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Styled by Elsie

March 31st, 2009

Daniel Pontius



What could be better than pictures of Elsie on a Wednesday morning? I’d love to have that first dress–to make into pillows.

From Jan. 2009 Elle Decoration UK Edition.

Styled by Elsie

March 31st, 2009

Daniel Pontius



What could be better than pictures of Elsie on a Wednesday morning? I’d love to have that first dress–to make into pillows.

From Jan. 2009 Elle Decoration UK Edition.

Be Bibleots : Pillows

March 22nd, 2009

Daniel Pontius

“Someone will remember us I say even in another time.” Sappho. Linen and silk ground fabric embroidered in vintage cotton thread.

Vintage needlepoint textile with embroidered text in vintage cotton thread.

Strip Pillow. Repatterned Vintage Japanese Silk.

Pillows like belts or ties pull together an ensemble. They allow the eye to rest. Pillows are like the peacemakers of your environment: bridging colors and adding textures and creating focal points. They should have substance, be well done, and they must not be forgotten!

Be Bibelots’ new line of pillows are a mix of craft, imagination and wit.

Much thanks goes out to Roger Fojas Photography email shotbyme@yahoo.com
for his dynamite photos!

Monterey Park

March 19th, 2009

Daniel Pontius

The color swatches are my tinkering with the colors from a recent outing. We can call it a color narrative. From left to right: Peri-Blue, Lino Green, Samarkand Rose, Cash Register Gray & Froggy Yellow.

These go far into the dusty muted colors of the Omega & Bloomsbury which I have been loving recently as opposed to the bright not unlike Easter colors of the Shanghaiese restaurant (I’m told if you are in the know it is referred to as Wu Cuisine which is the regional name in the classic tradition) It was last Friday evening and I was in Monterey Park. The restaurant was painted two colors that although at odds with each other somehow worked. The space felt soft, relaxed and fresh even with all the tables full and staff running about.

The industrial works at the lofty ceiling had been painted out a periwinkle blue which wrapped down the walls about three feet. Below the walls were soft lavender. The floors had an industrial dark gray green carpet and the benches in the waiting area were upholstered in mint green vinyl. White commercially laundered tablecloths were on round tables that were packed comfortably together. The colors help to set off the colors of our food like the orange of the pumpkin and glutinous rice cakes the pink of the shrimp and the bright green of the loofa.

On the walls, decoration, the tiered red and gold printed Chun Lian were hanging from the ceiling welcoming the Spring and there was an appropriate amount of beaded screens made out of some kind of faux raffia in bright orange and hot pink at the door openings, as if someone might have said about their placement, “They will visually screen the dining room but not make the space feel heavy.”

The standard-light-bulb-shaped-pendant fixtures were spaced out evenly on a grid pattern and the bright whiteness of the glow matched the rice cakes. The whole place had a delightfully non existent approach to “art” and in the toilet there was a surprising lack of granite of juxtaposed colors that seem to be favored in many of the restaurants that I have visited in Monterey Park.

I PR Them

March 14th, 2009

Daniel Pontius







So I did that rock and roll thing for about 18 years. Then I took a welding course.

This is from Marsia Hozer in the New York Social Diary. Marsia is chic. Her apartment is big, and it overlooks Central Park. And, she’s English having arrived to the States in the 196o’s because here is where she says, if you have the energy to do something, you’re doing it a week later.

I love the jumps that people make in the narratives of their life. We leave out the middle ground, boredom, impatience, the time it takes for momentum to accumulate. You read some designers biographies and it sounds like they arrived in –pick a city– and the next day they were being discovered at the counter at Schraft’s. At least Madonna worked at Dunkin’ Donuts for a couple days. But, I still love the leaving out the middle part and the rewriting of one’s history. As Edwina Monsoon said: PR. PR. I PR things; people…places…concerts…Lulu! I PR them. I am and if you’ve heard of me, I have PR. I make the fab. I make the crap into credible. I make the dull into delicious.

Speaking of public relations, there is a a BBC documentary called The Century of Self that starts with Edward Bernays and the development of the Public Relations industry which makes one very much question why we believe anything that we hear on TV–or the internet. That said, it’s the little summing up that I find interesting because it’s always the important details that are left out about how I got from here to there (did you walk? Take a cab? Wait for the bus?)

It’s like reading a short story. Joan Didion said something about short stories. It was something like that the reason she didn’t write short stories, is because she didn’t believe in that epiphany the protagonist has in a short story. She says that it doesn’t happen that way in real life. Life is not just one way–something happens– and we are forever another way.

Further, I love the odd reminiscences we have on our lives. Things can get so condenscend and thick with just a phrase. One of my favorite is from a woman I knew in London who worked in a shop and once apropos of nothing, she looked down at me (she was very tall) and in her ponderous rhythmic voice. Her black sunglasses reflecting the track lighting:

…When I had an orange grove in Spain…I made marmalade…

She had been a model, before there were Models she would generally arrive late, and seemingly a little tipsy after lunch. But that was London. Everyone is a little tipsy in London after lunch.

Back to Marsia Hozer. She also is quoted as saying one of the most brilliant things I’ve heard in a very long time.

“Don’t think too much. Keep your mind quiet and if something pops into your mind just do it.”

Which is how this got written. I really do love this apartment.

**All photos from David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary.

Pretty Pretty Hats

March 13th, 2009

Daniel Pontius

Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni, Autunno

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies, is the last line of Keats’ To Autumn.
These very autumnal colors are pretty, and I’m in the mood for pretty– especially if it were a hat from Lanvin. I seem to be stuck in autumn today when Spring is only 7 days away. Maybe I’ll snap out of it when I go out to look for fabric. 

Elsie and her Bibelots

March 10th, 2009

Daniel Pontius

Above is a much published photo c 1890 of Elsie de Wolfe in her Turkish Room at 49 Irving Place, NYC. This is the essential before shot; before she became a decorator; before the new century. It was the ending of the Victorian Age and she was at the end of her acting career. She was going to have to do something. Check SpellingIn this before picture, she had not yet decorated 49 Irving Place, which helped to jump start her path (nothing new is what she said of decorating; woman have always done it). In the before photo she is in her late 30’s and living the Sapphic life and by 1905 at 40– she had received her first commission and off she went– and that, as they say, was that.

Bibelots has attempted to get permission to use a photo of Elsie de Wolfe by Cecil Beaton taken in the 1930’s. It is the quintessential after photo. Elsie de Wolfe at her most personal reinvention. Bibelots was told that “in theory” permission could be given for a fee…Well, enough said. You Dear Reader can see the image on your own at the National Portrait Gallery Website at this link: AFTER.

Elsie, I’m almost overwhelmed with a lack of words to describe this image. Elsie, the gilt! Never again will this be done so well. Is this your in-town home at 10 Avenue d’Iena or is it Villa Trianon, Versailles? 

I would like to imagine it is your Paris apartment, although I think it is Trianon. You were enraptured in the new found social status of your mariage blanc to Sir Mendl. You had stepped out as the newly fashioned Lady Mendl, New York behind you, it is at Avenue d’Iena that has always felt to me the culmination of your career:

“Throughout this period, the decorator became identified with conspicuous connoisseurship through the adoption of extravagant bibelots, particularly crystal obelisks and miniature jade and crystal animals. Her embrace of these, rather than Giacometti sculptures and Neo-Romantic paintings, further served to distance her from the interiors du jour of her contemporaries.

These treasures–including a small 18th-century gold-and-diamond coach and a magnificent crystal ship in full sail–were frequently used as centerpieces on her dining table”(257, Sparke).