This next reader’s home belongs to Dana. I featured her Italian villa last year, and today I’d like to share her lakeside home on Lake Como. It’s 35 sq m, with wooden beams and white walls, furnished with antique Asian furniture and flea market finds. There is a steel trap door in the floor to access the private boat dock and a cantilevered terrace with incredible views of the lake. So lovely!
It is a real gem. Not only does it contain a large plant collection in settings shaped, and continuing to be shaped, by some of the best contemporary designers and craftsmen, but it also offers a glimpse into country life of the most luscious and rarefied kind.
The National Trust has owned Woolbeding since 1958, but since it came without funding and the trust’s principal interest was in its 2, acres – containing, as described by Disraeli, “the prettiest river and nicest valley in England” – the house was tenanted out. In 1973, the lease was taken by Sir Simon Sainsbury, grocery magnate and philanthropist, and his partner Stewart Grimshaw, and it is they who have created the garden.
When Simon died in 26, plans were already under way to pass it back to the Trust with an endowment for its upkeep, but the house continues to be Stewart’s weekend home, and he is still very much involved in the garden.
Trees and rhododendron shrubberies were the dominant features in the Seventies, Stewart recalls, and maintenance was minimal, even in the house. “You could Read more…
It’s pattern on pattern, colour, layering, bold and quirky touches. It’s casual yet chic, elegant but slightly screwy. It’s WASP chic with a kick of fun, high and low and just darned pretty.
In today’s society where common decency and values are on the decline, it is easy pickings for thieves to pry upon farmers in rural areas. In normal economic times, law enforcement can be a half an hour or more away. In budget cutting times, they can be hours away, so thieves are having a hay day taking not only machinery and equipment but the crops themselves as Jesse McKinley reports for The New York Times,
Sgt. Walt Reed said he could tell right away that the grapes were stolen. They looked like an ordinary bunch. Except, he said, for the way they were dressed.
“Usually grapes are put into plastic bags,” said Sergeant Reed, a 28-year veteran of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office. “But th