Evolution of a Family Room AND The BROWN Giveaway Winners!!

 

I recently made a big change in my family room.   While I was lo0king at all the old pictures of this room through the years, it was just a tad embarrassing to see how much the room has changed.  But in my defense, I think most interior designers suffer from the same illness – the constant changing and updating of a space that never seems to end.

And, we have lived here almost 20 years so some change is inevitable and expected.  …..Sure it is…!!

I started out with taupe walls, white trim, and a gray and white ticking stripe sofa and chair bought from some long ago closed discount furniture store.  At some point, we got rid of that sofa and used a slipcovered khaki linen sofa – along with all red and black accessories and freshly painted yellow walls.  The khaki slips later became white slipcovers – which are the first pictures I have of the room, below. 

 

A long time ago – an old sofa with white pleated slips, yellow striped pillows, wicker chair, old coffee table.

 

And across the room – the small game table and French chairs. 

 

Several changes later – a new sofa and two wing chairs, along with an antique dough table from France. 

 

 

Les Indiennes and brown velvet pillows.

 

 

This suzani covered the wine tasting table that replaced the game table.

 

 

The next big changes: gray walls (Pratt & Lambert Feather Gray) replaced the yellow ones and new curtains were hung.  The curtains were made of a taupe and white ticking stripe, very neutral, with just a hint of color. 

 

 

 

The curtains ran from one end of the breakfast room to the family room.  You can see the pattern in the fabric here – just very muted and quiet.  Not sure why I just didn’t go with plain white linen which I love? 

 

 

 

Another big change came when I added the arched doors w/chicken wire over the bookshelves – which I think helped tone down all the accessories on the shelves.  The shelves made a big difference and, along with the curtains, helped quiet the room somewhat. 

 

 

The last big change was getting the two new side chairs.   Every time I showed this room on the blog – I would get so many negative comments about the furniture arrangement – “your wing chairs block the fireplace” or “the room is not balanced – you need to add something more on the right side” – and on and on.  And, yes, I knew it was all true – so I finally bit the bullet and moved the two wing chairs across from the sofa, flanking the French wine tasting table – and centered underneath the flatscreen.   The two new chairs I chose – from Hien Lam – were purposefully tall and narrow to create a variety of heights in the room.  Their top is arched, just as the sofa and wing chairs are, and they have pretty French wood (Os de Mouton) legs.  That’s sweet Tucker on the sofa!

 

 

Lucy, Tucker, and Micki!

 

But by far the biggest change in this room was the puppies.  For the past two years – we have had 4 puppies here.   First, we had Elisabeth’s Lucy, then our new puppy Micki and we also had two puppies who stayed here quite a bit – my nephew’s two puppies – Riley and Tucker.  And all four are Blenheim Cavalier King Charles Spaniels!  One of the puppies (not naming names!) chewed up the miniature wicker chair and the wicker dog bed, the zebra rug, and a host of wicker baskets, amongst other things.   Plus, we have had lots and lots of puppy “accidents.”  Thankfully seagrass is very price friendly, easy to clean and cheap to replace.  

 

 

But, the biggest problem became the curtains.  While I love a puddle on curtains of 3, 4 or 5 inches – so did the puppies.  Day after day I would find the puppies laying on the curtain puddles and no matter what I did – I couldn’t break them out of this habit.   After a while, it became a real problem – I had to have the curtains taken down and cleaned, more than once, which actually didn’t really help at all.   They would return “cleaned” with all the puppy spots intact.

 

In order to stop the problem, the curtains needed to be shortened and as long as I was making a change, of course I wanted to make a BIG change – more pattern and color.   Monica – from Custom Creations by Monica – whipped up new curtains in just a short three weeks – before I really even had time to think it all through!

And here is how the new shorter curtains came out:

 

I chose a brown/gray/white toile from Vervain.   I love the way the pattern is so vivid and it really warms up the room.  I was just craving some pattern and color in this room – and the curtains gave me the perfect opportunity to satisfy that itch.

 

The difference the new curtains make is huge – though it’s not as easy to see in the pictures – and the entire room seems cozier, warmer, and more alive.  It makes me want to use patterned curtains everywhere!   I’ve tended to shy away from busy patterns on curtains, but doing this in my own house gives me the confidence to go with more pattern, more color in clients’ houses.  So get ready!!!   Here – you can see how the curtains cover the entire back wall  - from the breakfast room to the family room.

 

Looking down from the stairs to the family room.  As always – I paired the curtains with shades – to hide the dead spot of drywall between the crown molding and the top of the windows.  Also, all the curtains are lined and interlined with blackout fabric – which keeps the sun from showing through the fabric, allowing you to see the pattern vividly.   Plus, the added weight of the blackout lining adds to the lushness of the curtains.   We puddled these curtains only 1/2 inch – so that the puppies can’t lie on the curtains, yet they aren’t too short or skimpy looking.  I don’t ever iron in pleats in curtains.  I like them unstructured and loose and full looking – rather than two stiff looking panels of ironed fabric. 

 

If I want to brighten up the room, I have hot pink linen pillows I could add, but I still like the brown velvet.  Maybe next summer I’ll try the pink pillows.   

 

The toile is Vervain:

 

 

The fabric is Vervain’s linen Doucette in Pewter HERE. 

 

And speaking of curtains paired with textured shades:

 

Mario Buatta’s 2nd Apartment from the early  60s. 

While perusing Mario Buatta’s new design book, this image really struck a chord with me.  It shows his second apartment for the early 1960s – done in all Rose Cummings chintz  and stripes – and antiques.  But, who wouldn’t want this as a sitting room today – with the gorgeous tea table, the beautiful antique chair, the silk covered skirted table, the plant stand?  I would add a rug, and call it a day.  Amazing that this photograph is now over 50 years old, and is it really that far off from something Miles Redd would do today?

Of course the curtain treatment really caught me eye – how perfectly Buatta executed them.  Notice he brought the rod up over the window and placed it right under the ceiling – thereby elongating the view and fooling the eye into believing the window is taller and grander.  He covered up the tell-tale drywall dead space with the ever-chic rattan shade.   And for even greater effect, he recreated the shape and size of the window with the aged mercury mirror behind the sofa.  By mimicking the window, he makes the tiny room look twice its size.

Antiques don’t date, and neither does good design.  And this image just goes to show the anonymous commenter is way off his mark  - who insisted that textured blinds are a product of the south, used only in Texas, by inexperienced designers like myself.  Had to laugh seeing the New York born and bred Mario Buatta using textured shades in the same exact way we do in Houston, Texas. 

Speaking of Mario, I mentioned that we interviewed him on the Skirted Roundtable last month – so be sure to give it a listen HERE. 

 

Buatta’s ageless and timeless look.  His book shows over 50 years of his designs – and it’s hard to say which is his new work versus his older work. 

To preorder Mario’s book – click on the book below.

double click the book to order!

 

And finally:

 

 

 

We have chosen the seven winners in the BROWN giveaway – after Labor Day Sale!!!

As you may recall, BROWN, that fabulous décor/lighting store in Houston hosted a large sale after Labor Day – and ran a contest searching for seven winners in honor of Cote De Texas’ 7th year of blogging.

Jill Brown – besides being so talented and creative – is also one of the sweetest, most giving human beings I’ve ever known.  Truly, she is a doll and a real mensch.

Jill hand picked ten items for the giveaway – and here are the pictures below.  The first place winner will pick the item she wants below, then the 2nd place winner will pick her item, then, the third place winner – and so on and so on until all seven winners have picked their prize.

The first place winner is :    Patsy Fox

Patsy has her pick of any of the ten gifts below.  Once Patsy picks, the 2nd place winner, Jeri Windrow gets to pick her gift – and so on, until all seven winners have picked.

Have I said how much I LOVE Jill Brown?

Here are the 10 prizes being offered by Brown – in no particular order:

 

A pair of cream table lamps with their shades, valued at $450.

 

 

A set of 4 white Palacek outdoor chairs, valued at $1100.

 

 

Black swan print valued at $750.

 

 

Glass cake plate with dome, valued at $235.

 

 

A pair of woven rattan side tables.

 

 

A large, geometric glass lantern.

 

 

Set of Seagrass Baskets, valued at $100.

 

 

A pewter tea set, valued at $750.

 

 

An antique mirror, valued at $975.

 

Charming coil table lamp, valued at $125.

 

 

Six assorted hand-made candles, valued at $180.

 

So – as soon as I hear from the first place winner, we will then go onto the next six winners!

 

Visit BROWN HERE.

 

Did Julia Roberts List Her Secluded Hawaiian Hideaway and Buy Another?

SELLER: Julia Roberts and Danny Moder
LOCATION: Hanalei, Kauai, HI
PRICE: $17,000,000
SIZE: 1,807 square feet, 4bedrooms, 3 bathrooms (total)

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It recently came to Your Mama's attention by way of The Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial that semi-reclusive Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts and her budding cinematographer husband, Danny Moder, own not just one but two multi-million dollar ocean front hideaways superbly located near heavenly Hanalei Bay on the North Shore of the achingly scenic and relatively unspoiled Hawaiian island of Kauai.

As it turns out, butter beans, one of the two ocean front estates that Your Mama understands to be owned by Miz Roberts and Mister Moder, happens on the market with an asking price of $17,000,000.*

And, children, it's gorgeous. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter would buy iffin we had seventeen million extra dollars to spend on a relatively remote Hawaiian hideaway where, according to someone with whom Your Mama is acquainted who is intimately acquainted with the very strip of beach to which the Roberts-Moder property rubs up against, the swimming situation along the beach behind the house is far from idea due to the excessively rocky shoreline. "Attempting a swim in front of Ms. Robert's beach shack on the North Shore of Kauai ain't for sissies," We were informed. "If you want to swim along that part of the coastline you make a left at Pierce Brosnan's place and don't stop until you get to Ben Stiller scowling on a chaise outside his breathtaking beach front contemporary." There you have if from a wealthy Hollywood haole who frequents this particular corner of paradise. Anyhoo...

Property records for the estate are a mite convoluted but, as best as Your Mama can tell, in June 2009 Miz Roberts and Mister Moder coughed up somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million clams for the undeniably luxurious but low-key spread that spans three contiguous parcels that total 8.92 secluded acres and claims more than 400 feet of ocean frontage with, according to current listing details, "Seasonal swimming, surfing, windsurfing, and snorkeling." The recently re-habbed main residence has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in, according to property records, just over 1,800 square feet. A separate cottage near the head of the long driveway has another bedroom and bathroom for guests or caretakers.

At the heart of the low-slung Hawaiian-style ranch house is a roomy, open-concept great room with wide plank wood floors, a vaulted ceiling lined with heavy-duty wood beams, and clerestory windows. One the ocean side of the house a ribbon of windows provide a sweeping view of the beach and pounding surf. The children may or may not have noticed the well-conceived and executed wooden louvers below the windows that, Your Mama imagines, are used to increase or decrease the air flow as needed to keep the house cool on hot days.

On the opposite wall from the ocean view windows are a long row of wood-framed glass doors that fold back and expose the great room to a spacious screened porch that overlooks vast and verdant lawns that give way to dense tropical thickets and inspiring views of Mt. Makana and the unspoiled Limahuli Valley. Listing photos show there's some sort of portable, half-trashy blow-up plunge pool situation out on the back lawn where there's also, rather charmingly, a swing hung from the branch of a mature shade tree. We know it's not fair and we'll probably get called all kinds of snobby for saying so but even though we'd most certainly roll our eyes and scoff with superiority and disdain at a blow up pool on the back lawn of a suburban tract house in Peoria somehow it's charming and pleasantly humble when the same blow up pool sits on the back lawn of a stunningly redone residence in Kauai that only the financially elite can even afford to imagine owning.

As those who do it know, families and other groups of people who vacation in private homes, either rented or owned, often spend a great deal of time preparing and eating food. Trust Your Mama when we tell you, that's just what happens. Three days in to the vacay and everyone is like, "Can we pleeze go to a damn restaurant? I'm so tired of cooking and washing dishes I could spit urine." So, addressing that issue the designer(s) who handled the recent overhaul of the home—that would be Greg Warner of Walker-Warner Architects in San Francisco according to marketing materials—smartly installed a commodious, expensively equipped, and centrally located country-style kitchen with white porcelain apron sink, open shelves for daily dishes, a thick slab of butcher block on the super-sized work island that doubles as a snack bar, and top-quality appliances tucked discreetly behind the bead board cabinetry that someone had the chutzpah to paint a particularly fetching shade of tomato. Behind the kitchen, our own house girl Svetlana noticed with an angry kind of envy, there's a well-designed mud porch/laundry room with more tomato red cabinetry and a double-wide sliding louvered door that, when open, allows the laundress of the house to have a $17 million view of the ocean while folding up bathing suits and underthings.

A small sitting room furnished with a generous sectional seating lounge provides a buffer zone between the hustle-bustle of the main living space and the serenity and coziness of the master suite. A central walk-in closet that can be passed on either side separates the compact but adequate bedroom from the bathroom where there's a custom wood vanity, a free-standing soaking tub set in front of over-sized windows with moist, green mountain and garden views, and, for reasons we can't fathom, a pair of pea green Moroccan poufs. Maybe that's where the $200/hour house-calling manicurist sits when she comes to do an in-tub mani-pedi for the lady of the house?

Anyways, according to celebrity real estate scuttlebutt on the island and circumstantial evidence in various property record data bases and other online resources it appears that in November 2011 Miz Roberts and Mister Moder very well might have spent $13,375,000 to acquire a well-known and Hawaii historic, 3-ish acre beach front property on postcard perfect Hanalei Bay where the the shore is sandy rather than rocky and hence perfect for bare-footed shore strolling and surf frolicking.

The vintage estate has a sizable main house with an open plan main living area that opens on the beach side to a covered porch, six bedrooms and three bathrooms plus and outdoor shower. A separate detached but fully self-contained cottage has another beach view covered porch, an open plan living area, one bedroom, and one bathroom. The property was—and, oddly enough, still appears to be—available as a un-fussy but hardly inexpensive rental, $1,500 per night for the main house and either $350 per night for the cottage.

Kauai quietly attracts a slew of celebrities and other well-heeled Tinseltowners, often over and around the winter holidays. Most rent but a few of the high profile people who own luxury island getaways on the North Shore of Kauai include the aforementioned Ben Stiller and Pierce Brosnan as well as Honolulu-born Bette Midler, music industry mogul Irving Azoff, producer John Wells, and María del Roasario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza, a hip-poppin' and coochi-cooing ball of fire otherwise known as Charo.

Your Mama's brief and entirely unscientific research on the internets reveals that in addition to their substantial residential real estate holdings in Hawaii Miz Roberts and Mister Moder maintain a number of other private residences. There's the custom-built bluff-top estate in Malibu, a ranch about 10 miles north of Taos, NM, and several apartments in a dignified boutique building in the Gramercy Park area of New York City plus a penthouse pad in a full-service post-war building in the heart of Greenwich Village that she picked up in mid-2010 for $3,895,000. In 2010, presumably for use by staff or family, Miz Roberts and Mister Moder paid $1,332,300 for a fully updated and upgraded 1920s Spanish bungalow with two bedrooms and two bathrooms just a couple short blocks from the center of downtown Pacific Palisades and, until August 2010 when she sold it for $3,000,000, the couple maintained a gated micro-compound just off Abbott Kinney in in the city's increasingly pricey yet proudly gritty hipster-swarmed beach community of Venice.

*In the interest of full disclosure Your Mama would like the children (and etc.) to note that we have not been able to directly link Julia Roberts or Danny Moder to the property in question. What we have is a whole lotta circumstantial evidence. Several sources have told Your Mama that the Roberts-Moder family maintains not one but two residence on Kauai and one doesn't have to scour the internet for long before picking up snippets of gossip and rumor that say so. Also notable is that, technically, the property in question is owned by a vaguely named trust that links back to the same Beverly Hills office of an accountant long known by celebrity property gossips like Your Mama to be associated with Miz Roberts as the rest of her many residential properties. Make of the circumstantial evidence what you will. Let's be honest, though. Even if it's not Roberts' house, it's worth a gander anyways, don't you think?

listing photos: Hawaii Life

Cotton T-Shirt King James Perse Snags Another

SELLER: Stefan Lessard
BUYER: James Perse
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $6,690,000
SIZE: 7,000 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama, followed by a number of our property gossip compadres, had to eat celebrity real estate crow in mid-February (2013) when we erroneously reported that money-minting musician Dave Matthews of his eponymous Dave Matthews Band had quietly dropped $6,575,000 for a recently re-did domicile in the celeb-saturated Point Dume area of Malibu, CA, that was described in listing information from the time of the purchase as a "European Country Home."

Within days of our digital discussion we heard from a paid representative of Mister Matthews who was appreciatively friendly but absolutely emphatic that her client did not buy the house in question and does not, in fact, own any property in Malibu or even in California. We added a note that stated such and we moved on.

Then, about a week or so ago, while—'tis true—Your Mama was shacked up in a tent the size of a downtown Manhattan studio apartment in Sister Woman's backyard, we received a covert communique from deliciously relentless real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak who snitched that she's quite certain—totally positive, she said—that the 1.78 acre estate in question was acquired by Mister Matthews' long-time bass player Stefan Lessard and his second wife, Jaclyn Burton. The seller was Maura Kaplan, the designer daughter of late actor Leslie Nielsen.

Mister Lessard, 39, has played bass in the wildly successful Dave Matthews Band since he was a wee lad of sixteen, which means he's plenty rich enough to buy a six and some million dollar house in Malibu. However, Mister and/or Missus was almost immediately stricken with buyer's remorse or caught a severe case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle or something because the couple quietly flipped the 7,000 square foot house in an off-market deal in early July (2013) for, according to property records, $6,690,000. The buyer, snitched Yolanda, is luxury cotton t-shirt king James Perse and his wife Brandi Briskman, a Beverly Hills -bred brunette who is sometimes described on the interweb as an interior decorator.

As it turns out, we also learned from Yolanda, the Lessard's unwanted white elephant isn't the only residential property in Malibu owned by Mister and Missus Perse. In fact, it's not even the most expensive house they own in the Point Dume area. In late 2010 the casually chic couple surreptitiously spent $16,000,000 to acquire an organically modern wood and glass pavilion on 1.28 plum acres with ocean views and direct, deeded access to a sensationally scenic private beach. Your Mama's research shows Mister and Missus Perse purchased the beach house from former Surfing magazine editor and X-Files creator Chris Carter and their nearest neighbor is none other that Miz Malibu Herself, Barbra Streisand, who presides over a sprawling, multi-acre, multi-residence bluff-top compound that includes an rustic water mill with a working wooden water wheel. Anyhoo...

Until recently Mister Perse owned a sleek and low-slung one bedroom and 1.5 bathroom abode in a much desired location above the Sunset Street that he had designed by the talented folk at Standard and first listed in 2009 with a sky-high $4,995,000 price tag. After a long slog at the real estate rodeo and a significant price drop to $3,750,000 in 2011, the property finally sold in April of this year (2013) in an off-market deal for $3,550,000. The buyer, as per property records and Yolanda Yakketyyak, was L.A.-based artist, writer and luxury eye wear entrepreneur Alex Israel who, incidentally, just sold his high-floor two bedroom and two bathroom condo-crib along the Wilshire Corridor for $875,000.

listing photos (Malibu, top): Prudential Malibu Realty
listing photos (Malibu, middle): Coldwell Banker
listing photos (Sunset Strip, bottom): Hilton & Hyland