Friday 28 June 2013

Bon week-end


Books: Ernest Hemingway · Lisa Stefan
© Lisa Stefan | Books & Latte
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Thursday 27 June 2013

Garden design: a mill house garden in Oxfordshire



An interesting thing happened yesterday. I was uploading these photos from my files, of a garden that belongs to an 18th-century mill house by the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire, when A came home from work. He had grabbed the latest copy of House & Garden (July 2013) and I'm not kidding, this same garden is featured in the magazine and there is a short interview with the garden designer, Arne Maynard.

From the feature I learned that Maynard published a book back in 2004, A Sense of Place: How to Create a Garden with Atmosphere, which immediately found its way to my wish list.


It says in the article that the house is 'sandwiched between the River Cherwell and the South Oxford Canal on a finger of land that is almost an island' (p. 102). (In the magazine I was able to view different angles of the garden and the house itself.)


When Maynard arrived on the scene the garden was overgrown with 'dozens of unpollarded willows and everything [was] covered in ivy.' The garden was in desperate need of breathing space so they started with clearing everything except the beautiful 'New Dawn' and 'Albertine' roses that you can see climbing on the façade of the house.


Close to the house things are kept formal but at its edges the garden looks more natural. There is a herbaceous garden filled with many colourful plants and they also created a parterre that has yew pyramids and box hedges at its borders.

Don't get me started on all that lavender!


In the article, there is a quote from Maynard's book:
A successful garden must relate and respond to the surrounding landscape and its history as well as to the style of the building, to give it a proper sense of belonging.
I think it is safe to say that this garden philosophy is clearly visible in this gorgeous - yet somehow simple - garden.



Wednesday 26 June 2013

Karen Blixen museums + quinoa pudding recipe

In my Monday's post Danish author Karen Blixen played a role (Isak Dinesen was her pen name). I'm waiting for her book Out of Africa to arrive in the mail so I can start reading it again.

Karen Blixen's private home in Rungsted Kyst in Denmark (by the coast, north of Copenhagen) is open to the public. Hardly anything has been changed in there since Blixen's death in 1962. I don't know who took the photo of her study above, but I find it fascinating. It's not only her old typewriter sitting on the desk and the beautiful light coming in through window, it is also this sense of peacefulness; an echo of the past.

Blixen not only wrote books, she was also a skilful painter. In 1902-1903 she received training from Charlotte Sode and Julie Meldahl in their art school on Bredgade in Copenhagen, preparing for further studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1910 she also went to an art school in Paris. The two portraits above are of Abdullahi Ahamed (right), the brother of Farah Aden, a Somali who became her right hand on the farm in Kenya, and a young girl from the Kikuyu tribe.

When Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he was quoted in an interview saying: "I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had gone to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." She wrote him a thank-you letter that is kept in the museum.

On the website of Karen Blixen Museet you will find more photos of Blixen and the house.

Karen Blixen's old farmhouse "at the foot of the Ngong Hills" in Nairobi, Kenya was also turned into a museum and the photo above is taken there. When I make it to Kenya one day it is on my list of places to visit.

And from Karen Blixen to a delicious pudding.

Earlier today I posted my recipe of quinoa pudding with Greek yoghurt and strawberries on kithcen & aroma. Depending on our mood, it also contains peaches or apricots. This one has become our favourite Sunday treat.

photo credit:
1: unknown source via Writers Write Creative Blog / 2: Karen Blixen Museet / 3: K.R. Hoppe via Karen Blixen Museet / 4: Blixen with Marilyn Monroe in 1959 via ibid. / 5: Phil Douglis via Pinterest / 6: Lisa Hjalt

Tuesday 25 June 2013

notes à la mode 35

I am not quite done with Africa. In a discussion with my friend this weekend, the one I mentioned yesterday, who has travelled all over East Africa, I was saying that my ideas about Africa, my daydreams, were mainly based on a safari fantasy presented in ad campaigns by brands such as Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren. She answered that it was perfectly fine; their trips were probably somewhere between a Louis Vuitton ad and backpackers style. You see, her brother and his wife have been offering tours to Africa for many years and people can basically choose what kind of a trip they want. They want to show people the real Africa but people can also ask for a bit of luxury.

Let's keep the fantasy going with a few photos from a Louis Vuitton ad campaign from 2010, photographed in South Africa by Carter Smith. It features Dree Hemingway, the great-granddaughter of author Ernest Hemingway, Andrew Cooper, and some beautiful travel items, accessories and vintage luggage.

photo credit:
Carter Smith for Louis Vuitton 2010 Cruise via Quite Continental | models Dree Hemingway + Andrew Cooper styled by Antje Winter

Monday 24 June 2013

Summer living | Vive l'été



I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
These are the first sentences in the book Out of Africa by Karen Blixen (1885-1962), which I read many years ago, too young to really understand this incredible woman and her experiences in Africa. I intend to read it again this summer.


During the weekend I was Africa obsessed - there is no other way to describe this feeling that sometimes takes a hold of me. Blame Karen Blixen, scenes from the film Out of Africa (1985), and friends of mine who have travelled all over East Africa on many occasions. I found myself starting to collect photos on the desktop and it wasn't until later that I realised that most of them where from the Masai Mara National Reserve in the south-west part of Kenya. Even the Vogue editorial, featuring actress Keira Knightley, was shot there, in the Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp and its surroundings. In her journal for the magazine she wrote: "Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp is like something out of a fairy tale. Totally in the wild. White tents, huge four-poster beds with draped white mosquito nets. All the furniture is like something from Out of Africa."

There it was again: Out of Africa. I thought to myself, why not make a different SUMMER LIVING | VIVE L'ÉTÉ where the theme is Africa, or the Masai Mara, safari style and, of course, Blixen?

And that's what I did.



How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the water-hole where we were to outspan, travelling in a long file. The plains with the thorn-trees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity - and over our heads, to the west, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz. The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the cicadas would begin to sing. The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn-trees.
from the chapter 'A War-Time Safari' in Karen Blixen's  Out of Africa


photo credit:
01 + 03 + 05: Sigrun Thorsteinsdottir / 02: Eric Lafforgue / 04 + 06 + 09: Arthur Elgort for Vogue US, June 2007 | actress Keira Knightley styled by Grace Coddington / 07 + 10: Travel+Style Magazine (Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp) / 08: Singita/Pinterest

Thursday 20 June 2013

drawing with light 23

photo credit:
Will Davidson for Harper’s Bazaar Australia, March 2012 via Ada of Classiq/Pinterest | model: Marloes Horst

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Garden design: a French inspired garden in Alabama



The French window above with its gorgeous garden view made me fall completely flat for this feature on the website of Traditional Home. In Redmont, a historic neighbourhood in Birmingham, Alabama, stands a beautiful house from 1926 that belongs to interior designer Mary Finch and her husband. They bought it back in 2004 and it was gardener Norman Kent Johnson who helped them designing the gardens, which were bare and had old and overgrown wisteria in desperate need of cutting.

Before buying the house, Mary hadn't done much gardening but the property "afforded a blank canvas she couldn't resist." Because of travels to French wineries and to the Provence, French gardens were her inspiration. With pure honesty and laughter she remarks: "Perhaps the most French thing about this garden is the amount of French wine we’ve shared here."


Above you see a purple salvia and the beautiful terrace, which they use to enjoy the morning coffee while admiring the gardens and the view. Today Mary sounds like a true gardener when she says: "There's always something changing ... It's exciting to see a new leaf emerge, foliage change, or a flower about to bloom."


The flower above is a red verbena, which I have never seen before. It also goes by the name 'Voodoo Star' and attracts butterflies, birds, and bees.


The view in the back is wonderful, with the terrace overlooking the parterre and the Appalachian Mountains across the valley. It was Mary and gardener Norman Kent Johnson who added the parterre, a nod to formal French design. Four urns standing in its corners mark off the parterre.

There is an open-air patio in the garden, ideal for entertaining guests, with lanterns on the dividing wall that provide a beautiful soft light in the evening.

photo credit:
Jean Allsopp for Traditional Home


Tuesday 18 June 2013

in woodworker Joshua Vogel's studio



The moment I found this feature on woodworker Joshua Vogel over at Garden Design it felt as if I had dug up a treasure chest. I knew nothing about Joshua Vogel, who produces wooden sculptures, furniture and accessories in his workshop called Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading, Co. in the Hudson Valley, New York. He is also the co-founder of BDDW, located at 5 Crosby Street in NYC.

Vogel's studio, an old factory building from 1917, is one of my ideas of heaven. Everywhere you look there is wood and pieces in production, and the woodworking and engraving tools are neatly organised. The theories of American naturalist John Burroughs (1837-1921) are his guiding inspiration and for the production he uses local woods such as black walnut, sycamore and maple.
A vase hewn from the crotch section of a sugar maple with butterfly joints holding together the natural split.

Below you see Vogel at work in his studio. When talking about his design process he says: "I have many forms in my mind I want to create ... but once you start out on the lathe, you often have to let go of your intentions and let the wood tell you what it wants to be."
A sculpture made of sycamore and finished with black graphite. The ridges are hand-wrought.

The Scout magazine visited Vogel in his studio and in this beautiful and soothing video - an ode to trees and nature - he shares his ideas about his work and his life philosophy.




photo credit:
1-3 + 5: Rose Callahan / 4: Seth Smoot (Vogel at work) / 6: Vivian Lanzarone via Garden Design

Monday 17 June 2013

the National Day of Iceland



Today Icelanders celebrate 69 years of independence, gained on this day back in 1944 (it became a sovereign state in 1918). It so happens that my husband and I got married on this day in 1998 so we are celebrating our 15th Anniversary - its symbol is crystal. Here in Luxembourg it's just another weekday with work and school but I'm pretty sure I will make a cake or something later today. Or maybe just ice cream and lemonade as we are expecting 30 degrees (86°F).

Yesterday we were laughing because our oldest daughter asked if there had ever been 30 degrees in Iceland. I looked up the Icelandic weather records and said that there had been 30°C on some day back in 1997. There was silence. Then our daughter said in wonder: 'That's 16 years ago! I wasn't even born!' And we just burst out laughing. I looked at the record again and told them that before that it was back in 1991 ... more laughter ... and before that back in 1946. At that point our laughter had become uncontrollable and the tears were rolling down our faces. Maybe you have to be an Icelander or know Icelanders very well to understand the humour.



In his introduction in Daniel Bergmann's Iceland Landscapes, photographer David Ward writes:
Iceland is a country I love. But even after numerous visits over the last decade, it is one that (it pains me to admit) I hardly know. In fact, I doubt if one can truly know this land without spending a lifetime immersed in it. (p. 13)
I think he's spot on.



Daniel Bergmann writes in his reflections:
Iceland holds endless discoveries for photographers. I spend months every year traveling its wilderness and still have much to see and experience. Iceland is a place of contrasts and extremes that I sense are reflected in the psyche of those of us who were born here and have lived here. We are part of the landscape and it is part of us. (p. 126).
Also spot on.


To all the Icelanders out there I say: Gleðilegan 17. júní! I wish the rest of you a wonderful day, and if you feel like visiting my home country then start looking at Visit Iceland.

photo credit:
Daniel Bergmann nature photographer, from his website and Facebook page. The last photo, of the puffin at Látrabjarg cliff, appears in his book Iceland Landscapes.
- published with permission

Friday 14 June 2013

Bon week-end



This morning has been very exciting. Remember when I told you about and showed you a few photos in A's workshop downstairs? We have decided to take that workshop to the next level and today we were waiting for some equipment, quite a heavy piece, to be delivered from Germany. It is now in the garage and A is beaming, he’s walking on air. I won't tell you more now, you will just have to wait and see.

While waiting I drove to the nearest magazine shop and got me the latest issue of Côte Ouest and have been swooning over cosy French seaside towns while enjoying my coffee.

I'm wishing you a wonderful weekend with photos that I took in a neighbours' garden - I love their colour palette - and one photo taken during a wonderful walk in a meadow close by. They remind me of what I call our first summer walk this year; you know, that moment when you go for a long walk and realise that summer has indeed arrived.