Café Design

Decorating Consultations

Café Design Interviews | Alison Carabasi of Hillbrook Collections

Happy Friday! You won’t believe the treat I’ve got for you today!!! My ever-growing love of gardens has led me to read a feature in House Beautiful several years ago about a mother & daughter enterprise called Hillbrook Collections. I was stunned at the time because their garden sheds were some of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. You see, Hillbrook Collections is for many garden lovers the answer to an unspoken prayer. Run by Alison Carabasi, it is a family owned company that fills a gap in the market. They produce beautiful garden structures, inspired by classical architecture, that are tailored and handcrafted out of the finest woods by local Pennsylvania craftsmen.

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Fixer Upper | Part 2 | The Exterior

A couple of weeks ago I started a series of blog posts about a small Cape Cod style cottage that is for sale in our neighborhood. You can read the first post HERE. We won’t be putting an offer on the house but we were seriously thinking about it at some point. To make sure we were prepared, I had a virtual makeover planned to see whether this home could fit our needs and style.

Today I’ll share some of my ideas for the exterior.  My starting point was a picture of a beautiful home in Lyme, Connecticut that I saved a long time ago for occasions just like this one. I think it’s made its way onto most of my wish-lists over the years because it scores so high on all aspects – architecture, scale, landscaping. The architecture is rooted in the American vernacular, which I adore, and the landscaping includes that ideal boxwood hedge and pickets the American dream is all about.

country house

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Fixer Upper | Part 1

If you’re anything like me, you love a good home makeover. About a month ago, my husband and I went to a couple of open houses in our neighborhood. We are not on the market to buy right now, but were curious about what our options were in terms of housing. Historic Urbana has a great school district, it’s walking distance from shops, cafés, restaurants and it’s right across campus.

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Known as the “faculty ghetto”, the houses are older than the majority of buildings in the area and are architecturally charming, inside and out. The brick-paved streets are lined with old trees that look particularly beautiful in the spring and summer months. In the fall, the foliage turns yellow, and brown and ruby red, and it’s just the prettiest thing to see.  View Post