Long before I met my Italian husband, Panettone was a staple at our Christmas table. Back then though, I couldn’t understand why anyone would go and spoil a perfectly delicious sponge by adding chunks of dried fruit to it. Eventually, I grew to love it, candied orange and all. The ultimate Christmas morning breakfast, is Panettone french toast. That, or Father Christmas’ leftover biscuits.
These chairs look like they are made up of plush pink savoiardi, the spongy ladyfingers in Tiramisu. I have no idea where this chic brasserie is –– maybe Paris or Berlin –– but I’d love to sink into one of those chairs with a glass of champagne and a bowl of frites. Pink velvet chairs that look good enough to eat, sign me up.
Update: I wonder if Sketch would notice if I walked out the door with a chair in my Goyard?
When I lived in Florence, my father bought me a pair of tobacco brown Gucci loafers from the city’s flagship boutique on Via Tornabuoni. I think that may have been my first, and until last week, last visit to Gucci. But these recent collections (since Alessandro Michele came on board) are too gorgeous to not see and touch up close. And yes, if money was no objet, I would snap up a least 20 pieces, including a watermelon pink blouse to wear with these embroidered white trousers. Too much? Never.
We have a house guest –– a sweet, young girl who may be as high-maintenance as Marlene Dietrich. Toffee, the school bunny arrived today, and already I’ve spent too much time sweeping up hay and pellets of poo. She eats kale and parsley, so mealtimes will be a cinch, but her bathroom etiquette, or lack thereof, is going to be a chore. But the children adore her, and as long as she doesn’t pee in my shoes, or nosh on the Christmas lights, we’ll get along just fine. Here is the fabulous Cecil Beaton, dressed as a rabbit!
When an opportunity presents itself to wear something on your head –– I say, go for it. Life is so much more fun with a felt beret or a paper crown on your noggin. The headdress that Marika Shioiri-Clark wore to marry Graham Veysey in Texas this August was nothing short of sensational. It’s just the sort of extravaganza I’d like to wear with a red pulley to Christmas lunch.
Julia Child is someone I would have loved to drink tea with. When I moved to Canada in my early 20s, my mother-in-law gave me a copy of The Way To Cook. It was a lovely gift, but perhaps a bit ambitious for a girl who stores her stilettos in the oven. It was never the cooking that drew me to Child, but rather the fabulous attitude that she brought to every botched brioche and pitiful pot roast. Her embrace of failure is what really inspired me. Indeed for every three collapsed soufflés, there was one gloriously golden winner –– a reminder to keep at it. Her home in the South of France is for sale this week, and the kitchen remains mostly original to Child’s design. Yes, to sit among her pots and pans eating “small helpings, no seconds…. a little bit of everything,” and listening to her talk, would be just splendid.
We brought home a beautiful Christmas tree on the weekend and covered it in lights, pompoms, shiny baubles, glittery fish and birds with hot pink feathers. “More is more,” is our mantra. While I appreciate the elegance and restraint of a tree covered in nothing but white lights, this is the time for colourful and kitsch. Some of our decorations are gifts, some we’ve purchased, and others, like the children’s great-grandmother’s vintage Eaton’s baubles, are festive heirlooms. Our tree reminds me of the trees I grew up with, also covered in a million decs, also playful and unpretentious. I liked white lights, my brother liked multi-coloured ones, so we alternated year-to-year. There were garlands of farfalle pasta, sprayed gold and silver, crystal stalactites that hung off every other branch and a somewhat disheveled looking angel at the top. Every year there were tears around the tree, (tangled lights, smashed baubles, and a massive fight with my brother in our late teens over who would dismantle it) but that only made me love it more. Yes, it was a fabulous tree.
I love a good profile shot; Cecil Beaton’s photographs of Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Streisand are two of my favourites. But the prize for most stunning profile goes to Jacqueline de Ribes. In the mid 50s, Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, asked the French aristocrat, socialite and couture muse to be photographed by Richard Avedon. De Ribes agreed, and this is the iconic image that came out of the shoot. Avedon described her as having the “perfect nose” and added, “I feel sorry for near-beauties with small noses.”
“I absolutely and emphatically believe that a life without flowers is not a life worth living,” says the wildly colourful interiors stylist, Carlos Mota. “Arranged flowers are the world’s simplest extravagance.” It’s at this time of year, when the city is bare and gray, that we should indulge in fresh flowers, weekly. While it’s seems odd to buy tulips in December, combined with bright berries and Eucalyptus branches, they look positively festive. And of course, you can can never go wrong with jewel-toned Dhalias. Buy as many as your budget allows and stuff them into your wackiest vase, for a look that is as comforting as it is joyful.
It’s so rare that I spend time in bookstores anymore. I used to love Acadia in the east end for beautiful and rare art books, (and a black cat that circled the piles of books) and Nicholas Hoare was always a pleasure, too. This time last year, on our way home from St. Pete, we spent an afternoon at The Oxford Exchange in Tampa. The book store there is a dream, with a mix of fiction, photography and lux coffee table tomes that you just don’t happen upon everyday. I picked up a limited edition leather bound copy of Old Man And The Sea there for my father that he adored. But my favourite book shop in the world is John Sandoe off the King’s Road in London. Now, that’s a place you can spend hours and hours in.
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