Welcome to Our New Blog!

Welcome to the first blog post!
I plan to cover lot of different topics I am dealing with and find fascinating. From studio, farm life, animals, entertaining, cooking and city life. I look forward to reading your comments and hope that what I write here and post on my instagram inspire you to take some time and make a little progress every day!

Some custom lamps I’m working on for a special client
The living room at the farm, all freshly painted after the Christmas fire
Two babies that just left their nest

Tons of baby pigeons in the dove cote. I think we finally have one Indian Fantail baby! We haven’t had any all year.

The earliest bloom on Witch Hazel Jelena ever. The warm weather in the 60’s over the weekend must have triggered this. Usually, I herald the first blooms that I see in Central Park usually in mid to late February as the sign that we have made it through the worst of winter. I think this may be a faulty sight. We’ll see.

It’s time to get your bulbs out and started! I’ve cooled these hyacinth bulbs 40-48 degrees in my basement bulb refrigerator for 2 plus months. When you see the bulb spike green with new growth, I take it out of the ice box and put them in the forcing vases. You want the water to be just below the bulb, so the bulb can ‘smell’ the water. These have grown in one week! Crazy how fast! I’ll write more about these and the process as they bloom.

The talk of the design town this week is the sale of my late friend Mario Buatta. On Thursday the 16th, Sotheby’s opens the exhibition of the 1,000 lots from his NYC apartment, Connecticut home and his vast storage units. Mario was an avid and collusive collector, two qualities I see in myself. He did buy THE BEST STUFF!!!! Sotheby’s is offering some 54 lots of dog paintings, tons of botanical English ceramics and some of the finest furniture to come to market in a long time. Some of the items he’s had, from what I can trace, over 50 years.

My prediction– the sale will be the Hunger Games of buying. Pure blood sport will be seen on Thursday and Friday.

I’ll be there for the opening and do a post on some of the highlights. Like Sister Parrish’s Aubusson rug that Mario paid nearly $100,000 and never unrolled. It will be interesting to see what it sells for this time.

My quote from the catalog
An endearing inscription from Mario in his Rizzoli book

One thought on “Welcome to Our New Blog!

  1. Congratulations on the revamped website! Your predictions for Mario Buatta’s auction at Sotheby’s certainly were realized. After Emily Evans-Eerdmans’s Instagram account, yours was my favorite to follow for special insight into the sale. When I decided to visit the blog, I anticipated design insight. Not in a million years could I have predicted I would see my first pigeon squab. Expectations exceeded!

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