Love Notes

We talked last Monday about classic style.  Yet we just scratched the surface.   Let's pick up again with classical design.  A friend of mine wrote a book about the physical response you get from seeing beauty, “Feeling Beauty”, by Gabrielle Starr Harpole.  While I can't do justice to paraphrasing the neuroscience she lays out in exquisite detail, I do intimately know the physical feeling she's describing.  You walk into a magnificent building or a beautiful room, and your involuntary response seizes control - you take a pause, an audible deep breath, then emit a sigh, while a smile takes form.  

One of my favorite spaces in Washington is the National Building Museum.  I get that pause/big inhale/sigh/smile every time I walk in.   READ MORE

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I spent last weekend in Charleston combining a myriad of favorite pastimes ... a visit to see my younger son, a visit to fabulous gardens, a girls trip with a dear friend, time spent with a wonderful new friend, all amidst rich American history and exquisite architecture.  And of course, no trip for me is truly fabulous without really good food.   And we had plenty of that.   And I gained four pounds.

Charleston, I'm in love.   READ MORE

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"Mid pleasures and palaces though may we roam
be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

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This week, I'm heading to Rome.  I have never been before, and I'm beyond excited.   Our mornings will focus on the iconography of the saints in the great cathedrals.   It's a subject I know very little about, and I've been incessantly cramming everything from guidebooks to youtube videos, hoping to establish a rudimentary baseline on religious history.  READ MORE

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I've learned a lot about Neoclassical vs. Classical vs. Federal vs. what-does-all-this-mean architecture thanks to our Thanksgiving holiday in Charleston (which was fantastic - you must go!)   Classical architecture is the real deal, as in a structure from Greek or Roman Empire, Neoclassical is "with elements from the school of Greek and Roman architecture" but built much later, and Federal is Neoclassical but happening in 18th and 19th century America.

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