Things I saw in NJ antique stores that need your attention:

1. These table and chairs set was only $600. Each CHAIR sells for $1500 online. So someone go buy this. NOW.

Asbury Antique Emporium 646 Cookman Ave  Asbury Park, NJ 07712 (732) 774-82

2. Can we talk about this probably Milo Baughman Z chair frame that’s $95 dollars. Yes we can.

Shore Antique Center. 413 Allen Ave  Allenhurst, NJ 07711 (732) 531-4466

3. I’m iffy on the rattan rocker. I am. But it was $40. Also Shore Antique Center.

4. And at Home Goods, this wicker bike. You guys need this. Reminiscent of the rattan motorcycle at the ASH pop up shop that I posted about. But only $200.

5. And, last, what I actually bought. That brass octagon pedestal. I’m obviously obsessed with pedestals. I put my Shona sculpture on top. I’m still not sure where it belongs in the apartment. But I like it there for now.

Ok, so why should you listen to me? My eyeballs have much wisdom. I’ve rescued countless of worthy things from antique piles as well as garbage heaps. With the last confirmation of my awesome eyeballs coming last night. Last night, while perusing 1st Dibs, I found THIS.

The exact same mirror I found for $225 in NJ, that a reader went and BOUGHT after I posted it… look there it is in her house, see the first post about it HERE and then HERE, is on 1st dibs for $3500 HERE. So my eyeballs are gold. I’m so kind of pissed I didnt buy this thing.

Why can I never find what I’m looking for, and always what I cant possibly use?

I was looking at pinterest the other day, when I noticed someone pinned a NYC apartment that wunderkind Nick Olsen designed. I clicked through and saw it was posted on his blog. Yay! Nick was a New Traditional in TradHOME, Traditional Home’s magazine. I knew they just came out with a new one, and I shot off an email congratulating him. What an idiot! The house and article was from LAST YEAR’s issue, and even as I was typing the words, I was thinking… oh they picked him two years in a row? MORON, I am.

Regardless, I loved the home so much I decided to share it with you. Nick is known for being generally the next big thing in design, his bold use of color, for having his apartment on the cover of Domino while interning there, for being Miles Redd’s former protege and for mixing high-lo with amazing grace and  being ridiculously good at DIYIng stuff for his own place… think hand painting floors, making amazing abstract art in a cinch, and you know, other things like draping an entire room in fabric.

This project is actually restrained for Nick. I love the color scheme, mixing of hard and soft materials, the bold use of wicker and seagrass, that travertine fireplace is THE SHIT, and so is that screen behind that bed.

A bright start to an otherwise gray week here in NYC! Enjoy! And PS, I actually have a little shout out in the CURRENT issue of Traditional Home. HERE, and go to page 50!

I know its Saturday, I’m late with the post. Too bad.

I’ve previously been something of a bah humbug about the Chobani store. I’m more of a Fage girl myself, and why would I need or want to go to a Chobani store? I think I kind of disapproved of Chobani’s popularity when I KNOW that Fage is the better yogurt. Like I was offended on the part of Fage. And anyway, what the heck could they possibly have there? Well, a few weeks ago I was in Soho with  my friend Caroline of The Nine Month Project and she wanted to go check it out. We ended up leaving with 6 yogurts between us and about ten recipe cards each.

So whats going on a Chobani Soho? Its basically just some brilliant packaging mixed with a bit of ingenuity. Freshly made greek yogurt concoctions in a beautiful corner store, in a take home glass bowl and cheesecloth packaging. The yogurts cost about $4 each, which is more than the plastic grocery store version, but also a billion times better.  I had one with grapefruit, mint and honey. Amazing. I also had one with olive oil and cucumbers (basically like a take on a tsadziki) which was great. Another one I wanted to bring home for my husband was a smoked salmon version. I decided not to bring it home because I didn’t think it would travel well. Your yogurt is made for you in a little lab like environment at the back of the store. You can eat it at the store, or take home the glass bowls. Why does TAKING HOME THE GLASS BOWLS delight the mind so? I dont know. But it does. It really really does.

So do I detract previous statements that Fage is the better yogurt? Not 100 percent revoked, but the Chobani store is definitely worth a visit! They also have a great website with a million recipes. Not just plain old fashioned greek yogurt++ recipes, but how to use it in food, dressings etc… HERE.

Sometimes this is what life in New York feels like, especially when it rains.

I might be losing it. The other day I popped in at cb2 for my bimonthly stroll around. I bought two little picture frames for all the film I’ve been printing, and then boom, I was inspired by a garbage can. A smoked lucite garbage can. That would make a fabulous pedestal, I thought. Elevate things and they become art. That’s a real thing. Frame art and it becomes important. Raise things up and then they are up. Right? Problem is, I didnt have anything in  mind when I purchased said garbage can. I originally intended to have it sit vertically, and put something big on top. But when I got home, I didn’t have anything that looked right. So I sat it on its side, and put a branch that Cookie and I painted a year ago on top of it. The branch is pretty cool, I had it in the kids playroom as a “decorative object”. I love the idea of this. The smoked lucite cube looks so cube-y, you cant even tell that one side is missing. Even when staring right at it. And sometimes the light shines through it and thats pretty too. (Also considering putting something funky inside.) I’m still tweaking this.  I’ll probably buy or make a sculpture for it. Will sculpture be my next adventure?

And last, it was sort of inspired by this present that JoJo made at school for me for Mother’s Day. It’s a “Bronzed Shoe” flower pot. I LOVE it. I mounted it on a block of lucite that I had and engraved the lucite with his name and the year. I think this is one of the cutest things I’ve ever gotten back from school, and he’s only two and goes only two mornings a week. Adorable. Moms, I would totally do this at home if I didn’t already have one. The little dude is a Navajo Kachina doll that I picked up in Arizona. An ear broke off. I love these little Kachina dolls. Natural Curiosities makes a Kachina doll drawing prints that are beautiful, HERE. I almost bought a set of them once, before I realized I had no room for them. I love these for a playroom or little boys room, hallway, or anywhere that needs a group of prints. So awesome.

SO, I’m still working on the garbage can turned pedestal idea. But mostly, I just need to find or make something big and awesome enough to sit on top.

Happy Wednesday folks!

A few weeks ago I was downtown with Cookie and we decided to pop in to Matter. Matter is a New York City based gallery, showroom, and manufacturer, representing a refined selection of national and international contemporary design. The brand is revered as a resource for detecting what lies beyond the horizon in the realm of design. Architects and interior designers around the world look to Matter to take the temperature of the current state of design and look for inspiration.  Matter is basically what I am calling an “art-furniture” shop.  They sell furniture, that is also art. This is kind of a lead in from yesterday’s post, because I feel like the two have a very comparable aesthetic. Incredibly fresh sculptural pieces pervade, white walls provide gallery like settings, raw woods ground the spaces, and saturated primary colors in single palate pieces add bold playfulness. I got a ton of ideas just from being in the store. Not to mention, the wall hangings, arrows, lucite sculpture… all things I’ve written about loving before. (Did you know I had to endure a full body pat down on the way home from Arizona because I tried to bring an arrow on an airplane? Is it really a weapon without the bow? I didn’t think so, but they did. How many times a day do you think they take away arrows at the Pheonix Airport? 3? 10? Bummer.) While both today’s post and yesterday’s might not be in line with everyone’s taste – too modern, too cool for the more traditional among us, I DO think that every type of home can benefit from artful and playful pieces of furniture. Just one piece of art-furniture can elevate an entire room.

You can shop online HERE, or visit the store.

MATTER
405 BROOME STREET, NYC
(TEL) 212 343 2600
(FAX) 212 343 2610

Allow me to introduce you to the Australian home of Peter and Helen Cole. Peter and Helen are both artists, Peter is one of the most renowned sculptors in Australia. In addition to having created almost all the art within the house, the two designed the house in its entirety, with only  the help of a local draftsman and a young builder. The house took 8 months to build- from demolition to house warming. The home contains Peter’s studio, above and feels like a mix between an art gallery and a house. I love that in every photo, there is some explosive saturated color. Some say the house is Peter’s greatest sculpture! Some of my favorite details include the drawer pulls, which he designed of course, and the mint green doors. Remember Monique Lhuillier’s house that launched a thousand grays? May this be the house that launches a thousand green doors!

Photos via The Design Files HERE. You can see Peter’s work HERE.

Happy Mother’s Day!

My dress HERE, Cookie’s dress HERE.

Remember my DIY splatter paint Toms from last year, HERE? Yea, those were cool. I wore them so much that they all but fell apart. I tried to wear them last week and noticed the sole of one shoe was missing. Oh well, I needed a new pair. Hmmm…. what should I do to them? I didnt want to do the same thing over again, and wearing Toms is basically like wearing slippers around the city. I hit up Urban Outfitters and picked up a pair of natural color canvas HERE. I thought that would work better than white, which could be a little harsh.

I always say the best DIYs are the easiest. Its when you go beyond your skill set that you get hokey looking stuff that you would never actually buy. This is why I don’t upholster chairs, or wallpaper my own walls. It’s not like I’m Little Green Notebook, or anything. Anyway, using whatever I had in my apartment, scotch tape instead of blue tape, q-tips instead of paint brushes, I used the tape to create two asymmetrical color block shoes. This part is important: I used the Sharpie Paint Pen to trace a super straight line on the shoe. If I relied on the tape to do the job, the paint would definitely have bled all over the place.

Then I just painted in the side I wanted to keep black and viola! Done. Dry in ten minutes. Im really happy with them. Cute, goes with everything, basic with a twist!

Have a great weekend!

I’m not a beauty product fiend. Not by a long shot, but I like a strong lip color because I dont tend to wear too much eye makeup (I hate how my eyelids look with eyeshadow. Anyone else feel this, or is it just me?) so when I want to look like I actually tried, I put on a red, hot pink or even coral or orange lip. I would say I normally buy 1 or 2 lipsticks A YEAR, and its usually after I get my makeup done and they use a new color on me and then I want to go buy it. That’s easy for me, because I already know it will look good! It’s not that I’m so snobby that I never bought a drug store lipstick, its just that I never thought about it, because I’m not a product person, and just went with recommendations. Above you see a few of my favorite lipsticks (pretty much all of them) and the absolute decimation they endured at the hands of my children. Keep them UP HIGH! You’ll say. Yea, I do. Thanks for the tip. The monkeys CLIMB.( I instagrammed a picture way back when of what they did with it. Oh god. And no, I wasnt home.) This was a few months ago and I was still using them anyway. Wrapping the base in a tissue so I wouldnt get lipstick on my hand by accident and then all over my face later on, and then just trying to get a nice smear out of it. ENOUGH! Yesterday I went to Duane Reed and bought 6 new lipsticks. (One I forgot to put in the picture). First I was like, lemme try this… Then I noticed they were having a sale, so I went crazy. At the drug store, you cant smear the lipstick on your hand as a tester and there’s obviously no salesperson to help you choose so its more of a guessing game. I tried to cover all my color bases: Good reds, orange, nude, dark 90′s style berry and a fuchsia. The reds were easy enough, but I could find no good match for my YSL fuchsia which is really magical. That’s the one of the left in case you are wondering. Destroyed.

Now, are the  $25- $40 lipsticks really better than the $5- $8 lipsticks? It depends. I bought two brands, Revlon and Milani. The Milani aren’t great. The color doesnt match the color in the stick, which is the biggest problem with it. The red is too dark and the sangria is too purple and I think it may even have a shimmer to it. Which is bad. I surely do not want purple sparkly lips. It also has a taste. However, the Revlon stuff is AWESOME. That Orange Flip color is part of their “Moon Drop Lipstick” in a cream finish, and its pretty great. It goes on really smooth and thin. Ever put on a Mac lipstick or any high end lipstick? It goes on like paint and then you have to de-apply some so you dont look like a clown. The Revlons are the opposite. They go on really thin and then you can add another layer to make it darker. Maybe that’s the real difference in quality? The thickness? And the way they last? Aside from packaging, that is. Also not pictured is a Revlon Super Lustrous Plumalicious. I love that one too. It’s kind of like that 90′s berry brown color that Kim K was wearing at the Met Ball. It’s pretty fab. It goes on thin, like I said, so you could even wear these bold colors during the day and not look semi-nuts. The nude was not as good as my old Nars. But it’ll do.

I get that a lot of women like to see a nice label in their makeup drawer. It does feel good to pull out a sexily packaged lipstick when you are trying to get yourself out of your sweatpants and semi presentable. It helps. The barrier for entry is not THAT high, so many people could afford to spend a little more one or two times a year to get a better product, or a product that makes them feel better, so why not? I get it, but are they really better? My conclusion: for really nuanced color, I would say the high ends are better. I could not find a decent pink. For thicker, more long lasting color: the high ends. But for a good red or bright orange, I think the cheapies are great. And  the Orange Flip, HERE and the Plumalicious HERE are really good colors, by all standards. Those I really recommend. Go get em. Also really recommend YSL Rouge Pur Couture 7, Le Fuschia, HERE and Nars, Belle De Jour HERE. Oh, and I dont wear lip gloss. Period.

What are some of your favorite colors? Do you go for the brand name stuff or drug store stuff, or both? Any recommendations for us?