Year of No Rubbish Purchases - Month 1

I have been sorely tempted this month, by a pouty Angelina Jolie on the cover of Vanity Fair, by a super soft caramel wrap scarf thing at Husk, by the abundance of ballet flats for spring which are on sale in every shoe store and by my desperate need for more storage baskets.

But I have refrained and remain reasonably true to my aim.

This month I have invested in:

This APC t-shirt.  I am very particular about my stripes and when I find stripes in the right width and spacing I find it hard to be disciplined.  And a stripey top is a long term classic, and therefore fits my criteria.

To demonstrate.  These stripes are wrong: 

(Sienna Miller)

These are unflattering:

(Claudia Schiffer)

But these are perfect.  Funny isn't it?

(Olivia Palermo)

Secondly I bought this plastic container which is for storing cut up onion in the fridge. It stops the onion infusing everything else with an oniony smell. I have wanted one of these for years and came across it in a shop. Of course I could always use any old plastic container but there is something so very satisfying about putting an item into a facsimile of itself.

There is an important carve out to this exercise: children's clothes.   I had to buy some of these otherwise my son would be running around with a bare tummy and ankles showing.

Hence, the purchase of these (sorry for small image) from here.   If you can't wear peacock blue skinny cords when you are 7 years old then when can you?  She has barely taken them off since she got them. 

Epilogue:  I had an incident which required the purchase of a Vanity Fair, which I regret. What happened was this: I had an early morning client meeting in the eastern end of the city and I dropped my son off at creche with half an hour to get there. I rang my husband for his view about the best way to get to my destination from Chapel Street.  We agreed Punt Road.  Bad idea. Punt Road was a car park. I inched forward, minute by minute, the appointed time for my meeting getting closer and closer. I emailed my client to let them know I would be a little late.  I patiently sat in the gridlock. I could feel myself getting slightly panicky.  I finally got into the city and instead of driving around looking for a good value car park as planned I parked at the $70 a day one.  I parked the car and grabbed my briefcase only to realise it was completely empty.  I had left all my documents at home on the kitchen bench. Not only that, but I had no paper to write on and no pen to write with.   In all my working life that has never happened to me.   I ran to the nearest newsagent, grabbed a pad and a pen, opened my wallet to pay the $5.50 and realised I had no money. At all.  No coins, no notes.  I then remembered I had let my daughter take her pocket money from my wallet that morning. I gave the purse lipped lady my card to pay by EFTPOS and she said 'sorry $10 minimum'. I said (pleadingly) 'I am having a really bad morning' and she said (unflinchingly) '$10 minimum'. So I grabbed the thing which was closest to me, which happened to be a Vanity Fair (the one with the Twilight girls on the cover).  I then went to my meeting, puffed, hot and a little bit peeved. 

Tweet

More Rooms in Art

I get a few emails about this post so I thought I would do another one.  

To kick off, Matisse, who invented the idea of the completely red room.  Personally I couldn't live with it, but I can see why people do rooms in this way.  For me, my red dining room is enough to be going on with, and even that room I rarely enter. 

The Red Studio (1911) 

This is a wonderful abstract art piece by Theo Van Doesburg called Counter Composition, painted in 1924.  Very radical for its time.

Its perfect match is this fantastic 1975 kitchen in a John Fowler house in the UK. I have seen red and black laminate kitchens but only rarely blue: 

(Warning: water restrictions rant coming up)

It is rainy and awful (still, again) here in Melbourne. We have floods all over the state and yet our water storage is still only at about 42%.   I can't work it out.  Is there a leak in the dams? I am told the main reservoir is very extremely ginormous and will take years to fill.  So now, after putting a dripper system in our garden and installing three huge water tanks four years ago when the drought began, I may just be able to start using my decommissioned sprinklers.   But there is really no point as we pulled up most of our lawn years ago.   And my water tanks are now overflowing. 

Anyway, I am not so sure about this David Hockney, but you cannot go past him for blue skies and shimmering pools which to me are the epitome of LA.   

Nick Wilder (1966) 

This is the Kauffman house at Palm Springs built in 1946 and designed by Richard Neutra.

And this, the Petrucelli house in Kew here in Melbourne by McBride Charles Ryan. 

To perfectly capture the misty waters of Venice, what better than Giorgione's The Tempest, painted in 1508, which is possibly the first landscape painting (where landscape is not just the background) in Western art.  only 6 works survive and he died of the plague at the age of 34.  Very little is known about him but the maturity and calm in his works influenced many Venetian painters including Titian.  Something pretty creepy is going on here. But no one has ever really been able to work out what. 

To accompany this work, a Venetian palazzo:

and an interior which seems to me to be very Italian in style and feel:

This work is by Ken Done, a designer and artist who was very famous in Australia in the 1980s for his almost Fauvist style vistas of Sydney Harbour.  He uses bright primary colours, which are perfect for any children's room. 

Happy weekend to one and all.  We are off to have Greek for dinner with the children tonight and tomorrow I am hoping to buy some lawn from the nurseries to plump up the nude bits in our garden, and also some more herbs and possibly some silverbeet.  

(Images: (2)(3) Elle Decor (10)(11) Lost sorry! (13) Design Sponge)

Tweet

Drive by Houses - Avoca Street, South Yarra

I often drive up Avoca Street on my way to the Tan for a run.

This is my absolutely favourite street in all of Melbourne. I know there are more perfect streets, and more well known streets, and more paved with gold streets, and this one certainly has its share of 1970's brick 3 storey apartment blocks. But it is on a hill, and is a short walk to the Royal Botanic Gardens, and it has some amazing houses.

I do love a good sticky beak at the outside of houses. It is why I prefer being a car passenger than driving. I am sure I have almost had many near misses, distracted by some wonderful facade as I drive past. In some ways gazing upon the outside is more satisfying than seeing inside a house. I often don't like the inside of people's houses. Especially those houses owned by people with lots of money. Sorry but it's true.

My way, one can furnish the house oneself. Elegantly, sparsely and relatively true to the period, with lots of modern touches thrown in.

Anyway, I thought I would take some sneaky photos to see if you agree with my assessment.

All the food groups are represented in Avoca Street:

Early Victorian 

Georgian 

Victorian Terrace (at the end of this row (called Lee Terrace) is Waterloo which I wrote about here)

Spanish Mission

Melbourne modern Palladian

1930s Georgian revival

Palm Springs

 Italianate

Forbidding and Inaccessible 

Colonial

Do you see why I like it so much?  

.

Tweet

Biscuits for the Medici

On a windy Sunday recently I turned my hand to some Florentine biscuits, part of a life long search for biscuits which maintain the interest of both children and adults.

I remember these biscuits being rather popular in the 1970's and feeling quite grown up when I ate them as a child.

I adapted a Karen Martini recipe for these, and had to road test some of the ingredients on my daughter.  She didn't like the glace ginger so I took it out. 

A tip - this is sticky and messy to make, so much so that it is almost impossible to form a biscuit to put on the baking tin by hand.  I scooped spoonfuls into 10 cm metal rings, pressed down and then lifted the ring off.

Ingredients

395 ml condensed milk

250 g cornflakes

150 g unsalted peanuts coarsely chopped

100g dried cranberries coarsely chopped 

100g dried apricots coarsely chopped

finely grated zest of one lemon

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/3 teaspoon ground cinnamon

250 g melted dark chocolate (I used milk to satisfy small children)

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.  Line two or three baking trays with baking paper.
Combine all ingredients save the chocolate in a large bowl and mix well.
Press 1 to 2 tablespoons of mixture into 10 cm scone or biscuit cutters and place onto trays. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until golden and cooked.  Remove and when a bit cooler, cool on wire racks.
Spread melted chocolate on the flat back of each biscuit.  Leave to set.
They keep for about 7 days in an airtight container. 

So why Florentine biscuits?  Some say the biscuits are actually Austrian in origin. Another story has it that a master confectioner created them at Versailles, in the kitchens of King Louis XIV of France, in honour of the Medicis of Florence when they visited.   Those who are up on their Medici history will recall that Catherine de Medici married Henry, Duke d'Orleans who later became Henry II in 1547.  Louis XIV reigned between 1654 and 1715.  By this stage the Medici family had waned in power and I think they were quite unlikely to have been visiting Versailles.  

In any event, can you imagine that a little cornflakey biscuit would have impressed or delighted the likes of these people?  Somehow I just can't see it.   

Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) by Bronzino

Giovanni (Lorenzo's son, later Pope Leo V) by Bronzino

Guilio (later Pope Clement VII)

One thing my European History studies taught me is that you do not mess with the Medici.  They would probably see conspiracies galore in such a frivolous biscuit  

Tweet

Giveaway Winner

It is Father's Day here in Australia.

Just a quick post to announce the giveaway winner.   I know a lot of you who commented said you didn't have an iphone but you all went into the truly random draw which was drawn by a small Spiderman.

The winner is Amanda from Small Acorns.   Amanda - email me with the best address for you and I will post it to you tomorrow.

And now, when you are walking coolly down the streets of Auckland like Lauren Santo Domingo, you can be certain that when you drop your phone it won't break!

For all of you having a Father's Day thingy, have fun.  To all of you having a double Father's Day thingy (for your father and then for your children) don't let the family organisational stress get too overwhelming...

My children have given their father a tomato plant, and a plastic container of Worm Wee.  It's true.  It looks like cranberry juice and smells like wee.  I don't know where it came from and I don't want to know.   And of course then there is the mind boggling concept of how they get the wee from the worms in the first place.  I am wondering if perhaps worm wee is a euphemism for pureed worms.   



xoxo

Tweet

Barrow House Bathroom ...

Do bathrooms usually age well or badly?

I think of all the rooms in the house they can be the most prone to dating.  We did our bathroom before we had children and didn't pay that much attention.    I won't make that mistake again.   

It therefore has some deadly features:  square knobs on the cabinets which are apt to slice little hands open, tiles which are too pale and too creamy to keep particularly clean, and a tap which hangs elegantly over the bath in just such a spot that the children keep catching and bruising their backs on it.  You should see my son's back.  

I spend a bit of time sitting in the bathroom doing bath supervision.   For a range of reasons but mostly back protecting.   The splashing makes me a bit crazy but I am working on controlling my Bathroom Rage. 

But if I am going to spend time in the bathroom, I wish it could be in this one.   In front of the fire, with a glass of aged Reisling (that's a little joke).

This bathroom used to be a living room and you can tell.   I think I prefer it during the day because that overhead light it a bit too laboratory for me.  

What are your bathroom mistakes?  Surely I am not the only one who is brain dead in the practical bathroom department? 

(All Images from Andrew Maynard's Barrow House) 

Tweet

Office Brown to Wishing Chair Whimsy

I tend to launch my shopping raids on Ikea in military style, swooping in with my printed out page of catalogue, storming the ramparts of the yellow paths which force you to walk past every single room display, searching in a focused, targeted way, more often than not dragging unhappy children behind me who only came because they thought I might buy them one of those enormous stuffed toys from the children's section.   If I plan carefully, I can do the whole in and out thing in 45 minutes.
  

My distaste for the whole Ikea experience means that if I have gone there to buy something I Will Not Leave Empty Handed.   When the shelves I wanted for my daughter were only available in pale dirt brown (I think they call it Birch), did I sensibly retreat?  No, I allowed a 7 year old girl who wants dinosaurs to come back to life persuade me that it would look fine in her room.  Well you know, it didn't look fine.  It looked terrible. It looked like someone had accidentally dumped a piece of 1970s office furniture in a pink elves' forest. 

So I decided to refurbish it.  

I chose last weekend to do this task, armed in advance with lots of advice from the man from Paint Spot.  Never mind that I had the worst hangover 'food poisoning' I have had since university. (Never, never, ever, drink aged Riesling. I think that was how the Germans managed to overrun Alsace those two times last century.)   

One thing I know now is that it is not easy to paint a veneer.  It needs to be sanded (which I did, lazily), it needs two coats of undercoat, it then needed a further two coats of our chosen paint.  I thought I could get away with two coats in total. I was wrong. 

And then I wallpapered the outside. I know that that is not the usual way, and that people  usually wallpaper the inside of shelves, but that meant that the pattern wouldn't be seen that much given all the books intended for the shelves.

And are you wondering about the green? I was.  It is called Green Thorns.  It looks almost florescent in a darkened room. I confess my idea was to go with pale pink or cream but I felt my daughter should have some say and this is what she chose.   And she was quite adamant so I went with it. 

And here it is all filled up.  I call the dolls on the top the House of Representatives.   They sit in judgment on what goes on in this bedroom.   If you look carefully can see Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop.  

And here is a shot of a sequined basket I found for her a few months back.  I think I like it more than she does! 

A perfect accompaniment to dreams of the Wishing Chair.   Wouldn't mind one of these myself. 

Tweet