September | 2010 | Door Sixteen

Chevron and herringbone.

Sep 30, 2010

I have a real thing for wood chevron and herringbone floors, especially the slightly-battered, wide-plank ones you see in pictures of perfect old French apartments.

All four of the above photos are from B&B Italia. I could move in there tomorrow, no problem.

This is in Holly’s new apartment in Hannover, Germany, which she’s been blogging about over at Haus Maus.

Photo by Tia Borgsmidt. There’s a whole lot to like here aside from the herringbone floors—like those Poul Kjaerholm chairs!

From Sköna Hem.

Photo by Per Ranung.

What’s better than wood herringbone floors? Wood herringbone floors stained black. Via sfgirlbybay (I don’t know the original source, sorry—if you know, please tell me!).

Interior by Joseph Dirand Architecture. I really love the color variation in the chevron!

I saved the best (and most predictable!) room for last: Jenna Lyons’s bathroom, as seen in Domino. Interior by Levenson McDavid Architects. Ahhhhhh.

Chevron parquet by Atelier des Granges, who are welcome to come to my house anytime and install floors just like this.

The last evening of summer.

Sep 22, 2010

New York City
Vanity + Wearables

27 comments

I took a little walk in the West Village tonight. It will officially be fall in a few hours, and summer decided to give us one last hurrah with temperatures in the 80s and a thunderstorm that I missed by seconds.

One of my favorite shops in New York is Avignone Pharmacy (no website!). They’ve been in the same location at 6th Avenue and Bleecker Street since 1929, but originally opened in 1898 on MacDougal Street. Avignone is exactly what you imagine a perfect independent chemist’s shop to be like—pharmacy in the back, friendly clerk at a low counter in the center, white penny tiles on the floor, and pretty much every amazing beauty product you can think of. They have everything, including the complete Mario Badescu line (I’m totally obsessed). I used to stop in to Avignone all the time when I lived in Brooklyn since it’s right off the F train, but I’m going to make more of an effort to go there now even though it’s a bit of a haul.

The vestibule is finished!

Sep 20, 2010

Newburgh
The House

76 comments

Only (!) four and a half years after starting renovation on the tiny vestibule at the front of the house, I am happy to say that our entryway is now 100% DONE. Okay, except for doing some doorknob repair work, repainting the outside of the exterior door, and replacing a strip of missing trim on one of the windows. As far as I’m concerned, though, this is a project that I can now cross OFF the to-do list and feel content with the results.

It’s really hard to take photos of such a tiny space that show all of the details, so I took a whole bunch of somewhat redundant pictures that together tell the whole story…

I think we bought this wallpaper before we’d actually closed on the house. I knew I wanted to use it somewhere, and this was the right spot. I still love it now as much as I did five years ago.

We don’t use this mail slot (mail is so much BIGGER now than it was 120 years ago!), but it’s super cute. I usually like to coat rusty metal hardware with flat black spray paint, but I actually like the rust on this guy—maybe because this was one of the first things in the house that I stripped a million layers of gooey paint off of.

The step-down to the porch is a giant hunk of slate. I love it. This photo makes it look like the tile is lower than the slate, but I promise everything is nice and level!

See? We did wind up going with the world’s largest threshold (just a 42″x6″ oak board, stained black and coated with polyurethane), and I’m very happy with it now that it’s in situ. And yes, the floor is still horribly scuffed, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future!

I wanted to include a detail shot to emphasize my belief that sometimes “good enough” is good enough. I don’t fret over every gap (that’s what caulk is for!) or worry when molding is damaged. My house is old, and it’s been through a lot. It’s never going to look like new construction, and I am more than okay with that.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have any real “before” photos of the vestibule, so you’re going to have to take my word when I say that it was gross. All of the woodwork was painted either high-gloss brown or forest green, and the walls above the wainscoting were covered with fake-wood paneling (graffitied with the catchy tagline, “Mr. Bojangles”). There are some pictures here of the hideous tile that we ripped out (demo shots!).

Sources, in case you’re curious…
Black paint: Benjamin Moore “Black Beauty”
White paint: Benjamin Moore “Simply White”
Wallpaper: Orla Kiely “Flower Blossom”
Tile: U.S. Ceramic Tile “Marfil Brown” (with black grout)

Frivolity and excess, with nice packaging.

Sep 19, 2010

Art + Design
Greed
The House

28 comments

I couldn’t resist. The second I saw the limited-edition Walnut Hang-It-All, I had to order one. Considering I have absolutely no idea where or for what I could use in in the house or the apartment, this was really one of my more frivolous purchases. I try not to buy things I don’t have a clear purpose for owning, but…geez, look at this thing!

I love how much consideration was put into designing the enclosed paperwork and even the envelope containing the screws and wall anchors. I even recognize the paper stock as being from the Eames collection from Neenah Paper.

Isn’t the shipping box beautiful? You know how much I love those lines and dots! Great packaging and attention to detail are important to me. Silly though it may be, I wouldn’t have been half as excited to pull the Hang-It-All out of a plain cardboard box.