White Out

If you're ever in a situation where you're sort of on the fence about repainting, throw a Bavarian-themed holiday party and create an elaborate faux timber theme with gaffer's - not masking or artist's, mind you - tape. Yep. Do just that. The resulting mess will be something like the images below.  As one cannot live like THAT, you will be forced to re-think your entire color scheme and revolutionize your whole living space. In our case, our new color scheme is pure, glorious white with some Parisian-style moulding touches (this is just the beginning on the moulding front).  (BTW, those tusks are made from hundreds of little melted plastic toy soldiers! You can see their little guns and bodies when you flip 'em over. How cool!)

Room and Bard

My family has always been utterly thrilled to know that Jeffersonian architecture never inspired me to read, learn or wax intellectual. All those white columns and red bricks ever mustered in me was a tremendous urge to play journalist and consume large quantities of terribly cheap beer. In the end, that was ok, since I grew up to become a journalist who still loved beer. But I wish my years at W&L would've felt more like I'd imagined, like a movie: cozy, dripping in Faulknerian accents and thought...oozing with some magical dust that would make me devour books like I did in my youth. That never happened. Years passed. Countless novels went half finished (the ashamed would-be reader's way of saying, "barely started").

And then I went to visit Porter at her school, Bard College. Like the most fun guest a college freshman could ever desire, I spent the whole weekend curled up in her tiny dorm room reading away voraciously as she went out and did appropriate, college kid things without me. I couldn't help it. The "dust" had hit me. All those stone buildings! Trees! Mountains! River!

I still think it's one of the prettiest places on earth. And now, the college has posted some of the highlights of its photo archive online. All schools really should do this. It's better than any pamphlet they could whip up. What also helps the ole collegiate PR machine is a huge feature story in Town & Country.

Blithewood Mansion in the snow

Hanging out at Stone Row (Porter's dorm room was in there, too)

The early years when the campus belonged to St. Stephen's School

The Old Gym - former home of the former Drag Race, a helluva hop that was canceled Porter's junior year after all the ambulances in three counties were dispatched to campus to deal with kids, who, on that night, were highly affected by things other than that magical reading dust.

Main Campus

Ward Manor - this is now a dorm

Early Technicolor: Ziegfield's Glorifying the American Girl 1929

Just. Completely. Incredible. Daphne Guinness would be proud. Read more here.

Early Kinemacolor No. 2: Deauville, France 1912

Early Kinemacolor No. 1: With Our King and Queen in India

Highlights from British India's celebration of George V's coronation in 1911...in color.

Charting Inspiration

Port and I are keeping track of all the things we'd love to buy for ourselves (but cannot (damnit!)) or for clients (hopefully!) at the Hovey Design tumblr page. I'm a bit heart broken that I didn't choose this wonderful grid theme for my own when I launched it. While it's much more fun to look at the page as a chart, we're tweeting all this too via @HoveyDesign.

Winter's Finally Here

As a gal who grew up in a place where school closed when nary a flake fell but but winds blew so cold you'd lose a nose if you waited for the bus for more than five minutes, it seems mighty wimpy that all us New Yorkers are crying over the mid-20s, but it's icy and blistering out there! We're used to light windbreakers and lunch outside on Dec. 31! But perhaps it's time to get out the mid-50s speedsters and grab our skis. Yes. I think it is.

Good Will and Testament

For 2012 I don't really have a resolution...it's more a mandatory assignment: FINISH YOUR BOOK (on time) AND MAKE IT EVERYTHING YOU'VE DREAMED! So, I'm diving head first into my quest to gather together the most spectacular, touching tales of family pride, childhood joy and nostalgia...and the heirlooms that represent (or will represent) all three. I have chills over the list of people some family friends have suggested, but I want to cast the net as wide as possible. 

So with that in mind, I reach out to you all with a grand request: Do you know anyone or any families who've done an amazing job preserving their legacy - as a family and/or individuals - and incorporating their heirlooms into their homes beautifully?  I'd be thrilled to hear from you! Shoot me an email at hollister.hovey@gmail.com.

(Above: Frida Kahlo's My Grandparents, My Parents and I (Family Tree), 1936)

(Queen Victoria's family of European monarchs)

(The incredible Black family tree mural from Harry Potter)

(A great nautical "tree" found online)

Happy New Year!!!!

I owe so many people so much for making the past 12 months some of the most exciting of my life. What ridiculous once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, adventures, gifts and laughs you've all given me. I'm so lucky to have you around. Here's a little 2012 cheer for all - and a wish that you all get to spend the rest of your days surrounded with your favorite past-Presidents, polar bears, giraffes, soldiers, cowboys, natives, skiers, tennis champs...or maybe just your best, sweet friends and fam.

Pictures from Home: A Visit to the National World War I Museum

Kansas City gave me one of the best gifts ever this Christmas: a touching, beautiful, honest, fascinating homage to everyone touched by and lost to the first Great War. You enter the National World War I Museum's new wing (opened in 2006) walking on glass floating above a field of 9,000 poppies, each representing 1,000 of the 9 million soldiers who died during the conflict and recalling images from John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.  

In 1919, a year after the war ended, a local group came together to raise funds for a memorial. Within 10 days, Kansas Citians handed over $2.5 million to make it happen - a staggering amount for the day (or any day). On November 1, 1921, the supreme Allied commanders - Lieutenant General Baron Jacques of Belgium; General Armando Diaz of Italy; Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France; General John J. Pershing of the United States; and Admiral David Beatty of Great Britain - gathered together in the same place for the first and only time to dedicate the site in front of a crowd of 100,000. President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the nearly finished memorial three years later.

The original museum sits in two sections on either side of the memorial gloriously featuring sections of all that remains from the incredible mural Pantheon de la Guerre, started in Paris as a French propaganda vehicle in 1914 and eventually displayed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. Originally 402 feet long by 45 feet high, it took 30 artists painting until after the armistice for the massive work to be complete. It served as a sad memorial of loss for Europeans but the Americans framed it as a patriotic piece when went up at the fair. But then it was thrown into storage and forgotten as the second great war unfolded. Kansas City acquired it in the 1950s and pieced together about 7% of the undamaged pieces (which are still staggeringly large) to fill the two old wings of the museum.  This detail featuring tiny portraits of real soldiers above hangs in the western wing.

A detail of a portrait of John Lewis Barkley's uniform. The Missouri boy was declared the most decorated soldier of the Midwest.

Gas masks

A South African kilt

A model of the German U Boat

Court dress tunic and hat of Baron Rudolph Karl Maria Alexander Schwarzbek von Marau

Grenades

Captain Glenn Orrin Brown's hand monogrammed haversack

More of the Pantheon de la Guerre in the old East Wing

Legacy: Grandma + Givenchy Go to a Party

Aunt Virginia wasn't the only one in the fam lucky enough to make it into LIFE. It's always been a huge source of family pride that grandma got the cover in '55 (for being a pretty stunning socialite), 12 years after her second husband got his (for fighting Nazis from the cockpit of a P-47 Thunderbolt) (click here to see the covers). It wasn't until a few years ago when I got my own copy, that I realized grandma was inside her issue, too...on the arm of Givenchy! I finally found it online. You can read the whole issue and the article (starting on page 24) right here thanks to Google Books. Man, I love technology!

Legacy: Ginny and Rita Go for a Picnic

During a 4 a.m. fit of insomnia this morning, I started poking around on the internets and came across something quite shocking: photos of my grandpa's sister riding bikes, making jelly sandwiches and eating chicken with her friend...Rita Hayworth! Aunt Virginia's on the right. Their poor friend Jane Hopkins didn't seem to get the memo about the uniform of the day and Minerva Griswold seems to be kinda struggling to keep up, but at least they all got treats at the end of the 10 mile ride. So fun!

Photos by Peter Stackpole for LIFE Magazine, 1940

Hovey Design is Born!

In the name of not wasting once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, we figured it would be good to have a website for our new interiors business. It's been near-torture to keep it under wraps until now! Click the pic to take a tour - designed by the dear and amazing Christopher Lopez-Thomas. Port took all the photos. 

You can also tweet us up at @hoveydesign!

The Decorating Project: Revealed (in a Shocking Way)!

In what must be the greatest convergence of great luck, timing, loads of effort, lost sleep, manual labor and true proof of Santa, Christmas legend and fairy dust, the results of Porter's and my first decorating commission appear in the home section of this Thursday's New York Times. 

We went from taking six years to fill our windowless loft, to about three months to warm up a brand new, beautiful penthouse with 20 foot high windows that open the walls up 270 degrees, offering clear views from Williamsburg to downtown Brooklyn to the Williamsburg Bridge to the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.  

The owner made a real leap of faith when he agreed to pay two amateur vintage addicts to fill his stark white glass cube. We can only hope that in setting out to buy him new furniture (and a really huge folding kayak), we've managed to make him a home.

I'll share all the details of the fun, adventures, generosity and deals that went into this process in a bit, but in the meantime, reporter Emily Weinstein has perfectly captured our motivations and feelings about the project and photographer Trevor Tondro has made it glow with his wonderful shots. We honestly owe them and our client, Peter, our futures.

 Porter and I (who actually look like sisters in the shot below) decided that it would be an incredible shame to not try to make good on the daydreams and promises we've made ourselves for about two decades. So, with this project, the interiors obsession becomes official with the launch of Hovey Design. Porter will man the ship full time, while I throw myself in on nights and weekends. We absolutely cannot wait. We are eternally grateful (and absolutely so excited and shocked that it's really come true!!!!). Let us know if you need some help shopping, Ebaying or filling your entire house. That's what we're (finally) here for!

All photos by Trevor Tondro for The New York Times