interior design dreams: Other Bloggers

We were in NYC to meet up with our friend, Roopa, for lunch and then to spend the afternoon wandering around. As we were walking, I remembered my father’s words, to look up. Several months ago, I talked about the importance of looking up when you’re in a city. You often see details of the original architecture that have been eliminated or obliterated on the street level. Here’s some of what we saw.

The charming Puck, who stands over the entrance to the Puck Building. Who can resist a fat guy in a top hat?

Looking south to a building decorated a la Louis Vuitton.The front of the New Museum on Bowery Street.

The Bowery Savings Bank from the frontand the side. The incomparable E. Vogel, Custom Made Shoes & Boots. I had a pair of paddock boots from Vogel that were just stunning. Unfortunately, they were jettisoned when I moved to the UK. This building’s curved corner reminded me of the HQ of the National Trust in Washington DC. What you can’t see in the image were the amazing fluted columns on the second floor, which we could see through the beautiful huge windows.Sometimes you have to look down to see the unusual. Girl Props is one of my favourite places for funky and inexpensive costume jewelry.

And in NoLiTa, we saw a reminder of the area’s Italian heritage in mosaics on the doorstep, and also in the beautiful tile-work inside. NYC 034

We saw this lovely gal hovering above an entrance just to the north of the huge Ralph Lauren store in Soho. All in all, a great trip up to NYC, a wonderful lunch with a dear friend, and lots of walking and talking with a pal.

Do you ever have one of those days when things just move along seamlessly, that everything is fun, and you are just happy? I had one of those days on Saturday.

I met up with my new friend, Christopher to head up to Book Thing. Christopher had a HUGE box of books to donate, so we chucked them into the back of the Volvo and headed up with Connor riding shotgun. I always admonish people not to go to Book Thing expecting to find the exact book they’re looking for, since everything there is up to chance.

As I’ve mentioned before, the books are categorized, but they’re not in any order. Christopher was looking for Life of the Party, the book about Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, and within two minutes, we found it. Then Christopher found the issue of Baltimore Magazine which had featured him as one of the top young interior designers, which I hadn’t seen.

We headed back downtown to go to Housewerks, which was featured in Daily Candy DC last week. The mention multiplied their web traffic by several hundred times! Since we knew that the owners would have been busy, we stopped to pick up lunch for everyone in hopes that they’d be able to take a brief respite and have a hot drink and lunch. We arrived at Housewerks during a brief lull in the traffic and had a fun, chatty break with like-minded friends. Since Christopher hadn’t been to Housewerks, he was thrilled to have time to explore the space and check out all of their incredible treasures, like the faience light above.

The late afternoon light was gorgeous and provided some opportunities to take lovely pictures, both inside the building,

and out.As we were exploring the grounds, we found the resident tomcat curled up in a pile of leaves taking a late afternoon snooze. To catch the best of the late afternoon light, we headed over to Mount Clare Mansion which looks out over Baltimore’s downtown. The light just warmed the old bricks of the mansion and glowed in the windows of the office buildings in the distance. Mount Clare is the only remaining Georgian plantation house in Baltimore City and it retains much of its former glory. I particularly love this door, which would have originally been at the back of the house. I hope that you had a perfect weekend, too!