What a Long, Strange Trip It Has Been

This could be a lot of things: A wistful, nostalgic post about the evolution of the store over the years. A depressed, pitiful post about the ending of things. A "remember when" post about all the exciting (and not-so-exciting) things that have happened since we opened our doors.

But it's not. Instead it is a time to look back and see that the meandering path led us to the exact place we wanted to be from the beginning, without even knowing it. While perhaps naive, I like to think this is how most of life works...it just takes some time to see it.

Enough with the cryptic philosophizing -- after four years, we are closing our retail storefront to focus on our interior design business. And we couldn't be more excited! The world of retail has been a wild ride and has opened doors to so many people, places, and things we would never have otherwise known, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

But most of all, it has helped to build a flourishing design business, a passion for which has always been the underlying driver of the storefront. And it has connected us with hundreds (thousands?) of people who would become customers and clients--even friends--and that has been the most rewarding part of the entire journey. Since opening four years ago, the city has become a different place to me, filled with familiar faces everywhere I go. What an amazing gift. Thank you for being a part of that, and for sticking with us as life continued to get crazier with more kids, new locations, different business strategies, and more.

We aren't going far -- just to a second-floor spot down the street (1205 East Pike Street, to be exact) where we will have a by-appointment design office that will house all of our wonderful fabrics, wallpaper, product catalogs, and more... We hope you'll continue to follow along on our endeavors; heck, maybe now I'll *finally* have time to blog again!

The good news? We have to clear the decks here before our big move in a few weeks, and there are still some goodies to be had. All remaining inventory (not including already sold pieces --duh, right? -- and artwork) is 50% off.

Stop by Thursday - Saturday from 10:30 - 2:30 to scoop up some bargains and say hello...we would love to see you. Plus we really don't want to move any more stuff.

Thanks for hanging in there with us through thick and thin. We wouldn't be here without you.

Fantasy Dining

Iconic sideboard from Oscar de la Renta's collection for Century

It doesn't quite have the ring of "Fantasy Island," but assembling a dreamy fictional dining room was at least as fun as being greeted with, "De plane, de plane!" (Am I aging myself here?)

But I digress.

Seattle Homes & Lifestyles magazine graciously invited me to offer my take on "traditional," which as those of you who follow the blog know, it's basically not so much, though I do occasionally have thoughts of covering an entire room in toile...you know, in an ironic way.

I got to create my own client profile, and I'm now wondering what it says about me that I made her a single, childless woman of my own age. My interpretation of traditional was to design a classic dining room with a more contemporary palette and finishes, and upon reflection, it's basically the room I'd create for myself with A) more money and B) no children.

Being broke and with child(ren), and actually no dining room at all, I've opted for a functional but quirky eating nook that serves as our primary "hanging" spot in the house, but more on that in a few months. (We're prepping for a photo shoot of our home in a few weeks, to hit a magazine near you next year! Stay tuned.)

Take a look at the spread from the magazine, and be kind when taking in my rendering.

Here are some of the dreamy items I included:

The Empire Chandelier we all know and love, from the uber-fabulous Marjorie Skouras

To-die-for vintage pink Murano glass lamps from Swank Lighting

My current favorite dining table, the Phillippe by Oly Studios

Also from Oly, one of my favorite chairs of all time...

...tied with this one, a reinterpretation of Frances Elkins' classic design by Hollywood at Home

What you can't see well are the ahhh-mazing Jim Thompson striped silk curtains and Moroccan-influenced cotton sheers, or the just-right-shade-of-turquoise leather seats on the Frances Elkins-esque chairs and the canary yellow Kravet ultrasuede on the Oly chairs. (I know, ultrasuede....?....but a great color and completely cleanable, a must for the dining room.)

And we have previously discussed the fabulousness that is Cassandria Blackmore....she is, of course, a key player in my little fantasy, and this piece was the inspiration for the room's color scheme:

Maybe someday this will be a reality for me, but for now I'll have to live through my fictional client and my little rendering.

Holy Oly!

In addition to the amazing food and diverse culture, I've found yet another reason to live in the Bay Area: proximity to Oly's annual sample sale!

A California client of mine was able to attend, and scored five pieces for the retail price of one of the pieces alone, so let's all plan a field trip for the next one, shall we?

Her treasures included the gorgeous Dominique cabinet shown here, planned for her daughter's room:

Can't you just see the interior painted a lovely pale blue or, for the more adventurous, a kelly green lacquer?

My client purchased one in the silver wood finish, shown here:

Sadly, when she returned home, she realized the piece was too large for the room, so she'd love to see it find a good home. The normal retail price on this piece is $6, 250, but for you, only $2,500! Too good to be true.

If you're intrigued, drop me a note and we'll strategize.

Happy weekend!

Dog Gone It (or, How Oly Saved Two Dogs' Lives)

I often think that interior design is 20% creative, inspiring work and 80% problem-solving and trouble-shooting....everything from tracking back-ordered products to securing missing components to replacing damaged goods to figuring out how to handle a drunk contractor -- but that's a story for another day.

Earlier in the week I received a forlorn e-mail from a client who had just taken receipt of a few fabulous, not inexpensive case goods from Oly Studio. My first instinct when I read the words, "I'm so sorry to bother you but..." is to brace myself for what will follow, but what I read surpassed even my wildest expectations. Here's an excerpt:

"This may or may not be a first for you in client dealings, but here goes: I was hoping that when I woke up this morning, it was a nightmare of some sort, but one look at our dining room at 6:15 am reminded me that it wasn't! Our dogs (1 big and 1 small) slept out of their crates last night for one of the seldom nights that we let them. They are so well behaved and easy going that leaving them roam and sleep where they choose has never presented a problem in the past. So, when I woke up at 1:15 am to a funny noise I assumed it was them fighting over a piece of stray bone or dog toy. To my incredible dismay!!!!....they had been gnawing on the leg of the brand new dining room table. Maybe they mistook the claw feet as real?! I don't know but they normally aren't chewers. I almost started to cry."

I almost started to cry myself, reading this, as she had just taken delivery of the table only a day or two earlier, after waiting several months to receive it, and it was not an inexpensive purchase.

Here's what it looked like when she received it:

And here's what the legs looked like after man's best friends had their way with them:

The horror!

I immediately contacted Oly, who were not immediately optimistic about remedying the situation, being that their pieces are all handmade and not assembled from components. However, to my delight, I received a call from their wonderful claims manager, Tammy (yea, Tammy!) letting me know that in an amazing coincidence, they had just received another Oscar dining table with a damaged TOP -- the legs of which can be refinished to match our black top, and they are providing it to my client AT NO COST!

We all hear so many stories of horrific customer service that I simply had to share this tale of heroic effort from Oly. Readers, please visit Oly and buy, buy, buy! Of course I am happy to help with the "buy" component. ;-)

Thank you, Oly, for thrilling my client and allowing two dogs to live another day. I'm betting they will be doing some serious crate time going forward.

My Imaginary Client

At the risk of you thinking me even nuttier than ever, I have a tiny secret to reveal: in between working on real projects (or usually, in the middle of), I like to create imaginary clients and assemble fabric schemes for them. Sometimes I go even farther and add in furniture, other materials....though I usually stop short of giving my imaginary clients names. (That counts for something, right? Notice I said usually.)

When creating schemes for actual clients, I often stumble across fabrics that aren't quite right for the project at hand, but I'll realize they would be perfect with that (insert name of wonderful fabric here) I've been dying to use. Thus the imaginary client is born. After cobbling together the ideal scheme, I make a mental note of everything and await the appearance of an actual client it might be perfect for.

Won't you say hello to my current imaginary client? She's a girl of around 8 -- she likes pink but is not one of those "princess pink" types, so we're balancing things out with some navy.

This guy from Kravet is the star of the show...

...but I have since developed a small obsession with his friend from Andrew Martin:

Also represented are my old faithfuls -- a few indoor/outdoor selections and a pair of favorite patterns from Alan Campbell. My client has such impeccable taste!

I'm also thinking we could work in a few pieces from the shop:

These lamps with some framed vintage Florence Broadhurst wallpaper panels?

Perhaps some additional throw pillows for her dreamy twin canopy beds?

And what young girl's room is complete without a vintage cloisonne vase? Ha.

Clearly I still have navy and white on the brain...just scored a lot of striped Sunbrella yardage on eBay, soon to be a pair of dining chairs. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, my imaginary client is beckoning... She is one fierce taskmaster. Kids today!

Art Obsession

As many of you know, we recently relocated to a new neighborhood in Seattle -- we're now in Capitol Hill, in what has become dubbed the "Pike/Pink Corridor," home to a wide range of new restaurants, residential developments, and independent retailers and creative types.

One such creative type has since become a minor obsession with me. Conveniently located adjacent to the local cupcake bakery (which, as you might imagine, I see an awful lot of), artist Cassandria Blackmore's studio has a streetfront gallery of sorts to show off recent works.

She practices reverse painting on glass, which she then shatters so that it fragments in unpredictable ways. Tackling both figurative and abstract subjects, I am blown away by the beauty and intensity of her abstract work, which lines the showroom walls:

Her figurative work is equally impressive:

...but it's those shots of color, woven beneath the shiny, fractured glass, that make my heart race. I haven't unearthed any prices in my investigative work, so I'm inclined to reference the old adage: If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.

I'd love to use the orange or blue over the fireplace in a current project, in which we've done two oversized slipper chairs in this, Quadrille's "Contessa," flanking an orange ostrich-print ottoman:

If (I mean WHEN) I am published in House Beautiful or Elle Decor, one of those is going up on my wall. Budget be damned!

Take a Seat

For the last few months I've been working on a fun project involving significant transformations of several rooms in a gorgeous old Tudor here in Seattle, with the primary goal of infusing the spaces with more color, interest, and, well, quirkiness.

For the master bedroom, one of the action items was to replace an outdated, overstuffed "chair and a half" with a more modern (yet not too contemporary) option, with a higher back to add some variation of heights to the space. We planned to upholster the lucky winner in a canary yellow faux leather...hello, gorgeous!

It didn't take me long to find the perfect candidate, the Tom Dixon by George Smith chair shown above. The only hitch? It's $8,000. For one chair. For some of you, that may seem reasonable (and if so, please call me!), but for me and my client, that was a bit of a stretch.

Time for round two. The contenders (aka options less than $8K!)?

A few options from Ironies:

This lovely from one of my favorite designers, Victoria Hagan:

And our favorite of all, this gorgeous wingback from Duane Modern:

Still, our favorite from Duane was going to run close to $5K, not including our custom fabric.

When I presented the much-loved Astrid chair from Anthropologie in chocolate brown print as a reading chair for the Living Room, it was an aha! moment. The client had previously sat in this chair and loved it, AND it was a comparitive bargain at $1,300. Done and done.

The best part of all? I found an orange one on craigslist for $800! Since we were planning to reupholster it anyway, we didn't care what color it was.

I love making money, but I also love saving my clients money.... And thus concludes Operation Reading Chair.

Stay tuned for some great before&after photos in the next few months.

Waking the Dead

If anyone is left out there reading this sad, neglected blog, let me be the first to applaud your perseverance! With more than a month since my last posting, I'm shocked that you may be out there, still checking in now and then for a pulse.

Well, today your persistence pays off: a faint pulse beats on!

Since opening in our new location a few months ago, we have been a bit...well...overwhelmed. As you know, one of the primary motivations for relocating was to scale back while shifting our focus to our true passion: interior design. Not that we don't love lacquer boxes and classic children's books as much as--heck, probably more than!--the next person, but what wakes us up at night are thoughts of lacquering 18th-century oak chairs (gasp) and reupholstering womb chairs in Trina Turk indoor/outdoor fabric. Not so much the boxes.

The good news? Our plan is working! Lots of new clients and projects. So much fun. So many great people. So many great finds.

The bad news? Our plan is working! So few hours in the day. So many kids waiting at home. So much laundry. (Seriously, where does all the laundry come from? I really want to know. Is my family screwing with me?)

We're not complaining, mind you. Just trying to rationalize our absence from the blogosphere. If it's any consolation, I have written some AMAZING posts in my mind. Here's hoping they will be transferred to reality soon. One of them even mentions *you*. Yes, you.

In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at some our new inventory soon to be hitting the Web site as part of our New Year's Resolution. Almost none of our new store inventory is on the site (kind of the point of a Web site, right?), so obviously we are excited to mark this one off our to-do lists.

Thanks again for bearing with us through our growing pains. We promise not to be such a fair-weather friend in the future.

*Images courtesy of the fabulous Dorothee Brand, of Belathee Photography (gratuitous fame-dropping: she photographed the wedding of design*sponge's Grace Bonney)

Behind the Scenes

Primarily because of the insanity of my life (I know, join the club, right?), I am not as good as I should be about documenting my design projects--a goal for the New Year is to create an online portfolio of professional project shots--but I have a nice (though not yet complete) visual story of one to share.

This project began, in a sense, about a year ago, when a husband...let's call him "Chris" (since, well, that's his name) bought my favorite table ever for his wife as a Christmas table. Wouldn't you like to find this beauty under the tree?

Now, with a new fabulous table, a new and equally fabulous set of chairs was needed, which led to a need for some other new and fabulous items, and thus, a project was born.

The first matter of business? Selecting a new exterior paint scheme. I drew up some options (most traditional, a few more outlandish) using Benjamin Moore's great Color Preview program (incidentally, a great way to lose at least 4 hours of your life). Here were a few of my favorites options:

Here's the winning scheme, a combination of a few suggestions:

Classic and timeless, as well as a great representation of the schemes being incorporated inside. I put together some concept boards for various rooms; here's a peek at the Dining and Living Room inspirations:

Here's a peek at what made the cut in the Dining Room:

Most of the final selections are represented here--the Jonathan Adler greek key rug in the Dining Room (being made as I write), paired with affordable red-lacquer chairs from Pottery Barn sassed up with some colorful indoor/outdoor fabric on the seat cushions, and the stunning chandelier from Arteriors.

Compare the new light to the old (unelectrified!) fixture:

What an improvement. And now they can see what they're eating, too! (When I cook, dim lighting works in my favor.)

A few pieces, like this graphic bookcase from a local design showroom, were happy surprises:

And I unexpectedly scored a great (and gigantic) piece of art, a print made with a steamroller (!) by one of my favorite local artists, Tina Randolph.

We're still awaiting the arrival of a number of pieces, and there remains more work to be done, but I thought I'd share our progress thus far. Stay tuned!

*First image from the fabulous Conde Nast archives, a vintage House & Garden photograph by Herbert Matter