Table of contents for November - December 2015 in Veranda

a very special giveaway SETTING THE BAR Let us entertain you! We’ve teamed up with Horchow to award Ralph Lauren Home glassware and a bar cart to a lucky reader. See page 164 for contest rules and go to veranda.com/horchow for your chance to win. Toast the Season! Get your imagination cooking with a compendium of our favorite holiday entertaining stories from the archives, chock-full of great ideas. veranda.com/holidays Santa’s Little Helper If our holiday gift guide (page 61) leaves you inspired, check out the bonus fashion, home, and beauty goods we just couldn’t keep to ourselves (like the Cluster diamond earrings above, price upon request; kwiat.com). veranda.com/giftguide 24/7 Style Don’t miss our daily download of style and design news, happenings in the world of luxury real estate, and the…

a who’s who of tastemakers have sworn by them, including no less personages than the Empress Joséphine, Elsie de Wolfe, Billy Baldwin, Bill Blass, and Albert Hadley (just to name a very few). When it comes to glamour—be it quiet as a purr or strident as a roar—nothing lays a versatile, genre-defying foundation quite like an animal-print rug.…

New York RESTAURANT Prune is a teeny-tiny place that’s been around for a while, but every time I go there, it feels like a secret spot—small, bustling, and serving delicious food. 54 E. First St., prunerestaurant.com. SHOPS I never buy junky things, but Sockerbit is the cutest little candy store with the chicest treats. I get the kids special somethings at Christmastime. 89 Christopher St., sockerbit.com. • I have been a giant fan of Ted Muehling since I moved to New York. Everything he does—from acorn spoons to drop earrings—is so thoughtful and beautiful. 52 White St., tedmuehling.com. • When I’m looking for an objet to decorate the table—a salt cellar shaped like a ginkgo leaf, metal bird’s feet— I can hands-down find it at Michele Varian. The selection is…

“WE PLAYED WITH THE traditional shapes OF TOPIARIES, GARLANDS, AND WREATHS, ALL IN MODERN MATERIALS.”…

For a client who wanted to bring a mix of traditional and modern design to her craft room, while still enjoying a vibrant place to work, California Closets design consultant Chloe OÕKeeffe created a simple gray-toned palette that allowed the color of the yarn to become the eye-catcher. The system is Classic White, with elegant details such as door fronts in Wisp Silver (resembling yarn) and three accent drawers that are wired high gloss in Mercury. This interplay of softness and gloss combines with functional and visually interesting storage cubbies to create a sophisticated haven in which to work. The design also works around an angled ceiling and includes a window seat with custom storage underneath. The perfect spot to dream and create! Get inspired by more California Closets client…

I have a confession to make: I’m not a big fan of fall or winter. Sure, the foliage is wildly beautiful, and I absolutely love the holiday season. Really. But my birthday this year falls less than 24 hours after the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) and two days before Christmas, so from then on, it’s sort of a slippery slope for me until the first signs of warm weather. Though I enjoy cocooning fireside on a cold winter day, I enjoy being outdoors much more. So I get out, even on the bleakest days. (I once strolled along a New York beach in February when it was 18 degrees—the sun was shining, and somehow, the quiet and solitude were enough to make me happy.) Of course,…

FASHION MAVEN For the cognoscente who has everything, baubles and bibelots worthy of an icon. SOCIAL BUTTERFLY A woman with a fully inked Smythson will revel in a quiet, welcoming sense of luxury. FREE SPIRIT When worldly and well-traveled go hand in hand with the sumptuously well-heeled. REBEL Who says your favorite nonconformist shouldn’t get to look good, too? RENAISSANCE MAN Rugged, well-rounded accessories for the guy who can do anything. DAPPER GENTLEMAN A cultivated aesthete needs plenty of handsome playthings.…

a single pillow by Rebecca Vizard can take more than 66 hours to stitch, but the down-filled accessories are actually centuries in the making. Her business, B. Viz Design, has a devoted following for designs that incorporate antique textiles: fragments of Aubusson tapestries, Ottoman gold embroidery, sun-bleached bits of Fortuny damasks. Vizard rescues the remnants from original pieces that are beyond repair and reincarnates them in pared-down compositions designed to set off the exquisite handiwork of other eras. Backed or framed by dusky velvets or nubby homespun linens, they become subtle furnishings with a sense of history that can bring a certain je ne sais quoi to a room. “It’s like pairing pearls with a simple black dress,” Vizard says. “They can go into an eclectic space or a spare…

when Marie Daâge puts together a table, you will never see uniform place settings marching down the Belgian linen. “I think of dressing the table like the way I dress myself,” says the Parisian porcelainiste, who mixes and matches her own made-toorder ceramic patterns with stylish irreverence. “You can wear the same trousers with different tops and change the sensibility completely,” she says. “I hate a ‘total’ look.” Daâge celebrates the holidays in her Haussmann-era flat in the regal 8th arrondissement, using her wares in the airy dining room, where wedding-cake moldings encrust walls painted a pretty shade of verdigris: “It’s an 18th-century color that has a little gray and pink and brown in it—very bright, but it goes with everything.” Antique English and Biedermeier chairs surround the table, herringbone…

FLIGHTS OF FANCY The vivid colors of 19thcentury French illustrations have inspired Volière, a collection of china from Richard Ginori that features 12 species of birds in finely feathered detail. With a rich palette that includes more than 50 shades, animals like the Nestor parrot and the blue dacnis come alive in charming depictions that will bring a soupçon of color to your next soiree. From $125 each; richard ginori1735usa.com. A GREEN THUMB IN WINTER Hyacinths in glass jars, ornamental cabbages in galvanized-metal tubs, moss-flecked terrariums—in The Winter Garden (Cico Books, $20), author and horticulturist Emma Hardy resplendently proves there’s plenty for the enterprising and inventive gardener to do during the coldest time of the year. ARTFULLY PRESERVED Conservationist and author Amy Goldman has built a reputation for lavish books…

CERTAINTY IS A WONDERFUL QUALITY in an interior designer, that bulletproof assurance that soothes clients through the hundreds of nerve-racking decisions. But humility is also an unsung virtue. Shawn Henderson, the New York decorator whose style hews to a sophisticated yet unpretentious neutralhued modernism, admits to having made a few initial decisions, during the original renovation of the weekend house he bought a decade ago, that were long overdue for reconsideration. “I didn’t really know entirely how I wanted to live or who I would become,” he says. “I know how to help my clients make those kinds of decisions, because I have distance, but it was harder for myself.” After a bit of soul-searching and a second redo, Henderson has sculpted his country retreat in Hillsdale, New York, into…

“I stick to things that suit me rather than forcing myself into a mold of whatever’s fashionable.” as the daughter of the founder of de Gournay, the wallpaper company renowned for its chinoiserie panels handpainted with plumed fauna and trailing flora, Hannah Cecil Gurney had an early exposure to rarefied beauty. “I grew up with butterflies and birds on the walls,” she says. “It felt so normal.” Gorgeousness is second nature to the 29-year-old Londoner. Gurney studied physics and math at university and worked as an accountant at Price Waterhouse Coopers before joining the family business, where she helps devise new ways to keep the time-honored tradition of artisanal wallpaper relevant. Employing archival patterns, the firm has pioneered such techniques as a tone-on-tone design with a pearlescent ground and raised…

tricia Foley’s pared-down sense of style is purposely hard to date. The designer and author inhabits an 18th-century farmhouse in the quiet hamlet of Yaphank, Long Island, a living laboratory that she’s filled with the touchstones of her aesthetic: nubby neutrals in linen and jute, Wedgwood basalt-ware serving pieces from the 1700s, walls in ethereal shades of white. Though the bones of the house are centuries old, her embellishments could exist in any era. “I always seek out things that are timeless, even though that’s such a tired word,” Foley says. The look is clean and spare but imbued with an indelible warmth. Hers are spaces in which the world recedes—calm, contemplative, and ideal for curling up in. “I love decoration,” says the former magazine editor and consultant for such…

with a deluge of reclaimed materials—almost 25 containers of beams, stone, tiles, and architectural elements like mantels and window surrounds—a house by designer David Michael Miller and architect Don Ziebell feels like a centuries-old Provençal mas, but it’s actually perched in the rugged desert hills of Scottsdale, Arizona. “We got on a plane and went to Avignon,” says Miller of the shopping trips he took with Ziebell and the homeowners, which yielded a treasure trove of weathered goods the team used to create a soulful family residence that avoids easy clichés. Ziebell designed the dwelling as a series of distinct buildings to give the illusion of a home that had been added on to over time. And the South of France slant isn’t a stretch for the American Southwest: Long,…

Gracious, inviting, and warm—the holiday season calls for gathering with friends and family in homes filled with the spirit of good cheer. EVERY PARENT OF TEENAGERS HAS BEEN THERE. WHEN THE RATIO OF FAMILY TIME SHIFTS IN FAVOR OF THE KIDS HANGING OUT WITH THEIR FRIENDS, spending time together is at a premium. For Aerin Lauder, a scion of the Lauder cosmetics empire and the brains behind her eponymous lifestyle brand, a ski house in Aspen offers up the perfect place for the busy executive to relax and reconnect with her husband, Eric Zinterhofer, and their teenage sons, Will and Jack. “We spend the holidays here, as well as school breaks—skiing is such a great family sport,” says Lauder, whose legacy in the tony alpine enclave dates back to the…

THE GEORGIA-BORN, NEW YORK–BASED DESIGN WUNDERKIND Miles Redd states the obvious when he declares, “I love color.” But it’s more than that. “I love color relationships more than anything else. If I’d shown you a sample of taxicab-yellow lacquer, you might think it looked like shellacked dried egg yolk,” Redd says, referring to the living room walls of an Upper West Side apartment he recently decorated, with his colleague David Kaihoi, for a couple with four young children. “But if you put it with blues and greens, soft grays and reds, it takes it down a notch and gives you the feeling of brandy held up to the firelight.” Such sumptuous images are the designer’s stock-in-trade. “I’m a romantic,” he says. “I don’t deny it.” “If you were to describe…

PERSONAL LUXURIES Pages 51–52 Wallpaper: de Gournay, $1,076, 212-564-9750, degournay.com. Ring: Fred Leighton, price upon request, 212-288-1872, fred leighton.com. Lamp: Collier Webb, $1,475, 011-44-207-373-8888, collierwebb.com. Rug: Rodarte for the Rug Company, from $224 per square foot, 212-274-0444, therugcompany.com. Backgammon set: Smythson, $650, 212-265-4573, smythson.com. Cologne: Jo Malone London, $125, jomalone.com. Bag: Chanel, $4,700, 800-550-0005, chanel.com. Linen: Clay McLaurin, $149 per yard, 212-475-4414, studiofournyc.com. Coat: Dubarry, $699, 866-658-3569, dubarry.com. Night oil: Sunday Riley Modern Skincare, $105, sephora.com. Porcelain: de Gournay, $593, 212-564-9750, degournay.com. Sneakers: Nike, $90, nike.com. ARTISAN Page 86 Rebecca Vizard, 318-766-4950, bviz.com. AT MY TABLE Pages 99–102 Marie Daâge, 011-33-1-44-90-01-36, mariedaage.com. ARCHITECTURE Interior design: David Michael Miller, 480-425-7545, davidmichaelmiller.com. Architecture: Don Ziebell, 480-443-4904, ozarchitects.com. Page 104, top left Table: Dessin Fournir through Kneedler Fauchère, 310-855-1313, kneedler fauchere.com. Cushion fabric:…