French Opulence

The ceiling in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

Side chandeliers along the walls
in the Hall of Mirrors

 

After lots of tres very good shopping in Paris, it was time for some Play Days.  Versailles was grand, very grand.  It certainly was grand.  But do you know, I didn’t much like it.  Sure there was beautiful marble everywhere, gorgeous parquetry floors, gold on everything, sumptuous fabrics, and the materials themselves were all top quality.  But together it was way OTT and on such a huge scale that you had to wonder how people actually lived there happily.  And I do hate the room off room off room look – no privacy anywhere.  The grounds were very beautiful, though, and I stole several ideas which I will implement as soon as I have a few thousand gardeners on staff.

 

A garden idea I might steal
 

 

Busker 1 - Quite Good

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Busker 2 - Tried Hard

 

 

As an aside, we caught the train to Versailles from Paris, and it was a short but enjoyable journey, with buskers variously serenading us with violin and piano accordion.  Between the tunes I overheard an Australian tourist talking about an interview she recently had with the Bunnings Hardware chain, and one of their questions was If you were a Super Hero, which one would you be?  What a very strange interview question, but it did get me thinking about who I would be.  I do have a Super Power, which is the ability to walk into any shop anywhere and immediately identify the most expensive thing without looking at price tags.  I never hesitate, and I’m never wrong.  So naturally I am The Incredible Spendo-Woman.  Or maybe The Retail Flash.  

An exhibition of textile art was on show
throughout Versailles. This marble
lion is covered with crocheted doillies.
Yes this is Art, people.

Anyway, I digress.  We spent half a day at Versailles, and noted the benefit of getting there early.  When we arrived, about an hour after it opened, there were hundreds of people milling about but by the time we emerged from the Trianon (Marie-Antoinette’s play house, still with 20 feet ceilings but tiny compared to the main chateau) there were hundreds and hundreds of people walking the grounds.  The end of the garden is 3.5km from the chateau, but it was still easy to imagine how packed the place gets in summer.



A pink ostrich-plume covered
helicopter within the Chateau
at Versailles.  This is also Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We saw a bride and groom having their wedding photos in the gardens of the Trianon, and it reminded me of something an American we met told us about watching a wedding party in Paris.  He stood on the side of the stairs leading up into the Cathedral, along with many other tourists, and as the bride passed he said to his companion Wow, every one in the wedding party is gorgeous.  The bride turned to him and said We’re French, we don’t do ugly.  Of course they don’t.

Anyway, after the Play Day at Versailles we headed off to visit a usually good supplier several hours west of Paris, but on this occasion he had nothing I wanted.  So then on to St Malo, on the Atlantic coast, where we found a nice room in the old town with a view over the sea wall to a few small islands just offshore.  The causeway to the islands floods rapidly and with some force at high tide, and apparently it’s not uncommon for people to misjudge their walks and find themselves trapped there overnight, but we heard no plaintive squawking emanating from the islands on this occasion. 

 

View from our hotel room in St Malo overlooking
the causeway to the islands.



 

The bad news we received at St Malo was that Brittany Ferries, with whom we were due to return to the UK the next day, had cancelled all crossings between France and England indefinitely.  How lucky that I carry a travel laptop so we got the email about this in time to make other arrangements.   The only choice was to immediately rebook with P&O and travel up to Calais, which is over 500km from St Malo.  There are many thousands of people still trapped in France as I type, because not everyone can make the trip up to Calais, so we were among the “lucky” ones.

Le Mont St Michel

St Michel fighting a
Demon - my second
favourite stained
glass window

But before we bolted to Calais we wanted at least some of my Birthday Play Day at Le Mont St Michel.  We started the day with a champagne and pate breakfast, then off to the Mont.  It is an extraordinarily beautiful place, and building such a whacking great abbey over 1000 years ago on a small island that could only be reached at low tide showed real dedication.  But apart from being impressively huge, there are all sorts of smaller details that I really like.  For example, at the very top of the very highest spire is a golden angel, so high up that you can’t see it clearly but they still made the effort to put it there;  at the top of the abbey is an unexpected small walled garden surrounded by a very beautiful colonnade;  and at the tiny church at the bottom is my second most favourite stained glass window (my first favourite being in a tiny chapel in Prestbury in Cheshire). 

        Colonnade around the small

        walled garden at the top of

               Le Mont St Michel

 

If you want to visit the abbey you have to be prepared for stairs, a lot of stairs.  A lot, lot, LOT of stairs.  How I hate stairs.  And once you’re at the top and think that now you can tour the abbey on a level surface, oh contraire, there are still plenty of stairs to navigate.  What a higgledy-piggledy building, all up and down and labyrinthine, and if there weren’t signs to show us the way out we might still be there. 

We had time for morning tea of crepes and some local cider, and then we had to make the long trip up to Calais, where we arrived with 10 minutes to spare before they closed the gate for our ferry.  Phew.  So all in all, we had a 5 hour drive up to Calais, 2 hours over to Dover, and another 2.5 hours to get to our hotel in Portsmouth.  Not exactly how we had planned to spend my birthday afternoon and evening, but all part of the adventure I guess.

 

Our view as we enjoyed morning tea at the bottom of the Mont. 
See the golden angel right at the very top of the abbey?

So it was au revoir to France for this trip, and Allo, allo, allo to Old Blighty for the continuation of our Play Days before we start work again.  We left France having done some seriously good shopping and visiting two famous and beautiful National Treasures – we never run out of good things to do on our Play Days.  But we will start work again soon, I promise. 

In lieu of my usual moggie photo:  this carpet is in the Trianon at
Versailles, where Calypso & Caleb would feel right at home. 
Even Marie-Antoinette liked Bengals.

 

I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles ....

Can you imagine walking for hours
around the Paris Markets in these
heels? Neither can I.

Fortunately, I also love Paris in the Autumn, when it drizzles.  And it’s drizzled a lot since we arrived, but we don’t care cause we’re in Paris.  It’s surprisingly warm, and a light rain gives even French girls bad hair so hurrah! for once there has been more of a level playing field than the Me Bag Lady – You Glamour Puss encounters I usually have to suffer through.  So yay for drizzle in Paris, it’s on my side.  Whatever the weather, though, it doesn’t stop the gels wearing outrageously high heels at the Markets, and on that front they’ve got me because I just can’t walk for miles in stilettos.  This is a skill that I think French women are taught from birth.

 

Huge horse figure carved into the chalk hills
overlooking the Eurotunnel entrance

 

 

 

This time for the trip over to France we caught the Eurotunnel train, and it was cheaper, easier and so much faster than the ferry so we’ll probably use the train in future. It’s not for the claustrophobic, I must say, because the train is only a little bit wider than your vehicle and you stay in your vehicle for the entire trip. They close off each carriage from the others, to contain fires apparently, and Douglas kindly regaled me with stories about fires on underground trains, floods in tunnels and other horrible ways you can die while in a confined space deep under the English Channel. Very reassuring. But anyway, after chatting among ourselves for half an hour we were suddenly in France so we set off for Paris.

 

** Before you go on:  if the font is all over the place from now on, I have no idea why and can't fix it.  Blogspot seems to be having a hissy fit on the font front.  I hate technology when it's stoopid.  Now to continue ....

 

As usual, we hit the Périphéric (the ring road around Paris) at around 3.00pm, and on a Friday afternoon it was its usual mayhem. I know I’ve said it before, but I do prefer the French Police sirens to all others – they always make me think of the Bourne movies. By now Paris has an exotic-yet-familiar feel to us, at least around the area where we usually stay, and French Police sirens add to the general ambience – especially when they’re not after us.

 

Dan sells the best
Hot Chocolate Ever

I did get concerned at one point when Doug parked illegally in order to get some cash– ATMs aren’t nearly as common in France as they are in Australia, so you have to get your cash when you can. He left me with the van in order to plead the Australian-tourist-wot-doesn’t-know-any-better story should the Gendarmerie turn up to book us. Everyone parks illegally in France, so you generally have a good chance of no grief, but sure enough on this occasion a couple of boys in uniform spotted the van and started heading for it. But hurrah! just then some young man did something stupid in his car right in front of them, so they veered away from me and headed for him. And then Doug turned up and I told him to drive off very fast, and he obliged without actually knowing why, and so we escaped the wrath of the French Police and got shopping money to boot.

And what a good thing we were cashed up when we hit the Markets because I spent half of our budget for France in a few hours. We arrived before sunrise, as you must if you want the best bargains, and immediately ran into Dan the Hot Chocolate Lady. Dan is an actress who works on silly early morning French TV shows, but at the Markets she also sells the best ever home-made spicy hot chocolate, with ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. So, well fortified, we started shopping and this time we walked away with a really interesting range of items.



Some of the jewellery on offer



The women who asked me to look for antique French cotton lace trim will be well pleased, because that’s the first thing I found. We also got some interesting kitchenalia, including probably the nicest glass and bakelite honey pouring jar I’ve ever obtained. Plus we found lots of excellent copper saucepans and some lovely and unusual enamelware.

Some of my rivals
for the jewellery -
not who you'd
necessarily expect

I ended up with tonnes of fabo jewellery, but this time I had to fight off more middle aged men than girls for the good stuff, and these boys were very competitive so I had to move smartly to get my chosen pieces. I also found good French magazine advertisements, a seriously cool Italian desk lamp that we are considering keeping, a tres very cool chrome and glass coffee table that we are also wondering whether to put in the shop or not, plus lots of lovely Art Deco glass and ceramics. We also carried off a giant panchon, which is a huge earthenware bowl that was used to rest dough when making bread, and this one has a lovely mustard yellow glaze on the inside that I’m very taken with. I’m sure there’s plenty more I can’t remember off the top of my head, but suffice to say that the Porte de Vanves markets delivered big time, and now we are exhausted and recouping for a few hours before heading to a nice little café just down the road for dinner.

 

You can find anything you want in the
Paris Markets - I didn't buy this





I bought the green Art Deco vase



  

It’s Play Days for most of the rest of our time in France (plus maybe a bit more shopping on Monday), but we already have such a good haul from the Markets that I’m feeling very relaxed about our buying progress so far. Even putting aside the things that might never make it into the shop, we still have plenty of really lovely items that will look great in the front window. We know that we’ll catch up with a number of French dealers at the big antiques fairs in the UK in a few weeks’ time, so the buying of French stuff hasn’t yet finished, as long as I still have spending money left by then, that is.

 

 

Calypso & Caleb would blend in nicely
on this couch, but they are poor, deprived
pussy cats and it stayed in Paris.

Ringing to see if she could offer
a better deal on this way
expensive cabinet. 
She couldn't so it stayed behind.

           

One Night in Bangkok ....

Yes, yes I know it was actually one day in Bangkok, but that doesn’t sound as exotic as a heading.  And anyway, if I discuss our night in Bangkok I’ll be talking about a whole lot of sleeping going on, because we got in late and went straight to bed - and in a Blerk I’ve got Jetlag sense, not an Ohh, one night in Bangkok sense. 

And I know once I’m on a buying trip I’m meant to put the shop behind me for a while, but I have to tell you about this:  a woman came into the shop wanting a ceramic teapot.  It was two days before we were heading off so I only had two left in stock to show her.  Both date from the 1940s and both are $38 and $48 respectively (ie. utter bargains – they’re both on the website, so you can see for yourself). 

Oh look at the prices, she said, you know I don’t need an antique teapot. 

You’ve come to the wrong shop, then, I said. 
What do you mean?
You know you’re in an antiques shop?
A blank look:  Yes? 
So all my things are vintage and antique. 
Oh, everything? 
Yes, everything. 
Oh ….

And off she wandered without another word.  Honestly, it was enough to drive me screaming from the country.  So off I went.

 

There are lots of lovely temples
along the River ...



 

The flight to Bangkok was as pleasant as you can hope for when you’re in Economy.  There is plenty of room on Thai Airlines and the food is excellent so that was a good start.  I get horribly tired on long-haul flights (even though this was only 9.5 hours) but our room had a seriously enormous and comfy bed so a good sleep-in mostly cured my woes.  From our room we had a nice view of the Chao Phraya River, which flows through Bangkok, and seeing how there was a dock right down stairs we decided that a river cruise would be a nice way to spend a few hours.

all of them beautifully maintained ....

 

We caught the local commuter ferry as far as it would go down the river and back.  A two hour return trip for $A1.20 was somewhat cheaper than the official cruises and as the ferry criss-crosses the river we saw pretty well all there was to see.  Then we returned to the hotel for a very nice long, leisurely lunch just in time to watch the afternoon monsoon lash the river – and everyone unfortunate enough to have not anticipated that those whacking big black clouds might have indicated that rather a lot of rain was about to fall.



.... other places are
a little more ramshackle


 

Then it was off to the River City Centre to look at what is described as the largest collection of antiques shops in Bangkok.  Almost a third of this Centre’s shops are now empty, and looking at the prices we could venture a guess as to why.  OMG they were clutch-your-throat-and-fall-down-gagging high!  I have bought and sold many beautiful Buddhist artefacts over the years, but by golly I can tell you right now I won’t be sourcing any in Bangkok.  So that was disappointing because I saw plenty of lovely things that I quite wanted but had zero prospect of affording.

 

People are still living in this once gorgeous house.



 

One excellent find, though, was a wine bar/tea house/café nestled among the antiques shops and overlooking the river called Tête Quarters. It has only recently opened and is owned by some interior decorators so the décor is vintage and stylish (noice, different, unusual). It has silent movies from early 1900s Paris, plus some Charlie Chaplin movies, projected nonstop onto one wall, comfy leather couches and old upholstered chairs, vintage china, an eclectic collection of bits and bobs everywhere and large and mismatched chandeliers. It sounds odd but the overall effect is quite pleasing.

A thing I liked but couldn't afford -
marble buddha, about 4 feet tall, c1700

 

So we wiled away another few hours over drinks and snacks, watching the huge amount of river traffic undertake a complex ballet which involved everyone getting everywhere real fast and all missing each other. We lingered long enough to watch the lights up and down the river turn on, and then off to the airport. We expected a good flight with Swiss Air, but how wrong we were.



 

A really fabulous thing I liked but
couldn't afford - Thai wooden figure of
a horse, about 6 feet tall on its stand, c1600

  


Yep. another thing I liked but couldn't afford -
small Bronze figure of a Deer, c400AD

















Our flight from Bangkok to Manchester via Zurich was almost indescribably bad. Almost - but not quite – indescribably bad. So I've found it within myself to provide a few observations:



-   The seats were minuscule.  Where were we heading – Lilliput?  Everyone commented as soon as they sat down on how small the seats were, and some poor blighter ahead of me had to spend a good deal of the trip with one arm draped over his head so there was room for the person in the seat next to him.  Granted he was a big lad, but that he had to sit like that for most of an 11 hour flight was ludicrous.  Doug and I raised the seat arm between us to give us a tiny bit more room, but it was horribly, HORRIBLY squashed and uncomfortable for the entire flight to Zurich.

 

Inside Tête Quarters - one wall has nonstop
black & white silent movies projected onto it



 

-   The food was awful.  Dinner was an exercise in stodge, harking back to the bad old days when airline food had a deservedly terrible reputation.  Most other airlines have upped their game considerably these days, but not Swiss Air.  Despite significant bragging in their In-Flight magazine about how damn scrumptious their Business and First Class food is, it appears that what happens in Business and First Class stays in Business and First Class, and nothing remotely scrumptious trickled down to the poor schmucks in Ultra Sardine Class.

Watching the boats light up from our vantage
point in Tête Quarters

-   And just let me just harp on about how truly bad the food was for a minute – how can you get tomato or orange juice so seriously wrong?  By buying the cheapest possible, that’s how.  Black & Gold and other generic brands have their places, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference between them and name brands, but other times you need to step up the quality and Swiss Air has clearly gone for the cheapest possible option with its Economy class food and drinks.  Even their cheese was hard and dry and awful and came without crackers – just a lump of cheese.  They’re Swiss!!  How can they get cheese wrong??  But okay the itsy-bitsy chocolate squares they hand out after meals were what you’d expect from Swiss chocolate.

 

-   The headsets provided so you can watch movies were those hideous tiny ones that fit into your earholes and which don’t actually let you hear much over the ambient noise of the aircraft and which give you a horrible ear-ache in no time.  In our experience only Turkish Airlines also uses these entirely unsatisfactory headsets, and it was a surprise to see Swiss Air was equally penny-pinching, to the intense discomfort of their customers. 

 

And seeing how movies and meals were to be our only form of entertainment over the next 13 hours (11 hours to Zurich, then another 2 hours to Manchester) finding them to be respectively inedible and unusable – and on the Zurich-Manchester leg totally non-existent - was seriously aggravating after spending so much on fares.  When you spend that much money on an airfare, and even in Economy you’re forking out thousands of dollars, then there are basic standards you should be able to expect.  Swiss Air didn’t deliver in any sense.

 



One last thing I liked but couldn't afford -
seated gilded Buddha, 4 feet tall, c1800

We have the same torture in store on the Manchester to Bangkok leg on the way home with Swiss Air, but we have another month before we have to face that. So anyway, now we’ve reached Manchester after an unnecessarily exhausting flight, and all going well the shopping will start tomorrow.



One last thing I have to mention before I collapse into bed for a few hours is Mischka’s attempt to help me pack for this trip.  We always leave packing until the last minute, and the night before we left I threw some things in my bag and shut the lid but didn’t zip it up.  On the morning we left I opened the bag to pop in a few final things and found that Mischka had crawled in overnight and left her favourite toy among my clothes.  How sweet was that?  Just in case I need something to play with while I’m away and missing her, she donated her all-time favourite toy, which is a fabric ball filled with some type of grain and festooned with feathers.  Then it occurred to me how I would go trying to explain it while going through a bag search with Customs and Quarantine.  I swear the cat packed it!  Yeah right, lady.



Mischka is notoriously difficult to photograph nicely because she just won't sit still,
but what a sweet-heart assistant bag packer she is. 
Or is she planting suspicious objects to get me arrested?

 

 

Do You Have Any Final Requests?

 

Random shot of things in
the shop because I like them

Only four sleeps until we head off on the second buying trip of 2012 so this is my last missive while in Australia for the next little while.  I’m so not looking forward to the flight – cattle class has little to recommend it – although this time we’re travelling with Thai and then Swiss Airlines so we’ll see how they shape up.  It’s been some years since we were last in Bangkok, which is where we’re stopping over this time, but it’s just a quickie stop over because the whole trip this time is just a quickie trip. 

People have been coming into the shop or emailing me about things they want me to look for while we’re away.  So are there any more Final Requests before we head off?  Just email me (or visit the shop) and I’ll either put you on my Search List or tell you you’re dreaming. 



Double-chambered French glass
soda syphon lamp - the shade
has stylized Fleur de Lis,
which is nice

So, last Blog you might recall that I complained long and loud about how difficult it can be to find stylish lamp shades but how I needed suitably stylish shades to do justice to the French soda syphons I had converted to lamps.  The very next day, after our morning beach walk, we visited One World at Noosa and walked away with a lovely shade for each lamp.  And better still, they were having a sale!

 

French Blue Glass Soda
Syphon Lamp with
Metal Casing

The last time I had a seriously good lamp base in need of a shade it was a converted Qing Dynasty vase with a gorgeous crackled turquoise glaze and which featured a swimming carp.  I loved it the moment I saw it, but Doug didn’t and instantly dubbed it Crappy Lamp.  That was until we visited One World and obtained exactly the right shade for it, and now he also likes it - although it will forever be known as Crappy Lamp.  And he liked Crappy Lamp sufficiently that he agreed that we should keep it, so it never made it into the shop.  The only reason why the double-chambered soda syphon lamp hasn’t stayed at our house is because we already have one.  It took four years to find another one like it, but eventually my hunting paid off and it looks excellent in the window.  I must say I have my eye on the blue glass syphon lamp, but we already have lots of really cool lamps at home so I’ll have to think about where I’d put it.

 

The battle commences ....

But sometimes the hot water bottle
fights back and gets on top ....



 

 

It has been just Calypso and Caleb coming into the shop in the lead up to the buying trip.  They are the two that need the most handling to be social, and Caleb in particular is still learning his name and also that there are Rules-That-Must-Be-Obeyed-Because-I-Said-So.  He is really grappling with this concept, but we’re getting there.  And the more time I can spend one-on-one with him, without him being distracted by some passing moggie who he could wrestle with and bite in the neck and who is more fun than me, the more responsive he is to doing as I bid.  

 

So then you must renew your attack ...

I know the cats will be spoilt rotten and allowed to run wild while we’re away, so it will be good if especially Caleb doesn’t find the whole idea of Rules entirely foreign by the time we get back.  They all tend to play up for a good week or so after we return from a buying trip, refusing to do what I say.  They look at me with a look that Doug has interpreted as I’m sorry, I don’t speak Maid as they turn tail on me and flounce off.  This attitude doesn’t withstand the Wrath of Me for very long, but they all try it on for a while.



It's exhausting ....

The latest rat-baggery from Caleb this week has involved my hot water bottle.  It doesn’t matter how cold it is, if I have warm feet I’m fine so I do like a nice hot water bottle on cool evenings.  And I recently purchased a fluffy striped fake fur hot water bottle cover that Caleb immediately seized as his favourite toy.   He’s been dragging it all over the house, which is quite a feat because it’s about the same size as him, so I have to do a search whenever I want to use it.  Last night I decided I needed warm feet and so collected the hot water bottle (this time under the bed) only to find that the little wretch had bitten holes in it!  He’s killed my hot water bottle!  Then this morning I caught him red pawed having a go at the replacement.



But you must fight on ...




 

It’s lucky for the rest of the Gang that cat skin is tougher than hot water bottle rubber.  When Caleb was a few weeks old we used to watch him play with his siblings, and he was always in the middle of huge wrestles and always on top.  Nothing has changed except the size of his opponents – he is constantly wrestling with someone and is always on top.  He went a paw too far recently when trying to evict Mischka from her favourite spot and was told in no uncertain terms to Sod Off.  So he can take a hint if it’s accompanied by a great deal of stiff-legged growling – much like most boys, I’m thinking.



And eventually Victory will be Yours.

Your stalking sucks, Caleb.  We can see you coming.

Rejecting Boring & Bland & Generic

 

I have been a good gel this week and almost finalized our bookings for the buying trip, so we’re almost ready to go and really looking forward to it.  Only ten sleeps to go.  We’re getting seriously short on stock from the last trip, although we still have some interesting furniture to tart up and present when we get back, so we’ll have plenty to keep us busy while we wait for the next shipment. 

I’ve found a shop selling lovely striped canvas material, and unless I can find better in England or France I’ll get some to cover an excellent white cane lounge that I shall be offering for sale soon after we get back from this trip.  It will look really great in the front window.  (Sister Kym: Sewing Alert!).   I’ve also found a shop selling mugs with spotted cats on them, so I’ve now got some new mugs for me and my visitors to the shop.  They’re very zappo and goofy looking mugs, but when Calypso and Caleb aren’t looking all beautiful and elegant they’re totally goofing-off.  This was my first rejection of boring and bland and generic for the week.

I think I’ve managed to slip in some Play Days at Stone Henge and Avebury while we’re away.  We drive past Stone Henge on almost every trip and visited it many years ago, and I think it will be good to go and have a closer look again. Not that you can get too close these days – Doug says the very first time he went there you were able to walk among the stones, but that was a long time ago and these days you can’t get so close.  But anyway, I think it will still be good to go again.  Not far from Stone Henge is Avebury, which has the largest megalithic stone circle in Europe and even though it’s one of the best known prehistoric sites in England, we’ve never been there.  So, depending on how much I buy while we're in Somerset and Wiltshire (and therefore how much we have to pack) we shall try to get in some Prehistoric Play Days.

 

The weather in England and France seems to be quite pleasant at the moment so fingers crossed that their summer lingers into autumn.  We’ve been very lucky on most of our September/October trips to enjoy warmish weather, but just in case it’s chilly we’ve been getting in a bit of beach time before we leave.  It’s always nice to have an early morning stroll along Noosa Main Beach, it’s good for your soul, and whatever else we will do in England and France it probably won’t include beachcombing.  English and French beaches are often pebble beaches, which look nice but aren’t so good for strolling along.  Many of the vintage French images I have that involve girls at the beach usually show the girls wearing nice shoes with their bathers, and that’s because pebble beaches are dang hard on your feet.  Plus French girls take any opportunity to wear nice shoes, of course. 

Enamel bucket with Hydrangeas

Hurrah that this week is turning out to be excellent for sales, which is always good news.  I’ve bought some more flowers for the shop, so we’re looking all Spring-Time in the window this week, and it’s interesting how many French enamel buckets I’ve sold since I’ve started putting the hydrangeas in them.  And now we’re down to one French enamel ewer, although I don’t like my chances of getting any more at a good price because they’ve become very sort-after and that means the prices go up.  But I’ll see what I can find.  I see that stylists in British homes magazines have started potting up nice old enamel pieces with herbs and bright flowers, so that doesn’t bode well for me finding affordable enamel anything on this trip, let alone ewers.  But I’ll see what I can find.

 

I put out two old wooden printers trays this week, and they both sold the day I put them out so I’m positively looking for more this trip.  And the nice heavy wire baskets that I kept forgetting to bring in to the shop both sold on the day when I finally did remember to cart them in, so I’m looking for more of them, too.  Plus Deco glass, French copper, enamelware if I can, jewellery (naturally), French magazine covers and images, and any nice Deco lamps I can find.  Today I put out a quite nice Deco lamp on a marble plinth and with a soaring bird, and that went straight to the front window  It’s not the best photo of it, but I took a quick shot before it sells (which I expect will be quite soon).  And finally we have the soda syphons converted to lamps back from the electrician – that took ages but boy they look fabulous so we’re very happy with them. 



French Art Deco Electric Lamp

Now I just have to find some suitably stylish shades to go with them, and then they can be put in the shop.  But finding suitably stylish shades is harder than you’d think, because there’s so much generic boring stuff about and I want suitably stylish.  What is it with all the generic boring stuff that so many shops offer?  Logic would suggest that this is what’s offered because this is what everyone wants.  But is it?  Do we really all want boring and bland and generic?  I guess that’s easier than putting in some thought to design and aesthetics, but living in a lovely environment is good for you.  It makes you feel good to live somewhere nice, and wherever you live you have the power to arrange that in your immediate environment.  So anyway, I reject boring and bland and generic, and the hunt for suitably stylish lamp shades has begun.

This week Caleb discovered the excellent ambushing potential of newspaper.

Where is that Ratbag?  I know he's here somewhere ....