I’m of Italian descent. I was brought up in an Italian household with parents and grandparents who endured hard lives in Italy, came here to make better lives for themselves, only to have to live through the Great Depression. For them, wasting was not part of the program. Almost everything that came into their possession […]
One morning over coffee (one of our favorite times of the day), I was sharing some of my design thoughts with my husband, Mark. In particular, I shared with him an article from Business of Home entitled, “Is rental furniture the next big thing?” He was so taken — and conflicted — by the very idea, he […]
Recently, while searching through Work Design Magazine, I came across two articles that could have been about my husband and me. I don’t mean to suggest we were mentioned by name or anything. It’s just that they seemed to celebrate the differences in our working styles; although, the first one was a tad more cryptic […]
Leafing through the April edition of Home Accents Today, I saw an article called, “Thinking outside the design box”. I suppose (hope) the author intended some irony in the title because the article was about thinking outside the design box by purchasing designs in a box. According to the article, the process works like this: […]
We were at a home a while ago to perform a staging assessment. The home was owned by a pleasant young couple. Since they’d bought their home, they’d had two beautiful children. As a result, what they’d always intended to be their starter home was now bursting at the proverbial seams. It was time for […]
This post is for all of my friends, acquaintances, and connections who are residential realtors. I read a post on Your Modern Cottage recently — “We Buy Homes the Way We Buy Hamburgers” — that presented a slightly different flavor (no pun intended) to home staging. The post said this, in part: Most people buy […]
This is not your grandmother’s rocking chair. That’s because it’s my grandmother’s rocking chair. Aside from the facts that (1) I’m shamelessly sentimental (2) value is subjective, and (3) the value in that chair is the familial heritage it represents, I couldn’t part with that chair because it’s simply beautiful. And its beauty notwithstanding, that […]
There comes a point at which you could almost get tired of beating up on the self-defeating shortsightedness of open office designs. Almost. The fact is, when an idea does itself that few favors, it gets what it deserves. The bad news is it encourages all manner of piling on. The good news is it also […]
The other morning, my husband and I were reading a humorous article about the days when we, as kids, could hop on our bicycles after school, knowing the only admonishment we’d receive was, “Don’t come home till supper.” After we got through laughing, reminiscing, and recalling our youthful days with a kind of wistful nostalgia, […]
In an odd moment of cultural and artistic dissonance, two things found their way into my senses sequentially the other day, followed by a related thought. First, in my Facebook feed, a friend had posted the 1966 garage-band, proto-punk classic, “Talk Talk“: Here’s the situation And how it really stands I’m out of circulation I’ve all […]