Who else is relieved that Lady Edith Crawley, played by Laura Carmichael, is finally finding happiness on Downton Abbey? Having binged on all of the…
View More I Met Virginia Woolf in This RoomTag: memoirs
Exploring the memoirs of notable figures throughout history is a passion of mine because they make great fodder for bringing the past into the present.
One of my favorite posts that contains information garnered from memoirs is Transitory Spaces. It was inspired by Garrow Kedigian’s space in the 2016 Kips Bay Decorator Show House, dubbed Napoléon’s Lounge. It was a stunning room with chalk tromp l’oeil architectural elements that knocked me out. There was even a small bundle of antique letters folded and tied with a ribbon on a side table in the room, which told me I simply had to present the point of view of the Emperor through his own memoir penned by Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, who was Napoléon’s personal secretary for eleven years and was given the immense task of recording the statesman’s every thought!
Did you know that his flagship, the Orient, as he is about to sail toward Egypt held these items? “Bonaparte’s own quarters were ‘astonishingly luxurious.’ Arnault had been asked to assemble for him a superb library aboard: history principally, and philosophy and poetry.” The books included in the library are actually recorded in Napoléon’s memoirs and the erudite choices are impressive for “a man of the campaign”—his intention to be sure. There were also eight hundred bottles of the best Burgundy and a city carriage for use in Egypt on board! If these types of details that bring history to life fascinate you as they do me, you can click on the memoirs tag on my site and read other posts with a similar verve.
The Red Carpet Treatment
There is a momentum to writing that, once interrupted, is challenging to reboot. I’ve experienced this first-hand during the past two months as I have…
View More The Red Carpet TreatmentWe’ll Never Be Royals
Nest Nest Nest features the Alliage pattern.As I write this, I can feel the design energy draining from the Americas as the movers-and-shakers in our…
View More We’ll Never Be RoyalsThe Sense of Beauty
I am guessing this will not come as much of a surprise to anyone but me. As I was digitizing the majority of my design…
View More The Sense of Beauty