Finding A New House In A Bucket Of Paint

BEFORE

I am constantly compensating for my various dissatisfactions with our house by investing myself in home improvement projects.  And admittedly, that is the beauty of a small home — that home improvement projects are all the more viable and easier to confront.  Our home may be smaller than I would like, but I am committed to making each part of it exactly as I want it.  Throughout our house we have blond wood floors which I hate.  Admittedly, that seems like an extreme response, but it’s a pet peeve of mine.  They’re just so darn yellow looking.  In addition, of the limited square footage we have, a fair amount is dedicated to the stairway and landing — wasted space in a small home — so I am determined to milk that staircase and landing for all of the aesthetic potential they are worth.  Hence the beloved dear.  And now the Christmas vase.  The last step, easily accomplished with a quart of paint or two, is the stairs themselves, and that cursed blond wood. Read the rest of this entry »

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Everybody Loves a Bargain

Alice + Olivia bicycle, $499.99, luggage, $179.99

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Water Bottle Feathers and Tea Bag Dresses

Dress by Faith Garland. Composed of 200 Aquafina bottles and 1,000 staples.

Boston Fashion Week is now fully underway, and dropping in on today’s shows seems to me to have highlighted why Boston is prime finally to become a fashion center (of sorts).  

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Target Delivers Fashion Sealed With A Kiss

A bunch of things I’d like to talk about – but I’m afraid it’s kind of getting down to the wire to mention the upcoming crop of Shops at Target hitting stores this Sunday.  And even as it is starting to become part of the normal course of things, so that you think we’d all stop falling all over ourselves and acting as if it represents a once in a lifetime opportunity, I can’t resist a good designer x fast-fashion-retailer collaboration.  The funny thing – to me at least – is that I found the last series of Shops at Target pretty easy to resist.  There are, after all, no “Designers” involved.  The designers are store owners collaborating with Target’s design team.  And as great as your eye for fashion may be, and as fabulous as I’m sure your store is, it doesn’t mean you can design your way out of a box.  The girls at Kirna Zabête, however, have done a fantastic job.  Everyone seems to be jumping to point out that this is a chance to get, for less than $100, clothes from the folks who generally bring you a $2600 dress from Giambattista Valli or a $1700 dress from Lanvin.  Flawed thinking, to say the least, since what you are getting for less than $100 is certainly not a Lanvin dress.  It is, however, an awfully cute dress, perfectly on trend, which at $39.99 is still an incredible steal.

I cannot mention this collaboration without pointing out that Kirna Zabête is a seriously problematic store name.  I still cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to pronounce (even to myself in the privacy of my own brain).  But this collection is strong enough that I have gotten over my discomfort with the name and am now sold.

In addition, I have to make a confession up front.  I never thought I would say this — and I’m kind of shocked that I’m saying it out loud — but after a few seasons of the fashion industry trying to foist it upon my, I am loving the jumpsuit/playsuit thing.  I still don’t know who can actually pull off the look besides a few blessed souls.  You will certainly never catch me in one.  But it’s too bad, because a jumpsuit can be kind of cute.  In fact, I’m not even going to show you the Kirna Zabête for Target jumpsuit until later in the post in order to let it flow seamlessly with my other favorites from the collection.

Long-Sleeved Shirt Dress $39.99 (Fedora $22.99, Envelope Clutch $29.99, Bracelets $16.99 for a set of 3, Ring $14.99)

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Built It And You’ll Never Want To Leave

I now officially have the home renovation bug – bad.  I know I promised the other day that I would share images of the built-ins we just installed in my sons’ room and didn’t deliver.  I will, eventually, I swear.  But I am in love with my built-ins.  In fact, I am in love with built-ins in general.  As a kid there were a built-in closet and dresser in my bedroom and we cursed them nearly every day.  The placed serious constraints on how I could arrange my room, and seemed a highly inefficient and unattractive use of space.  And as an adult homeowner I have noticed that built-ins seem to have generally fallen out of favor for some time now.  But I think that’s a big mistake.  When done well, the storage — and therefore space, organization and dimension – and character that they can add to a room is truly phenomenal.

I received perhaps my favorite complement of all time the other day when my son and his friends did some baking for a school fundraiser in my renovated kitchen and one of the boys commented that it was the best kitchen he had ever seen (or something to that effect, but we’ll just assume that was the gist).  I loved not only the complement itself certainly, but the fact that it was made after and in response to spending the day working in my kitchen.  Because certainly whether it is the nicest looking kitchen around is highly debatable.  The really beauty of the kitchen is in how efficiently and effectively the space is used, so that it honestly makes me happy every single time I cook or bake in it.  All of which feels fairly arrogant to say, since I designed the kitchen, but I think the actual point is that built-ins work best when they are designed by (or in conjunction with) the owner and take into account the user’s specific needs.  While pruning the photographs in the iPhoto library which threatens to take over — and then take down — my computer I came across pictures of the kitchen pre-renovation.  Organizing the room around efficient storage was nothing short of transformative. Read the rest of this entry »

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