Virtual World

How fun is this?

A virtual tour from the landscape designer who we asked to put together a plan for our backyard. {Jason from Paragon Landscape in Charlotte}

More on what we'll ACTUALLY do later, but love to have something to muse on/take slowly/give ideas :)

Full video can be viewed here, or selected stills below.

Note the red Ferrari he also inserted in the plan, ha!

New screen porch in the background

Plan for the deck we want, and surrounding concrete pavers that we like

View back to the cars/garage

And up to another patio area in the distance. We are hoping
to have a second area in which to entertain.

Birdseye!

Another birdseye of the new patio area

From the corner of the driveway

Night view of the (virtual) firepit

View of the patio from the deck

Love my new imaginary friends~

Looking down the patio to the rest of the yard, which is left natural

Note the new virtual dog!

Looking back from the natural area to the patio and garage

And...say goodbye!

Screen Porch Finish!

We finished the screen porch on Saturday!

The last step was stapling up the screen, and then placing the trim pieces on top of the screen.
When the screen gets damaged (likely!) we just remove the top trim piece and replace that panel.

Here's the finished product, minus the door.
Door is coming from the west coast and takes 8 weeks – of course :)

I came home from Happy Hour Sunday night and Mike had the lights on, reading his iPad
and having a glass of wine... Love it – that's why we wanted this!

Here are our table and benches from West Elm, paired with the Verner Panton chairs.
Hi + low!

This is the Bubble Club Lounger we ordered from Kartell a few months ago. We saw a photo of
this sofa with cushions online at DWR, but after calling them, and calling Kartell, the cushions
seemed to be discontinued. So we took the picture to someone local, and had them made.

Ours turned out really well – we upholstered the cushions in navy Sunbrella fabric.
Easy to keep clean, and protected from fading.

Ok, so what's next out here?

Here's the rest of the plan for furniture, which will finish out the lounge space:

These are Primary Poufs from Quinze + Milan. They come in a ton of colors...
I'm considering the dark purple to go with the cool palette of lime/navy we have so far out there.
The plan is to put 2 of these in front of the sofa, as a kind of coffee-table-that-also-doubles-as-seating.

And then the cherry on top - the Bertoia chair!! I've wanted one of these forever, and it hasn't ever worked out inside. We recently found out it's also sold as an outdoor chair, too.  I showed Mike a bunch of similar (less expensive) kind of things last night and the comment was "just go for the Bertoia" - yay. Probably going to go with the white, and not sure what color seat cushion yet. Thinking just one will round out that seating area on the porch.

Also working on a rug for the screen porch. Will post pics once we're all done!

Shop: Atlanta

Mike and I had to be in Atlanta last weekend and it was a great excuse to take Friday off and get down there early to....furniture shop! One of the two of us *may* have been more excited than the other :)

Most of the showrooms I wanted to go to were around the Howell Mill Road area. We started out at Jonathan Adler with the intent of checking out a sofa I'd honed in on online.

 I'm not a huge Jonathan Adler fan - people say he's "modern" but it's more of a pop/kitch modern to me. Not really into humor with my decor. But I've been searching for a sofa for our living room/music room for a l-o-o-o-o-ng time - both on my own and with 2 decorators. Mike and I wanted something not too formal, but with a luxe touch to it. It's a hard balance to find.

Eventually we ran across the Topanga sofa from JA:

Topanga Sofa from Jonathan Adler
The name struck a California chord, of course, but it was really the silhouette that sold us

The fabric we were interested in "Brussels Charcoal" velvet,
which is shown here but on a different style sofa

 We visited the JA store to see the Brussels Charcoal velvet in person and really liked how it looked. So excited to finally buy a sofa for the LR!

(Update: Today, after purchasing, I found out that of course this ONE specific material is currently taking 14-16 weeks to deliver, which seems to be the story of our furniture life...Oh well...)
.........

After JA, we hit Switch Modern across the street, which is a favorite. We usually shop them online but have been in the store the last 2x we were in Atlanta. Didn't see anything there this time but it's definitely a good one to keep checking...

Next up, was Room & Board, also nearby:

We have been eyeing this polyethylene contemporary version of an adirondack chair from R&B for a while.
It happens to come in the perfect gray to match the exterior of our house!

And don't I wish I could have crammed 4 of these into my car. The chairs may be $399 each but the shipping
on these suckers is $229 - eesh! Alas it was only a showroom, so no luck there...

After 2 more uneventful stops, the last stop of the day (and Mike was still going at this point, so impressed!) was at a vintage store called City Issue over in the Old Fourth Ward area of town. This place was SO AMAZING! They had a better mid-century spread than I've seen anywhere – well, besides Palm Springs. Too much to even go into, but suffice to say I'd make the trip back in a snap just for this place!

We immediately spotted a brass sculpture by Curtis Jere upon entering. I've written about these before, and have really wanted one over our bed for a while. This one is signed and from 1969 which is one of his earlier pieces – the shape is just what I was looking for and the size is perfect for over our bed - it covers about 2/3 the width of a queen across.

1969 Curtis Jere Sculpture that came home with us! This is sitting
on the floor atop the shag carpet sample we were testing out.

I can 't decide if we should try and refinish the brass. It has some wear to it but that's part of what I love about it - most of everything else we have is so clean and new that it's a good contrast. 

It's getting hung this weekend, I'll post pics soon!

Oh and just for fun - what I wanted and didn't get was this:

Also Curtis Jere from the 70s...

Is it a sculpture or is it a light?...love both aspects!!

What it was *not* however was a "necessity" – well, especially in my husband's mind :) Haha.

I think this piece is to-die-for though and could be a great fit in my living room. It's admittedly a little too-early-to-tell what finishing touches are needed in there, so I'm hoping we revisit it!

Happy-almost-Friday to everyone...

Screen Porch Cont'd

The screen porch is shuffling along! The next step after framing was painting. We called in some help on that one (ironically, not a bone in my body enjoys house-painting even though I fine-art painted for half my life). We have had some crappy cold weather here in the South so it's taken a couple of weeks to get the painting completed.

In-progress painting – we went with Ben Moore "Cinder"
to match our  other house trim

Today we started laying on the screen to test the color. We found a perfect match to our grey house color palette which was a really great option. More commonly used, though, is the darker screen which essentially is a transluscent back. We started laying on the grey colored screen but there was some disagreement on whether it was too light – so we went back out and got a sample of the darker one as well to try and come to a decision.

Here's a longer shot of the screen halfway up. You can pretty
easily tell the panels that have screen on them.

Here's the second color screen test going up. It is showing up pretty
transparent in this photo but in reality has more of a black tint.

We decided to go to go with the lighter grey which seemed to be a better fit with the rest of the house and has a custom look to it. We had to special-order the larger width for the remaining panels so we'll finish that up next weekend.

We also had lighting and a fan installed by the team that re-wired the house. We went with can lighting, the 4" cans, and installed six of them around the perimeter of the room.

The fan choice took quite some time to settle on - this was our second fan to go up - the first one was quite lovely in look, but didn't really push the air around like it should have. The current fan has a large span, 60", and is by Emerson.

The new can lighting and fan. The ceiling tiles were original to the house, and painted.

So, almost there! I'll post finished pics next weekend. Yay.