Pssst…House Porn.

I might have a problem.

When I was a young woman and could squeeze a few bucks from the grocery budget, I’d pick up the occasional copy of Better Home & Gardens. It didn’t take long to pick up on the fact that not only was a subscription rate way cheaper, but subscribers got their fix days earlier than the poor fools hanging out at the newsstand waiting to pay cover price.

I was hooked.

In the years between then and now, I escalated from the soft stuff, magazines, to the hard cover stuff – coffee table books and compendiums of window treatments. My dependence has resulted in copious amounts of time and money poured into my habit; not to mention missed social obligations from falling down the rabbit holes of Pinterest and Instagram and occasionally forgetting to eat. Okay, well, not that.  But it could have happened. For many of these years, I’ve had a good cover: as a design student, house porn was required reading; as a working designer, it’s called Research and Development.

soft cover stuff

I’ve been reflecting on this because of my growing collection of soft core stuff – those magazines are taking up a fair bit of real estate in my little office. Not quite the stash of my grandfather’s National Geographics, but voluminous nonetheless. Current subscriptions include House Beautiful, This Old House, and Country Living, as well as the previously noted BH&G, (continuous since 1981!). I find this group more relatable, certainly the design more attainable than say, Architectural Digest. It’s a growing collection, because while the idea of leisurely leafing through a magazine is seductive…what is this leisure? The time available to feed my habit is inversely proportional to my stash, making it more prudent to get quick hits on my iPhone and send the magazines straight to the shelf. Kicking the paper habit is hard. What are the chances of getting the publishers to put production on hold while I catch up on the backlog? Right.

So I was contemplating both the recycling bin and cancelling my subscriptions when my deus ex machina arrived in the form of the FedEx guy delivering an advance copy of Sandra Espinet’s new book, Barefoot Luxury.

How to say…SQUIRREL!

The package included a cover letter from Andrew Joseph PR requesting I consider reviewing the book and posting on social media. Crazy. I had literally just listened to Sandra Espinet on an episode of my favorite podcast, LuAnn Nigara’s A Well Designed Business.

Up front, I have to tell you that Espinet is a luxury designer with a capital Luxury. Me? Not so much. I almost passed on this podcast episode precisely because she is so high end. But I’m glad I tuned in, because in the interview, I found her to be engaging and down to earth. I enjoyed listening to her espouse her position on designing from a perspective of what you know and addressing topics I’ve been struggling with internally. Espinet’s thoughtful views and approach to design and business gave me much to think about, and I was excited and flattered to have the opportunity to review her new book.

Honestly, I generally steer clear of the high end market – it isn’t where I come from and, generally speaking, it isn’t what my clients are looking for. Beyond affordability, my first thought tends to be: who’s going to clean that? In our house, it’s me. While my husband might not see it that way, if there’s going to be cleaning done, I’m in charge. So high end design is often off-putting to my practical side. (Yes, honey. I do have one.)

Barefoot Luxury delivers some serious hard cover house porn. Hector Velasco Fazio’s photographs are just what you might expect: breathtaking. They capture the depth of Espinet’s impeccable sense of design, color and context; and the soaring scale of situation and space.  

But I read it for the articles. Really.

The book is over 200 pages, most overflowing with photographs and accompanying descriptors, and just 13 devoted primarily to prose, but those were the pages that captured my interest. Sandra Espinet is an engaging writer, at once hip historian, design docent and intriguing insider. Her words breathe more life into this luxury design travelogue than I would have imagined. I love her background info on tourism in Mexico and the rise of the private communities to which she caters. I appreciate her approach to design which includes a respect for the local community, its artisans and natural resources.

The press packet that accompanied my copy of the book included Espinet’s definition of the concept of barefoot luxury as “the ultimate way of living freely without pretense yet still with elegance and style”. Although I might take issue with the concept of living “without pretense” in one of these Mexican coastline retreats, I can’t argue the “elegance and style”. I think that’s what I liked most about the book – the designs are thoughtful embodiments of what her clients are looking for. They capture how her clients want to feel in their spaces, without trends or gaudy excess. That’s the kind of design I believe you strive for at any price point.

I brought the book with me on a weekend trip to our little camp in the Adirondacks – lightyears from Mexican Resort Living and devoid of pretense. We have our own special style, though we might be light on the elegance. It was interesting to juxtapose Espinet’s elegantly manicured and maintained resort-style retreats with the reality of our fixer upper at the lake. Call me clueless, but it is one of life’s little ironies that our vacation place is exponentially more work than anticipated. Camp maintenance is not unlike my magazine stash: inversely proportional to the leisure to enjoy it. No staff to prep the place for our arrival, no one to set the Adirondack chairs out on the patio. 

But the thing is…there is a patio, no shoes required.

Luxury is where you find it.

The Wallpaper From Hell and other office gossip.

I don’t know how it works at your house, but around here if there’s an aspect of design that offends my sensibilities, I’ve been known to resort to vandalism. So, if the color of the family room offends me, I might splash a few paint samples on the wall. I’m not discreet about it - focal wall, about eye level is good. You can really move a project up the food chain that way. Don’t like the wallpaper? Start stripping it in a very conspicuous place. Oh. Bummer, honey. No way we can salvage that paper.

While the technique has worked for me in the past, I’m a little off my game. It’s unfortunate that the sick peach undertones of the wallpaper haven’t grown on me in the past year, because while I was able to get it on the Hit List, I was also assigned to get it off the wall. Let me tell you, this stuff was applied with perpetuity in mind. This is what I’ve accomplished in the past year…

There’s about a million square feet of this stuff and since chewing it off an inch at a time is not my idea of a good time, I opted for a cover up - covering as much wallpaper as possible with every photograph and piece of art we own.

Not a long term strategy, but enough of a diversion that I was able to start another project, my office, which is also unfinished. 

But the skeletons have come home to roost in the closet next to my office.

And though I can live a while longer with the wallpaper from hell in a state of suspended animation, my office situation has become untenable. It’s been waiting to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted for several months, and in that time has become a wasteland of stuff I can’t put away because, keep up! -  the room needs to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted. The skeletons have me thinking maybe I can tap into the Closet Mojo. 

Since the Closet Exposé, harmony and balance are almost as easy to find as my clothes. Could an Office Exposé - metaphorical paint swatches on a wall - bring similar results to my office space? I’m a little afraid that pictures of my office in its current state could go viral. In the design world, you don’t want to be famous for ‘Before’ photos, but if I hafta throw down to represent, I’m willing to be the lab rat of design research. 

The following images are graphic and disturbing. How does she live like that?!  How can she find anything?! That, my friends, is what I’m sayin’. 

This is the here, this is the now.

Game on. Watch this space.

Good gourd.

You might wonder what possesses a person to go out in search of gourds at 9 pm on a Sunday night.

Or, you might not wonder.

I’ll tell you why anyway - because the Gourd Incident correlates to writing a blog, or not, while hip deep in home renovation.

Home renovation shares a few similarities to childbearing - having done at least four of each, I feel I speak with some authority. Not the least of the similarities is the amnesia endemic to both: once you see that shining face or space, you forget the blood, sweat and tears that went into delivering it. Such is the delight in this new being, that the pain and discomfort of the previous months fade into the mist, and before you know it, you’re talking your husband into another one.

And that’s why renovation and childbearing are not like rodeos. Lessons learned can’t carry over: “Not my first rodeo” does not attach in the blissful, amnesiac ignorance of reproduction and renovation.  The type of ignorance that can lull you into the belief that, not only will you be able to form a coherent sentence at the end of the day, but that you’ll do so with style, grace and high quality images over multiple social media platforms. You know…capturing the glory and the glamour, with wit and wisdom, of a yearlong renovation or the average gestation and neonatal period. (First pass on that sentence was ‘the gory and the glamour’, which is at least fifty percent closer to the truth. For either process.)

My hat is off to the scores of design and lifestyle bloggers out there who manage to do it with stylish professionalism, producing blogs that are engaging and informative, ripe with polished tutorials and photo essays of various projects. They make it look easy and effortless.

I’ve been hoping to find my place among them. I’m a designer. I like to problem solve spatial and aesthetic issues. I like to write. I like to take pictures. ‘Easy and effortless’, however, are elusive. It’s a challenge to follow many of the directives you might find in a ‘How To Blog’ blog. For instance, if you want to develop a following, you’re supposed to blog regularly. With a frequency measured in units smaller than years. You need to create quality content, identify key words, develop a calendar, et cetera, et cetera. I find that all much easier said than done. This stuff takes a lot of time.

In an effort to jump start my stalled blogging career, I hopped on the Instagram bandwagon, where images carry more weight and you don’t have to string too many words together. I still fell short on the ‘regularly’ thing. Looking for some structure to address that, inspiration arrived via the youngest member of the household, my grandson, Jack. Jack is into rainbows. Big Time. Everything he’s colored for weeks has been a rainbow. “Grom, what color comes next?” ROY G BIV is indelibly etched on our collective psyche and once it occurred to me that  I’d posted photos of pickled sour cherries and then cherry tomatoes on my counter…R…O – Insta Inspo! The ROY G BIV #counterproposal Protocol was born. Framework! Structure! I had at least one, two…seven weeks of a plan! I could do it any day of the week, preferably keeping the photo shoots at the same time of day for consistent light levels and maybe even do a few ahead to have in the InstaBank.

That worked until we got to Indigo. Indigo inspo was elusive. And, you know…life happens. All of a sudden it’s Sunday night and I have no Indigo. No daylight.

The #counterproposal was about to be tabled.

Until I remembered the paint for The World’s Smallest Powder Room which was custom matched to my Indigo Batik (SW7602) cabinets!!!

What to paint?

Another glance around the room and my eye fell on Jack’s little tiger pumpkin. But seriously, I want him to like me still.

And so…a quick trip to the grocery store, a coat of paint and before you know it there’s a trio of indigo mini gourds on my counter, waiting for their close up. I took photos as I painted, with the idea that maybe this is what they mean by ‘creating content’. Not unlike the thoughts I had as I cleaned out my closet last week. Write what you know. Sure, I could write you up a list of my Go To Living Room paint colors, but there are a lot of people doing a really good job at that. I’m still working on finding my niche, but I think there’s room for someone who can pair the proper wine with an indigo gourd project.

I was going to share a link to this post with my photo of the Indigo gourds on Monday morning, but…me. 

Still some skeletons rattling around in my perfectly imperfect closet.

My Closet: The Naked Truth

I couldn’t sleep last night because I cleaned my closet.

For a lot of people, that might actually contribute to a restful night’s sleep.

Not for me.

Was it the excitement of finding my jammies on a designated hook, rather than on the floor among the detritus of quick changes, gym shoes and the container-of-toiletries-looking-for-a-permanent-home-since-we-moved-in-December 21, 2016?

Compelling, but I don’t think that was all of it.

If we were to do a quick walk through, and trust me - it’s a ‘reach in’, not a ‘walk-in’ - quick would be the operative word, you’d conclude that it’s a designer closet only by virtue of the facts that, A) I am a designer and B) it is a closet. No Instagram love, no crazy pinning, nobody checking my bio for how to shop my IG account. There is nothing compelling about this closet. Save the fact you can now see the floor that was so beautifully refinished last November.

Anyway, some context so you can keep up: We decided to relocate to our hometown. I found this house online. Dan looked at it. I looked at it. Five minutes later we bought it. Dan had the dumpster in the driveway before the ink was dry on the papers. He’s wicked smart, excels at a lot of stuff, including demo, and is really good about trusting me to put a design together.

There was a lot of design happening in a very short time, as our multi-generational household packed up and shifted states. We’ve done major renovations on four houses in the past several years, with twenty some closets before we got to the ones herein. I’ve also worked on more than a few for clients, so configuring a few more at easyclosets.com and waiting for the UPS truck to fill the garage wasn’t an issue for me. I was more focused on making sure there were toilets and a kitchen sink than customizing closets.

We’re blessed with plenty of closets in the #newoldhouse and while they’re spacious, none of them are candidates for a photo spread, because they’re…closets. Functional. Utilitarian. Also, I’m not a clothes horse. I don’t need a walk-in with dressing room. I just need a place to put my stuff. A hook to hang my jammies. When we moved in, after living out of a duffle bag in a rental for four months (with most of our clothing stored in a POD for half the year) I just shoved my stuff in, forced the door closed and hoped for the best. And that’s how it remained, causing me no small amount of anxiety when I need to find something to wear besides the yoga pants with the hex shaped grout lines embedded in the knees. There’s always so much other stuff to do, I just throw stuff in and close the door quickly before anything falls out.

Am I alone?

Yesterday I’d reached my limit, so using equal parts Swedish Death Cleaning and Marie Kondo, with the voices of my mother and my Use What You HaveTM mentor, Lauri Ward echoing in my head, I took everything out, tried, tested, tossed and then regrouped what remained into something I can keep organized.

I found some hooks in the basement and a towel bar I’d salvaged from one of the bathrooms we demo’d and mounted them inside the closet door. I hung some command hooks on the walls, and ordered some clear boxes for the shoes worn so infrequently they require dusting. Inexpensive solutions I can tweak, if necessary, and perhaps upgrade at some point. As I worked, it occurred to me that there are probably more closets like mine in this world, than there are the aspirational spaces found on Pinterest and Houzz – the palatial spaces lined with wallpaper, coordinated storage solutions and Anthropologie hardware.

While they are lovely things to aspire to, they’re not really me. And while I confess to a bout of closet envy now and again when I see them, the investment in such a space doesn’t make sense for me. Having an organized and functional space is more important, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive build out - it’s something anyone can manage with some careful thought.

I had been waiting for the perfect time to ‘do’ the closet…like when I’m at the ‘perfect’ weight, with the ‘perfect’ clothes. But what has become a recurring theme for me of late, is that perfection is the enemy of good. It’s not friends with ‘finished’, either.

I couldn’t sleep, because of the excitement of this life changing exercise - simple organization and the perfectly imperfect are enough. My closet isn’t perfect, but I think it will work. And at the end of the day, I know right where to find my jammies.