Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Another zillow posting up!

Well it may be a little slow up at the farmhouse, but there's lots of action down in the city. Loads of professional projects this week, lots of cooking, and another one of my Zillow Home Improvement posts is up on their website, so be sure you swing by and take a look.


Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of my post and click the  ❤️️ button, so the people at Zillow know that someone is reading these posts!!

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Thanks for the love guys! 

Monday, March 30, 2015

Chimneys: Out. Bricks: Gone. Progress: Some.

I'd like to say that we made tons of progress this weekend, but that's a bald-face lie. Aside from picking up the William Morris wallpaper, and trolling Craig's List a fair amount, almost nothing else was accomplished.

But! This is the great thing about paying a local dude to remove your chimney and fill the hole it left behind!

*I know. I know. I have guilt about paying someone to do this work, I'm such a crazy hawk about money, but sometimes... 

"It's a dirty job and somebody else can do it." 

Last week while we were working away in New York City, someone else was upstate hacking away at the remains of the brick chimneys in our guest bedroom and attic, and throwing all the debris out of our third floor window onto a tarp in the yard.

Just to be clear-- these chimneys were not functional and did not extend through my roof. Some vindictive son-of-a-#$% chopped the rest of the chimneys off when they re-did the roof a few years before we bought the house, so although there were once wood-burning stoves in every bedroom (AMAZING) they aren't there any more. That same vindictive $%$ also left the bottom half of all the chimneys in the house for us to deal with a few years later. What a guy. (NOT AMAZING.) Of course, the perils of being incredibly-cheap and paying the local dude by the hour is that you end up with a yard full-a-bricks, and it's left to you to dispose of them. Luckily, John and my dad were incredibly good sports and loaded up this epic pile of bricks this afternoon, and now they're headed off to the town dump when we go up to the country next!

I can't wait to photograph our guest room once it's fully-finished. It's already transformed sans chimney. What a difference!! 

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Moving Right Along! (At a snail's pace.)

It hasn't exactly been a lighting-fast progression up at the farm, namely because one of my friends is having a NYC-specific crisis (her building lost its Certificate of Occupancy and everybody is OUT!) so it's been a frenzied non-project-focused weekend upstate, with a group of unexpected house-guests who are far more focused on looking at real estate than installing panel walls.

I did, however, stand strong on my detour to New Jersey on my way upstate, and picked up my fantastic William Morris wallpaper-- my latest Craig's List victory. This wallpaper is just lovely-- and ordinarily significantly more expensive-- so assuming it doesn't kill me or ruin my relationship with my family (my mother has said she'll help me hang it up the stairs...) it is going to be such a stunning addition to our farmhouse.

But-- I'm not stopping there. I found another incredible (slightly kooky!) bucolic landscape wallpaper, and I think we're going to install that in the bathroom downstairs. It's a little bizarre, I'll give you that, but it's also $95.00 for an enormous amount of wallpaper, and I have a strange feeling it's going to be AWESOME once it's installed. So-- weird or otherwise-- I'm taking the plunge. (And if it's really that bad, I only have to live with it until we can afford to chop the bathroom off our house... just a mere 10-20 years from now...)

Inconveniently, that wallpaper (also a Craig's List find) is located out on Long Island, but conveniently I happen to be headed out to East Hampton this week for a (professional) project I'm working on, so lickity-split, that wallpaper shall be mine!

Oh baby. It's gettin' weird up in here. 

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Holy home improvement!

In a typical "Christina-Salway-Too-Little-Money-Too-Many-Projects" fashion, I'm taking on some big offenders up at the farmhouse this Spring. We've got lofty goals, a fair amount of progress already, and a surprisingly small budget in order to accomplish everything on my list.

Here's what I'm aiming for: (Don't laugh!)

-Wallpaper the stairwells from ground floor to second floor, and second floor to attic: The good news: I think I've already found the paper for this-- on Craig's List bien sûr-- so that helps my ailing budget considerably... The bad news: Wallpapering 4 diagonal walls. I can't imagine this will be easy. Having no experience with wallpapering is not going to make it easier. 

-Wallpaper the downstairs guest bathroom: This should really be low on my list because eventually I'm hoping to totally renovate this bathroom and quite possibly chop it off the house altogether; but I've come to terms with the timeline on that-- and it's looking more like 2026 than 2016... So with that in mind, spending $150.00 to wallpaper it for a decade doesn't exactly feel like throwing good money after bad, if you know what I mean...

In case you can't tell-- the walls in the photo are made
of spray-foam insulation, NOT a lovely butter color paint,
applied in traditional tudor style... 

-Ok. This is the big one. I think we're finally makin' moves to finish the attic: This is not a project of skill as much as it is a project of devotion. My plan is to install horizontal bead-board throughout the entire room, build a wall to divide the sleeping space from the storage space, and then install a railing around the stairwell so Jules, the dog, and any inebriated friends of ours don't fall down the hole unwittingly. It's kind of a bummer about the storage space/ sleeping space division, because the whole attic is really lovely as a whole, but let's be serious. 25% of the reason city people have country houses is the storage space. If we didn't have this attic for hiding our "old baby clothes/insane amount of mismatched frames/random pieces of wood/bonkers collection of windows and doors", we'd be lost. Or we'd have to rebuild the barn. 

And no. I don't want to talk about the barns right now. 

As though I don't have enough on my plate, I was recently informed that my utterly-collapsed hay-filled haunted barns are "starting to smell like hay". Which I'm neither thrilled about, nor poised to do anything about. Unless someone else has $7,000 they want to use to bury my barns.... Any takers???

I hate this chimney. Sorry this is such a terrible photo,
but literally, I hate this chimney so much, I don't have
any photographs of it. I'm avoiding it. We're estranged.
I've also resigned myself to hiring out the demolition of the rogue chimney that remains in one of the guest bedrooms. It's this ridiculous eyesore, but also creates a colossal amount of dust and detritus, and after talking about it for a year, I asked a local dude to hack it apart for me on the cheap. I just didn't have it in me when there are SO MANY other big fish to fry... (There are so many fish to fry around here, it feels like a freakin' chip shop.) You must realize that this was a major concession for me to make-- I'm SO tight fisted about paying other people to do work I know I can do, so letting this manual labor go was a significant psychological break-through/ failure on my part. You say potato, I say PO-tah-TOE. 

Anyway........

By removing the chimney from the guest bedroom, we also have to remove the chimney from the attic, because the guest room chimney was supporting the weight of the attic chimney. The positive spin on this last little project is that now both chimneys are out, I can finish furnishing the guest room how I want it rather than how it fits around that f-ing chimney; and when we start paneling the attic, we don't have to work around a chimney we wish didn't exist... 

So that's where things stand today. Lots to tackle this weekend, lots of decisions still to be made, and then SO much more to tackle. 

I'm already tired. 

Monday, March 23, 2015

Baked Goods To Live By...

I'm whipping up a batch of these Lavender-Lemon cookies today, mainly because I've got a whole lot of lavender left over from the Lavender Puddings I made a few weeks ago, but also because I'm on the hook for a playdate tomorrow morning, and I can't rightly show up empty-handed. For shame!

I think I'm going to make them with a mixture of whole-wheat and regular flour because I really love gritty-grainy cookies. Apparently you can substitute 3/4 cup of whole wheat flour for 1 cup of regular flour (though there appears to be some debate about outcome), so there's an opportunity for a little experimentation here, which is always fun/occasionally disappointing...

I'll report back. 

Ingredients:

3/4 cup all-pu
rpose flour .5625 cup wheat flour 
1/2 cup almond flour (Can you believe I actually just have this in my pantry?!?) 
2 tablespoons arrowroot
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon dried lavender
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, chilled
1 large lemon, zested
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Directions:

Place an oven rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a food processor, pulse together the flours, arrowroot, sugar, lavender, salt and baking soda.

Add the butter and lemon zest. Pulse until the mixture forms a coarse meal. Add the honey and lemon juice. Pulse until the mixture forms a soft dough. Form the dough into 1-inch round balls and press into discs, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter and 1/4-inch thick. Arrange in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. Bake until light brown around the edges, 9 to 11 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely, about 15 minutes.


Oh wait-- I've also got a P.S. 

Unrelated, except that it also involves baked goods: John made homemade banana bread over the weekend, and my mother-in-law suggested making it into french toast (aka. soaking it in egg and milk and frying it.) Holy-hotdogs! It's like eating crack for breakfast. It's so delicious that I'm considering serving it with ice cream for dessert at my next dinner party. Yum, yum, yum. 

Friday, March 20, 2015

The First Day of Spring!


Well- you'd never know it was the first day of Spring if you looked out my windows in Brooklyn, but the calendar is telling me otherwise.

I'm going to try to persuade you by deluging you with a bunch of springy pics from the farmhouse. Maybe if we all think Spring hard enough, the weather will oblige...



You know what they say:

When in doubt, put a tulip on it. 


It's coming guys. I swear. Don't give up and move south now. We're through the worst of it. And eventually, the sky will look like this...



Wednesday, March 18, 2015

OMG. New to me.

So late last week, I got an email. "------- has a large antique dresser they want to get rid of. Any interest?" Screeeecccchhhh...

Have you met me? 

Any interest?!?!? I would sooner leave one of my limbs in the trash than let an antique dresser make its way onto the sidewalk. There's got to be somewhere good that can go! (This mentality is also what is paving the way to my eventual "hoarder-status", but we'll ignore that for the moment...)

Long story short, I picked up the dresser in a heartbeat, and just got it situated in our guest room upstate.

It's utterly charming, and works perfectly with the existing antique bed frame in there, as well as with the adirondack-style shelf I hung up last weekend (an incredible $5.00 find from my thrifting adventures in Connecticut...) This room is really coming together! Now I just need to finish painting the walls and we're in business. (Not sure if you can tell, but that's actually just a primer coat on the wood paneling. We got that far, and then some other construction emergency reared its head, and I just left it as-is.)

Quelle horreur! 



Monday, March 16, 2015

Really. Can one obsess too much about their table top surfaces?

Also known as: Have you ever seen a folk-art-plate-warmer? Neither had I. Until a few weeks ago, when I came upon this magnificent specimen. It's, like, the perfect interior design accent object. It adds a beautiful form (I swear this was the inspiration for the original sputnik), a lovely material (a rich deep wood), and it's visually transparent without adding more glass to a room...

It's, like, perfect. 

So even though I'd spent a fair amount of time obsessively moving my living room around this weekend, this morning I had a REV-E-LATION, and realized it just wasn't working on our coffee table. But I also knew where it needed to go! On the ever changing Freeman's console table, along side the orchids and ivy in our living room...

Ah-ha! 

Unbelievably-- after all that moving and shifting, adjusting and tweaking-- I only got this one half-way decent photograph of my antique plate-warmer in its new location... I promise I'll get a better photo ASAP. What a lame-o....

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Post-scone Follow Up...

Okay.

Well the news flash is this: These scones, which are extremely good, are even better with mango-ginger chutney. This may not come as a surprise to you, but I was delighted!

The verdict regarding the taste test was... they're all good. We really liked the chili-sugar; someone else said the cardamon-sugar was the winner; Jules seemed to prefer the sugar-salt; and actually, even the rather experimental lavender-sugar was good; though less excellent with the chutney...

You'll just have to be the judge.


Saturday, March 14, 2015

Apparently it's National Pi Day...

But I guess I screwed the pooch, because I woke up this morning and churned out a batch of delicious Ginger-Cardamon Scones which are absolutely rockin', but decidedly NOT pie.

I was committed to a recipe that Martha Stewart borrowed from a cookbook writer called Joan Nathan, but discovered before I even started that I didn't have everything that Joan/Martha recommended. However, it was whizzing rain and generally miserable outside, and I was damned if I was going to the grocery store, so I elected to ad-lib the missing parts. I have no idea how these scones are if you actually follow the recipe, but I can assure you that my version is truly excellent.


INGREDIENTS

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon cardamom pods, crushed and inner seeds ground
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
  • 1/4 cup crystallized ginger, chopped in 1/4-inch pieces 
  • **This is where things took a turn. I didn't have any crystallized ginger hanging around, so I peeled and then finely minced about 4 tablespoons of fresh ginger. I actually looked up the conversion of fresh-ginger-vs-crystallized-ginger, so this quantity isn't completely arbitrary...
  • 3/4 cup sour cream 
  • **No dice on sour cream either- but weirdly- I did have buttermilk, so I did a mixture of 2/3 c. buttermilk and an additonal 4 T. butter. In my defense, again, I did look up "sour cream substitutes" so I didn't just pull these quantities straight out of a hat. 
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 4 teaspoons sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • DIRECTIONS

    1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
    2. Place the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, the bowl of a food processor, or in a large bowl and mix by hand. Sift ground cardamom seeds into mixture; stir to combine. Add butter and mix until crumbly.
    3. Add ginger, sour cream, 1/2 cup sugar, and 1 egg. Mix, blend, or pulse, just until combined; do not overmix.
    4. Form 1/3 cup dough into a ball or use a large ice cream scoop, and place dough on prepared baking sheet. Repeat with remaining dough, spacing scones about 2 inches apart.
    5. In a small bowl, mix together remaining egg with a dash of water. Brush scones with egg mixture and sprinkle evenly with remaining 4 teaspoons sugar. Bake until golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes.
**The last revision: We decided to do a taste test (I LOVE TASTE TESTS!!!) to determine if there was a more exciting/enticing way to finish these scones than with just a sprinkling of granulated sugar. We did a variety of mixtures: Sugar & Salt; Sugar & Chili Powder; Sugar & Ground Cardamon; Sugar & Finely Ground Lavender... 

The jury is still out because we've only tried the Sugar & Chili Powder and the Sugar & Cardamon flavors so far... I will report further tomorrow, but so far, we've been pleased.

In the meantime, I hope the rest of America is enjoying their pie. 

Sorry, family...

A place for everything and everything in its place...

Today has been a day devoted to obsessive-compulsive-behavior. 


Or my version of it. I've polished brass (incredible tray! explosion-proof submarine lantern!), meticulously hung art work (hanging six almost-but-not-identical prints exactly the same distance apart-- left-to-right-and-up-to-down-- a true testament to my patience), attempted to channel a more creative person while arranging flowers (Martha! Can you hear me??), mounted an adirondack shelf, positioned and repositioned my (new-to-me) antique plate warmer (google it. There are like two on earth...), made beds, and just generally obsessively-buzzed around our farmhouse-- putting all of my latest thrift-store/yard-sale finds into their new found homes.


But-- in the interest of suspense-- I'm not going to show you all of the photos in one shot-- so you'll just have to keep tuning in to the blog, or my instagram feed (@christinasalway) to catch all my latest scores in situ.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Baking: Learning Through Experimentation...

Just churned out Better Home & Garden's Lavender Lemon Pudding Cakes for a dinner party last night-- these are a cinch to make, quick as a whip, and pretty much lovely exactly as is; though of course, I've got a few adaptations...

First: I'd give the rock-sugar/lavender mixture the skip at the end, and just sprinkle a little raw sugar on top instead. There is really just the right amount of lavender flavor in these cakes, and I think that mixture would tip them over the edge and into "eating-a-candle-status". Not good. 

Second: If you're feeling daring, I recommend topping this cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprinkling of sea salt. That's the joint!!

EAT THESE WITH THAT. The extra fat of the olive oil along with the salt, combining with the creaminess of the ice cream, the tartness of the lemon, and the subtle aromatic lavender flavor is... pretty much perfect.

Lavender Lemon Pudding Cakes

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon dried lavender
2 lemons
6 tablespoons granulated sugar (+ more for baking dishes)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon butter, melted
3 eggs, separated
1.) Finely shred 1 Tbsp. peel from lemons. Zest two lemons. (Not sure what the difference is between zest and finely grate, but it elicited a fair amount of discussion, which ended in zesting...) Juice lemons (1/4 cup). Set aside. Butter six 6-oz. ramekins or custard cups with softened butter; sprinkle each with sugar tapping out any excess. Set aside.
2.) In a large bowl combine 2 Tbsp. granulated sugar and the flour. Whisk in lemon peel, lemon juice, and melted butter until smooth. In a small bowl whisk together egg yolks and strained milk. Whisk milk mixture into flour mixture until smooth; set aside.
3.) In a small bowl beat egg whites with an electric mixer on medium speed until soft peaks form (tips curl). Gradually add remaining 4 Tbsp. sugar, beating on high speed until stiff peaks form (tips stand straight). Stir a small amount of the egg whites into the lemon mixture to lighten. Fold in remaining egg whites (batter will be thin).
4.) Pour batter into prepared dishes, filling each three-fourths full; place in a shallow baking pan. Bake 20 minutes or until tops spring back when lightly touched. Remove pan from oven and cool cakes on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Place remaining dried lavender and rock sugar in a blender. Cover; blend until fine. Skip this and just use raw sugar... Sprinkle over cakes. Serve warm with sea salt ice cream. 
This is a perfect spring-time dessert! 

Feeling The Burn...

Sadly, this is not because I've been exercising. In fact- it is the opposite of that. It's because I've been spending way too much time looking at fancy things where fancy people shop and I've got a major case of the "I-WANTs". That's the worst. Because I've also got a major case of the "I DON'T HAVE THE MONEYs", which is totally cramping my style when it comes to the "I GETs"...

Dang.

Do you think this painter-- Samantha French-- would accept one of my less vital organs in exchange for one of these paintings? I'm not trying to be extreme-- I'm thinking something that's already superfluous-- like my appendix or something like that... I'll have to ask my brother (the doctor) if there's something that's valuable but also expendable. Maybe she could use it for her next art installation...?


This first one in particular. Maybe Ms. French wants her own little piece of Christina Salway in a jar in exchange for that glorious painting. It's 44" X 50". Did I mention that? I'm not suggesting I undergo major surgery for some teeny-tiny painting, I'm talking almost FOUR FEET BY FIVE FEET. That's big. That's no joke.


Unfortunately, if I can't work out a creative (aka safe) way to sell off a piece of my insides, I'm probably going to have to sit tight on these paintings, because they're currently listed around $10,000.00 a pop. But they would look rad in the multi-million dollar loft (I don't own...)

Dang. 

Adding insult to injury is that I don't seem to be the only one loving these swimming-watery scenes... Jonathan Adler's latest catalog features fabulous Slim Aaron photographs celebrating poolside living; as well as some terrific oil paintings by Helena Wurtzel-- which almost feel like rudimentary versions of Samantha French's photo-realistic swimming scenes... 


So not only are her paintings fabulous, they're also poised to be the next big trend. 

Dang. 

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Another Zillow Post Goes Live!

The people over at Zillow are publishing my D-I-Y posts faster than I can write them! Another piece just went up in their Home Improvement section... Go swing by, take a look, and...

...don't forget to click... "Recommend"!! 


Saturday, March 7, 2015

Latest Recipe: Key Lime Pie with a Pretzel Crust

Yep. This was made on a dare. Someone said "That would be good." Someone said, "Can't be done." And then someone (me) said, "Gauntlet thrown. It shall be done."

And so yesterday I made a Key Lime Pie with a Pretzel Crust, essentially following a typical key lime pie recipe, but substituting pretzel sticks for graham crackers. And here are the results:


a.) decidedly delicious.

b.) tastes almost exactly like regular Key Lime Pie.

c.) I think I should have used skinny pretzel sticks or curly pretzels instead of chubby pretzel sticks, to get more of the salt and crunchiness and less of the bread-i-ness.

d.) less sugar would make the pretzel flavor more pronounced.



I'm gonna try this baby again, minus the sugar, in personal-pan-tart pans to see how that shakes out. However I'm going to wait until next week when we have friends over for dinner so I don't have to eat three miniature key lime pies by myself.

*Note: One other change I made to this recipe: I put the whole pie into a fluted tart pan with a removable bottom instead of a regular 9" pie pan. This is a little bit of a hassle-- it takes a little bit of patience to get your pretzel crust out of the pan form-- but as long as you spray the pan thoroughly before you press your crust in place, and you let it cool completely before you remove it from the form, it should come out fairly easily. The reason I did this is because I really think the tart-shape and  fluted edge elevate this pie from ordinary to elegant. And why wouldn't you want this delicious pie to look as good as it tastes?!?

Friday, March 6, 2015

Hard Core Thrifting Successes/ OMG Stamford Connecticut

I have secretly been buying and hoarding tons of incredible thrift finds recently. They're pretty much all for the country, so I haven't had an opportunity to place them yet, but after my recent trip up to Stamford, Connecticut yesterday, I just can't contain myself anymore.

I HAVE TO TELL SOMEONE. 

Now if you know Stamford Connecticut, you know it isn't usually synonymous with "bargain shopping." The area is a totally bizarre experience-- basically a cluster of incredibly high-end, beautifully curated antique stores set in the center of an otherwise rather blue-collar, sort of rough looking city. Seemingly populated by people who probably aren't shopping for $8,000.00 love-seats. And make no mistake. I'm not in the market for an $8,000.00 love-seat either. I was there shopping for clients-- and looking exclusively in the < $3,000.00 love-seat department...

 But once I was finished, I pulled a "Christina" and googled "Thrift Store Stamford Connecticut" and toodled off to a nearby thrift store (name withheld!) where I found a veritable bounty of incredible goodies, priced well within my tax-bracket. I literally had to put some stuff back because I was so over-extended at this thrift store...


I picked up a set of fantastic framed & matted vintage culinary prints which appear to have come from an old cookbook called Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (six for $50.00!) Considering the website I found is selling these prints framed for $145.00 EACH, I'm feeling pretty pleased with my investment! You've really got to see these prints to fully appreciate them. Mrs. Beeton had some pretty eclectic ideas about what qualified as a salad, I can tell you what! (Note: If you really love these prints, someone on Etsy is also selling a similar-but-not-the-same reprint you can print yourself for like $3.00 a pop. That seems like a heck of a deal too, if you don't feel strongly about provenance...)

Anyway... Moving along! I also found a fabulous italian tole wall sculpture for $5.00, an sweet little antique adirondack-style gate-leg shelf for another $5.00, and most importantly, a set of carved wooden bowls (for my babysitter's birthday present!)... The list goes on and on!

Such a victory!! 

But-- my confession continues further... Earlier this week I had a major win at a yard sale in East Hampton (Again, another place not known for its discount shopping...) but I picked up this ENORMOUS brass lantern (Apparently it's a submarine lantern and it's EXPLOSION PROOF. I have not tested this, but I trust the guy who told me...) I bought that for a mere $15.00. I'm pretty sure the brass alone is worth more than that. It's so heavy it could probably sink a smaller ship.





















And then last but not least! I also discovered this spectacular hard-to-find-vintage store called Adaptations in Greenpoint, while exploring the furniture and design scene in Brooklyn earlier this week. I picked up a couple of gems for clients, but the real victories: The decorative brass tray, pink depression glass cake stand, and the gigantic primitive wood bowl that I discovered for another $45.00 total. By gum. What a week.

Albeit, I'm about $120.00 lighter than I was last week, but I'm now RICH IN ACCESSORIES! 

Don't try to tie me down, Budget! I will resist!

New Zillow Post! Up & Running!

Yes indeedy folks! Another one of my Zillow Do-It-Yourself blogs is up and running. 

Once again, let me encourage you to "recommend" my article by scrolling all the way down to the bottom and clicking the ♥, and if you're feeling really loquacious-- go ahead and leave a comment too. (Preferably of the "We love these helpful, handy DIY posts! Keep 'em coming! variety... Hint, hint.)


Monday, March 2, 2015

Obsessed. Completely obsessed.

One of the perils of working in interior design is that occasionally-- while shopping for someone who has a lot more money than you-- you encounter something that you want for yourself. And not like a "casual-want." I mean like a "can't-stop-thinking-about-tattoo-are-your-arm-want." That's a lot of want.



I've just had one such experience and I'm still reeling. (And trying to plot different creative ways to hastily rustle up $4,000.00) If you know of any high-return ponzi-schemes that could help fund my acquisition of these painting, please let me know.


The painter is Aaron Hauck... He's actually originally from Minnesota, weirdly, and studied at MCAD, which is a well-regarded art school in Minneapolis where a bunch of people I know actually studied. His paintings are photo realistic images of New York City-- cityscapes-- and I find them absolutely breath-taking. Like taking-away-of-my-breath... They channel this very Edward-Hopper-esque rendering of light and architecture that just makes my heart flutter... So now I'm going to live on water and crackers until I've saved up enough money to buy one of these sensational paintings.

If you need me, I'll be hungry.