Peter Dunham celebrates the start of summer with this Lisa Fine designed room in his Hollywood at Home showroom. I’ve been wanting to paint a floor like that for ages.
Image via Hollywood at Home.
Summer’s Fine
Tag Archives: Designers
Grand Masters
Click on over to see who Elle Decor has named to their Grand Masters list. I can’t argue with a single pick. Indeed, many are long-time favorites. Oh, and two of the nine are Kansas City natives, including the dashing Tom Britt, whose work appears above. Here.
Image courtesy of Elle Decor by Peter Vitale.
Tin Man
Another captivating little detail of Stefanidis’s house that I noticed in An Island Sanctuary is the metal shades.
Sometimes painted a snappy color.
Sometimes not.
Always so crisp. And durable, or so Mr. Stefanidis says.
Besides the metal shades, for which I could not find a good source so forward one if you have it, I’m mad for this drink tray.
So much better than carrying a bottle in each hand, the cocktail napkins under your arm and opening the door with your elbow. Chic. Make mine blue. (A change from black or white; maybe things are looking up.)
For really wonderful coverage of An Island Sanctuary; A House in Greece, make sure you don’t miss Courtney Barnes’s posts on the book here.
Top five images from An Island Sanctuary; A House in Greece by John Stefanidis, Rizzoli. Photography by Fritz von der Schulenberg. Last image from Stefanidis’s site. I’m trying to find out where one can purchase the drinks tray.
Sanctuary
Last week I had a Bee buzzing in my in-box, “Where is that Teddy Millington-Drake post?” There wasn’t one, isn’t one, really, though Miguel Flores-Vianna had mentioned M-D in his Enduring Style post.
After I searched the blog for the link I searched the bookshelf for An Island Sanctuary; A House in Greece. The book is the story of John Stefanidis’s home in Greece which he shared with the late Teddy Millington-Drake.
I pulled it out again, thinking of maybe sending it to Bee for her own hive. It’s a beautiful book, and I enjoyed it at first glance, but there is only so much room after all. When I looked through again, in a different place than last time I suppose, I was captivated by how much craft filled the house.
Millington-Drake was an artist and the canvases, top, are his work. But he also created those wonderful, graphic porcelain plates which seem quite happy to live in the same spot as the place settings of Flora Danica.
In nearly every room there are hand-embroidered pillows and linens, locally hand-made furniture and decoratively painted surfaces.
But certainly none of this seems kitch. While the interiors are spare they are rich in the details that have been hand crafted. Alas, poor Bee, not stung I hope to have to buy her own copy (she did.) I need this one close at hand.
If for nothing else, this post script. A small image, the last in the book, of chairs that Stefanidis’s sister stitched for his London home. Four scenes from his island idyll.
And this:
As Best You Can
Even if you cannot make your life the way you want,
try this, at least,
as best you can: do not demean it
by too much contact with the crowd
by too much movement and idle talk.
Do not demean it by dragging it along,
by wandering all the time and exposing it
to the daily foolishness
of social relations and encounters,
until it becomes an importunate stranger.
C.P. Cavafy (Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglous)
All images from An Island Sanctuary; A House in Greece, by John Stefanidis, published by Rizzoli. All images are by Fritz von der Schulenberg, but the last which is Graham Seager.
Go Away Gray
Everything seems muddled. Nothing is quite coming into focus which makes it hard to act and I am very bad at waiting. Letting the universe reveal itself to me has never been a strong point.
So when I had coffee today with a very wise woman I was hoping she would be something of a lens. What she told me surely, with steady gaze and firm conviction, was that it is good to try new things. And that not everything goes as expected. And sometimes that is better. When I asked direct questions she just shook her head slightly and said, “I don’t know; you’ll find out.” And we moved on.
Literally and figuratively back to her house where she very generously loaned me some books. Self-help? Philosophy? Poetry? No. Needlepoint books. Vintage needlepoint books. Needlepoint has always brought comfort in process and in plumpness and these books have offered more comfort than piles of eider down quilts.
“Black and white mark the outer limits in tonal value. There is nothing darker than black nor lighter than white. When the two are used together they generate more visual excitement than two shades of gray used together. The closer the tonal value the greater the loss of contrast, therefore the greater the loss of drama and excitement..”
I’m not a girl for gray and muddled. Universe, bring on the black and white, the drama and excitement. 
All this beautiful work is by Stephen Knollenberg who was featured in the May/June issue of Chicago Home + Garden. These images are used with Mr. Knollenberg’s permission from his site. Photography is as follows: top three, Beth Singer, next two, Gordon Beall and last, Dana Hoff. The quote is Maggie Lane from Needlepoint by Design.
