble has a book? Surprising.

And this is the first time I have seen the cover of the Domino book. Also a big surprise. A little cutesy for them, right? I thought we would get a little Paul Costello porn on the cover, but no. Oh well.


DOMINO BOOK

CELERIE KEMBLE BOOK

Contenders.

We desperately need to pull our bedroom together. It's a sad little room. 

I am on vacation which finally has given me a block of time to start ordering things online which I hope will magically show up next week so we can start to make something of our bedroom.

Here are the contenders.

I like these rugs. I even like them together. Must decide. Depends on what we decide to do with the floors. We might put something sisal-y down. We will see. 

I am not really a "pillow" person, but we might give that a try. I am not sure these are the ones, necessarily.

We need a new bedside table that can really go the distance. It needs to hold lots of books, remotes, all the spare change that gets deposited here by the man, and all the other stuff that inevitably gets stashed away. I like the shape of the green one, but I don't like the non-committal color. Too country-cousin. May need to paint it lacquer orange or something. Or just black. 

I am definitely stealing pillowcases idea. They always make me laugh. My other half would laugh to see "YES" on my side of the bed in this photo. I think with a new bedroom, there will be more "YES" in my future. 

I like this. Also considering not pulling up the carpet and refinishing, but instead just installing something like this. 

Like the lamp and headboard. But it looks a little hotel-y. Will need to avoid that. 

We already have this big photo by Chad States, which is sort of lost in our current sad, sad room. I think it will look better once the rest of the room is pulled together.

And I might buy another photo, just to give the Chad States pic some company. Maybe this Alex Prager job right here. 

(And I like this blue...)

Never saw this coming.

Joke. Of course I did. She's a clingy weirdo nutjob.


And, in related celeb commentary:
I loved how the People magazine with all the baby photos was like 98 pages of Angelina with a smirk on her face that seemed to say, "Suck it, Jen."

Z Gallerie helps ruin a trend I hated anyway.

Well, good for them.

Z Gallerie is known for copying trendy and iconic lighting, among other items. Most notably, they made a copy of the CELLULA chandelier and now they are at it again making a copy of THIS stupid ship chandelier which can be seen in a number of homes (Nanette Lapore's in this month's Elle Decor, for example).

I hate that fucking ship lamp. I like whimsy, but this lamp speeds past whimsy and sails headlong into "bat-shit-crazy" territory.

I'd scan a copy of the Nanette Lepore place since her living room rug is something to dream about, but I am on vacation and therefore too lazy to do that.

I am not too lazy, however, to let you know about this stupid ship. Enjoy.


I think this is Muriel Brandolini's place, but not sure. She has one of the damn ship chandeliers.

Finally.

I've been looking for the perfect silverware for a long time and figured I would just know when I found it. And I have.

This photo does this silverware no justice. I just found it in a luscious photo in the December 2007 Gourmet magazine. Apparently I can only get it HERE at James Robinson. I have no idea what I am going to pay for this. Will probably be buying it a few pieces at a time. In fact, I am confident this is the case since they make you email them for the price list. Whatever.

I will have you, my little pretties.

**UPDATE**
They just emailed prices to me:


Four Piece Dinner Setting- 3 prong $1,405.
Four Piece Dinner Setting- 4 prong $1,410.
Five Piece Dinner Setting- 3 prong $1,770.
Five Piece Dinner Setting - 4 prong $1,775.

Ouch.

I am pretty sure that when you go to this person's house, she reads your your tarot cards.

Which would be kinda fun, really.

Speaking of - are you superstitious? Do you pay attention to astrology and people's signs and all of that? I recently got a tiny little notebook to keep in my wallet and it has the Chinese animals and a list of the correlating years, so my party trick is to get people talking about if they are a pig or dragon or whatever and figure out what it all means. It's amusing. Sometimes it's spot-on. The Fortune Telling Birthday Book (HERE), is also weirdly perfect for the 12 or so people whose birthday's I've looked up.

Are you a believer? Do you think you are your "sign"?

What exactly happens in a room like this?

Seriously. What happens here?

I'll take it.

We'll ignore that both rooms belong to Paris Hilton.

Oh lord, do we really need a new kind of snobbery?

Ice snobs? Really?


From The New York Times.com:

A couple years back, though, Ms. Polk noted a change in the habits of her guests, who casually started bringing their own ice, she said. Her ice, as it eventually turned out, was apparently not to her friends’ liking.

“Maybe the cubes were the wrong shape or they didn’t taste that good, I’m not sure,” Ms. Polk said last week. “But it got to the point where people came for cocktails, and they were bringing different bags of ice.”

“B.Y.O.I. was a turning point for me,” Ms. Polk said of the moment at which she exited the world of generic ice use and entered another. It is one where a cube, formerly a common and readily available commodity heaved out of supermarket freezers or convenience store cases, is transformed into a symbol of yet another type of consumer connoisseurship — not ice but “ice.”


Read it all HERE, if you can bear it.

Perfect white?

I need help. My step-kid (13) called the color of our front room "cat-lady yellow" which is kinda still tearing my heart out.

I need the perfect bone white. A little cream in it, but no grey. Seattle is too grey as it is.

Does the perfect white exist for the light here in the NW?

Help, por favor.


(Cute green, huh? But I need white. Photo is just for funs, y'all.)

Scandale, part II

FINALLY he admits it.

But he's still denying the baby.

Feel the love.

MICHELLE ADAMS is having a really good day. Jonathan Adler gave her bright & clever (and tiny!) apartment a lot of love HERE.

Check it out.

How to win your wife back:

Go shopping for clothes with the woman you were messing around with.

Oh, Balthazar. Figure it out, man.

If someone handed you $2,000 tomorrow...

...and told you you had to spend it on your house, what would you buy or do?


Photo from HERE

How do you do it?

Can we talk about cleaning?

Do you have a routine or schedule? Do you pay someone? How often does he/she come to clean? And what do you have them do exactly?

If you're a do-it-yourselfer (and I am sure most of us are), what's your program?

Currently my program is to find out that someone is coming over and then to get really pissed with my slovenly self and then I scramble to clean. This is not working, as you can imagine.


Photo from HERE.

Sometimes you have to go all the way.

So much ivy.
So good.



HERE

Oh, please.

Who's tired of the NY Times presenting a certain group of its citizens as a bunch of sniveling "poor-me" whiners?

I am. That's who.

Read all about it HERE. Someone in comments (I think when I asked if we'd buy a $4000 Chanel sweater many, many posts ago) lamented the NY Times being totally out of touch with most of NY (the non hedge-fundies, etc). So true.

I know the economy is tough for many people, but is this the group to interview? People lamenting the fact that their euro-pals come over here and outspend them on shoes and cashmere sweaters?

I feel totally old even thinking this, but our country is going to hell in a handbasket (that's so much fun to say).

I head to NY today. I'll let you know if I see angry mobs of new revolutionaries protesting their inability to get good tables at the hottest spots now that they have to compete with hordes of Eurotrash.