Part I: The Outside

I have said it before and I will say it again... I am very lucky. I have great family and friends and one amazing person who is both. Our siblings have been married to each other for 20+ years, and M and I are aunt and uncle to their four great children.

When M invited me to stay at his Eastern Shore house for a few days, and to bring Connor along, I knew I was in store for a real treat. I'd been to the house once before since they moved in a few years ago, but hadn't spent time there.

When we got to M's early in the evening, Connor needed to be walked, so we took a stroll in the gardens, which have been a showplace for more than 40 years. There are two axis views, with the center-point being a graceful fountain and pond. Naturally, Connor fell into the pond, taking a drink and overstepping the edge.

There are both formal and informal gardens at the house, and many specimen trees, including a huge tulip poplar, evergreen magnolias and an allée of maples leading to the house.

The kitchen gardens are away from the house, out by the barn and are organically farmed by the charming Hope. Before I left to drive back to Baltimore, she packed me the most incredible basket of veggies, including home-grown artichokes! The farm also raises soybeans and corn. I've written about this over on my foodie blog.

The formal gardens are bordered by small ball-shaped boxwoods and rosemary plants. There are plants and shrubs, all in varying shades of green, which make up several themed gardens, including one with banana plants. There is a garden folly with an Edwin Lutyens bench and numerous urns and planters, all creating a unified vision of a formal garden, beautiful from all angles.

This is the view from the bench, through the folly to the river and below is looking to the folly.

The garden blooms throughout the summer, but it was mostly hydrangeas and elderflower blooming this past weekend, and tons of gorgeous lush magnolias, which smelled incredible.

As you brush against the rosemary borders of the garden, the smell just wafts along in your wake.
View from the window in the room where I stayed.
Stay tuned for Part II: The Inside. I will probably post it tomorrow. Also, check out my foodie blog for pictures of the kitchen garden and Betsey, the baby duck!

Just a Hint

We're having some quiet time before the next set of guests arrive and so I am checking e-mail, blogs, and other things. I thought I'd share some pictures of the house and property.

This is the pond Connor fell into, mere moments after we arrived. He's used to swimming in the river near my house and didn't quite get the concept of straight sides!

More later...

Away...

I am heading over to Maryland's Eastern Shore for a few days to stay at a gorgeous private estate, owned by a great friend and semi-relative (our siblings are married to each other). He's an incredible collector, with a beautiful house dating from the early 1800's, and has invited me to take pictures to share with you all.

I am clearing out the memory card on my camera and packing extra batteries, throwing Connor in the back of the car and heading out over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. See you all in a few days!

The House in My Dreams

I was lucky enough to grow up in the same neighbourhood where my mother grew up, and where my grandmother and several sets of cousins lived. The area was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,Jr. who took into account the shape of the land when he laid out the streets and pathways. Olmsted and his father are most well-known for the landscape design of Central Park in NYC. The houses in the area are mostly Queen Anne, English Tudor, Georgian and Shingle styles.

While I was at my mother's today, we looked through piles of old photos and I came up with some of the interior and exterior of St. John's, the house where I grew up. I am still looking for the detail shots.

This house is where my mother grew up, and which was recently sold and completely renovated. It had an old carriage house behind it, with room for seven cars. Mostly my mother and her siblings used it to have parties in.

This is the house where we lived when I was young, and where we had the original compost heap and the wonderful grape arbour. It was solid stone and stayed cool in the summers and warm in the winters. The front porch was a great place to sit and read.

We moved to this house when I was about ten. In this image, you can get a better idea of the width of the front porch and the detailing along the wide wall that surrounded it. The porch extended about twelve feet beyond the sides of the house and was about twelve feet deep. The east side of the porch was shady in the mornings, so we ate breakfast out there in good weather. The west side was shady in the afternoons, so that's where cocktail hour took place. It was also a great place for parties.

One Christmas, I made a huge Williamsburg-style decoration for over the door. I remember that we had a few warm days and the pineapple started dripping!

Two of the bathrooms had tiny hexagonal tiles with a Greek key trim around the edges. You can see that the house shifted a bit!We all hated the sinks in this house because they didn't have modern mixing taps. It was impossible to wash your hand without freezing or burning them, or filling the sink. It looks like there's a center tap, but it's the drain.The window seat on the landing was a great place to sit and read. The windows were originally like the three at the top, but my parents had them replaced to let in more light and so they could see out to the back. The center window has my mother's family's coat of arms in it. When we moved, we had that window redone and took that special piece and had it framed. I loved the fireplaces in this house. We used them a lot, especially at parties, of which there were many. This has matched granite stones, two carved stone heads and huge mahogany planks for the chimneybreast. Unfortunately, they were painted later on.

This is the library, always a quiet place in the house. There is an oak mantlepiece, again with two carved heads, and a scroll with the words "A clear fire, a clean hearth and the rigour of the game", a quote from Charles Lamb from Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist. This was also removed from the house.

This is the view looking down into the center hall from the landing. You can see the huge chandelier at the top if the image. Someone's friend was bragging about his kicking prowess and managed to hit the bottom tier of crystals. The living room is off to the right and the dining room to the left. I remember rolling back the rugs and everyone learning to shag!

The dining room was such a great room. We ate dinner there nearly every night. The bottom two-thirds of the walls were paneled with a plate-rail along the top. The paper was handprinted in China and the curtains matched it. There was another huge chandelier above the table. There were pocket doors that sometimes closed and weighed a TON! This and the other snowy picture above were from the blizzard in 1996. This is the lower section of our back yard, and you can see the door of the sunroom, which was filled with plants. The picture below is from the opposite angle, probably four or five months later. You can see the garage in the top left and the path leading to the sunroom at the bottom right.

Seeing all of these pictures just makes me realize even more how lucky I was to have been able to live in such an incredible house. As you see, it's truly a special place. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

Baltimore Painted Screens

In Baltimore, a city full of rowhouses, there is a long tradition of painted screens. This dates to the days before central air conditioning and was used to allow people to have their ground floor windows open but not have the inside of the house seen by everyone walking by. As air conditioning became more ubiquitious, the painted screen tradition faded away.

Traditionally, the screens were in working-class neighbourhoods with their rowhouses and lack of greenspaces and trees. The images painted on the windows didn't vary much, usually a red-roofed cottage surrounded by tall firs and cheerful gardens, and a pond in front with several white swans a-swimming.

Last year, my dog Connor, decided he didn't really want to be stuck inside, so one day when I had the windows open and the screens down, he jumped out the window. Twice. The first time, he just pushed the screen out of the frame, but the second time, he shredded it. Because it was summer, I just cranked the A/C and didn't do anything about the screen. But this spring has been so cool, I have been keeping the windows open and needed to have the screen repaired.

I decided that I wanted to try my hand at screen painting, but didn't want to use the tradtional paintings. I found a decorative print element, enlarged it and printed it out on numerous sheets and taped them together. Then I set to painting the screen with a cream background, and then traced the element onto the screen and filled it in. One of the main problems with painting is making sure the holes aren't clogged with paint. After the screen dried, I coated it with several coats of spray varnish and put it in the window.

The lost art of screen painting is being preserved by the Painted Screen Society and there was a recent exhibition of the screens at the American Visionary Arts Museum here in Baltimore.

The Front

A few weeks ago, my brother and I were looking through some of my father's old photographs and I took some home to scan and distribute to my siblings. This picture had fallen out of the cache and I found it in my car this morning. It's the front of the house that I showed in the last post.
There were 24 steps leading up to the front porch. At the landing, there were two huge old white azaleas. The porch was about 10-feet wide and was paved with terra-cotta tiles. It extended beyond the sides of the house by about 12 feet on either side and was wonderfully shady. There were huge old roses along the thick stone wall surrounding the porch.

It's hard to see, but there are two chinoiserie-style lanterns hanging in front of the columns. There were always loads of hanging plants and flowers, as well as urns and planters filled with geraniums, impatience and other flowers. Most unfortunately, the arriviste family who bought the house pulled out all of the roses and azaleas, as well as the hedge at the bottom of the hill. They also got rid of a lot of the interior details, including a spectacular mirror and fireplace surround.

I am still hunting for the detail photos of the inside of the house. I can't imagine I would have gotten rid of them, so they're around in some storage box.

Tea Towels

As far back as I can remember, my parents had a "green" bent to their ways. As a child, I remember adding grass clippings to the compost heap in the back garden. After a year of it cooking, my father would turn it over, and use the previous year's pile to help fertilize the gardens. We grew veggies and flowers in great number and had a grape arbour that ran the length of our back yard, from the house to the alley. We even took cuttings of the grape stock with us when we moved to a bigger house with a much larger yard. *** We also took the compost heap to the new house!***

One of the other things my parents did was to use linen tea towels and napkins, instead of paper products. Since they traveled a lot, my mother would pick up linen towels at places they visited and we'd get mini-geography lessons about shires in the UK, cheeses in France and olives in Greece. I still keep that tradition today, although pure linen towels are more difficult to find.


Linen is great to dry dishes and glassware with because it doesn't leave lint behind. As you may know from wearing linen during the hot summer months, it's also very absorbent. Even dry, it retains about 6% to 8% moisture. The shine, or luminosity of linen is caused by the flax from which it is made. Many tea towels were made of Irish linen, and a lot of the ones you find today are made by Ulster Linens in New York. They have a lot of good information about caring for linens. (Wash them, they're tough!)

As I look through the tea towels I have right now, I find them from Windsor Castle, Sandringham in Norfolk where my auntie lives, and Manchester. I have two brand new vintage ones that I just found at a local thrift store for 50¢ each, one of which is pictures of silver teapots from the 1700's and 1800's and the other is the rooster above. They're in perfect condition. I can't wait to wash them and begin using them.

More Maison Jansen Stories

One of the most fun things about the lecture the other night was the fun personal stories about Maison Jansen's clients. I think that all of these stories are elaborated upon in the book and illustrated with sumptuous period photographs and preliminary drawings.

First up, the First Lady. As you may know, Jacqueline Kennedy asked Maison Jansen to decorate the White House. One problem - they weren't an American firm. Much of the work was billed through Parish Hadley because there would have been a lot of political backlash if they'd used a French firm, albeit one with a branch in New York. Mrs. Kennedy did the same thing with dress designer, using French designs made by American designers.

At Ditchley Park, the Chipping Camden home of Nancy Lancaster Tree and Ronald Tree, MJ purchased a run of red silk damask to use as the wall-covering for their living room. However, MJ thought it was too new looking, and laid it out on a field for the summer so it could fade to a pale yellow-pink. It was then applied to the walls.
Are you distressed because your renovations are taking longer than expected? The work that MJ did for Lady Baillie took more than 40 years! Of course, they worked on houses for her in Kent and the Bahamas, and did loads of work, but still... Some of his work included cleaning and relining all of the tapestries in Leeds Castle and designing all of the passimenterie specifically to fit a room and then having it custom-made.


Babe Paley is widely considered to be one of the most stylish women in the world. But Stephane Boudin always said that she was one of only two women born with perfect taste. When asked who the other woman was, he would just smile and let the questioner think that it was her. That's an amazing way to flatter your clients. There are some beautiful preliminary sketches for the rooms MJ was designing for the Paleys.


As I mentioned earlier, the years around WWII were not kind to Maison Jansen. First, their workshops were raided in the hours after Germany entered Paris. By quick thought, many items were saved. When it looked like Germany would invade, workers went to chateaux that MJ had decorated and hid furnishings and dismantled the power and plumbing so that the Germans wouldn't burn the houses.
Adolph Hitler commissioned MJ to redesign the interiors of the Bank of Germany. M. Boudin agreed, but only if he could use the Jewish craftsmen that worked in MJ's Paris ateliers. He collected letters and parcels to take to the workers in Germany, but when he got there, he didn't recognize anyone. They were a random assortment of workers and so he had to train them from scratch to do the work. If the work hadn't been perfect, they would have all been killed.


One of MJ's signatures was their amazing faux bois work, which was nearly indistinguishable from that from the 1700's. They would begin with old wood, cover it with mud and paint. Then they would wax it and strip it. They would leave it in a barn yard, paint it agian several times and slather it with mud. Finally, they would clean it up, wax it again and hang it in a house. Ellen Ward Scarborough has a piece of MJ's faux bois for sale on her website for $7,800.


After he finished decorating the White House, Mrs. Kennedy gave M. Boudin an album documenting the work that MJ had done. M. Boudin usually gave his clients a gift when he finished a job, too. Clients received a hand painted chest or dresser, with items faux painted on it, like a letter or a special piece of fabric. For more interesting stories about Maison Jansen, their clients and the fabulous furniture, please read Mr. Abbott's wonderful book.

Book Thing...

...even though I should be writing a follow-up Maison Jansen post. The scanning for that post is in process, so it will be a little later in the week...

Kitchenography and I have established a Sunday routine - Farmers Market at the crack of eight, breakfast at some random dinerish place and then a trek to the Book Thing. I've noticed that books in the decorating section have been sparse lately, and so I've been looking more closely at some of the other sections. Kitchenography always makes a bee-line for the cooking section, as you might imagine, and I glance through it.

I love biographies, so I head there next and usually end up meeting Kitch there. A few months ago, I found the 1971 edition of Living Well is the Best Revenge, the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, by Calvin Tompkins. I recently found Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After, a biography of the Murphys by their daughter Honoria, who was their only child to survive past childhood, but I haven't read it yet. Today, I found Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story, by Amanda Vaill. Whereas Living Well seems mainly to focus on the Murphys in Europe, this seems more comprehensive. Now I just need to find Making it New, and I will have a good library about them!

I also love to stop by the small etiquette section and found two interesting books. First is Miss Manners' Common Courtesy, In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problems That Baffled Mr. Jefferson. This slim volume reminded me of the dear Mr. Easy and Elegant Life, so I will be posting it to him shortly. The other book is the Wedding Embassy Journal, a 1939 publication by Marie Coudert Brenning, which has a beautifully embossed white leather cover. It looks like it will be fun to read. Lest you think I snatch up all of the treasures, there was a book that got away. Style Court mentions it here.

There are some books I pick up for their titles alone, and today, I found another one. The slightly cumbersome title is The Incredibly Lazy Person's Guide to a Much Better Body. That's certainly starting out with the bar set low, and not raising it by much! The final book is Date Bait, The Younger Set's Picture Cookbook, published in 1952. The pictures alone make this book worthwhile! The names of the recipes are hilarious, including shrimpola, a concoction of shrimp, tomato soup, rice and chili, and some revolting dessert called Heavenly Goo, which serves 20!

Yves Saint Laurent RIP

On a weekend when fashion is at the forefront, Yves Saint Laurent, one of the most influential designers of the 20th century has died at age 71. He will be remembered as one of the leading lights of his generation and his innovative look will echo through the years.