Saturday, August 14, 2010

Appearing Luxurious Atmosphere

Luxurious usually correlated with real estate home in classic style, leather furniture, and full detail engraving accessories. Now, luxurious has new dimension that is ultra modern apartment design with glamour impression and fantastic view to sea. This nuance form in this apartment unit.

apartment modern interior design ideas
This unit consist of three bedrooms, has open layout without partition wall between foyer, family room, and dining room so feel spacious. Main area surrounded by wide windows from floor until plafond so maximize view to sea.
luxurious apartment interior design inspiration
To appearing luxurious atmosphere, this apartment arranged in classic and modern style. This design approach applied in furniture and accessories form, refers to geometris squares, but sweetened with curve detail like in chair leg, sofa arms and headboard border. To create comfortable situation, cool, and luxury, colors nuance inside chosen from soft colors combination like blue navy, pale gray, broken white with little touch of wooden chocolate colors, black or silver that give glamorous and elegant impression.
home apartment elegant design living room modern
Beside of that, motif and texture from every imported material exposed, so make room beautiful without need to adding ornament. The imported material such as wenge wood from Africa which covered bedroom floor and palissandro classico marble from Italy which that covered almost of all apartment floors has exotic tendon motif. Tearose marble from Spain and red marquine marble from Italy covered floor and wall of bathroom. Apartment interior decorate with soft furnishing like vitrage, gordyn, and blind for the windows, wallpaper for wall, carpet for floor, upholstery for furniture and also bedcover in bedroom.
apartment modern interior luxurious design ideas
Beside have soft texture, soft furnishing elements combined harmony. For example, family room ordered with one sofa in velvet layered, single chair in silk layered, and frieze carpet. Interesting accent seems at cloth pillow, decorated with feather and beads. The unique things are a combination of leather dining chairs with dining room table and mirror at the wall which has cockle shells formation. All of wall in main area covered with cream wallpaper and combined with dropped down ceiling and a couple of candle place from crystal.
apartment house interior design ideas

luxurious flat apartment design ideas

At main bedroom, blue bedroom with gold colors motif and has baroque nuance succeed to become eye catcher which combined with cut and loop carpet in contemporary style also upholstery in pale blue colors at Cleopatra chair, headboard, and bench. At children bedroom, pony skin material use as upholstery single sofa and carpet succeed make nuance become live. Finally, layout lighting and arts object collection have important role to give spirit of interior. Lamp in this apartment programmed to appear four ambience, normal, light, and romantic, and gallery. Beside use dimmer and integrated automation system, lamp armature chosen in unusual form, such as Floss lamp decoration.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Decompressing

After 4 days of 6+ hours of driving per day, I'm in decompression mode.  First home to Virginia from my dad's in Illinois...  That took 2 days (we split up the drive for the kids' sake) and we delayed leaving because we were having such a good time SO that led us into 2 more days of straight driving up and back from NY to celebrate with some friends. 

{Justin "up-up-up-downing" at our McDonald's makeshift picnic on our roadtrip home}

Before we left though, we did get some fishing in at the lake...


I'm a terrible fisherman  ("fisherwoman" just sounded odd there) but I love it now that Christian has so much fun doing it:


He kept reeling it in and seeing the minnow (for bait) on the hook and thinking he'd caught "a little fish!"  (We didn't have the heart to tell him.)

Dave's learning too...

I love those cloudy days at the lake where you just relax.  There's gray beauty everywhere...



{"One-two-three-four-five-six-seven... SEVEN snails" says Christian}

He was so excited to catch his very first bass with his Nanoo (my dad)...  (It was definitely the smallest bass we'd ever seen ;) 


My dad's an awesome fisherman and even mounted "my" very first bass that I caught at four years old.  Here he is now in the playhouse:

I wasn't ready to leave for home but I guess it's always better to leave while you're still having fun.  We're finally home from an amazing time in NY at Eddie & Jaithan's where we got to see & meet some amazing blogging friends in person.  ...Debra of5th and State, Patricia of PVE Design, Michele of My Notting Hill, and the Vamp (Valorie of Visual Vamp) to name a few...  it was like meeting old friends and they're just as amazing as you'd expect in 'real' life. As my usual I'm-having-too-much-fun-to-take-pictures-self, I didn't take any but in true Eddie & Jaithan fashion, you can bet it was beautiful.   And when I got home, there was a beautiful package waiting for me from Patricia who had no idea we were even going to meet when she's sent it the week before:



She'd found an amazing book that she thought I'd love for $1 and sent it to me!  (Now this is the kind of person I want to be.  She's so incredibly thoughtful and generous!!  And seriously chic- oh my goodness!)  Anyway, It's called Found Style by Amy and David Butler and the photos are incredible:


I plan on taking some time this week to read it and another book (Living With What You Love) this week ad am attempting to decompress from our whirlwind of driving. 


I've got a great week set up with clients to get back into the swing of things (if any of you are reading I missed you!! ;)  ... tonight we had an awesome dinner-  a Greek Salad with ground tukey (I swear it's good) and life is beautiful.


I hope you're having a great summer too& are enjoying any minute you can. 

xoxo, Lauren

ps-  This is so odd, but for the past 5-7 days or so, I haven't been able to type...  I don't know what's up but it's worse than usual!!  (I keep mixing up all the letters and leaving letters out.... ??hahaha  ....  ok only funny if it stops.)

1 year

today is my 1 year blogiversary! 

starting this blog was one of the best things i could have ever done.  i have met so many amazing people through blogging.  i never thought that i would enjoy it near as much as i do, and i definitely never thought that blogging would open so many doors for me. 

i am so thankful for all of my readers.  i really enjoy hearing from each of you, whether by comment or by email.  hearing that you’ve enjoyed a post makes my day, so THANK YOU so much!!  i’m looking forward to another great year of blogging and i hope that all of you will stick around for it.

xo,

Cristi

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Sunday, August 1, 2010

American Immigration in Historical Perspective

Randall Stephens



On Sunday, August 1, Peter O'Dowd reported on NPR that "Arizona's controversial immigration law went into effect this week, or at least parts of it." In a summary that looked at the reaction of church groups and religious leaders, O'Dowd noted "Despite significant support for the bill in the state, critics have been loud and organized." This comes on the heals of a Federal Judge's blocking of the more controversial aspects of the law last Wednesday. Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction on sections of the law that called for law enforcement officers to check a person's immigration status or require suspects to prove they were in the country legally.



Like abortion, gay marriage, or taxes, little divides Americans like the issue of immigration. And this historic conflict keeps repeating itself.



Unlike a variety of European nations, the US has had relatively open policies on citizenship. (Naturalization rates, as well, have remained high in Canada, the US, and Sweden.) Through much of the 19th century the new nation needed laborers and settlers. Still, the question of just who was or was not an American tended to exercise the masses and energize politicians. Sometimes the matter stirred up intense feelings.



Numerous Easterners in the 1850s and 1860s worried about the "wild Irish hordes" that descended on coastal cities. Millions would have agreed with English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it--by heavens--squelch it." Nativism and the Know-Nothing Party made great political hay of the "Papist Menace." Samuel F. B. Morse--who helped invent the telegraph and a code for transmitting words over vast distances and also crafted his own brand of virulent xenophobia--was particularly adamant on the subject. In 1835 he wrote: "O there is no danger to the Democracy; for those most devoted to the Pope, the Roman Catholics, especially the Irish Catholics, are all on the side of Democracy. Yes; to be sure they are on the side of Democracy. They are just where I should look for them. Judas Iscariot joined with the true disciples. . . . They feel themselves so strong, as to organize themselves even as foreigners into foreign bands, and this for the purpose of influencing our elections. . . . That they are men who having professed to become Americans, by accepting our terms of naturalization, do yet, in direct contradiction to their professions, clan together as a separate interest, and retain their foreign appellation."



In the 1880s anti-Chinese legislation gained wide support in the American West and fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law read, in part: "That the master of any vessel who shall knowingly bring within the United States on such vessel, and land or permit to be landed, any Chinese laborer, from any foreign port or place, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars for each and every such Chinese laborer so brought, and maybe also imprisoned for a term not exceeding one year."



Most famously, though, the Immigration Act of 1924 raised the bar so that undesirable immigrants would have a difficult time entering the country. One stipulation ensured that old-stock white immigrants would receive special preference. "The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the Untied States census of 1890, but the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100."



Many of the exclusionary policies were changed for good when President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, supported heavily by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. That landmark legislation did not end the debate or the ongoing contest over immigration.



The Arizona Law may or may by like or unlike earlier immigration laws. But it certainly lends itself to significant historical questions of legal matters, national identity, ethnicity, class, and more. Plenty for the general public and for students of history to consider.



For more on the history of immigration and the changing shape of the law, see the following helpful sites:



On the Arizona Law





Immigration: General History, Legal History, Etc



Friday, July 30, 2010

June Issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The June issue of Historically Speaking is now up at Project Muse. (We couldn't be more pleased with the terrific work the Muse people are doing. Readers can finally consistently read HS on-line. Scanning back issues is now in the works.)

The June issue includes a lively forum on Charles Joyner's classic Down by the Riverside. It also contains interviews and the usual fare of insightful essays.

In "The Art of History" popular historian Ian Mortimer throws down the gauntlet. Academic historians, in his estimation, don't care all that much about writing, narrating, and dramatic story telling. "Most professional historians do not understand the art of history," he asserts. "Quite what constitutes the 'art' seems to be the problem. Is it originality of thought, a distinct literary voice, innovative writing, sensitivity to public perceptions and assumptions about the past, or clarity of expression? Or something else entirely? Whatever the answer, these suggestions by themselves indicate that some of the activities associated with the 'art' do not figure prominently in university departments. Literary skill is almost always downgraded by academics to a supplementary role—supporting an analytical process but always subordinate to it. Originality is surprisingly rarely valued in academic circles: when it is most clearly displayed, it often proves to be the catalyst for its protagonist to be declared a 'maverick.' No historical departments (as far as I know) encourage their members to be sensitive to public perceptions and assumptions. Few historians have actively explored what drama, suspense, and literary conceits can add to a narrative. Creative writing is never discussed in historical journals, even though it is implicit in the very act of writing something new. All in all, historians seem generally oblivious to the basic fact that when expressing ideas about the past, the way one writes is as important as what one writes."

I disagree with Mortimer about some of these assumptions. Seems too broad a generalization, I think. Still I find it an interesting, provocative take. See Donald A. Yerxa's interview with Mortimer in the June issue for more on the subject.

Historically Speaking (June 2010)

"Two Historians on Defeat in War and Its Causes"
Peter Paret

"U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929"
Allison Sneider

"Ian Mortimer: Making History More Meaningful to Society"

"The Art of History"
Ian Mortimer

"In Search of New Narrative Frameworks: An Interview with Ian Mortimer"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community A Panel Discussion"

"Introduction"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Learning from Charles Joyner"
David Hackett Fischer

"The Influence of Down by the Riverside"
Sylvia R. Frey

"Two Journeys: Honoring Charles Joyner"
James Peacock

"Creolization, Decreolization, and Being 'at Home' in the Diaspora"
Stephanie J. Shaw

"Response"
Charles Joyner

"Writing Historical Crime Novels: An Interview with Jenny White"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India"
Anthony Disney

"Faith and the Founding of Virginia"
Lorri Glover

"Letters"
Stanley Sandlar
Vivian R. Gruder

"In Grateful Memory of Max Palevsky, 1924-2010"

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Sneakity Peek: Rugs for Pure Style Home!

As I recently mentioned, we're working on getting an online store up & running for Pure Style Home.  It's going to be filled with one-of-a-kind things I absolutely love and want to keep.  (But because I'm not independently wealthy and don't have ten houses, must sell ;)  I am SO INSANELY EXCITED over the rugs we just recently found to be sold in the shop!!  (We were only able to buy 4 to start out with-  rugs are a serious investment- eek!)  All of the rugs chosen are hand-knotted, have an antique washed feel, and I want to keep every single one.  I'm in the process of photographing them and was just too excited not to share with you.  This one is a Mamluk rug, created in the style of rugs produced during the Mamluk Dynasty in 14th Century Egypt.  It's full of golds and browns with splashes of pale blue-green:


It's approximately 8 x 11 and I'm seriously in love,  Here's a close-up:



I'm really not a sales person but have started this venture out of my love for stuff.  Yeah, there I said it, I LOVE STUFF.  But I can't keep it all, and in my job, I see so many beautiful things that it's hard to walk away from them.  It's hard for me to "sell" things to anyone, but if I don't, I'll end up with either a house smashed-full of beautiful things and an empty bank acoount or having to continue to walk away from all of these treasures.  So, the new shop will be my outlet for making these items available to clients & others who love them as much as I do...  a place for my "uncommon finds."  I hope you never feel that posts like this are "salesy" and that I'm trying to push anything on you...  I hope you see it as me being so excited that I want to share things with you because that's truly what it is.

{A bunch of the other items in the photos above will be for sale too, but I'm not sure which ones yet as I'm having trouble parting with them- ha!}

 
I'm adding inventory to the store daily and am trying to get it up and running as quickly as possible.  I'll keep you posted!!  Would love to know what you think of it!!

xoxo, Lauren

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

my dream kitchen

if i could build my dream kitchen i would build one with very few or no upper cabinets.  i like the look of shelving but think i could do without them completely.  while i was browsing through my kitchen inspiration files i realized how many kitchens i have saved that don’t have upper cabinets.

celebrity-homes-photos-meg-ryan-03 elle decor {meg ryan’s home in elle decor}

i love the task lights above the sink in this kitchen.

Adrian Kahan's home Ralph Lauren elle decore

{elle decor}

so pretty.  this one is neck and neck with my favorite one.

{lonny}

home-decorating-ED10090-SENK30-05

{elle decor}

kitchen-decorating-ideas-ss19

{elle decor}

Home: white open plan kitchen, dining area, room; stools, table, window, steel flooring, pendant light, cooker . Modern rustic. Pub orig L etc 11/2005 p86 Real home

{living etc}

ss_100035526

{unknown}

tupperlake6_thumb3

{unknown}

and my favorite…

ellen-pompeo-hollywood-home-ED0510-04 elle decor {ellen pompeo’s home in elle decor}

History Book Reviews Reviewed, July/August 2010 edition

Chris Beneke

What follows is the first installment of a semi-regular update on historical reviews in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other places that we bothered to look.

Jeffrey Rosen, “Why Brandeis Matters: The Constitution and the Crash” (TNR, July 22) Review of Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon)

Writing admiringly of both book and subject, Rosen says that Urofsky’s “definitive,” “masterful” biography of the great supreme court justice is timely given Elena Kagan’s nomination to Brandeis’s Supreme Court seat and the rediscovery by progressives of “the virtues of judicial restraint.” Rosen is confident that Brandeis “would have predicted the crash of 2008.” (The bearish justice would have no doubt still preferred bonds, as he did in the 1920s, rather than credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities.) Rosen details Brandeis’s long-standing critique of concentrated financial power (“the curse of bigness”), his commitment to judicial restraint on most matters but “judicial vigilance” on the especially urgent matter of civil liberties, and his support for Zionism as both a complement to nationalism and a source of intra-national cultural vitality. The 2008 financial crisis figures centrally in this piece and Rosen builds on a distinction of Paul Krugman’s, positing the existence of two historically-informed schools of thought on financial reform: “the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians, who want to break up the big banks and prevent them from engaging in risky behavior, and the Hamiltonian neo-New Dealers, who prefer top-down government regulation.” Rosen suggests that the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians (like Paul Volcker) have gotten it right, but the Hamiltonian-New Dealers (like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner) have gotten the votes. Urofsky’s biography is itself quite big. Given its hefty 955 page count, you might want to read Rosen’s longish review before taking the plunge. Or maybe even wait for Rosen’s own forthcoming book on Brandeis.

Anthony Grafton, “A Jewel of a Thousand Facets” (NYRB, June 24) Review of Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Belknap/Harvard); and, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute)

The two books reviewed here might be a good complement to Stephen Prothero’s hot-selling God is Not One (not mentioned by Grafton). Prothero’s conclusion that the world’s religion’s do not much converge is today’s contrarian position. That wasn’t the case in Bernard and Picart’s time. Grafton observes that the emphasis on the similarity of the world’s faiths was a subversive stance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Also subversive in that period: dense, weighty compilations of global knowledge like Religious Ceremonies of the World, and chatty, “ironic” footnote commentary on “orthodox inanities.” By detailing (in both print and image) the nuances of religions across the globe and by comparing the common forces underlying their different practices, Bernard and Picart injected sociological and anthropological substance into enlightened appeals for toleration. Though wondering what contemporary readers thought of Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies, Grafton is impressed by the collaborative, interdisciplinary effort that went into this two-volume project. He concludes that the authors “have done justice to a great work of eighteenth-century humanistic learning. And they have shown us some of the directions in which humanistic scholarship should move in generations to come: not only away from older narratives of intellectual change, but toward new models in which books and digital media, grand accounts and detailed inquiries shed light on one another.”

Bee Wilson, “Stuck with Your Own Face” (LRB, July 8) Review of Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Oxford)

Beauty trends may rise and fall, but the beauty industry only rises. In 1916, roughly “four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind mosturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel.” Today, “[c]onsumers around the world spend ‘$330 billion a year on fragrances, cosmetics and toiletries’.” Scent was the first sense to be addressed by the broadly conceived category of beauty products. Salvaging the body from early modern street odors was not an easy job. Perfume helped. By the mid-nineteenth century, this early beauty product was sold in mass, factory-produced quantities, along with “‘the first factory-made, non-toxic mascara’.” Over time, manufacturers moved away from beauty products that poisoned their users and toward products adapted to the visual revelations of electric light. They also went global with products, such as skin-lightening creams, that changed or reinforced prevailing conceptions of race and personal attractiveness. The greatest of the beauty industry’s innovations, according to Wilson, may have been lipstick. It’s legitimation “over just a few decades [in the twentieth century] must have brought about one of the biggest changes to the appearance of the Western female body in history.” Wilson is generally pleased with the data that Jones offers. She is less impressed with his grasp of the “artifice” that has gone into the sale of these high-margin products with often questionable claims to effectiveness.

The Tempel Lipizzan Legacy

A few miles from my dad's lake house (where we're visiting now) are the Tempel Lipizzan Stables which house Lipizzans, Europe's oldest domesticated horses, owned by the Tempel Smith family (of Tempel Steel).  The grounds are incredible and we love going to see the shows.
 
{The Stables}

According to Lippizan.com, "Lipizzans are Europe's oldest domesticated breed of horse. They not only possess beauty and nobility, but also a rare combination of courage, strength, ability, temperament, and intelligence.



The Lipizzan breed had its beginning in 1580"... and was created by a combination of different breeds... They have been moved throughout the past 400 years numerous times to survive various wars including the Napoleanic Wars, and World Wars I & II.  "In 1945 General patton executed a daring rescue of the Lippizzans, the story of which is told in Disney's The Miracle of the White Stallions."

{photo of a photo I saw in the stables}

"In 1955, millionaire Tempel Smith (Tempel Steel) of Chicago, imported 20 Lipizzans from Austria, 11 from Hungary, and 6 from Yugoslavia..."

{Me creepily taking photos of one of the riders who was resting between performances...  he totally caught me- oops!}

..."Tempel Smith devoted 15 years, until his death in 1980, importing and breeding his herd to over 400 horses. Since Tempel Smith's death, much of the herd was disbursed. However, Tempel Farms still breeds a number of Lipizzans each year, and they still successfully compete Lipizzans for Tempel Farms."
 
{The Show...  The woman above was so beautiful & poised...  exactly what you would imagine. }

This year, the weather was perfect when we took Christian & Justin to see the show.  The horses are just incredible:



I can't believe how high they jump!!!


The boys had so much fun and even 7-month-old Justin was into it...

 

 {I loved this photo from the stables}

And Christian loved the old "fire truck"- 


I'm apey over the Guest House, which sits high up on a hill overlooking the grounds:
 

It can be rented for private events and there's a pool in the back:


  

... which overlooks this:
 

And the stables house some of the best design I've ever seen:


The hallway was gorgeous. 

 

They've kept everything as it was in the 50s:


Check out the heat lamps the horses use when being bathed:


...And of course I can't see all of this and not start to think about interiors.  Oh my gosh, please someone call me with a horse fetish!!!  (err passion ;)  I'm dying to do a home for a horse-lover now!!

  Check out these photos taken by Roger Davies for Elle Decor of Mark Badgley and James Mishcka’s home:  Mmmmmm.. love it!







 And this one from Nuevo Estilo Magazine via La Dolce Vita:


(I can't help but get a little bit excited for Fall when looking at all of these images but I'm holding it back because Summer's still in full force.)  

And one last picture of the horses as we drove by another day on the way home to the house...  You can see them right on Hunt Club Road: 

  
{The Tempel Lipizzans}

xoxo, Lauren


If you're still in the mood for horse-inspired interiors, definitely check out these 2 posts full of equestrian eye candy:  (so gorgeous!!!)

Chic Equestrian Style in Home Decor by Simplified Bee
Equestrian Chic by La Dolce Vita
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