Bear?

Look closely at the Jamie Geller Dutra Original Abstract painting. What do you see? I see a landscape on a rainy day with the sun glinting through the rocks in the background.


What does the Guy see in his birthday painting? A bear, that's what. It took me ages to see what he was on about but eventually I got it.
Anyone else see it?

Birthday, Secret, Painting

I have been patiently anticipating writing about this for a month now.

On February 10 I received an email from Jake Gorst announcing the opening of artist Jamie Geller Dutra's store on etsy. Jamie is Jake's mother and daughter of Shirley and Andrew Geller, architect of The Cool House. The email came fortuitously as I was looking for something arty and modern for "the guy's" birthday. I fell in love with original abstract painting in shades of green, bright blue, purple, red and gold, quickly purchased it and as soon as it was in my hands I dropped it off at the Framing Workshop in Huntington in the hope if getting it framed by this weekend.

The whole time I wanted to blog about how fabulous the painting was, how the colours would fit perfectly in our bedroom, especially how the abstract reminded me of lakes and mountains, shafts of sunshine and waterfalls, and I couldn't because I wanted it to be a big birthday surprise. I did blog about Jamie's site on 2modern design, but I couldn't add any personal elements in case the guy got wind of it. Very frustrating.

That I'm impatient is no secret but did you also know I am hopeless at fibbing and getting the painting home without the guy finding out would stretch my artifice to its limit? First I had to rope a neighbor into picking up the framed painting because it was too wide to fit in my car; this entailed many secret phone calls and emails and eventually a fictitious trip to look at furniture with said neighbor. The guy was suspicious, and very reluctant to leave the house at all yesterday (normally he's running errands all over the place on Saturdays) but the five inches of rain we had may have been responsible for that. Finally we went out to dinner and per the plan our neighbors snuck the painting into the garage while we were out, hiding it behind my car.


This morning I placed it in the kitchen and he was totally blown away by it. I picked a wood frame with a brushed stainless steel finish that picks up on the cool grey tones and an off-white matte that really defines the colours in the painting. We hung it over the sofa in our room and suddenly the guy understood why I made him rearrange the furniture in there last week. I told him it was so the room would appear larger (which it did) but really it was so the painting could be positioned on this wall and seen from the great room, back stairs and landing.


All this subterfuge was exhausting. I have only the greatest admiration for people who pull off surprise parties for family members, I don't know how they can get everyone to cooperate without letting the secret out. But all the drama was worth it when I saw the wonderful work of art as I walked up the back stairs and the look on the guy's face when he opened his present this morning.

What makes a bedroom?

Another bout of snivelling colds and hacking coughs has us torturing ourselves watching reality shows and HGTV. It's about all our feeble brains and even feebler bodies can cope with. We expect nothing from this TV except entertainment but occasionally we come away with a piece of knowledge that we would be unlikely to glean anywhere else.
Watching HGTV's "My House Worth What?" over the weekend we heard a realtor say that in America the legal definition of a bedroom is a room that contains a built-in closet! We were pretty much astounded by this because we'd always assumed that a bedroom is any room used for sleeping. It also means that of the many houses I have lived in, only four had bedrooms. The majority were either too old to have built-in closets or were in countries where this was not an issue. We just purchased wardrobes or armoires to hang our clothes in and put these in our "bedrooms". We knew no better.
So I checked the internets for an online definition. Three online dictionaries described it as a room containing a bed, while another gave this definition that is at once vague and overly precise. "Any habitable room that can be used for sleeping. This typically includes, but is not limited to, a room with a proper escape window and one in which there is a closet or a door OR a closet or a door could be reasonably installed. ...". I don't understand why it would be either a closet or a door or the possibility of either that defines a room but I know if I had to choose between the two I'd go for a door every time. Because otherwise it's a box that I can't get out of, no?
Of course I couldn't leave it there. I had to know - what makes a bedroom, and I found another definition in the San Matteo, California town code "an enclosed habitable space" that is designed primarily for sleeping and contains at least one window. State building codes require that a bedroom must be a minimum of 70 square feet.
It's all very confusing but I know one thing: Most of the built-in closets I've seen have the ugliest doors* and I'd rather have a sleek modern PAX wardrobe from IKEA or a beautiful old armoire any day.

* If all closet doors looked like this I'd take that back!

Keeping things in perspective

I'm always interested to see where people have been before they visit the blog. Often they've come via an image - usually a Flickr photo and I always check the link to see which one it was. Today someone in Florida happened upon this photo.
Did it take your breath away too?
It was taken the first day we moved in. That's our Leggero bed with Area duvet and shams (bought at Area's semi-annual sale in NYC) and a $4 Ikea lamp. Everything else is left by the original owner: the green carpet, the walls, and the holes where the baseboard should be.
I was complaining remarking to Steven on New Year's Day that master bedroom looks like a college dorm but good grief I take it back. It looks a zillion times better than this. Those walls, hand-painted, faux-finished orange veined walls, gave me nightmares for the month before I painted over them. The artistic design continued onto the window frames for that "cohesive" look. Unique.
Last year we changed the placement of the bed and this is how that side of the room looks today. It's still unfinished but at least I don't gasp in horror when I see it.

Bamboo to you

Hurrah, we have bamboo flooring in all the bedrooms; the furniture is back in place; the beds are made; pictures have been hung and it all looks fantastic. There is a lot of colour variation in the bamboo so it has movement and the gloss finish makes the rooms feel much lighter. Because most of the rooms had recently been painted cream we will leave them for a while, it's neutral and clean looking. But we will paint Steven's office as we had to strip panelling and wallpaper there. He wants a cranberry colour but I think yellow or gold will work better. We'll see.

We also changed our minds at the last minute about bamboo on the landing. I felt it was too shiny and casual for that space. I asked Steven to go look at some Tigerwood that I thought would work but we would have to wait until November for delivery. He didn't much like the Tigerwood anyway (too yellow) but he saw some Brazilian redwood that was new in that day so he bought a sample home for the weekend so we could live with it. As the ceiling is redwood it tied the whole area together. It looks good where it joins the bamboo and against the teak banisters, too. The bonus of doing it this way is that there will be enough bamboo to floor the master dressing room and my office. By the end of this week it should all be finished and we can sit back and relax. Ha ha.

Overwhelmed

When we bought this house we knew there was a certain amount of work we would have to do before winter set in, First we had some windows that had to be replaced, some of the guttering was shot or missing and the siding over the garage had been damaged. Inside all the carpets would have to go to be replaced by wood floors and, to make more space, because 5000 square feet is just not enough, there were closets to be taken out (I know that it is impossible to believe that a gal can have too many closets but even Imelda Marcos would have trouble buying enough shoes to fit in here) plus there was the decorating stuff to be undertaken: paneling to be ripped off the walls, wallpaper to be stripped from three rooms and a hallway and the "Muenster Cheese" decor in the master suite, which covered every wall, door, architrave and baseboard, would have to be painted over.

We figured we would make the outside waterproof before tackling the interior projects. But of course things never run off a slate roof, as they say in Dutch, so we are working backwards, doing all the stuff we don't need to do while waiting for the windows which at this rate will probably be installed during a three-day snowstorm in January. In July, just before our first houseguests left, the contractors started work tearing out the panelling, taking down the mirrored closet in the bedroom and shortening the hall closet to make a bookcase. Then they painted over the oil-blue interiors of the remaining closets with a fresh coat of clean white matte and left for their vacation.

Koen and Verity stripped wallpaper and pulled up two carpets before they left and we ordered 1500 sq' of pre-finished wood flooring. Sick of the cheese effect, I painted the walls of the master bedroom and dressing room a calm blue shade and the ceiling, trim and doors a brilliant white.