PUTTING THE BED IN BEDROOM COMMUNITIES Mattress Firm celebrates the opening of its 500th store. You keep building those strip centers, they’ll take care of the rest! [Houston Business Journal]
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Tag: Furniture
What can you do with those long, old-growth pine floorboards you’ve managed to rescue from . . . say, an old farmhouse being torn down in Pecan Park? And what if you’ve got an extra shower door laying around?
Answer after the jump:
Cote de Texas author Joni Webb comes clean about her obsession with a recently constructed home in West U.
. . . whenever I drove by the house, I would slow my car to a crawl, craning my neck to try to see inside the white stuccoed home that had so captured my imagination. Through their windows, I could make out some of their furnishings – first, there was a screen in the living room, and then I could see an oversized mirror. Next – I noticed the dining room’s antique light fixture which furthered my suspicions that this was a house I would love – inside and out. By the time the sheer, linen curtains were hung – the deal was sealed – I was an official stalker and somehow, I had to finagle my way into the home to see it first hand.
This must have been tough for Houston’s highest profile design blogger, because Webb is usually obsessed with French design, and the design in this particular home was clearly more . . . Belgian.
After the jump: The stalker gets in!!!
Design blogger Joni Webb identifies Houston’s latest “hot pocket of stores selling reasonably priced, yet very chic antiques.”
Where is it? At the Fiesta Mart!
Or more accurately, in and around the shopping strip that includes the Fiesta — on the southeast corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama. Webb’s Cote de Texas blog runs through items available at Antiques and Interiors on Dunlavy, the Country Gentleman, plus the latest shop to open: Boxwood Interiors, a second store by the same people who run Foxglove Interiors on Alabama, a few blocks to the east. Boxwood
. . . immediately called to me when, through the window, I glimpsed freshly laid seagrass matting stretching from the front door to the back. It’s amazing what spending a few extra dollars on seagrass will do to an old and ugly mall space.
After the jump: seagrass magic! Plus a few of Webb’s Fiesta-area finds.
Houston interior designer Joni Webb takes time out from her usual focus on French design to tell the story of a home in Avalon Place that was done up first in an English country style (top photo), and then — some years later — completely redone by the same owners to something more . . . 18th century Swedish (second from top).
The English incarnation, which was captured in a Country Living magazine feature in the 1990s, had taken years to perfect, Webb reports:
. . . the finished project was perfect: a cozy English, country-style home, filled with authentic antiques, Italian oil paintings, wall to wall seagrass, faux painted yellow and red walls, toile wallpapers, Bennison fabrics and Kenneth Turner candles. It was an open, fun house – the site of many parties where people gathered around a roaring fire and lounged in the deep George Smith sofa, all the while remarking on how warm and inviting the home was.
So, it was a great surprise to many, including [Houston interior designer Carol] Glasser herself, when the wife declared she had changed. She no longer loved her home’s decor, she wanted a new look – a Swedish look – and not just a Swedish antique here and there, but a total, complete Swedish home. And so, for the second time, everything in the house was either sold or was stored and they started the process of decorating their home, completely from scratch, again.
Who best to complete this European migration? Carol Glasser, the same designer who had created the house’s first look. (This time, she enlisted help from Swedish Style expert Katrin Cargill.) After the jump, more before-and-after photos, plus nitty-gritty details of international style-travel.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnLsrK5Tjs 400 330]
The brave work of Southwest Houston and Houston Apartment Renaissance scholars has been rewarded — a second mid-1980s Colonial House TV commercial is now available on YouTube!
No it’s not quite as iconic and over-the-top as the one with the VCR in the pool, but look at that fabulous indoor-outdoor furniture! Almost a quarter century later, we know Michael Pollack is alive and well, but does anyone know where that living-room mandala and dining-room set ended up?
- Colonial House Apartments [YouTube, via Lou Minatti]
- Beautiful Southwest Houston: The Golden Age of Apartment Living [Swamplot]
As hotels around the globe redecorate their rooms with slick new flat-screen televisions, the inevitable has happened: the market for entertainment armoires has become saturated. Juliet Chung of the Wall Street Journal reports on the sad fate of the unwanted furniture pieces:
Industry analysts estimate that as many as 40,000 armoires could be looking for new homes by the end of the year.
The rejects are ending up in some unlikely spots. Some are retiring to the Dominican Republic, where they’re being used in bed-and-breakfasts and private living rooms. Craigslist and eBay have hundreds of postings by people trying to unload the units. But most are gathering dust in warehouses from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The result: price drops. Chung reports one hotel-liquidation company is unloading armoires for $50 each; Hotel Surplus Outlet in Los Angeles has been refusing to accept any more for several months now.
“We don’t want to have a warehouse full of buggy whips,” says Michael Grimmé, owner of AMC Liquidators in Fort Lauderdale, where unsold armoires from luxury properties are piling up. Mr. Grimmé says he has cut prices by about 25%, which has attracted buyers who need to outfit lower-end hotels and motels.
Plenty of used old-style 27-inch televisions are available too, but of course that doesn’t make for as interesting reading. If you’ve still got one, or want a place to put one, or want to convert a former entertainment armoire into a computer desk or a nightstand or even — what a concept! — an armoire you can actually hang your clothes in, now’s your chance. The article lists four sources where you can buy used armoires for cheap:
- Au Revoir, Armoire [RealEstate Journal]
Photo: Doug & Michelle Smithwick, Country Cottage Chic
Ever wonder how come all the folks featured in shelter magazines get to live in such perfect, pristine interiors — when your place is such a wreck? Well, maybe they’re not really so different from you.
Cote de Texas’s Joni Webb, this month’s Houston House & Home magazine cover girl (well, actually — her dogs are on the cover; she’s on page 50) gives a picture of what really goes on behind the scenes:
I had exactly one week to get my home “photo ready.” I was totally overwhelmed by this news, but my family was ecstatic and promised to help me clean it up, which I knew would be a lie (it was.) . . .
The list of rooms that couldn’t be photographed was growing: my office is such a disaster even I hate to go in there, my daughter’s room is a typical teenage mess, the kitchen, with it’s outdated appliances, has new pewter hardware clashing with the brass plumbing fixtures which are awaiting their turn to be replaced. This same problem affected all the bathrooms. My decorating crises didn’t leave too many rooms “photo ready”so I had to get the rest of my house in tip top shape and fast. Like most people whom I sure don’t have “photo ready” rooms, my house is filled with the clutter of everyday life: piles and piles of unopened junk mail, back issues of unread magazines stashed everywhere, an overcrowded garage — not that they would want to photograph my garage, but after the grease-stained headboard cover story, who knew? In other words, my to-do list was very, very long, so long that I dreamed of calling the magazine to cancel. My suddenly publicity hungry husband threatened me with divorce if I did. And so, I proceeded on to d-day.
After the jump, what to do with junk mail and electrical cords: A Houston design blogger reveals how to make your home ready for its close-up . . . in a jiffy. Plus: more pics from the shoot!
Couldn’t get out of town last weekend? Francophile designer Joni Webb features a photo tour of Round Top’s semiannual antiques extravaganza on her Cote de Texas blog:
Once, the Round Top Antique Festival meant Americana and Texana antiques. Today, French, Swedish, and English antiques have overtaken the prominence that Americana and Texana once enjoyed. Now highbrow antiques share space with the very lowbrow: vintage, bric a brac, and just plain junk are plentiful in areas where the rent for stalls is cheap.
After the jump, more photos of vintage junk!
