I have decided that I need to acquire a large, sunny room with a dark polished walnut floor, white walls and diaphanous floor-to-ceiling muslin curtains. In one corner I will have a huge grand piano and the rest of the room will be completely empty except for a different exquisite piece of furniture every week.
Last week’s piece was the Liberty chair. This week’s piece is this incredible leather appliqued screen by Susannah Hunter.
It’s that mix of modern shape and pattern again – oh and the cool, summery colour palette. Why can’t all flatpack furniture be this beautiful?
These boxes/tables/seats are made by Zaishu Project and come as five separate pieces which you just slot together (found via Decor8). I would love to sell these through mirror mirror but I suspect that by the time we’ve paid to import them from Australia and then store them the cost will be prohibitive. But I will make enquiries. At the very least I might have to treat myself to a couple when we go to Seattle.
I hope you won’t find it terribly self-indulgent if I review the books I read on this blog. I’ve often thought about keeping a book diary and this seems as good a place to do it as any – a sort of chronicle of my life in books (bad as well as good), albeit started a bit late.
In fact, now I think about it, how marvellous it would be to be able to look back through a list kept since childhood. Maybe I should force the Minx to start one now? ‘Dear Diary, Today I read Miss Polly Had a Dolly 853 times, interspersed with the odd perusal of Knock Knock, Mr Croc (which is totally fab by the way) and the occasional run through of Baby Touch Rhyme Book complete with actions’.
But I digress. I was pleasantly surprised by Other People’s Marriages. It was one of the books that you pick up in haste in order to qualify for Waterstone’s 3-for-2 offer after you’ve been browsing for far too long and your baby is protesting grumpily in her buggy.
I don’t think I read chick-lit, but I suspect this book comes very close (the front cover certainly seems to think so). In fact I’d liken it most to the literary equivalent of Cold Feet – exceptionally easy-to-read, amusing and often unnervingly observant about the state of modern marriage.
The premise is a simple one. Anna is writing what could be her breakthrough non-fiction bestseller about marriage and is using her group of somewhat clichéd thirtysomething (now that was a fab TV programme) friends as case studies. (A propos, am I the only person in the world who doesn’t hang out in a group of three or four married couples who’ve all known each other for ever and don’t have any other friends?) Cue lots of introspection and dissatisfaction about the various marriages being dissected, and speculation about perfect Anna’s own relationship. As you would expect, each marriage unravels and then re-ravels in different ways, insights are gained, and perfect Anna’s relationship falls apart. Once I’d sorted out the various couples in my head, I ripped through the book, wincing occasionally when it got a little too close to the bone of my own marriage, and seeing all sorts of parallels between the marriages of the protagonists and those of my friends (and no, I’m not telling).
Unfortunately I didn’t like the ending much. Having successfully demonstrated that every marriage has its secrets and that marriage is by no means all its cracked up to be, Watson resolves all the various problems rather too tritely and finishes off with a wedding. But I suppose that’s the genre. Don’t buy this book expecting great literature, but if you’re looking for a surprisingly well-written, easy-to-read book to read by a swimming-pool this summer then this book should suit very well.
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Riverside pub, golden daffodils, storybook canal boats, 14th century tithe barn, ancient churches, banks covered in primroses, honey-coloured stone walls, cobalt blue skies, big black dogs and one happy Minx.
In the spring, the English countryside is the only place to be. Thanks to D, J & N for a glorious day out. |
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Occasionally (er, several times a day) I like to take a wander through my web stats (both for the website and the blog) to check how traffic is doing and see where it’s coming from.
Yesterday I was getting traffic from what appears to be a Japanese/Chinese design blog (difficult to tell as the characters just show up as little square boxes in my browser) which appears to have mirror mirror listed as a supplier of Atelier LZC products.
Anyway, I was browsing through the pictures when these gorgeous illustrations stopped me in my tracks. They are the work of fashion illustrator Eduard Erlikh and I just can’t get over how stunning they are.
There’s something about the rawness of sketches – both fashion and architectural – that just gets to me and sketches with so much movement and vigour in dayglo colours really take the cake.
I WANT.
By a timely coincidence the film Super Size Me was being shown on Channel 4 tonight, so I sat down to watch it as part of my weight-loss campaign.
I have never been so horrified by a film IN MY LIFE*. The bad news is that the thought of taking myself and my daughter to live in America is now scaring the living daylights out of me. The good news is that henceforth I will be living on carrot juice with the occasional alfalfa sprout salad.
*Actually it was a really enjoyable, watchable movie in the Jamie’s School Dinners vein. Highly recommended.
I’ve just weighed myself for the first time in ages and I appear to have put on one and a half stone (21lbs) SINCE giving birth over a year ago.
I wasn’t exactly sylph-like before the birth either, though I was very careful whilst pregnant and fairly active throughout the pregnancy, so I actually weighed LESS a couple of weeks after giving birth than I did when I conceived.
But since then the weight has piled on. I used to be really active – cycling to work, rollerblading in the park and going to the gym – but since the birth I just haven’t had the free time to exercise much at all and over the winter even long walks to the park haven’t been on the agenda. And being at home with a baby is so boring and stressful sometimes that I may have occasionally sneaked one or two more slices of toast with (lashings of) butter and Marmite than were perhaps strictly necessary.
But I don’t want to be fat when I go to Seattle, and I have lots of pent-up fashion spending which it is impossible to indulge when one’s bosoms are this enormous, so I’d like to drop a couple of stone (28lbs) in the six months before we go.
To this end I am currently reading French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, the GL Diet by Nigel Denby and I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna because I really need to address (I originally wrote ‘lick’ here, but that doesn’t seem entirely right in the circumstances) the mental problem of comfort eating (which I do mostly when I’m bored or stressed) once and for all. There is nothing like a bit of of strenuous reading, I find, to make those pounds just drop off (and into someone else’s pocket).
I will report back.
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Just spotted this beautiful handmade silver dish on Abigail Percy’s Flickr site. All I need now is a spare £1200 and a butler to polish it.
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Please forgive the blurry image – it’s an artist’s impression scanned in from last night’s Evening Standard – but was enough to make me very excited. This is the new temporary pavilion which is being built this summer at the Serpentine Gallery. By Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, it is made from translucent material and can be lit from within at night. The walled enclosure below the canopy will be used as a café and events forum.
Every year for the past seven years, the Serpentine Gallery – a gorgeous little avant-garde art gallery in Kensington Gardens – invites a different world-famous architect to build a summer ‘pavilion’ on its outside lawn. The structures are only open between July and October each year, so the architects are encouraged to go a little bit crazy.
My favourite in recent years was the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion in 2003 which echoed the profile of the Victorian building behind (though I wouldn’t have painted the ramp red) and I didn’t much like last year’s brutalist tortoise-shaped effort. It sounds like this year’s giant light installation will reach new heights of superb nuttiness though.
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NIEMEYER PAVILION |
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BRUTALIST TORTOISE |
When it comes to decorating I love mixing modern forms, colours and styles with vintage furniture and fabrics (and vice versa).
So I just adore this Egg chair by Liberty Bespoke (also from Elle Deco) which is upholstered in traditional Liberty prints and in which I could happily swivel all day pretending I was a Brocante Home James Bond villain.
Of course I’m just waiting for my brother (and new reader to this blog) to phone me up and tell me that this is an abomination – as he did with the Nokia phones.
