If this year’s San Francisco Decorator Showcase is any indicator, color is making a comeback. The hushed neutrals of the past have been replaced by sumptuous hues and bold graphics that feel fresh and invigorating. For example, in Cecilie Starin’s black and white dining room the abstract murals by San Francisco street muralist Ian Ross [...]
A designer once told me that all greens go together. ”It’s because you see so many different shades of green in nature that your eye is comfortable with a mix of greens,” she said. But do some greens play better with others? “Guilford Green,” Benjamin Moore’s Color of the Year for 2015, would be a [...]
As summer draws to a close, the landscape here in rain-starved California is dominated by straw-colored hills dotted with silvery-green foliage. It took me years to appreciate this dusty color palette having grown up in a place that was either bright with summer rain or starkly white under a layer of snow. But now these [...]
So here we are at the end of this crazy month of remodeling. I just left the new house after taking a peak at the glossy grey floors, the final coat still shiny wet as it begins to cure. The new coat of exterior paint (White Heron by Benjamin Moore—more white!) glowed against the clear [...]
On a not-so-blue-skies day last week I popped into Design San Francisco to catch Suzanne Tucker’s gracious presentation about her design practice illustrated with projects from her new book “The Romance of Design”. (Read more of what Tucker had to say in my BANG profile this weekend.) After she’d finished, I took a closer look at the [...]
Hello! I’m back from exploring a part of the world that is frankly otherworldly. Peru was so much more colorful, noisy, beautiful and demanding than I expected. I’ll share more over the next few weeks as I edit photos and compose my thoughts, but couldn’t wait to show you some of the gorgeous colors and [...]
Ever since I finished a ten-years-in-the-making quilt top on Tuesday, I’ve been happily plucking clipped loose threads off my furniture, clothing—even my hair brush. Now the top (and back) are off to be professionally quilted and I’m savoring the delicious pause between completed and new projects. I’m also taking a little break from fiction writing [...]
Happy Birthday to my husband, M.J. Well before Google was invented, he became the search engine in my world. Brilliant, clever, kind and decent–he’s provided the answers to so many questions in my life. Big and little. Our children mock our geeky courtship–we met in our university’s honors program, competed on the same College Bowl [...]
While congress squabbles, let’s consider some accoutrements of civility, shall we? For my tea party/baby shower over the weekend I decided to look for table linens more in keeping with the wall colors in this house. Since the interior walls are painted in the beige/gray/greige shades of the revamped Restoration Hardware, I started there and [...]
On this week of the fall equinox I’ve been spending time getting ready to host a baby shower for a young friend. Other friends are bringing the food which means I’ve been able to focus my party prep on my home and garden. Early in the week, feeling very Mrs. Dalloway-esque, I headed to my [...]
