Seattle Archives - Page 17 of 20

Tiptoe-ing through the Tulips

April 29, 2007 By Paola 7 Comments

Oh, I know I promised to focus this blog a bit more on design and business, but I thought you might like to see the glorious tulip fields in the Skagit Valley area of Washington, about sixty miles north of Seattle.

Some Dutch settlers realised early on that the area was perfect for growing tulips and set about creating acres of tulip fields. Washington State now ships tulips to the whole of the US.

The tulip festival goes on for the whole of April but we hadn’t been able to make it until now due to bad weather, and our trips to England and to Portland last weekend. Though most of the fields were already cut down, we were lucky enough to enjoy the most incredible Spring day and the remaining fields and showgardens were dazzling, as the sun shone through the petals.

There are more photos on my Flickr if you want to check them out.

My office

April 18, 2007 By Paola 1 Comment

I was going to write something complimentary about the Seattle weather, but that was yesterday and today it’s pouring with rain again.

The street where we live

March 28, 2007 By Paola 3 Comments

was looking quite insanely pretty the day we moved in.

Note to self. Don’t ever, ever, ever move house and pack to go away on the same weekend. (Written sitting in the bathroom in the middle of the night at our hotel in London. I love jetlag.)

Pizza the action

March 25, 2007 By Paola 3 Comments

More good news about the Wallingford area of Seattle, where we’ve moved.

Excuse quality – picture taken with mobiile phone

It is home to Tutta Bella – one of a handful of pizzerias in the US certified as serving authentic Neapolitan pizza. And having spent quite a lot of time in Naples eating authentic Neapolitan pizza with my relatives, I can vouch that the pizzas here are truly excellent – better than any I’ve had recently in London, the ice cream by Bottega Italiana is pretty darn good and the espresso is the proper pulled Italian version and not any of this Starbucks nonsense.

Excuse quality – picture taken with mobiile phone

And they could even do a proper Italian affogato.

The sad thing was that I was delighted to see the serried ranks of highchairs piled up at the entrance, when two years ago such a sight would have would have sent me screaming with terror in the opposite direction. I have a feeling we have moved to the ‘Nappy Valley’ of Seattle.

House proud

March 22, 2007 By Paola 10 Comments

So today we closed on the house purchase.

I can’t quite believe it’s happened. You have no idea how many phone calls at 1 am we’ve had to make, chivvying up mortgage brokers, solicitors and bankers. In fact it was touch and go until this morning whether the money would make it into our US bank account in time.

Tomorrow all the stuff which we last saw way back when will be unpacked, leaving us to gently move from our apartment to the new house on Saturday and Sunday.

Which is just as well, as then we’re flying out to the UK on Monday for a week or so.

Great timing, n’est-ce pas?

And I’m so itching to get a paintbrush out and go shopping and start lining up contractors and making plans etc. Still, it will be nice to have something to look forward to when we get back from the UK.

For those of you who have enquired whether the upstairs panelling was as bad as I was making out, here is a picture of the upstairs ‘party kitchen’. Note too the worktops/countertops which are the same delightful green as the exterior of the house. Pleasedon’t tell me you like them.

Food porn I

March 5, 2007 By Paola 3 Comments

So this morning we decided to check out our new neighbourhood-to-be.

Wallingford looks like it will be a lot of fun, full of quiet tree-lined roads, some funky shops on its main thoroughfares and lots of families. It reminds me a bit of Battersea in London – great views of the downtown area across the water, still urban in feel, but with a definite separate identity and even a zoo quite close by.

After being a bit disappointed by somewhat down-at-heel Gasworks Park (which I’ll blog about separately), we were thrilled to find the best children’s playground we’ve found so far in Seattle and, after following a recommendation from Not Martha, the most gorgeous little cupcake shop – Trophy Cupcakes and Party.

We brought some cupcakes home for our lunch and I can say that they were without a doubt the best cupcakes we’ve had so far in the US – richly flavoured, not too sweet (the chocolate buttercream was wonderfully chocolatey), with a soft but dense crumb and a slight bite to the top. We tried the Red Velvet, Chocolate Vanilla, and Vanilla Vanilla and they were all superb.

Add the fact that on Friday night we went to the cutest little art house cinema not very far away, and I think I’m going to enjoy living here very much.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I have a plan bubbling around to open a ‘mirrormirror’ shop and teashop when I get back to London. And I think this teashop is going to have to sell lots of American-style cupcakes, cookies and brownies.

Update

March 1, 2007 By Paola 3 Comments

The house inspection happened this morning and no major problems were uncovered. So it looks like we really are moving! Gulp.

Holy ‘hardwood floors and timeless mouldings’ Batman,

February 22, 2007 By Paola 12 Comments

I think we’re buying a house!

My head is still spinning and I’m not quite sure whether to be happy or very, very scared, but the offer we made yesterday on the ‘fixer-upper’ (in Wallingford, for those of you in the Seattle area) has been accepted.

It’s been a pretty strange week. We started off on Monday ready to make an offer on one house and here we are on Thursday having bought an entirely different house altogether. And I’d convinced myself that a ‘fixer’ would be far too much work, and now here I am with a fixer on my hands.

Would you like to have a look round?

On the plus side it’s got a beautiful panelled dining room and living room which don’t need a lot of work (will have to do something about the bright red fireplace though)

and a funky roof terrace overlooking Lake Union with a 360 degree view of this and on a clear day the mountains to the east.

On the downside, the whole upper storey looks like a sauna with wood panelling all over the walls and ceilings, which we’re going to have to rip out (do you Americans really like this sort of thing?).

The kitchens (yes, there’s one on each floor, I think it used to be divided into flats) and bathrooms also need to be remodelled, and the basement needs to be finished and the small backyard needs to be landscaped. So there’s plenty to do. Oh and the outside of the house really needs to be painted because I really don’t like this green AT ALL and there’s an awful lot of it.

But all in all I’m getting very excited. Please continue keeping your fingers crossed that our inspection doesn’t throw up all sorts of structural nasties which mean we’ll have to pull out. But if things go according to plan we’re going to be moving on March 22nd.

So, do you want the good news?

February 21, 2007 By Paola 1 Comment

Or the bad news?

The bad news is that, as suspected, our offer for the house we saw at the weekend was turned down. It will be interesting to see what it goes for as I’m sure it will be way, way, way over the asking price.

The good, possibly, news is that this very afternoon the house we’d offered on previously came back on the market. Apparently because the previous buyers had had some problems with raising the financing and not some structural problem.

And so we’re going to make a renewed offer tomorrow morning. And I am very, very scared because this one needs a ton of work doing to it and I had just been lazily thinking how nice it would be to move into a house that didn’t need any work doing to it at all.

So, I will keep you posted. It could be that I will be asking you all for lots of interior design advice over the next few months.

Thoughts on American Life

February 20, 2007 By Paola 6 Comments

THOUGHT 1: Having just about come to terms with the fact that Posh and Becks have followed me over here, imagine my horror when I turned on Good Morning America this morning to see Cat Deeley being all bouncy bouncy jolly jolly smiley smiley on my screen.

This clearly is too much. Strangely she appears to have checked in her unpleasant Brummie accent on arriving at LAX and instead has acquired a generic vacuous blonde UK TV presenter Estuary accent (cf. Denise Van Outen, who is also here presenting on primetime, but that’s OK because I quite like her).

THOUGHT 2: American Idol really gets going tonight as we’re down to the last 24 and the live rounds. With the Seattle auditions being roundly panned in all the media here (including this very blog), it appears that 3 of the last 24 are from Seattle itself, by far the biggest representation from any city in the US. From what we’ve seen so far I don’t think any of them are my cup of tea music-wise, but I’m going to have to give them some sneaky support. Am I becoming a Seattleite? I’ll be cheering on the Seahawks and Mariners next.

THOUGHT 3: I’ve been having an interesting discussion with Holly over on Decor8 about Jonathan Adler – who is an incredibly famous interior designer over here and chairman of the judges on my new favourite reality TV show Top Design.

She just assumed that Adler was HUGE in the UK, and I had to tell her that i) not many people had heard of him ii) I thought his stuff was very ‘American’.

Which led me thinking about the differences between American and UK interior design. Having now seen the insides of some 40+ American houses on our househunting search and looked at the details for probably hundreds more, I think there are some definite differences which I will blog about soon. In the meantime I’d be interested to hear what other people think about UK vs. US interiors.

Keep your fingers crossed for us. We’ve just put in an offer for a house we saw at the weekend. We know that there are probably going to be at least three other offers on the table, so it looks like it’s going to go for considerably more than the asking price, which will probably be a bridge too far for us.

It doesn’t have a view and it’s for sale via a property developer, so there’s not much scope for real ‘fixing up’ this time, but it’s in a great location, has been beautifully renovated and has scope to be my ‘SJP house’. But I’m trying not to get excited.