Lisa's house

Today, dear readers, you are in for a very special treat. My friend Lisa has graciously allowed me to photograph her alluring and enchanting home for your viewing pleasure. So put down your copy of World of Interiors, and take this dreamy journey with me instead.

From the moment you glide through the front door of this diminutive Craftsman cottage, you enter a charming world reminiscent of Bloomsbury Group domiciles, with echoes of New Orleans, North Africa, old China, and Mexico tossed into the mix.

And yet it is thoroughly Berkeley, in its refusal to be anything but what it wants to be in the moment.

Everywhere you look, objects wink and gleam...sunlight plays on glass...table displays beg to have their portraits painted...and plump cushions beckon you to sink down, arrange yourself comfortably, and sip a mint julep from a lacily etched glass.

It begins in the front hall, where gilded Italian columns greet you like stately butlers...

...and Turkish carpets stretch invitingly towards the back of the house.

 

 To the left is an airy dining room, where every shelf and corner holds a tableau designed to delight the eye and pleasure the mind.

On the wall, wooden angels smile down benevolently. 

  
And if you're feeling faint from too much champagne, the settee in the front window will cradle you soothingly.

I admit, I would not want to be the one dusting this bookcase.

But I am ready to seat myself at this table, gorgeously set for dinner.

Do we care what we're being served when eating off china like this? No, we do not. 

(Although I can assure you that Lisa is a fabulous cook.)

An air of genteel mystery pervades the living room, where the spice-infused colors 
evoke the feeling of an Oriental souk. 

And collections of disparate objects seem to have arranged themselves as if by mutual accord.

 

 Except, of course, when they just want to be alone.

 The amazing vignettes are just everywhere you look. It can be dizzying, because your head keeps whipping around to make sure you didn't miss anything.

Here is a lovely tableau on the front hall table, looking into the living room. That chair!

In the central hallway, an assortment of antiques and paintings take center stage.

This room has special meaning for me, because in one giddy, ten-hour day, I painted it while Lisa worked on the front hall. She did a better job than me. Lisa, you can paint my house anytime!

A charming kitchen counter arrangement...the counter itself is copper!

 

Lisa is the only person I know who has an antique street sign from New Orleans hanging on her kitchen wall. 

A tulip that has reached the end of its lifespan still has an elegant presence on the windowsill.

  

Although I typically like spare rooms with just a few bold accent pieces, I must admit I am mesmerized by all this detail. Even in the bathroom, there are lovely items to gaze upon. And flowers everywhere!

I don't know how she arranged to have these delicate green vines growing just outside her bathroom window, but there they are. Prettier than wallpaper!

 Whenever I read advice from interior designers, exhorting people to express their personalities through their homes, I think of Lisa. She's a master.

Next post: Bedrooms and back garden, including a secret gate...

© 2013 by A Silken Swoon. All rights reserved. All photos by Eileen of A Silken Swoon.

 

  

Terror in the Garden

They come by stealth, in the gauzy light of earning morning, in the rain-soaked hours of the afternoon, in the starlit calm of 2 a.m.

They launch full-on, soundless, brutal attacks. And when they have finished with their mindless destruction, they leave as silently as they came.

They belong to no state and carry no flag. They work for themselves, and answer to no one.

They are...

THE GARDEN TERRORISTS!

Lemon-eater!

Leaf chewer!

Rose nibbler!

Bud destroyer!

You would think I'd be prepared for this onslaught by February, but no, every year, they manage to take me by surprise. You can hear my anguished cries as I see my newly-budded roses stripped of every potential spring flower, my clematis leaves as lacy as Swiss cheese. My tiny green starter lemons made into...well, lemonade for squirrels, not me.

Caught as unprepared as the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, after the initial attack, I gather my formidable arsenal of weapons, don the rubber gloves, and spray, spray, spray. All the while fretting about the environment, the good bugs, my own lungs, etc.

But the damage has been done. The first bloom of my roses will be a shadow of their potential glory. Some of them, shattered by the early-season violence, won't bloom at all until June.

To be a gardener is to be a soldier. No one ever told me that 
when I first picked up a trowel.

© 2013 by A Silken Swoon. All rights reserved.

At the window

I woke up this morning to pouring rain, and for some reason it made me think of window seats.

Maybe that's because when I was a child, on rainy days I would kneel (on my bony, scraped-up knees) for hours looking out the front windows, waiting for the rain to stop so I could go out and play.

Those poor knees were on fire by the time I gave up and found a book to read instead. Just think, if we had had window seats in our house, I would have been spared all that pain.

Now, decades later, I still love to sit in the window and watch the rain, but for entirely different reasons. With big trees all around my house, I enjoy gazing at the gleaming wetness of the leaves. I admire the way they can take a pounding, for hours and hours, and still hold their drunken little heads up high when the sun comes out. 

So my current window seat resides in my imagination. It has beautiful curtains...

Or shades...

Definitely pillows...

And maybe a chandelier from outer space.

A furry throw for warmth...

Enough books for a year of reading ...

Enough space for hours of napping.

Oops, are these too many pillows? But they're so pretty, I can forgive the indulgence. 

Really, which of these would you take away? 

I wish all of you a beautiful front row seat to the next rainy -- or sunny -- day.

  

© 2013 by A Silken Swoon. All rights reserved. All photos via Pinterest.   

Remembrance of rooms past

The world evolves...styles change...time marches on. The loftiest interior design gods create exquisitely beautiful homes that we mere mortals can only aspire to -- and then they sell those homes and do something different, somewhere else.

Who can forget John Saladino's villa in Montecito? He published a book about it, here. 

What an amazing place.

Stone walls...

Delicate hues...

Old velvet...

 And gardens that feel as if they've been conjured up out of the mists of time.

Then there was Helene Aumont's supremely charming "farmhouse" in Santa Ynez.

 Bold

Original

Colorful

 

Featuring a seemingly effortless I just tossed that throw over the couch two minutes ago nonchalance that only the French seem able to achieve.

And gone, gone, gone. 

I wonder what happens to these homes when they are sold. Do the new owners scrap everything and start from scratch? Do the furnishings end up on 1st dibs?

I know, I know. Nothing stays the same. We are all constantly looking for new ideas, new ways to improve our environments.

But still...RIP, you beautiful rooms, you.