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Hi SmartyGirlHome Readers,
You can find my home decor tips on NewlywedSurvival.com this morning. Do you love Egyptian motifs and geometrical patterns? If you are a fan of the 1920s, jazz and Gustav Klimt Art Deco decorating may be for you.
Happy Decorating!
What did Greta Garbo do with her alone time? How did Jayne Mansfield decorate her home office? What did Danny Kayne cook in his kitchen? I love Architecture Digest’s Hollywood at Home. Though it was published in 2005, I find it interesting in 2011. If I could have a hideaway in Truckee, CA I would like my home to have a trough sink for my bathroom like Dennis Quaid’s home in Montana. Quaid’s turn-of-the-last-century cabin has a Montana stone fireplace and refurbished planks salvaged from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Reading this architecture and interior design book felt like an extension of my biography reading habit. Reading about Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield, and Danny Kaye’s home helped me understand how objects in the home can tell so much about a person’s outlook on life. For example, Greta Garbo collected Renoir. She also had such an eye for great art that when she bought David Levine’s The Pink Hat, it took her five minutes to decide to buy it after she spotted it at its opening. She was also an artist off screen. She designed rugs. Her Birds in Flight rugs are have classical motifs such as medallions yet modern and colorful geometrical patterns. I agree with her own confident statement that “there will never be another Garbo.”
Jayne Mansfield is delightful cheeky in her decor of her Pink Palace. Her red leather office is unabashedly sexy. Mansfield told reporters that she wanted a place full of cupids and hearts. Her bath decor included gold-plated swan fixtures and floor-to-ceiling pink shag. Her sense of humor, sexiness and likability is her legacy.
When I saw Danny Kaye on television in the 1990s, it was on the Cosby Show. He’d make guest appearances as the Cosby children’s dentist. I also watched him in Inspector General every year, during the holidays, with my mom. It tickles me even more that Danny Kaye completed an apprenticeship in Chinese cooking through San Francisco’s Johnny Kan restaurant chefs. His daughter reminisces about her dad’s nine-course Chinese meals that he made in his full Chinese kitchen. His specialties were Chicken Hoi Sin and Banjo Duck. I’m even more crazy about Danny Kaye now that I know he ate lotus paste moon cakes like me!
I recommend the chapters about Angelica Huston and her father John Huston. Martin Scorsese’s townhouse and Jack Warner’s interior design choices are certain to surprise you. Happy reading!
My interest in reading interior design blogs written by women with children began with one blog post perfectly suited to me, “Tentacle Pot Pie“. Notmartha.org Blogger Megan Reardon won me as a fan with her unusual presentation of conventional recipes such as meatloaf. She shapes unassuming meatloaf into oven-crisped amputated hands. Her chicken pot pie appears to be alive and wriggling out of its ramekin because she shaped her crescent dough crust into mollusk arms. Mollusk arms!
Megan is a good blogger with funny images and even better DIY tutorials on food presentation. Babble.com, a parenting blog, promotes itself as a blog for a new generation of parents. What am I doing at that site when I am only an aunt of my friends’ children? I just can’t stay away from good writing. Plus Babble met with Megan of Notmartha.org for a pre-Halloween interview in 2010.
If I didn’t venture into the interior design and home lighting community to include a reading diet of “mommy blogs” about DIY interior design, I’d truly be missing out! Disclosure ahead. I’m an aunt, not a parent, so the parenting experience is foreign to me: intimidating and fascinating at the same time. I admire my smart, strong girlfriends who are super-fit and can balance their toddler on one hip while carrying a conversation while cooking dinner. My single and married girlfriends are my heroes.
So starting this past workweek, I included homeschooling moms and stay-at-home moms to my list of daily must-read DIY home lighting and interior design blogging experts. The quality and variety of writing by blogging interior design DIYers is encouraging. Some focus on particular challenges while decorating a home such as life after cancer. Blogger Wendy is cancer-free now and manages her own blog. Her articles for health and relationship tips can also be found on The Trend Tribe, an article site for home decor, health and other topics. Her insight revealed in the article, “Ways to Help Friends With Cancer”, compelled me to become a regular reader of her blog.
Another pair of girlfriends got me hooked on a book called Five Aspects of Woman by Barbara Mouser. It is a book about womanhood and the human sisterhood from a faith perspective. Even if you are not religious, I bet you’ll find the chapter about befriending all women inspiring. Author Barbara Mouser sounds a call to action for women who are homeschooling parents and full-time stay-at-home moms to befriend married and single career women without children and vice versa. Mouser exhorts the human sisterhood to avoid taking the contentious bait of things that divide women and see the heart that we have in common. For me, as an interior design and home lighting copywriter, I find common ground in how the sisterhood rules and subdues the dwelling place. How does she make her living space cozy for herself or for her family of five?
That’s another reason why I am so happy to hear from Blogger Crystal of Mrs.HappyHomemaker, who is a frugal living and homeschooling expert. She also features darn good apple recipes such as caramel apple cupcakes on her blog, http://www.mrshappyhomemaker.com/
These are three female bloggers that I admire. I’m sure I’ll meet more bloggers, in the interior design and DIY home decor community, in the months to come. I am glad to be part of the interior design and lighting blogging community and I invite you to contact me with your story ideas. Please email me at lightingbyrenee@gmail.com when you find an image of a light fixture that intrigues you. You can also find my newest lighting fixture faves on my pin boards on Pinterest.com, Stumbleupon.com, Notcot.org and Weheartit.com.