Category Archives: Eclectic Tradition

A Venetian Vision

The last remaining vestige of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian vision for the music room at her Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, palazzo-style mansion is this oil painting by Martin Mower painted in the late 1890’s. Destroyed at the turn-of-the-20th-century, Mower’s romantic paean to Gardner’s Venetian decorative tradition paints a dreamlike world where 18t-century carved gilt chairs […]

Permalink         Comments (8)        

Puttin’ On the Ritz

 Now if you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to, why don’t you go where fashion sits? Puttin’ on the Ritz Puttin’ on the Ritz, a turn of phrase coined by Irving Berlin in 1929 for the song of the same name, was a slang expression to indicate “dressing stylishly”, inspired by London’s […]

Permalink         Comments (0)        

Oscar de la Renta: New York, c1970’s

Posted November 3, 2014. Filed in Chinoiserie, Eclectic Tradition, Oscar de la Renta

As a follow-up to the prior week’s last post I will be featuring over the course of this week, as promised, the homes of Oscar de la Renta, who passed away on October 20th after an eight-year battle with cancer. The elegant fashion maestro and his family have inhabited homes in New York, Connecticut, and […]

Permalink         Comments (0)        

Past Perfect

When I first laid eyes upon Jeffrey’s Bilhuber’s guest room/study in his then new Manhattan apartment a few years back I immediately sensed familiarity, but I couldn’t place it. Had I seen this room before, in a previous incarnation, or did it remind me of another room, its impression floating somewhere in my memory? Recently […]

Permalink         Comments (2)        

Oh, Nicky, You’re So Fine!

I can’t believe I missed this! Madcap decorator, writer, raconteur, crooner and bon vivant extraordinaire Nicky Haslam recently moved into a new London flat, as covered by T Magazine, of The New York Times,  a few weeks back. He has traded his smaller, slightly contemporary, moodily nocturnal and glamorous flat for a light-filled bottom floor […]

Permalink         Comments (3)