Bits & Pieces

I thought I’d do a wrap up of a couple of smaller stories today, instead of one longer one. Enjoy!

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My friends at Halcyon House Antiques are having a major sale this week. Sure they’ve done sales on this or that before, but they’ve never done a sale of everything in the store! They’ve cleaned out the closets, peeked under the stairs, searched the attic and brought everything they’d tucked away out in the open and now it’s on sale! Everything is 30-40% off – or make a reasonable offer and they might play along! Click on the link above for hours and location.

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In a case of six degrees of Baltimore, one of my friends sent me the link to a gorgeous chair, and asked if I knew the person who designed the fabric, because she’s from Baltimore, and then a little later, someone asked me to write an article about the very same person – Liza Hathaway Matthews. Some of the top blogs have written about her and here she is, in my own back garden, and I didn’t know about her. Shame on me! Liza is an artist whose work is now being made into fabric and wallpaper. Two of her paintings are in a piece by Celerie Kemble in February’s House Beautiful. I am looking forward to meeting her and writing a piece about her, too!

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A few months ago, I wrote about a project I was working on at my office. I showed you some of the before pictures of the room I was refreshing, but since that was one part of a six-part project, I never showed you the finished results!

Just to remind you what the room looked like before:

I have filled the bookcases with antique leather-bound books and other ephemera from our vast collections, so the room finally looks like what it was designed to be – a reading room.

The silver in the case above was found when we finally found the combination to an old safe and opened it one Friday afternoon. I have to tell you, my hands were shaking as I turned the dial for the final time and opened the massive door! I was pretty sure I’d find a skeleton in there!

The paint is Turtleback from C2 Paint, and it’s the most gorgeous paint! The painters told me a number of times how wonderful it was to work with and how beautifully it covered. Although these aren’t the best pictures, you can really see how the dark green paint really accentuates the beautiful millwork in the room. Before, it just disappeared.

The Reading Room again has the gravitas that it had lost for so many years while it was swathed in pink.

The final part of the project is matching up all of the museum labels with the 110 paintings we have scattered around our offices. Some bright spark pulled all of the plaques and plates off a few years ago, and I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to match up who’s who! You can follow along with my adventures matching paintings here.

What projects are you working on in the New Year?