This Week’s Finds

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Happy Sunday, dear friends! I hope you’ve had a joyous and relaxing weekend!  It’s been a busy one for us, with an interesting mix of work and play. We’ve had an overnight visit from a dear friend, and I’ve had the pleasure to prepare and observe our hard-working family room being used as a guest bedroom. I love sharing our house – be it sleepovers, dinner parties or visits from our (many) four-legged friends. Having friends over somehow, breaking the laws of physics, makes our tiny house feel larger, more useful, and certainly happier. Laughter and good times are design essentials.

A glimpse of the family room, with the last of this year’s anemones.

After a few weeks of neglect, the gorgeous fall weather today allowed me to be productive in the garden and get the last of the garden cleanup projects out of the way. Next on my list is cleaning and storing my terra-cotta planters, and planting the last of the spring bulbs, before it’s too late. Have you gotten yours in already? Planters and bulbs?

One of my favorite house guests

As for this week’s finds, I’ve assembled a few things from my shopping carts across the board – with an emphasis on books and furniture. I hope you’ll find something you like! 

Perfect English – Small and Beautiful, by Ros Byam Shaw

Classic English style is comfortable, timeless, and informal. But it can also be seen as rather grand—most appropriate for rambling rectories, manor houses, and country house hotels. This book sets out to show that Perfect English style can be scaled down to work in a home of any age, size or shape. Ros Byam Shaw visits 12 pint-sized homes that are perfect examples of this ever-popular look, including a terraced townhouse in Ludlow, a gardener’s cottage in Kent, a tiny London flat, and a perfect Cotswolds country cottage. At a time when sustainability and environmental concerns are at the top of the agenda, Perfect English style prioritizes reuse, recycling, and up-cycling, and happily accommodates objects that are worn, faded, and mended. As the inviting, characterful, and compact homes that fill these pages demonstrate, Perfect English Small and Beautiful reveals how to downscale with perfect English panache.

100% New Zealand Wool Throw Blanket

Tray-Style Metal Coffee Table

Country Life: 125 Years of Countryside Living in Great Britain from the Archives of Country Life, by John Goodall & Kate Green

For 125 years Country Life has presented its readers with the finest insider’s tour of everything quintessentially British. Now in one volume, this spectacular collection of images offers the best of life in the British countryside, from charming Cotswolds villages to panoramic views across the Yorkshire dales and Glastonbury for readers who will revel in tramping across the heather filled moors to see King Charles’s favorite view in all England, the white cliffs of Dover, and the Dark Hedges of Northern Ireland. Discover on these pages the culture and seasonal activities of country life, whether it be a gentleman farmer showing off his prize cattle, fly fishing in the Scottish highlands, swan upping on the Thames, or cricket on the village green.

The Irish Country House: A New Vision, by Robert O’Byrne

A unique presentation of Irish country house interiors, combining well-preserved historic estates with adventurous contemporary restorations, celebrating some of the most characterful houses in Ireland.

Forgoing the criteria of stateliness and opulence, this book is an exploration of the most captivating and unusual interiors in Ireland. Whether in the transformation of a derelict estate, the preservation of an historic hunting lodge, or the re-creation of a Gothic fantasy, each of the homes in this extraordinary book reflects a renewed vitality in the contemporary approach to Irish country houses.

Rich in detail and varied in scope, the houses reveal a refreshing dynamism in their decoration by equally diverse owners—from the ornate refurbishment of a castle by a Mexican financier to the bold palette of a contemporary artist’s renovation to an Elizabethan Revival house. The sparse interiors of a mansion in Westmeath reflect its painstaking restoration by descendants of the original owners, and at Coollattin—Ireland’s largest country house, part restored, part still in disrepair—the building’s baroque splendor is amplified by its raw, unfinished state.

Reversible Cashmere Blanket

Round Rattan Mirror

Devices and Desires, by P. D. James

Blenheim: 300 Years of Life in a Palace, by Henrietta Spencer-Churchill

The most important, most visited, and most renowned of all of Britain’s stately homes, Blenheim has been home to the Churchill family for more than 300 years.

Regarded as perhaps the greatest of the stately homes and the finest example of baroque architecture in Great Britain, Blenheim is a treasure of English heritage. In this stunning volume, Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, the twelfth generation of the family, takes us on a privileged tour of the palace.

Designed by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor (a protégé of Christopher Wren) in the early 1700s; with stonework, furniture, and tapestries crafted by the best talents of the age; and art and statuary by such notable artists as John Singer Sargent and Joshua Reynolds, Blenheim is filled with artistic commissions that provide a window into the history of England.