Manolo for the Home

It’s a busy day here at La Casa Del Beard, which means all I have time for is a quickie post. Here are four ubercool kitchen accessories from Art Effect:

They’re all wonderful colorful and inexpensive enough to buy for a relative or friend who’s feeling a little down. What could be more cheering than robot plates, a gnome bowl, nonna graters, and vintage-style cake tins? Perhaps robot plates, a gnome bowl, a nonna grater, and one vintage-style cake tin all wrapped up in pretty paper with a sparkly bow on top!

I love wallpaper patterns, but I’m so not motivated enough to do the whole wallpaper thing. Right or wrong, I think of wallpapering a room as this tedious and complicated process involving lining up patterns and picking fights with The Beard. Why the fights? Tandem home improvement tends to bring out the worst in people. Consider my friend who installed a new bathroom sink with her live-in boyfriend. She said that she was close to killing him by the time the sink was in. Oy!

So, yeah, wallpaper. Do not want. Children’s book author and crafter Claire Louise Milne found a new and wonderful use for wallpaper, however, and I think I could pull it off without becoming a widow. I’d show you a snapshot of her handwork but she asks that people like yours truly not use her photos without permission, so you’ll have to go look for yourself.

For those who’d prefer to stay right here, I’ll describe Milne’s pet project. After falling in love with Neisha Crosland’s “anemone” paper, she decided to jump feet first into the world of wallpaper. Long story short, she backed the doors of a couple of secretaries with some gorgeous with the paper.

“I decided the best way to indulge the wallpaper fixation was to decorate a cabinet. And I found some lovely vintage paper on ebay. It has a lattice pattern (which I love) and flowers (which I love) and the colour scheme is fresh with light green and lots of white.”

This is DIY on a small scale — perfect for those of us with more ambition than time!

The house that The Beard and I own — or sort of own, because a goodly portion of it still belongs to Wells Fargo — came complete with a backyard deck painted a sort of rusty red color that burns the hell out of our feet on summer afternoons. We’ve got a power sander and a couple of jugs of deck stain at the ready. What we don’t have is time!

Recently, my MIL was in town along with one of The Beard’s cousins, my own mother, and her partner. Watching our relatives carry kitchen chairs out onto the deck was a bit humbling, to say the least. We’d had two of those molded plastic chairs one can buy at the Family Dollar and a little matching table, which was fine for us. Then The Beard dropped one off of the side of the deck, meaning no more leisurely Saturday morning outdoor breakfasts. For now, at least.

Well, it seems my MIL noticed the lack of outdoor seating because before she left, she presented The Beard with a check for a thousand dollars to put toward a nice patio set. Now I’m wasting precious time scouring the Internet for ideas. I can’t decide whether to buy something chic for two (seeing as that we’ll be the ones using it 99% of the time) or a set that can accommodate larger numbers.

Here are two possibilities:

The Provence garden set would be perfect for those intimate breakfasts mentioned above, but less than ideal when guests were in town.

The Al Fresco teak set, on the other hand, would allow us to play host to at least three other people.

We’re gravitating toward something durable that’s less than the amount donated by my MIL so we can buy a few other things for our home. I’m thinking about picking up this lamp from Bellacor:

It’s lovely, it matches my living room scheme, and it costs a mere $151, which doesn’t seem like a lot when you have a thousand bucks to play with. Would I spring for it normally? Probably not because I like the thrifting game too much, but the rules have changed for the time being!

Radar won’t detect THIS chair from Blu Dot! Its faceted surfaces give it a very low radar signature because it can radiate almost all of the radar energy away from the receiver. Okay, maybe I’m making all of this up, but I can’t help it if my brain says B-2 when I look at this particular piece of furniture.

2Modern says: “Powder-coated steel ships flat and folds along laser-cut lines to create a dynamic and comfortable chair. As skinny as a supermodel, yet far more sturdy.”

I don’t necessarily know that I want my furniture to be as skinny as a supermodel. Furniture from my local discount store is as skinny as a supermodel and that isn’t good. I wouldn’t mind, however, if my furniture was as study as a F-117 Nighthawk because that’s pretty dang sturdy. Unlike the Nighthawk, the Real Good chair is available in ivory, aqua, and red.

If you’re a tea connoisseur like The Beard — or a tea cup connoisseur — how can you not love these “ted lights” from Domestic Construction? Besides the fact that they’re uberclever, they’re also just retro enough to be chic while still being subtle enough to blend into a modern space. Then again, a group of them would make a great focal point for a countryish space.

I’m not quite sure how one can acquire them outside of going to Brooklyn and knocking on the door with checkbook in hand. Domestic Construction appears to be a studio rather than a store, but apparently those local to the NYC area can buy some of their unique wares at Ricky’s.

Sucks to be the rest of us, I guess!

I am currently hosting houseguests in the form of my MIL and one of The Beard’s cousins. I’m sad to say that other than cleaning the house and giving up my bed, I did nothing to make them feel welcome.

I did not pull a Martha Stewart and stock a chair with water bottles, roses, and a basket o’ towels. Nor did I provide a glass of water topped by a second glass, to make things look classy AND keep the cats from dipping their paws into the agua. What else did I not to that Martha Stewart Living (which I only get because they canceled Blueprint) tells me I ought to do?

For one thing, I have not provided my in-laws with straw slippers that I embellished myself or lush bars of Savon de Marseille, like so:

I certainly did not make up a little binder with information about my town, my town’s TV stations, and a menu of the dishes I know how to cook so they can select a different breakfast each morning!

Nope, nope, nope. I mean, I’m not an entirely horrible host! I laid out some towels, made sure no one was allergic to cinnamon before putting it in the coffee, and had plenty of pillows at the ready. And, like I said, I gave up my bed! I’m just no Martha Stewart because she gets paid day in and day out to be a perfect host, while I most certainly don’t!

Oh, MetroSofa, you minx! Temptress! Or is that tempter? I mean, really now, is an only seating shop traditionally male or female? It doesn’t matter. Your antique-modern aesthetic makes me want to light all of the furniture in my house on fire just so I have an excuse to buy more.

Seriously — classic styles merge with hip fabrics in a perfect blend of old and new. They start with recyclable or antique wood frames that would otherwise end up in a landfill and work their magic to make them beautiful again, choosing “paints, fabrics, cushions and finishes with green production and manufacturing in mind.” Yep, green as in eco-friendly so you can feel good about your chair…unless you had to torch all your existing chairs to get it.

Plus, if you don’t like any of the chairs you see below, you can custom design your own!

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When I fall in love with a shop, I typically fall HARD. Recently, I have gone ga-ga for Flutter, a shop filled with a “delightful disarray of found objects and clutter.” The bad news is that Flutter is located about a billion miles from me…well, it might as well be a billion miles with airfare what it is right now. The good news is that Flutter, like Coleen & Company, has some of its wares for sale online.

I’d gladly invite any of these things into my home. Besides the fact that pagodas are hot right now, I’m a sucker for all things blue. I also love fruit-themed containers, vintage-look pillows, and anything “distressed.” It’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of extra green, because if I did, I’d be single-handedly paying off Flutter’s lease!

I could have bought an old, old, old home fraught with problems. When The Beard and I were house shopping, we saw one place we absolutely loved — it had three full floors with lots of rooms on each, high ceilings, wood floors, huge windows, and plenty of old school curb appeal. It also had a foundation so warped that the house itself was starting to lean to the left. Not good. We could afford the asking price, but not the necessary renovations.

So instead of buying an old, old, old home fraught with problems, we bought a fairly new cottage (circa 1950 or so) fraught with…well, ugliness. For example, we’ve been exploring the lovely wood shingles underneath the horrid off-yellow siding in preparation for the day we’ll tear it all off and paint. Then there is the vinyl flooring in the kitchen — it doesn’t quite reach the baseboards, leaving gaps where dust and dirt congregate.

The front door is actually quite new but, as it turns out, we are side door people. Growing up, I always wondered why some families used the front door exclusively while others gravitated toward the side door. We were driven to become the latter sort by practical concerns. Screen doors in the mud room effectively keep indoor cats from escaping, while it’s much easier for them to slip out the front. Plus, it’s nice to be sheltered when holding groceries in one hand while turning a key with the other during a rainstorm. It’s a place for dirty shoes, somewhere to stash a muddy trowel when one is too lazy to walk to the shed, and yet another way to let fresh spring breezes in.

The only problem? Said mud room was ugly, ugly, ugly.

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The problem with so many of the lovely antique and vintage things I see each day is that while they look as close as can be on my laptop’s screen, they’re actually thousands of miles away in cute little shops located all over the country.

I find, for example, the most darling little hand shaped teapot, only to discover that the Arizonian potter who creates them doesn’t do distance sales but would be happy to meet me at my convenience. That’s just one hypothetical example, of course.

Everything in the pic above can be found at Coleen & Company, in lovely Newport Beach, CA. Designer Coleen Rider finds lots of sweet pieces who knows where, stocking her shop with all things beautiful. She even deigns to put some of it up on the Internet so that those of us who secretly dream of things like leather-topped Italian writing desks, vintage porcelain birds, and colorful Chinoiserie panels can drool.

That problem I mentioned in the very start of this post? It’s no problem at all — order what you like on the web site (if, unlike me, you have the money), and Rider will have it lovingly packed and carefully shipped right to your doorstep. Happy shopping!