Last week House Beautiful hit newsstands and mailboxes with some unique projects featured from Fawn Galli and Jeffrey Bilhuber.  The ideas come from beautiful inspirations that are worth a close look.

I’ve been quietly watching Fawn Galli’s work for a while now. She takes the time to acquaint herself with her clients by tapping into their creative daydreams.  In House Beautiful’s annual color issue (which focuses on all of the wonders of green) Galli’s Greenwich Village project is a virtual dreamland.  Taking inspiration from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the apartment has been designed so that visitors step into a new and fresh world when they enter the apartment. Passing beyond the white entryway one finds a space where the designer is unafraid to use a wild variety of colors and patterns that make the space whimsical, airy and welcoming all in one.

Jeffrey Bilhuber’s approach in his featured project is slightly more toned down and studious.  The dark colors and utilitarian touches in his kitchen are evocative of the early to mid-1940s– sort of a practical glamour.  His approach to the kitchen island continues this practicality for the eye. Islands, while useful, can interrupt the aesthetic of a space where colors and lines could compliment.  Bilhuber draws the island back into the aesthetic flow of the space by painting it black, lessening the garishness of the idea of a block of wood sitting in the middle of a room.

This latest issue of House Beautiful mixes the traditional, contemporary and unconventional in the “green” conversation. Green is a color that can be used in so many ways to invoke so many moods. The color runs the gamut from regal to sweet and juvenile.  Pick up a copy of the magazine for some wonderful ideas.

Houston in 1988, via zimbio.com

I was nine-years-old and somewhere foreign in Alabama. I was with my parents at a family reunion where I knew all of two people.  My parents had dragged me down there from my familiar and happy perch in suburban Wisconsin to an environment that I should have felt more connection to than I did.  I wore Top-Siders with big, slouchy highlighter yellow socks and colorblocked shorts. My cousins were adorned in lacey Peter Pan collars under dowdy lavender dresses and thickly simple bangs.  Conversations started and stopped like cars trying to make it down the Los Angeles 405 at 5:40pm and all I felt was boredom and a touch of the self-inflicted alienation that American girls tend to inflict upon themselves under the guise of “drama.”

It was the final day of the long weekend and we were attending a banquet in a sparse recreation center that had been outfitted with a DJ and catering from a restaurant from Birmingham… an interesting combination of stale canapés for hors d’ouevres and soul food for the main course. I just wanted cake.

Kids were dancing with the abandon that comes with showing off for the friends and family you’ve been playing and competing with your whole life and I watched until those first unmistakable synthesizer notes began to play over the speakers.  The DJ grabbed two of my cousins and then, inexplicably, came for me.  He shoved us all up the steps to the stage where a microphone was waiting  and then started the song over again.

Each day I live…

The three of us began to mumble into the silver ball.

I want to be… a day to give… the best of me.

I’m only one…. but not alone… my finest day is yet unkown…

We began to get a little bit louder and a little softer until

I rise and fall… yet through it all… this much remains

I WANT ONEEEEE MOMENT IN TIIIIMMMMEEE!

WHEN I’M MORE THAN I THOUGHT I COULD BEEEEEE!

WHEN ALLLLL OF MY DREAMS ARE A HEARRRRTBEAT AWAY!

AND THE ANSWERS ARE ALL UP TO ME!

Off-key, awkward and likely horrendous, we belted out that 1980s anthem for little black girls across the country as though anything we might ever have the desire to do… even eating that moist chocolate cake… depended on it.

That’s what Whitney did… and still does… for anyone who has jammed out to her cassette tapes.  She brought us together. In the 1980s it was a group of little girls who had little in common or a group of best friends screaming “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” into their hairbrushes at a slumber party.  This weekend it was a diverse group sitting on a porch after a dinner party who remembered every word of “The Greatest Love of All.” Or it was a mother and father letting their five-year-old watch the singing of the national anthem from the Super Bowl XXV. It’s as if Whitney’s voice is a cure loneliness, except her own soul seemed immune to its effects.

This weekend when a hotel maid found Houston dead in a hotel room bathtub we were all snapped back to a reminder of something pure. A voice that is celebrated for it’s raw talent, not the spectacles the owner of that voice produced.  Many of us were rewound back to our childhood days of badly trying to emulate that voice, of which there will never be an imitation.  As speculation and investigation continue in the aftermath of the singer’s death, let’s hold on to our warm flashes of the past and remember her for how she made us feel, which was that each of us had somewhere that we belonged.

via NYTimes.com

Van Der Straeten has one of those minds that sets the pace for design.  He started out making jewelry after giving up on studying engineering in France.

As he moved into bold structural–almost sculptural–shapes, he began to use jewelry as a study in forms that would take him into furniture and home goods design.

via artedona.com

With pieces that are a mix of function, luxe and artistic vision, to own a van der Straeten is to invest in an objet that can be passed down for generations… and those generations will heartily thank you. Variations of his work can be found on artedona.com and at 1stDibs.com.  Travelers and Parisians can also visit van der Straeten’s gallery in the Marias district of Paris.

Well, my jaw fell into my chardonnay when I saw this:

via WWD

Riccardo Tisci, Givenchy’s creative director, nailed it. Madonna’s performance nailed it. These are two sentences that I am surprised to be writing.

via madonnalicious.typepad.com

As for Tisci, I haven’t paid much attention to his work with Givenchy since he started at the fashion house in 2005.  He seems like a nice man and the story about his acceptance of the position being partially based on his desire to give his family financial aid is a sweet one.  I was never overly wowed other than a few pieces here and there that I would spy on Style.com. The sheer and the ruffles of late just didn’t give me any sort of pause.  Last night was different.  I gaped at the costume for about 45 seconds before I even noticed Madonna’s performance. It was appropriate, stunning and–to use an overused word, fabulous.  Madonna was right on, though some of her dance moves showed us that she isn’t the 22-year-old that she would have us believe.  It everything a Super Bowl performance should be, no?

Anthropologie’s Greenfynch settee, shown above in Padrina, called out to the beach cravings I’ve been having this week. Having a deadline when it’s 70 degrees in January will call forth such cravings. The seat acts as a wingback chair for two, with ball-and-claw feet, cotton and linen upholstery, and a kiln-dried hardwood frame.  It is as useful as it is a conversation piece.  For more information, please visit anthropologie.com.

Modeled after the arched form of an aquatic wave, the above seat is called Chopu, after the Tahitian form that is a surfer’s dream.   It is one in a series of seats by Pennsylvania’s O’Hara Studio that is inspired by water and its elegant movements. The seat is assembled from multiple wooden elements which produce a radiating pattern designed to accentuate the fluid motion of the bench. For more information, please visit www.oharastudio.com.

One of the many wonderful crafts featured on Thursday Night Dinner

Today I was honored to have been featured in a profile about how CamilleMaurice was started and what keeps me inspired.  Those of you who remember when I used to share recipes on Camille will see a familiar sight… a recipe at the end of the post! Head over to check it out, I hope you enjoy both the profile and the Champagne Chicken!

via kiptonart.com

It was only a couple of years ago that I discovered a deep appreciation for geometric art forms… an epiphany that I chronicled here on CamilleMaurice.  Today’s FBT leans toward that admiration of the calculatedly abstract.

This abstract, mixed media piece consists of found wood collected in Brooklyn and Vermont and measures 60 x 76 inches.  The artist, Stephan Fowlkes, is a graduate of Bennington College whose list of accomplishments is long.  Among them is his nomination to The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Young Leaders Forum.  His role with the group was Fellow for the Arts, which took him to China on two occasions as an American representative. In addition to his productive studio time, Fowlkes works as arts editor for The New York Optimist.  View more of his work at kiptonart.com.