At Last Sweet Mystery of Life

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I’ve scoured and searched and begged hither and yon for pictures of George Terbovich’s work.

I’ve hit pay dirt a few times, but George is not all that interested in being published. Not his style.

Speaking of style, I’ve seen four projects on which George has worked and each is quite distinct. I think I know his personal style, but he is not a designer that one hires for a particular look.

Which you can now see for yourself as he has put a glimpse of his portfolio on-line along with great stuff from his shop.

Click here to see the portfolio; here for the shop.


All images George Terbovich Design. The portfolio is arranged by room, so I have done a little match-making myself. These images may or may not be related.
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Off the Rack – Down Home Cooking

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While I adore Elle Decor, wonder at World of Interiors and greet House Beautiful like an old friend, I still miss some of the dearly departed.

Don’t get me started on HG. But Domino and Cottage Living both offered glimpses of, well, really great regular houses. Houses that looked like my friends’ houses. Where I might hang out in the kitchen and have a cup of coffee.
I just picked up a subscription to Country Living; their editorial content is filling the gap. That runner, oh my.
All images courtesy of Country Living, November 2009. Caroline Scheeler’s home photographed by Roger Davies.
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Enduring Style – Miguel Flores-Vianna

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I recently received an incredibly engaging email from photographer Miguel Flores-Vianna. He had read the Enduring Style posts from last summer and they had triggered some introspection on rooms that had inspired him, “Here are a few of the people and places that, I believe, have deeply influenced my own personal vision, as well as trends in design around the world. Rather than make it universal and all encompassing, I have confined choices to people I know, have known and/or places where I have spent a great deal of time. So my list does not have any scholarly pretensions but rather comes from the heart.” His picks are as follows:


“The first one is an impression, a vague memory of a table all set up with white linens, shiny silver, colorful flowers. The table is in front of a shack on a beach in Patmos, Greece. I am about 20 years old and have no idea to whom the shack belongs; I walked past that memorable feast and went to lay at the end of beach. That table or the memory of it rather always stayed with me.

Fast forward another 25 years and I learn that that place belonged to the Englishman Teddy Millingon-Drake. A decorator, painter and friend to half the world in the decorative arts.


To me the world of interior design would not have been the same without the amazing eye of an American painter who, in the 50’s, moved to Italy. Cy Twombly has created some of the most outstanding rooms in the second half of the 20th century. His various residences have a modernity and a timelessness that is moving and captivating. His incredible deft at mixing classicism with modern art still is a bottomless well of inspiration for myself and countless decorators.



I grew up in Argentina in the 70’s. Everybody we knew, family and friends, either lived in modern glass houses or inherited old homes built at the turn of the 20th century with clear European inspirations. It was only later when I moved to New York and began working as an editor that I became aware of the difference between people of modernist or classicist taste.
And then one day I went to Houston and I saw the DeMenil House. I realized why, during my childhood and adolescence, I was never aware of old or new taste. See, the de Menils hired Philip Johnson to build them a glass box and later a New York couturier, Charles James, to furnished it. Few of us understand today that a modern house need not be decorated with contemporary furniture. James created atmospheres where the new met the old. Where the clinical met the sensual. Where color met blank spaces.
It was a bit what I had experienced as a child, whether we lived in old houses or new houses we always felt the presence of the past through hand me downs or purposefully bought antiques. James invented a language which, unfortunately, has not been necessarily understood by a generation of architects that came after the house was built and decorated.


Stephen Sills and James Huniford created a masterpiece in the early 1990’s. It is an hour north of New York City. It is dreamy and subtle and so, so grand. It became a bit the ABC of their style, a little Monticello. The low armless sofas, the over sized plaster vases, the Louis XVI chairs, the Rauchensbergs and Fontanas, leaves instead of flowers, stone floors and lacquered walls, pale blues, grays, chartreuse greens.

I can’t help but be mesmerized at the beauty of it all. It is one of the major triumphs of American design in the last 30 years.


The ivy growing in the wall… Rose Tarlow, need I say more?


Lars Sjoberg may one day become a national hero in Sweden. He has done more to reclaim and re-discover the 18th Century in his own country than the rest of the Swedish design community put together.

A watershed article in the World of Interiors in the mid 1980’s on his property Regnholm became the starting point of a love affair with those white, subtle rooms that we have come to known as “gustavian” (after King Gustav lll). Today Sjoberg owns about ten houses and they have all become his laboratories to study and re-fresh an era (1700’s) which has become his passion.


(Andre) Le Notre designed gardens, and gardens are made of rooms. I am including him in this list. The master gardener, the creator of Versailles and Vaux le Vicompte. The grand tamer of nature, logical, measured, musical.

Although I can not help but marvel at his masterpieces, it is a smaller one, and less known that moves me – the gardens of Courances, a chateau to the south east of Paris, still in private hands, but more intimate, private and measured.
A symphony none the less. Whether under summer rain or in brilliant snow the garden is a masterpiece, timeless and unmeasurable. At times grand and imposing, at times shy and quiet. Always poetic.


Luis Barragan is the grandest name in Mexican architecture as far as the 20th century goes. And what a decorator. His monastic eye gave him set standards to bear. And yet he created a language where the strict becomes sensual; the holy, decadent; and the colorless, a riot of hues.

His house in a nondescript Mexico City suburb is a mini temple to his passion for clean lines, luxurious nature, religious art and a passion for horses. At times claustrophobic like a monk’s cell and yet as liberating as a grand cathedral. Totally modern and timeless.”

It is an incredibly insightful compilation and I am grateful that Miguel took the time to share it with me.

Images, from top, two works of Teddy Millington-Drake via ArtNet; Cy Twombly’s home via Aesthete’s Lament; four images of the DeMenil home via House of Beauty and Culture; two images from Dwellings by Stephen Sills and James Huniford; Lars Sjorberg’s work via Belgian Pearls; Couranses via The Hip Paris Blog, and Luis Barragan’s work via google images, and I am so sorry, but I cannot remember which source.
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Arts and Crafts

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“Mom, are you an artist?”
“No. That’s not art. Art is harder than that.”

My eldest is right. Art is harder than this. This is craft, and my apologies to Gunther Forg.

The hallway needed….something. Even though it’s yellow, it seemed achingly bland. I had picked these frames up at a garage sale a while back. I bought eight canvases for nearly nothing and carted up various paints from the basement. Paint samples for rooms that didn’t work out, craft paint and kids’ paint. It’s an equal opportunity supply closet. Some were used in their original form; a few got to mix it up.

I used the image, top, for color inspiration, measured and drew lines across the middle of the canvases and painted. All eight canvases were completed in an evening.

The canvases did not quite fill the frame openings so I had the framer put in a white fillet. The framer, Frame Works, deserves the “Patience of Job Award.” I took in eight frames and eight canvases, but the direction and order of the canvases mattered and the direction and order of the frames mattered (they are chipped and worn which I liked, but they needed to be arranged specifically.) So I had labeled each frame and each corresponding canvas with a number and an arrow pointing which way was up. And, “Well,” I said, shifting my weight but not averting my gaze, “I need them in a week.” Unflappable, Betsy never blinked.

I’ve ordered this Dash & Albert runner for the stairs from Stuff and that will be the last of the spitting and polishing before the holidays. I’m still aching for dining room curtains, but fear they remain in perpetual simmer on the back burner. There is a great wool at Off the Floor Now at a terrific price, but I’m worried it is too pale. When I mentioned it to one of our guests he said,”You’d better wait; I get the feeling you’re picky.”
I have no idea where he got that impression.
Image, top, Elle Decor, December, 2006. Photography by William Waldron. Design by Shelton, Mindel & Associates. The image also appears in Style & Substance, The Best of Elle Decor.
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