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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.
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.
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:
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.
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. In 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.
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?
“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).