My New Life in Southeast Asia

It has been years since I've posted here, and much has changed. I've been living in Asia for some time, taking up photography, filmmaking, and YouTube. I'm curious if anyone is still connected to this blog, as I'm working on a trailer for a documentary or YouTube series about my experience with Garvinweasel, a ten year saga attempting to save an Antebellum home in the deep South, one that ended in a sort of ruin, which led me here, to my new life. If you're interested in seeing more about that, please let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.

p.s. this photo is my desk in Bali from 2018. 

Bookstack

... is, according to Merriam-Webster, a premium word. A bookstack can reveal a great deal about the bookstacker. This one pretty much sums it up for me.

Bedroom Renovation

This is my first post using the Blogger app for iPad, as well as my first post in quite a while. The photos were taken with the iPad on a recent morning. The mantle is from a local antique shop, and the items in the built-in bookcase include rocks picked up on a trip to Colorado, and souvenirs from trips to Hong Kong and Vieitnam. The chest I bought at the Salvation Army when I lived in Manhattan. I put the top down on the VW cabriolet that I owned at the time (later sold to Victoria Secret supermodel Frederique Van der Wal, but that's another post), parked it in the underground garage until about 1 am when I bribed the doorman at Trump Parc to let me pull the car up to the front door and move it into my apartment through the lobby and into the passenger elevator, which was a big no-no according to the building rules. The big mirrors were purchased at a shop in New York's Soho and first came home to my former loft on Grand Street. They were shipped south when I moved back to the states from Paris, and I painted and stained them to match the newly refinished greige color floors in the bedroom. The mountain chair was purchased at the Place Jeux du Bal flea market in Brussels, and were featured in an older post with the hay bale coffee table, my entry in the contest hosted by Brook at the Velvet and Linen blog.

Inspiration

Source: Maisons de Charme, Printemps 2008

DIY update

Lots of work underway here over the past few months. The master bedroom, seen here from the future master bath suite, is actually done now, and I hope to post an update of the finished version soon.

Twilight Pond

Photo: jamesxvi

Axel Vervoordt Interview for German TV

I can't understand anything the interviewer asks, and while Mr. Vervoordt answers in English, the German translation audio dubbed over his voice makes it difficult to make out what he is saying most of the time. If I can translate the transcript, I will post a follow up with some quotes. You can watch the interview here.

Vervoordt r.e. Kanaal

I found an interesting site about a project by Belgium's Vervoordt family. I heard about this when I was living in Brussels in 2008, that Axel Vervoordt's son Dick was planning a development around the Kanaal complex, where the Axel Vervoordt company has their workshops and showrooms. This extensive site contains an explanation of the master plan and its inspiration, descriptions and floorplans of the properties that will be for sale, biographies of the architects and designers behind the project, information about the Vervoordt Foundation, dedicated to supporting the arts and preserving the Vervoordt collection, and probably much more. It is in Dutch, but I viewed the site in Google's Chrome browser, which did a pretty good job of translating to English.

I have been on hiatus for a while now, focusing on renovations at Garvinweasel, with lots of projects underway simultaneously... never really a good idea in my experience, but sometimes things just work out that way. I hope to post some new photos soon of the original floors stripped of a century and a half of coverings, including at least two coats of paint and two layers of carpet. This is one tough project, slow going, and I have a backup plan for new plank flooring should I just give up at some point, so wish me luck.

French Lifestyle Blog - Two Maisons

Some of you know that I lived in France for a while in the nineties, and I sometimes dream about being an american in Paris again. Here's a link to a great lifestyle and design blog, Two Masions, by a lucky expat who lives in the south of France. She also has some great items for sale in the online shop.

Zen and the Art of Axel Vervoordt

Here is a link to a great article about Axel Vervoordt, from the online edition of Art + Auction magazine.

The article mentions a Wabi hut on the grounds at 's-Gravenwezel, 'made of earth and fallen tree limbs'. I am fascinated by this, especially considering the vast store of tree limbs still awaiting removal here, the result of a recent ice storm. If any of you have seen it, please let me know more about it.

Happy reading and good weekend.

p.s. I found a picture of the Wabi pavillion; it's in the slideshow that accompanies the article.

Photo by Laziz Hamani