Table of contents for Summer 2015 in MILIEU

Travel is always about the beautiful places you visit, but maybe more about the people you are fortunate to meet. While visiting London, I met the lovely and gracious Gillian Newberry, who owns Bennison Fabrics. I have used her fabrics for many years and wanted to find out more about her and the history of her wonderful line. In this issue, we feature Bennison’s Roses pattern in the article “In Full Bloom.” While traveling to Atlanta, I met a young architect whose firm is involved in the exciting project of recreating a ship known as the Hermione. It is the exact replica of the French ship that crossed the Atlantic to help defend the Americans against the British. I wanted MILIEU readers to learn about the detailed construction of the…

On your walls, I see fashionable women, portraits of Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Lange’s poignant shots of Depression-era America, lot of legs and hands. What is it about photographic images that captivate you? I’ve been living with some of these images — about four hundred of them, mostly black and white — for decades and they still make me stop in my tracks and give me a literal charge. I look at them and it’s as if I’m seeing them for the very first time. But on the flip side, they have the presence of old friends. Photography is about catching and capturing a moment. Each time you look at the image, you’re right back there again. Photographs have an immediacy that few oils, drawings, or sculptures can give you. It’s…

Why not?” It is a phrase the Marquis de Lafayette believed in so ardently that he had it sewn into his family crest when he set sail on his frigate, the Hermione, for America in 1780. His mission, as a mere twenty-three-year-old, was to bring French money, manpower, and weaponry to George Washington in his fight for American independence from the British. Had the French not helped, we would likely not have won our freedom. A history lesson to remember. “The phrase Lafayette used was in Latin, ‘Cur Non?’” says Alexis Boutrolle, director of operations for Asselin, the French company responsible for recreating the ship Lafayette sailed during his two-month-long journey across the Atlantic. “The ship that has been built, this new Hermione [pronounced air ME awn], is exactly about…

The challenge facing Tennessee-based interior designer Rozanne Jackson was how to transform a humdrum house into a chic country cottage. Her client, Lauren Palmer, is a well-known organic farmer, whose seasonal vegetables and herbs are sold to top restaurants in and around Nashville. When Palmer’s family purchased land next to their home, Bloomsbury Farm, in the rolling and fertile hills of Smyrna, they acquired an ordinary 1960s ranch house that, at first glance, appeared not to have much potential. But Palmer thought otherwise. She knew the right person to fulfill her vision was Jackson, a longtime family friend and owner of The Iron Gate, a spacious home furnishings store in nearby Franklin, Tennessee. From the beginning, Jackson and Palmer were in sync. “The family wanted a house that was rustic,…

In certain fields of Georgia where cotton and jalapeño peppers once grew, there is now a different crop to be harvested: rocks of granite and quartz. In a region where farmers have tilled the soil since the 1820s, plowing the land once meant first digging up plenty of rocks and piling them in distant fields. When Atlanta-based architect Keith Summerour began designing his weekend home outside the tiny town of Gay, Georgia, he found most of what he needed to construct a seventy-foot-high tower residence in his three-hundred-acre backyard. “We are blessed here with large mounds of rocks left by the former farmers who worked these fields,” says Summerour, who helped handpick the rocks that comprise his finished home. “The farmers salvaged them when preparing to plant and harvest, and…

TIM CLARKE Tim Clarke is an interior designer based in Santa Monica, California. He established Tim Clarke Design in 1996 and, later, Tower 20, his home furnishings boutique. Clarke is known for projects that capture the essence of coastal living, for he understands the elements and ways to combine them that make for a perfect beach house. His residences reflect the people who live in them and their own appreciation of the surrounding natural environment. Clarke published his best-selling book, Coastal Modern: Sophisticated Homes Inspired by the Ocean, in 2012. ROZANNE JACKSON Award-winning designer Rozanne Jackson leads one of the preeminent full-service design firms in her region of Tennessee. She also owns The Iron Gate, a favorite locale among Nashvillians for home furnishings. She opened the store in 1996 to…

MILIEU hosted the official launch of the Catbird Collection with Ruth Gay at her showroom, Chateau Domingue and Atelier Domingue, in Houston. Creator of the upholstered seating collection, Cindy Smith, united eight designers, including herself, to design pieces such as dining chairs, chaise lounges, and sofas with fabric selections. With friends, family, and colleagues in tow the Catbird designers — Paul Bates, Emily Bourgeois, Jeremy Corkern, Susan Ferrier, Bobby McAlpine, Ken Pursley, Jane Schwab and Smith — presented the collection to the Houston design community. Chateau Domingue was aglow with its own architectural and decorative antiques and housed the Catbird collection for the evening. Ken Kehoe & Company honored the Richmond, Virginia-based McKinnon and Harris with a cocktail event in Houston. The estate, garden, and yacht furniture, for which McKinnon…

Cuba had long been at the top of my get-there-soon list. I made it there last winter for the premiere of a ballet created by Pedro Ruiz, who has broken new ground as the first Cuban-American choreographer to work in his native land. What I hadn’t counted on was falling in love. With Cuba, particularly its architecture. The affair started in Camagüey, Cuba’s third-largest city, a fantasyland of bright pastel Colonial buildings. Many are dilapidated, yet they still exert a powerful allure; a surprising number have been or are in the process of being restored now that the central area of this provincial city has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Camagüey is a dreamy place to wander. Its sweeping Plaza San Juan de Díos, is home to an…

It took two years of searching the southern California coast before John and Patricia Shadden were finally able to say, “The moment we walked onto this property, it just spoke to us.” The couple is referring to what is now their home in Rolling Hills, California, a small, peaceful town that sprawls over the Palos Verdes peninsula, not unlike ripples that play on a gentle sea. This expanse of dimpled topography encompasses hills that reach 1,500 feet and provide long, dramatic views of the Pacific. Recognizing the site’s potential, developers deeded the seaside land for residential use in 1936. Just one year later, enough families were living in Rolling Hills to call it a bona fide community. Behind a single gated entrance flanked by Canary Islands date palms, the nearly…

An American couple establishes a second home in New Zealand, where all is at once familiar yet different Like many tourists at the end of a great vacation, a couple from Oklahoma found it hard to go home after visiting New Zealand. Every time they returned to the remote island nation in the South Pacific, leaving became more difficult. Finally, they began to wonder what it would be like to buy a second home there. After all, New Zealand offers stunning natural beauty, from pristine beaches and snow-capped mountains to breaching whales and gushing geysers, as well as the cultural traditions of British heritage and indigenous Maori tribes. In addition, Auckland is considered one of the most livable cities in the world. Captivated, the couple purchased an open-plan, rustic-modern home,…

Jerry Jeanmard finds things then puts them away. He collects dry-cleaning tags, used tickets, envelopes, maps, wallpaper scraps, discarded scribblings, Victorian-era papers, and chromolithographs. The scraps of paper that he carefully catalogs in his Houston studio inhabit his imagination until he takes them out and begins arranging them. Eventually, they morph into what he calls his “Paper People,” (also the name of his book) collage-like assemblages that illustrate his whimsical wit and intellect. “The papers don’t intersect in random ways,” he explains. “They are compositions as well as figures.” With his punning titles (Ampersand Man, St. Carrottop) and modern sense of color and composition, Jeanmard displays his canny humor, which he says has created a strong bond between him and his clients. Jeanmard, who is chief executive officer of Wells…