Happy Friday!

Let the summer games begin…

here

here

Here

Here

Here

Here

I figured I’d kick this memorial day weekend off with some fun affordable ETSY beach options to get us all in the mood for summer.  With the prospect of Josie donning a swimsuit, this is set to the be the best summer yet.  We’ll be kicking it off with a visit from two of my besties from college.  Thank goodness they both married men from wine country so they fly to me (or perhaps their in-laws) all the time!

Go on and get after it this weekend.

Designer Inspire: Anne Hepfer Designs

Good morning.  How are you doing?  We have been fighting off a cold for what feels like forever around here.  First Graham had it, now I do and it seems as though little Josie may be starting to get it as well.

I’ve been thinking I should introduce you to the designers who inspire me and perhaps try to do a very mini, non-scheduled, “series” on it.  First up is actually a designer that I just discovered this week and I am completely smitten with her work: Anne Hepfer of Toronto based Anne Hepfer Designs.

All Images from Anne Hepfer Designs

Isn’t Anne’s work beautiful?  I love how she is able to present a very coordinated look that stills feels relaxed.  I am a pattern and color girl myself so I love to see this in her work and how she carries a color story throughout a home.   A key take away is how she repeats the same bold fabric throughout the room thereby giving big impact without taking a trip to crazy town  (like the first image of a kid’s bedroom).  To feast your eyes on more Anne Hepfer beauties, check out her website, here.

Retro Chic

Guest Blogger: Allie

It all started with the lastest edition of West Elm’s catalog and their SMEG Refrigerators; love at first sight!

I knew, right then, at that exact moment…that I must do a blog post so that someone, somewhere out there would recreate my retro chic dream kitchen! Let’s start with the actual kitchen, shall we?

White and turquoise, I die! In order for the appliances to really be appreciated in their full glory, everything else should remain white, from the cabinets to the subway tiles. So obviously, the SMEG fridge is the first thing to go in, followed shortly after by the Big Chill Stove.

Now, I understand if you can’t fully commit to the white kitchen/turquoise appliance scheme. The fridge, well anyone should be able to say yes to that! But in case you are tentative about the stove and would rather just add the turquoise in kitchen accessories, this my friend, is for you….

Every kitchen needs one, so why not make your’s a statement? Moving right along to another necessary kitchen gadget, the kettle! I don’t know how you beat $14.99 from Cost Plus?

This looks truly adorable sitting on top of any range. For the much needed countertop storage, time and again, Target comes to the rescue. Enter Threshold canisters.

Anthropologie, always a great source for your fashion and home needs, makes these precious half dozen egg crates. Yes, I’d recommend turquoise, but it comes in other colors as well.

Now for everyone’s favorite part of the kitchen, the cookie jar! Except this is no cookie jar, this is a beautiful aqua glass cake stand from Shop Sweet Lulu, an exceptional online store for beautiful kitchen accessories and paper goods.

Your kitchen, like any other room in the house, is not really complete without some artwork or a personal touch of some kind. So, without further ado, the final touch to your retro chic turquoise kitchen!

Show your bacon pride and do it loudly with this print from Etsy.

Josie: 14 Weeks

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on my little love bug.  She has come out of the 4th trimester and woken up to the world and it’s so much fun to see!  Now that she watches me more intently, she has her opinions.

Sometimes, she thinks I’m crazy…

Other times she thinks I’m hilarious…

But she always thinks her dad is the most fun of all….

Or well, she will, once she is more used to riding on his shoulders.

Framing Clothes

The other day, Allie and I were in a frame shop framing artwork for a client when I turned to her and said, “I want to start framing clothes”

This is an example of the random sort of unexplained fragments of thought that Allie is used to hearing from me.  She laughed and replied, “You want to frame your jeans.”  I laughed too.  My pre-pregnancy jeans are about all Allie really hears about.  And honestly I probably could frame my pre-pregnancy jeans at this point, they are a relic…cause I still can’t imagine fitting into them.  One day.

Anyway, I digress.  Yes, I would like to start framing clothes for client projects.  And no, not my old jeans.

I’m thinking old swimsuits…

Julia Edeleman

I’m thinking mittens…

I’m thinking baptismal dresses…

I’m thinking vintage skirts…

Anna Spiro

You feeling me?

My Bedroom Before and After

I can’t believe I’m going to show you the before – cause it’s real bad y’all…real bad.  I find time and time again that everyone puts off the master bedroom last.  Well, I did just the same.

My headboard from my last apartment wasn’t working in our current space because we have really tall ceilings and I wanted to accentuate that.  So I sold this gorgeous headboard to a wonderful friend so I know it’s in a great home…

And then my room looked like this for a few months…

In my defense, I was pregnant and working like a dog.  But, then the January Cure came along for Apartment Therapy and I chose to concentrate on my bedroom.  I’m so happy I took on the challenge the month before giving birth to Josie because I now log a lot of hours in our bedroom with my sweet girl.  Here is the after…

Here’s a little breakdown of what I did.  The biggest change of all was bringing in this bed from Cost Plus that was on crazy sale.  I loved the shape and the height it brought to the room and it’s linen, people.

As you can see it’s a very tight space so I needed small bedside tables.  I used to have a beautiful garden stool as my bedside table but it didn’t hold any books.  I found this wonderful morrocan side table at Home Goods and I love how it fits my bajillion parenting and sleep training books so I can access them whenever I need them, like all the time.  I also framed a pic of Graham and I from our wedding and Little’s Ultrasound when she was the size of a gummy bear (let’s be honest, I usually don’t have fresh flowers by my bed).

The bedding was the Home Goods score that I blogged about here.  I’m so happy I kept it as a “you’re about to have a baby” gift to myself.  The throw pillow is a love and it came frame a local shop.  The JuJu hat above is what I lugged from South Africa home four years ago (you can read about that here).  It was in our living room and I decided it needed a new spot  As I said, I wanted to play up the height of the bedroom so I moved the JuJu hat to above our headboard and I felt like the throw pillow played off of it well.

We only have a built in corner cupboard for a closet it our bedroom.  A corner cupboard…terrible!  The upside?  We literally needed to get storage pieces for our stuff so I went with the beautiful bone inlay armoire.  Oh and the settee I found on Craigslist years ago for a steal sits at the foot of the bed with a pillow I picked up in Mexico on vacation.  There you have it.  The tiny but very much loved master bedroom of mine.

All photos of current bedroom taken by the wonderful and talented Alison Reiter…she can design AND photograph!  Photo from previous apartment by Michelle Drewes

To My Mom

It took my mom five years and one miscarriage to conceive my oldest brother.  18 quick months later my next brother came into the world.  He was a collicy baby and he would cry every night for about two hours straight.  When my two oldest brothers were 3 1/2 and 2 and my mom was 31 years old, her parents died suddenly in a plane crash.  A year later my next brother came along.  He had failure to thrive.  Once he was doing better, she popped up pregnant with me.  By the time I was born, all living parents (my grandparents) had passed away.

All of this sounds as though the odds were stacked against her for motherhood.  You would think that my mom would speak of the early days as trying.  Of course each of those events were incredibly difficult but those are just a part of the story of her life.

Ask my mom about motherhood and she won’t mention the above.  Not because she is private about it but rather because those experiences don’t define her. She’ll talk about the immense joy it brought her to be a mother. She’ll speak of the interest with which she would watch us rapidly change as babies.  The love of the little coos and smiles.  The magic of the first steps.

Growing up, it was easy to feel my mom’s love and I now realize how much basking in the joy that we brought her, helped me to feel loved and nourished.  She would spend her days trailblazing at the ranch with me on her back and three little boys running behind her; or copying down the stories that we would dictate to her night after night into a keepsake book; or pulling out her sewing machine and making every wild Halloween costume that we could think of; or constructing huge canopy tents in our bedroom so that we could have a spot for make believe; or reading to us book after book after book on a rainy day; or cooking us wholesome meals straight from the vegetable garden that she would tend to; or attending all of our sports games that we consistently sat the bench at; or marching out times tables around the dining room table; or reading every single one of our English papers before it hit the teacher’s desk; or practicing SAT vocab words with an after school snack; or jumping for joy as we got into top colleges; or hugging us bravely as we made our big move away to college only to head home for a private cry as a new child left the nest; or talking us through and encouraging each of our post college adventures, still far from home; or  standing with open arms and a huge smile as each child moved back to the bay area; or taking a hands on role with our weddings; or celebrating each new grandchild that is born.  These are the facts that she will speak of and these are the experiences that have formed us children into the adults we are.

I recently read another blog that was doing a mother’s day give away and to enter you had to say what you learned from your mom, what immediately popped into my head was to enjoy motherhood.

Now that I have Josie one of my favorite things to do is to call my mom and talk to her about how much I love being a mom and how happy Josie makes me, because my mom gets it.  I can feel her get giddy with me as she listens to what my little one did that day. A huge thank you to my mom for teaching me to love this role as a mother and to have fun with it.  And to my little girl who has brought me a level of happiness and contentment that I never knew before.  May she one day experience the same.

To all the mothers out there Happy Mother’s Day.

Get In…

Guest Blogger: Allie

Bed, that is.  Lately, there seems to be a bedroom theme to not only my blog posts, but some of my projects at work. Everything from photographing them to decorating them. Yesterday, while scouting around at one of my favorite stores in San Francisco, HD Buttercup, I came across some fabulous new bedding that I couldn’t wait to share with all of you!

sOUP (the lettering on that was intentional) is a home accessories company based in New York that focuses on using certified organic and sustainable materials in all their products. Including, yep you guessed it, bedding. Usually I’d be hesitant to recommend organic bedding before I tested the product, just because it can be a little scratchy when it comes to sheets and blankets.

But this stuff is fantastically soft! There isn’t a huge array of colors, it pretty much just comes in the classic neutrals of white, beige, blue and grey; my favorite colors for the bedroom anyway. My apologies if this brand is old news (apparently they used to sell it at Nordstrom’s) but it’s new to me and I just had to share!

So where do you get your hands on this truly luxurious bedding you ask? Well, if you’re in the Bay Area, HD Buttercup in San Francisco would be your best bet. For our East Coast readers, ABC Carpet and Home in New York also carries this line. It’s currently ‘unavailable’ at Nordstrom’s, it could be just a glitch in their system, so I’ll let you know when it becomes available again.

Wishing you all a wonderful day followed by a restful night’s sleep…

Red Gallery Wall

Remember when I took a vote for what color to do the frames for the gallery wall running up our front stairwell?  The votes varied but there was a resounding no on the color red, which was my top choice.

Well, yesterday, I saw that Camila of Effortless Style went for the red Ikea frames and it looks amazing!

Camila of Effortless Style

I am absolutely in love with the way her wall turned out.  It has reignited that fire under me to actually dress up those naked walls in our stairwell.  And I’m going red hot.  I even stopped by Ikea yesterday and bought my first batch of red frames.

I would like to do a combo of photographs and art.  One art piece that I’d love to add to the collection is this beautiful print by UK artist Sarah Walton.

Wish me luck that this project actually gets done.

Happy Friday

Happy Friday everyone!  The entire city of San Francisco has been in such a good mood lately because it is hot, hot, hot here.  The weather is amazing; it is so rare that we actually get to sport summer clothes in this city so it’s really fun when the opportunity comes knocking.  A little someone in my life finally got to wear her summer clothing in the city and she really, really appreciated it -

Enjoy your weekend.  We are off to our ranch this weekend and I couldn’t be more excited.  Don’t you worry about Little she is all set in terms of her ranch attire.  She’s had cowboy boots since she was about a month old -

For those who are going out on the town this weekend, enjoy the Derby De Mayo!