Rent The Mill, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor’s Cottage in France!

I’ve talked about the Landmark Trust in England a few times on Pigtown*Design. They take properties in the UK, renovate them and then rent them out. We stayed in a pair of knitter’s cottages one summer in the Cotswold hills. The Landmark Trust is working with Conservatoire du Littoral, the protectorate of the French coastline, to renovate and preserve a number of buildings along the coast, but they’re starting with an inland building, Le Moulin de la Tuilerie in Gif-sur-Yvette, the one time home to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, also known as The Mill.Just 35 km from Paris, this was the only house that the Duke and Duchess ever owned, and they lived there from 1952 until the late 1960’s. Most weekends, they would drive from their house in Paris to this little property where the Duke could potter about the garden and create his own little corner of England. In the book, Windsor Style, by Susie Menkes, an entire chapter is devoted to life at Le Moulin de la Tuilerie. In the book, she talks about Billy Baldwin’s visit to the house. He had this to say about the taste of his fellow Baltimorean: Most of the mill was awfully tacky but that's what Wallis had – tacky southern taste, much too overdone, much too elaborate and no real charm.The interiors were stripped by the Lebanese millionaire who last owned the property , but one of the few remaining pieces of the Windsor-era interior is a mural which the Duchess had painted. It’s a commentary on how she felt she was treated by the press – especially the UK press. Or, from Landmark’s description: The Duchess’s jeu d’esprit, created for her by decorator Stéphane Boudin, still presides from the wall of the large first floor living room – ‘I'm not the miller’s daughter, but I have been through the mill.’

Landmark has not attempted to recreate the Windsors’ bright and eclectic furnishings and décor, but has furnished the house with an echo of Englishness and with much to recall their happy times here.

For more information about this property, please click here.

Billy Baldwin Exhibition at Evergreen

You know that I am a big fan of fellow Baltimorean, and even more specifically, fellow Roland Park native, Billy Baldwin. His family lived just blocks from the house where I was raised and from the house where my mother and her family were raised. It’s entirely possible that some of her family knew some of his family, because Baltimore’s like that.  On Thursday, May 20th, Evergreen House and Museum opens an exhibit entitled “Baltimore’ Billy Baldwin”, with the opening reception that evening from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. RSVP here.

The description of the exhibition reads as follows:

The exhibition is organized around vignettes representing three of Baldwin’s most important Maryland commissions—rooms he created for friend Harvey Ladew, the artistic Voss family and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Spanning three decades, these very different interiors illustrate Baldwin’s maturation as a designer and show the influences of modernism and technicolor Victorian revivalism of the 1920s and 1930s, which inevitably gave way to a sophisticated and comfortable post-World War II sensibility that became synonymous with Baldwin. 

Known for his Southern charm, the dapper Baltimore-born designer created interiors for some of the world’s wealthiest and most celebrated people of his time: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, composer Cole Porter, actress Greta Garbo, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland were just a few who sought his exuberance and expertise.

Baldwin’s particular brand of modernism distilled traditional European influences through a crisp and efficient American filter. The resulting understated, comfortably restrained designs had such a powerful effect that his name became synonymous with American style. His choice of materials included cotton, bamboo and straw, while classic Baldwin touches were dark walls, white plaster lamps, the low armless slipper chair, plain draperies, geometrics, off-white and plaid rugs, and corner banquettes. 

As with everything at Evergreen, this promises to be a fascinating exhibit and it will highlight a talented man who was well-known in Baltimore and also around the world of design and decorating.

Good and Bad in the Magazines at the Grocery Store

As I was waiting in line in the grocery store {this is where the people who really know me begin laughing}, I started looking through the magazines in the line.

I gasped when I saw the cover of People Magazine, with the beautiful Yeardley Love on the cover. If you don’t know the story, Yeardley was murdered about two weeks ago by her boyfriend. They were both students at the University of Virginia, were both on the college’s varsity lacrosse team and were both from wealthy Maryland families. 

I knew Yeardley’s mother, Sharon, in high school, when she was my sign language teacher. She’s still teaching hearing-impaired children in Baltimore City’s Public Schools System. She was gracious, charming and just a wonderful woman. I am sure that her two daughters were exactly like her. The take-away lesson from this is that abuse can happen to anyone. If you suspect that a friend, family member or colleague is being abused by their partner, please let someone in authority know. Abuse can be prevented.

On a much more cheerful note, the other magazine I was reading in the loooong grocery store line was Oprah (another Baltimore connection). I spotted the most amazing picture of one of my favourite books: I Married Adventure. Byredo (from 'by redolence') is a new  brand from Stockholm, with fragrances inspired by the memories and experiences of founder, Ben Gorham. The fragrances are created with a distinct focus on craftsmanship and quality."I Married Adventure" is a box set consisting of Byredo's five best selling fragrances to date, including Gypsy Water, Rose Noir, Bal d'Afrique, Pulp and Chembur. Each fragrance comes in a 30 ml bottle and tells a unique story of a diverse origin remembering India, Africa and parts of Europe. 

The June issue of Elle Decor, which is their largest June issue ever, names the top five decorators to watch, and amongst them is blogging pal, Grant K. Gibson of San Francisco. I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Grant in person, but have been reading his blog since the first day he started writing. I hope that you’re still reading magazines, and not just getting your information on-line!

Flowers on Sunday & The Kindness of Strangers

At the Farmers’ Market this morning, I picked up another bouquet of peonies, and these are just stunning! They also smell so amazingly beautiful and their scent is wafting through my wee house.  The ones I picked up at Whole Foods lasted nearly a week, so I am hoping these do too. 

I got an e-mail from one of my readers the other day, asking if I’d like some books. Barbara writes a delightful blog full of a wide range of topics, and I am always learning something from her. We agreed to meet on Saturday when she came into the city for a family event.

First, it was a great pleasure to meet her and her family, and I appreciated their hospitality. Second – OMG! What amazing books! I have not yet finished looking through all of them – there were about 30 in total.  There were wonderful books on Versailles, gardens, homes, decorating and more, but I did pick some immediate favourites. Of course, 1000 Buildings of London and 1000 Buildings of Paris were two top choices. Mark Hampton On Decorating is a perennial favourite, and a book that should be in everyone’s library. I am anxious to read Duane Hampton’s new book, Mark Hampton, An American Decorator. With a new house on the horizon, Charlotte Moss’s book, Creating a Room, A Designer’s Guide to Decorating Your Home in Stages, should come in quite handy. Although there’s not much work that needs to be done on the new house, I am sure that there will be a lot of decorating ideas I want to put into place. One of my favourite type of books is old etiquette books. Two which were included are Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions, and Entertaining with Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to be the Perfect Hostess on All Occasions. They are both written by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, and were written in 1964 and 1965 respectively.

There was a book called “Elegance” about a woman who finds a copy of the original book, and decides to follow all of the rules it sets out. {Click the link for a great review of both.} Funnily enough, I picked up a copy of that book at Book Thing last week.  And now I realize that I have a copy of the reprint of the original Elegance that was published in 2004. There’s not much information on Mme. Dariaux, except that she worked at Nina Ricci and other Paris Couture houses.

Finally, as I mentioned the other day, Gore Dean is selling some of my pillows, and I thought you might like to see a few pictures of them in situ. If you can’t get to Baltimore, you can always find them on my Etsy shop.

Lots going on this week, so stay tuned for details!

Selling

Starting Friday, I am going to be helping out at Gore Dean once a week, generally on Fridays, when I don’t usually work at my real job. This should be lots of fun, considering how much I love every single thing they have in their shop. When I am not selling all of their wares, I will be taking pictures of it all!Now, there’s more than ever to love there, since Gore Dean will be selling some of the pillows I’ve been making.

If you are around tomorrow, stop in at Gore Dean’s Baltimore location and say hey! And don’t forget to watch the Preakness on Saturday!

Gin & Titonic

I have the sense of humour of a six-year old and find the strangest things hysterical.  So now that it’s gin-drinking season, I finally found something I’ve been looking for for ages! Ice cubes shaped like the Titanic and an iceberg for your gin!  The little ships float upright in your cocktail, knocking into the wee icebergs. That is just the kind of thing that makes me laugh! Available here.

Capote’s Willow Street House

“I live in Brooklyn. By choice…” Truman Capote lived in 70 Willow Street in Brooklyn and penned A House on the Heights while in residence there. From The Guardian:

The Brooklyn Heights home where Capote lived in the 1950s and 1960s - a five-storey, 11-bedroom townhouse built in 1839 - went on sale with Sotheby's International Realty yesterday for the first time in 70 years. Capote wrote his 1959 essay about Brooklyn, A House On the Heights, while living in the property, describing the splendour of its "beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny amber-gold glass", its walls "thick as a buffalo, immune to the mightiest cold, the meanest heat" and its "porch canopied, completely submerged, as though under a lake of leaves, by an ancient but admirably vigorous vine weighty with grapelike bunches of wisteria".Capote rented the Willow Street house from the stage designer Oliver Smith, living in two basement rooms. However, George Plimpton writes in his introduction to A House on the Heights: "when friends came to call, he often took them on a tour of the entire house (when Smith was not at home) and said it was his house, all his, and that he had restored and decorated every room ... One of them (which Truman does not mention) contained Smith's mother's favourite furniture - old beaded lampshades, rocking chairs - indeed, a room whose decor must have given Truman pause to explain to his friends on his tours."The author describes in A House On the Heights how, after a run of Martinis on the porch of the house with Smith, he eventually convinced his friend to rent him a few rooms in the property. "It got to be quite late, he began to see my point: yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes, it seems only fair that I should have some of them." For more information about this one-of-a-kind house, now available for the first time in 70 years, click here.

Some Things

I can’t let the passing of An Æsthete’s Lament go by without saying a few words about what the blog has meant to me. It was an education every time I checked the new posts. I never knew what treasure I’d find there or what words of wisdom I’d encounter. Regardless of what was written, it was always something that would enrich my life and my knowledge base. I had the great good fortune of helping Æsthete design the header for the blog, and after several iterations, we came up with the perfect image and words.  Blogging is hard, and I sometimes wonder why I/we do it. Certainly, for me, it’s not about the money, because I don’t make a penny from the blog. It’s about sharing the things that I know, even if I’ve been described as “being the boring old aunt at Thanksgiving that you hate to sit next to…”. Blogging takes time, time away from the family, the friends, the other things we could be doing. But we still do it, mainly because it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s a great community and it adds something to our lives.

The Preakness, the middle jewel of horse-racing’s Triple Crown, is being run in Baltimore this weekend. Things are really gearing up around town, and the excitement is building. I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I’d love to see Super Saver, with Calvin Borel, win the Triple Crown. Thanks to Eddie Ross for the shout out he gave me on his blog. Eddie and Jaithan bought some French Ivory knives and forks from me and he featured them at an event he did at Gracious Home in NYC. I still have a few of these knives and forks on my Etsy Shop, as well as some great old hotel silver spoons.  As I get closer to my move, look for more and more things for sale. As I am sorting through books, I realize that I have three copies of the book DV: Diane Vreeland.

When I moved the last time, and basically got rid of everything I own, I realized that stuff is stuff. And in the long run, I am really a hunter, not a collector.

Flowers on Sunday – May 9

We’re coming into my favourite season – the one where there are fresh flowers everywhere! So I am starting a Sunday flower post for the next few months. Today’s flower is four gardenias from my gardenia plant. Here in the mid-Atlantic, we can’t grow gardenias in the garden, so I have them in a big pot and take the plant in and out, according to the season. The plant is a cutting from a plant that has been in my family for 40+ years, so it’s hardy stock. I pruned it back last year and every cut was like a stab to my heart, because I was worried that I’d kill the plant. Luckily, it’s got tons of new growth, and now I am trying to make sure it grows evenly.I’ve just moved it outside for the summer and it’s now sitting out in front of my house. It’s got loads of buds on it right now, and they smell amazing.

They Came From a Land Down-Under

I had the chance yesterday to spend the afternoon with one of my readers who is in Baltimore from Australia. Nancy and her friend, Robyn are here with their husbands who are attending a conference, so we took the opportunity to visit some of the places that Nancy had read about on here on Pigtown*Design.First stop was DeBois Textiles, where the gals were overwhelmed by the selection of fabrics. While Nancy bought one yard of a number of fabrics to use as pillow covers, Robyn bought a five-yard length of a gorgeous silk to use as a tablecloth. Next, we headed out to the Greenspring Valley to Halcyon House, a shop that Nancy was so excited to see, and we arrived with strict instructions not to let her buy everything in the house.  That was going to be a difficult challenge.I love this chair, which has a very similar fabric to those above. At the party for John Robshaw, I spent some time sitting in this chair and chatting. It’s very comfortable. Each time I visit Halcyon, I see new and different things, all of which I love! This fun silverware, with the assortment of bamboo, tortoise-shell, faux ivory and other colourful handles, really caught my eye. These little salt cellars made from scallop shells enveloped in silver would look beautiful on a summer table. Halcyon has a great selection of handbags and carrier bags.

This cabinet with the selection of china is brilliant! Check out the plate on the lower right. It’s one of the great tin plates that I collect. These are from Mottahedeh. Great variety of cachepots. And catch the elephant, too! We grabbed a quick lunch at Whole Foods, where I was lucky enough to find peonies!  Style Court has started her Peony Watch 2010, so I weighed in with my sighting of them here in Baltimore. Robyn and Nancy bought me two bunches – one of a bright pink and one of a pale pink with streaks of darker pink. Thanks to Nancy and Robyn for spending their day in Baltimore with me! It was great to meet you both.