A Southern Gothic on the Porch

In an attempt to spruce up my austere veranda I have been hunting around for some inspiration.

When I was very pregnant with my first child I spent most of the daylight hours over about 3 days sitting on our front verandah in the sunshine reading this book:

This is a mystery wrapped in a childhood memoir and has been criticised for its uncertain ending.  I love Ms Tartt with a passion. I love the fact she takes 8 years or more to write books, her chain smoking, her clipped enigmatic interviews, her hermitlike characteristics.  Please write another book Donna. 

Of course porches are a great place to sit and read Southern Gothic books.  Some books are meant to be read outside.    Especially dark and twisted stories.   To me, an Edgar Allan Poe book is not for curling up with in a darkened bedroom.  

Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as 'an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience'.    

So how about this shingled porch:

for a bit of Tennessee Williams preferably The Glass Menagerie, featuring the slightly annoying  and out of touch with reality Amanda:

And this verandah suggests mint juleps, lush gardens and a bit of heartbreak, so I would recommend:

Gone with the Wind, not Gothic at all, but Southern and hot and feisty and a really great read no matter how unfashionable Margaret Mitchell may be:

Back to porches and verandahs.  I need seating, cushions, a mirror to reflect the garden back, a little side table or two.  Very simple.  Like this:

Or this, but with no cane furniture.  Even though I love cane, someone else here does not. 

Maybe a painted bench: 

Or this, what a clean and crisp, wonderful spot: 

Late last year I read what is possibly the scariest book ever.    I read it in about 6 hours, and kept thinking and thinking about it.   Of course now it has been made into a film so it is widely known.   

This is not a book to read late into the night.   It is a book to read with the sun shining down on you, perhaps a little breeze through the bougainvillea, to remind you that the world is not as horrifying as Cormac McCarthy makes it seem.

So for The Road, I would suggest:

This lovely trellissed porch:

Or something with a stiff drink on hand:

And to finish, something slightly run down and peeling, for another frightening book (so much so I couldn't finish it), written I am sorry to say by a man I would not like to have dinner with:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

(Images: (2) Apartment Therapy (4) Country Living (6) Skona Hem (7) Coastal Living (8) Ideal Home (9) My Sweet Savannah (11) not sure sorry! (12) Country Living (13) Traditional Home)

Tweet

Old Ladies to admire and a Ghost Story

Watching the Pixar film UP a few weeks ago it occurred to me how rarely modern culture has regard to the elderly, except in really one dimensional (grumpy, complaining, super fit) ways.

This is particularly so with women. And yet in our families, if we are lucky enough to still have grandmothers or great aunts or elderly mothers, they are so central to our lives.

So here are 3 elderly ladies who inspire me:

Sheila Scotter. Former editor in chief of Vogue Australia.


Notable characteristic - only ever wears black and white. Lives on her own at 88. Carries off a headband with aplomb.

She said: anyone can buy fashion but you can't buy style.

Dame Zara Bate (died in June 1989 at the age of 80)

Notable characteristic - stoicism in the face of the drowning death of her husband, the Prime Minister of Australia, in 1967. Getting on with her life after said drowning, including remarrying and always being wonderfully matter of fact in her appraisal of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

She said: on redecorating the Lodge, the Prime Minister's residence in Canberra, that she painted the walls of one of the bedrooms a bright Schiaparelli pink, with a glazed white ceiling.

Dame Roma Mitchell (died in March 2000 at the age of 87)


Notable achievements: almost too many to mention including being the first Australian female judge, Queens Counsel and governor of an Australian State (South Australia).

She said: she never believed 'that women have a monopoly over certain qualities and that men have the monopoly of other qualities'

At the request of the lovely Jane in Spain, here is my little ghost story.

The beginning: we know from the title search of our house that a lady lived in it for more than 30 years and that she was elderly when she died.

The middle: when I was about 38 weeks pregnant, my husband woke to find an elderly lady standing at my bedside, looking down over me in a protective, non scary way. He went back to sleep thinking he had just been a participant in one of those very realistic dreams.

The end: the very next day we decided to walk around the corner to the cafe for coffee. I opened the gate first but instead of walking into the street full tilt in my usual manner, something made me hesitate. That hesitation meant that I was missed, by just a nano second, by a cyclist who was riding down the hill at high speed on the footpath very very close to the gate side of the path. And yes those handle bars were certainly at pregnancy bump height.

I am not sure I believe in ghosts. But perhaps I do believe in guardian angels.

(Images: (1) The Sartorialist (2) National Archives of Australia (3) Mitchell Chambers.com.au)

Tweet

Melbourne in a Bento Box

I have found a delicious little website which wraps up in one exquisite package all the wonderful bits and pieces which make up Melbourne.

The idea is that you can create a bento box of your favourite parts of Melbourne. Each image has a number which corresponds to your description of the thing or activity. Each bento box gets a Melbourne Combo number and is loaded on their website for sharing, voting and viewing.

Here are some examples:

1. Love sipping on: St Ali Coffee at Outpost

2. Love accessorising with: Lulu Splendor

3. Love a few drinks at: Little Creatures

4. Love sales at: Cactus Jam Clearance Store

1. Love eating out at: Gills Diner

2. Love hanging out at: Books for Cooks

3. Love accessorising with: Morgan and Jane

4. Love looking good in: Material By product

And here is one someone has created for their favourite blogs:

1. Love reading: The Design Files

2. Love reading: I do believe I came with a Hat

3. Love reading: Daydream Lily

4. Love reading: RUSSH blog

Isn't this a wonderful way to encapsulate the spirit of a city? You can subscribe for free and it is not a sponsored site - you cannot pay to get your business included. It is run by a very clever brother and sister team.

Now I wonder what 4 things I would choose....

Tweet

Current obsession - chests of drawers (or should that be chest of drawerses)

What an everyday item... but so important. Especially if you have a secret stream running under the old part of your house, as I do, which runs directly under an important part of my walk-in wardrobe (where my nicest clothes are) and where that stream may or may not be making some of my clothes slightly dampish and maybe not smelling so great.

Time to elevate all low lying clothes I said.

Off to Ikea to buy a very plain, very white chest of drawers and move all the low clothes into my bedroom proper and into the chest . If the knobs are ugly, I thought, as they usually are, no fear, I will buy some pretty crystal or porcelain knobs and all will be well. I had in mind something like this:

Or this:

Nothing wrong with that plan, right?

Unfortunately I may have mentioned my idea to my husband. He forbad me to make the excursion to Ikea. He said I will not have THAT furniture in our bedroom (or words to that effect).

(Clarification required: I love Ikea especially their white open storage shelves great for children's bedrooms. My husband cannot bear it. He can't stand all the crowds of people there, and the check out line, and the fact you can't take shortcuts to escape, and always tries to point out shoddy workmanship in the items when we are there (which as you can gather is not very often).

His solution (with which I eventually agreed) - my divine mother in law, who is in possession of a great deal of unused furniture, has loaned us a very serviceable oak chest. It needs some more blue and white, maybe some chinese ginger jars but I do not want to overload the minimal furniture free environment in our bedroom.

Chests of drawers are somewhat out of fashion. We all love to display our clothes these days in neat Aerin Lauder style open shelves. But mine now stores all my camisoles, scarves, stockings, Tshirts, knobbly and silk knits, and jeans. Things you generally know you have and don't need to see on display. I think.

Unless you are going to strip them down and paint which is probably a task I am not up to, the wood needs to have a real patina, and not be too orangey. That means age. And age can cost. However you can still pick up nice ones, in fact antique chests seem to be better value than new ones, because, as I mentioned above, I think they are a bit out of fashion.

Here are the ones I like:

And here is my humble one.

There is only one pitfall - I put all my black cardigans (of which I have many) and black stockings (again, many) in one drawer together, and now I need a torch to find anything!

(Images: (1) Homes and Gardens (2) and (3) Ikea (4) Country Living (5) Joanna Henderson (6) Polly Wreford (7) Chris Everard (8) Elle Decor (9) Cookie (10) Jane)

Tweet

A Swedish Detective Trilogy and Swedish Style

Do you know how with some books the world inhabited by the characters just wooshes into your head fully formed? Complete with smells, the food they eat, and the colour and look of their world. This happened for me in the very successful Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (the first two are pictured below).

Tragically Mr Larsson, a journalist, died suddenly of a heart attack just before these books were published. Briefly put the books focus on two main characters, a journalist and publisher Mikael Blomkvist, a rather charming, passionate and determined investigative journalist who has a series of complicated personal and business relationships weaving through his life. I somewhat suspect he resembles his creator in character at least. The other character is Lisbeth Salander, a very mysterious, highly intelligent, possibly mentally unwell young woman. How these two people meet and solve a mystery is the subject of the first book. The second deals with in part, the fall out from the first adventure, and creates a new one which has its origins all the way back in Lisbeth's childhood.

Now, getting back to my point about the world of the characters. These books evoke a most striking sense of place (Stockholm), right down to the light, the streetscapes and the food they eat. Forgive me for my gender bias, but the way Larsson gets under the skin of his female characters, and the attention to decor and styling details is most un boylike,

I have this habit (perhaps it is better described as a compulsion which I should be able to better control) where if I like a writer I have to go and read every single thing they have ever written. Imagine my annoyance that part 3 (The Girl Who Stepped in a Hornet's Nest) won't be published until October 2009 in English. But unless I can teach myself Swedish before then and read it in its original language I am pretty much stranded on the seas of the slow to respond UK publishing market.

Anyway, dragging myself back to the point, Stieg Larsson's attention to detail is especially true when it comes to the various apartments in which the key characters reside, in Lundagarten and Appelviken, and on Sodermalm Island and Hedeby Island and other suburbs of Stockholm. The images below reflect his descriptions.

This is where I think Erika Berger (the co-publisher of Millenium) would live with her artist husband.

This looks like Lisbeth's Ikea furnished apartment on Sodermalm Island.

This more expensively furnished room could be a room from Henrik Vanger's house on Hedeby Island.

And this is a man's bedroom if ever I saw it so I say it belongs to Mikael Blomkvist:

Get the books and read them, they are great. (Oh, and one more thing - don't think just because the author has an eye for nicely styled interiors that these are light hearted mystery stories with a flippant superficial tone. They are in my view classic detective novels which have a very dark undercurrent and seek to expose some serious deficiencies in Swedish society, government and policing. This makes them even more not less satisfying to read.)

(Images: (1) Verandah, (2) - (4) Sasha Waddell Design, (5) House to Home (6) Marie Claire Maison)

Tweet

My architectural inspiration - Skywood House

This is Skywood House, designed by architect Graham Phillips (who at the time worked for Sir Norman Foster) for himself and built in around 1999.

This is a very famous house, situated in 5 acres off the M25 freeway near a town called Denham about an hour from London. It has won countless awards and been featured in a number of books, including the excellent See Through Houses by Catherine Slessor (2001) which I highly recommend if you are into this style of architecture. Skywood House received a lot of publicity in the early 2000s but has not been much discussed in the last few years.

I only recently found that Skywood has its own website. Not surprising for a house which has been used so regularly for location shoots that its owners often have to move to a neighbouring annex. Whilst I confess that took a bit of magic away for me, it is hard to blame the owners for taking advantage of the opportunity.

Anyway it is hard to describe how much I love this house. And 10 years later I think it still looks incredible. It has not dated at all. If anything, architecture has now caught up with it.

These shots are from the website:

This house meets all my architectural requirements for a new build: it is white, clean lined, set in a green oasis, has lots of glass, a completely flat roof, a major water element (the lake is man made) and has a strong Mies Van Der Rohe influence. Graham Phillips built it like a kit home, assembling component structural steel and other parts over a 72 hour period. You can do that when you are an architect and are brave enough to dispense with the need for a builder.

The strange thing is that when we renovated 7 years ago I only had one little picture of Skywood House. All the pictures here made me realise that Skywood House is almost identical in terms of key design elements to the new part of our house. So, whilst we didn't copy it, on some kind of telepathic subconscious level, we in fact did.

A rather grumpy sounding person wrote in a letter to the UK Architects Journal in 1999 that Skywood House is a great house for robots, and speculated on what you would do if you were taking a bath and had to run naked through the house to retrieve your book. I don't think this is an issue at all. It is not as if there is a block of flats peering into the living area. You need lots of storage and you would be set.

What do you think? Impractical or perfect?

Tweet