Gray

02 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Grisaille

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We all know gray is an important color now….

but the question is which one. I added tumbled light gray squares

to my limestone kitchen floor years ago to add a little accent

and roughness to their buff colored satin smoothness.

I love gray. I wear gray. I want gray.

Almost three years ago we covered over the dark wood paneling in our

living room with a thin layer of sheetrock and plaster.  This was to mollify

my husband’s concerns, and protect the wood if we wanted to go back to it.

It was thick, wide planked, un-knotted. So I couldn’t rip it out, didn’t want to

paint, bleach or sand it. We’re both thrilled with the consummate light that

fills the room now. Photo above from earlier Timeless in Provence here

I’ve eyed the almost 10 foot tall, built-in book cases on either side of one wall

for several years now. They are paint grade wood that has been stained

a “wood brown”. And I’m in the process of painting them gray…

So many grays…

Just picked up Coté Ouest and Coté Paris Dec/Jan ’10 issues

and they are flooded with grays…


With that now requisite touch of lavender or mauve…

I bought flat paint…for it’s chalkiness…

love the tremulous glow of Astier de Villate

emoting from the dark…and that gorgeous stone

curb that the glasses drain in…

What I’m conscious of now is the balance in the room

between an open beam wood ceiling that rises up to meet

the second floor, stone fireplace, several wood antiques that

I can’t just replace with painted French or Swedish …

Six photos above all from Coté Ouest

Grays mixing it up with sister neutrals…

from my Architectural Remnants post here

From left to right: Benjamin Moore “Storm”, C2 Paints “Pavement”,  “Stomp”,  “Carbon Dust”

I intend to paint the inside of the cabinets a darker gray…

I’m veering away from grays that are too plummy, or blue…

“Pavement” is a favorite so far….

Asli Tunca…a treasure trove of gray tones…

from earlier post Atelier in Istanbul

here

Aiden Gray photo

Masterful mix of neutral…

and strong pop of aged black graphics…

“An 18th century sculpted wooden Italian lantern is suspended

within an industrial mold made of wooden marquetry…”

The New Eighteenth Century Style

From my Strong and Silent post here

The photo on first flip through that caused me to buy the issue…

Liquid metal on French…

Coté Paris

Got a “go to” gray?

Please name it and describe it fondly to me…

always looking for a few good grays

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Oh…and yes…loving all the lanterns, too

Spring

28 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in French Interiors, Gardens

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Beneath a pelmeted bower of rose garlands in

a French chateau, I could dream a Sunday morning away…

But here in Northern California, two days of sun are forecast…

and I must wrestle myself from imagining my rosy bed

and set about setting the garden straight …

My absolute favorite way to spend the day…

The espaliered apples and pears are beginning to bloom,

the cherries setting small buds along their branches.

Muscari runs in rampant drifts headlong into the

babytears and nepata.  Self-seeded foxgloves

have made themselves at home artfully over the winter,

growing voluminous leafy skirts while it rained and rained.

This is what I wait for…from when the last plump

Bourbon rose is plucked, sometimes as late as December,

until the eternal rains finally start to abate. However briefly.

I have two days to step carefully into my damp garden,

stooping to pull and clear, everywhere looking

for signs of Spring…

1)The French Country House Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery, Photography Bernard Touillon

2) Appley Hoare Antiques

3) 19th century Cigar case cover Ruby Lane Antiques

4) Antique Bourbon rose from my garden Honorine de Brabant

Awards and Astier

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in 18th century

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I want to thank Pam from Red Ticking for recently giving me the Kreativ Blogger award…and Tish of  A Femme d’un Certain Age forwarding on the One Lovely Blog andThe Fabulous Sugar Doll Award and Renae of Renae Moore Design the Honest Scrap Award. These are all wonderful, creative women, and I’m touched and honored. What I wouldn’t give to stroll into Pam’s store in Seattle. Some of the finds I’ve stumbled over at her shop are heart stoppingly beautiful. I love following along in Renae’s creative footsteps whether she’s sorting out decorating schemes or letting her inner artist out to paint wall art for her son at college. Tish…on my first visit to her blog I just couldn’t drag myself awayfrom her side column…fabulous. Many blogs tell us where to go and what to see in France, but Tish gets down to the brass tacks of air kisses and how not to embarrass yourself when you are …drumroll…a woman of a certain age….

Rather than go on about myself I’d like to immediately award the Kreativ Blogger to these seven blogs…some that I’ve just recently started to enjoy:

A Perfect Gray

Linen and Lavender

Serendipity Rising

Limestone and Boxwood

Splendid Willow

Aged and Gilded

Bardot in Blue

A varied and talented batch, all. And the last one, Bardot in Blue, is the expatriate daughter of Jermaine of French Kissed . Soon Jermaine will join her daughter in Paris and travel with her to the south of France.

Speaking of Paris…I am a huge fan of  Astier de Villatte. Here is their new covered candle…Let’s see if we can get Jermaine to smuggle a few of these back for us…

Each piece of  Astier is one of a kind, gorgeous, inimitable… and très cher…high school French for expensive. I save up for the real thing, leap at any sale, and treasure every piece I have. That said…I’m not above a little infiltration in the ranks.

Trove Antiques has a heady collection of Astier…as has Chateau Sonoma

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Here’s the cabinet in my kitchen with Astier…and a few poseurs that I picked up at Anthropologie last year….for source see here

I bought this Astier de Villatte pitcher years ago, a work of art…but at Anthropologie’s price, I could afford to buy two of the simple white pitchers. They look lovely in the cabinets, or together on a long table replete with wildflowers…

My odd little Astier elephant vase in the cabinet…

Astier looks great in either rough or refined environs…

Store images from Remodelista. Seeing a wall of Astier still takes my breath away… but I love these little Tribeca cups I bought at  Anthropologie a few years ago and I just found online…Compare here here vs  here

Top cup with rose Astier de Villatte’s Emilie cup…bottom cup Tribeca. Previous post here shows a Myra Hoefer’s Paris apartment festooned and decorated with Astier and another post here shows a few of my favorites up close…

*And lastly…7 things about me from earlier post here

More Finds

25 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in 18th century

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French Casaquin c. 1790

Meg Andrews here

I started collecting 18th century shoe buckles last year…

Many from the Georgian time period 1714-1811. Anyone who has

read my blog for a while has probably noticed I love 18th century

ladie’s shoes…

LACMA

c. 1772

Until the end of the 18th century, women’s shoes were made

of lovely silk and embroidered fabric. Perhaps that’s why I find

them so charming…and expensive…and fragile…

and why I focused instead on collecting their sturdy silver buckles

I focused on silver with paste stones…

In the 18th century, paste was by no means an inferior

product and both men and woman loved how they

added a little sparkle to the dance floor….

highlighting their perfect mincing footsteps…

Some buckles lose their prongs along the way…

the top and bottom buckles

have the similar shaped mechanism that I prefer…

It was customary at the time for silver buckles to

not be marked, but they were all tested chemically

by the sellers who vouched for their composition..

Of course I was most drawn to flowers and bows.

The only matched pair I have,

this set came backed by damask

and the seller included loose stones

so that I could restore them…

Probably my favorite…

It has a nice heft to it, a good mix of paste sizes and shapes

and I like the open design. A pin was added to the back to

turn this into a broach and I added the scrap of 18th

century fabric. It’s not the whole shoe but it’ll do….

Pastes were set into foil, which intensified the shine

They also often added a black dot to the bottom of the paste to give more

dimension to it and duplicate the look of diamonds…

Matched pairs with no missing stones command high prices,

but I’m content with my little ramshackle fleet…

The buckle with baguette shaped pastes is another favorite. I’m working on a storage

and display case, but I like collecting antique objects that can be picked up and examined.

It just gives another dimension to history to touch the every day objects that people

lived amongst, relied on, were proud of.

Photo from Marie Antoinette Style by Adrien Goetz

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A great photo timeline of antique shoes here

A  collection of my posts that feature antique shoes here

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 18th century buckle collection here

Romance novelist Candice Hern’s gorgeous collection here

Finds

23 Tuesday Feb 2010

Posted by in Flea Market Style

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This week I thought I’d show you some of the things I love to collect…

I’ve been collecting antique French letters for several years…

Here’s one of my latest letters adding a bit of pedigree to faux

stack of old books…

I wanted the look of stacks of old books to add some visual height to a cabinet.

So I took the glossy covers of a stack of old SAT, etc,  prep books that I was going

to recycle, and brushed a few shades of cream on their outer edges, tied them up

with gardeners twine. Close up, they don’t look bad. On the top of the cabinet…

even better…

I searched for 18th century script…but fell in love with the more swooping

and looping style of the first decade or so of the 19th century…

I looked for words and letters that popped out from the neat rows of script…

My heart skipped a beat when I found this 19th century “Aubusson cartoon”…

Cartons de Tapisserie d’Aubusson are oil paintings on canvas that preceded the

creation of an aubusson rug or tapestry. Schools of artists copied classical elements

from master paintings, wools and silk were dyed to match the painting and

then weavers copied it…

Against the somewhat dingy background the aqua, vert, rose, and blue and white petals  glow…

Painted full size, either with gouache (an opaque watercolor) on paper, or oil on canvas,

cartons are also important as archival material. As tapestries woven from the mid-18th century

with wools coloured by chemical ingredients have faded with time, « cartons » are now the

only true representation of how tapestries looked  when being made. More here

Love the theatrical drapery, garlands of flowers,

stylized swirl of acanthus…

From the same dealer, an 18th century French embroidered piece of silk…

This triangular scrap (about 28 inches by 22″)  might have

upholstered the side of a bergere once…

Up close…stitches and bright chenille from over 200 years ago….

Not to be confused with your grandmother’s chenille bedspread,

Additional info on 18th century chenille embroidery here

As much as I love antique embroidered silk

It’s a relief to enjoy antique and vintage linens…

They’re washable, dye-able, sturdy…

Besides stacks of humble grain sack pillows,  my new favorites are initialed

French linen chemises and sheets that were probably folded neatly for

decades into an armoir….

Buttons…

Loved this Anthropologie jacket…but not

thrilled with its buttons…

Some other options….

Antique French buttons…

Found at the Alameda Flea market from

a dealer with a San Francisco antique store

that sporadically appears at the flea…

I bought these buttons last year on Ebay France…

Can be a little challenging on one’s high school French…

Luckily we have Tongue in Cheek ‘s boutique here and

Mélanie for Le Petit Cabinet de Curiosités just opened

her online boutique here for fresh from France treasures…

Buttons above available from Mélanie here

More of my flea market buttons

still in their crisp tissue wrapping…

And an idea for using them…

this was on 1stdibs last year

at Sarlo

To be continued…