McTeigue & McClelland Are in the Business of Enchantment
For nearly a century following its founding in 1895, McTeigue & Co. was one of the most respected hallmarks in the fine jewelry trade, selling only to elite retailers such as Tiffany & Co., which in 1990 acquired and absorbed the family-owned business into its own. Yet as he was growing up in Westchester County, young Walter McTeigue III (near left) dreamed, not of taking over the family business, but of becoming a farmer. He thought about farming all through his troubled school days and after, even as he halfheartedly entered the ancestral trade. Then in 1992, he quit his job in the estate jewelry department at Harry Winston and moved to Hillsdale to start an organic dairy farm.
“Fortunately, it did not work out, ” McTeigue says, adding, as if sharing breaking news, “Farming is really hard, and it’s almost impossible to make a profit.”
With farming blessedly behind him, when Walter III told Walter II what he intended to do next, the elder McTeigue reportedly behaved as if he thought (and not for the first time) that, as his son puts it, “I had lost my marbles.” Yet, thirteen years after its launch in 1998, McTeigue & McClelland, makers and retailers of some of the finest jewelry in the world, flourishes. Instead of a large manufacturing plant making jewelry for others to sell from hushed salons in centers of wealth, its headquarters, both manufacturing and retailing, is in an enchanting cottage on the edge of Great Barrington, the setting through this weekend and all of next week for an exhibition of rare, loose gemstones.
“We design and make jewelry, one piece at a time, and deal with customers one at a time,” says the jewelry-designing half of the team, master goldsmith Tim McClelland, describing the very aspects of their business plan that led the elder Walter McTeigue to predict its demise. “We are not looking to go play golf. We love this. We hire people who are going to be part of this family”—a family of nine, four of whom “sit at the bench” alongside McClelland crafting his designs.
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Bridal represents about 50% of McTeigue & McClelland’s business. Rings start at around $10,000; the one pictured here, a 5.03 carat Asscher Cut diamond in their Classic Flora mounting, $88,000.
McClelland, who apprenticed “under an Austrian taskmaster” at Shreve, Crump and Low in Boston, explains that the metal in “95%, at least, of all jewelry” is shaped via a lost-wax casting method that he likens to making ice cubes—“you can make 100 as fast as you can make 10.” In contrast, each metal element in a McClelland design is heated and hammered by hand, “similar to a blacksmith,” then ground and polished, as if it were a tiny sculpture. In their basement workshop, the only piece of equipment that would not have been used by a jewelry maker a century and longer ago is a high-tech laser welder that permits individually-sculpted elements to be joined with the greatest precision possible.
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Once the metal “sculpture” is assembled, the gemstones that inspired its design are set in place. The 27 matching sapphires in this recently completed bracelet, “sat on Tim’s workbench for a year,” according to McTeigue, before the designer came up with a design that would incorporate them all to best advantage. Similarly, after a long period of cogitation, a set of diamond and ruby buttons became a cuff.
“Walter is not going to tell you this,” says McClelland, “but he is one of the foremost gem experts in the world.” What McTeigue will cop to is being “discerning, picky, and neurotic about quality.” Gem traders worldwide know that when they come across something rare, such as the large, perfect orange sapphire currently in house, McTeigue is one of the few potential buyers who will understand it and know what to do with it. Alerted by a cutter, McTeigue recently bought a padparadscla, a rose-colored sapphire “much rarer than a ruby,” from Sri Lanka. It and other equally fabulous stones will be in the exhibition, which is intended as much to entertain and edify the community as to spark local sales.
In a stair hall of the cottage hangs a world map with pins to indicate just how sprawling McTeigue & McClelland’s customer-base is. And how, exactly, does, say, an Australian who’s in the market for a $50,000 engagement ring find a jewelry store that does not advertise and that is tucked away in rural western Massachusetts? “On the internet,” McTeigue says. “Or maybe in a bridal magazine. The editors like us.”
With good reason. If a piece of jewelry is a masterpiece, it has a better chance of enduring the ages than a marble sculpture. But unlike a marble sculpture, jewelry that misses the mark is easily dismantled so its parts can be recycled. McTeigue & McClelland do it all the time themselves, both with pieces they’ve acquire and with their own self-proclaimed “flops.” (They chalk those up to R & D.) But a winner is impossible to miss. A multi-carat diamond ring that comes across as gently charming is a triumph of finesse over intrinsic razzle-dazzle—a neat trick that only the best designers can pull off. The great Lalique did it routinely. McTeigue & McClelland seem to have the knack, as well. Pieces that, by rights given their component parts, ought to come across as trophies, are something much subtler and finer here.
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Dandelion Puff pin, 18 karat white- and yellow-gold, enamel, and 133 round diamonds, $8,500
Walter McTeigue recalls having breakfast with his father, now deceased, a few years ago at the Red Lion Inn. “He told me he was blown away. McTeigue & McClelland is the real deal”—a highly regarded hallmark that, despite the company’s size and location, has secured its place in history.
McTeigue & McClelland
597 Main Street
Great Barrington
Tuesday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Salon Show of Unusual Diamonds and Rare Gems
August 18 - 27
Opening reception: Friday, August 19, 4 - 6 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/15/11 at 11:04 AM • Permalink
LOCAL’s Economy Buoyed By Chocolate Trickle Down
“We are doing very well,” says Michele O’Hana, via a crackling Skype connection from her childhood home in West Cork, Ireland, where, as usual, she is spending the summer with her family.
“Repeat that please?,” I shout, certain I must have heard wrong. In these tough economic times, one has come to expect tales of woe from small business owners.
“WE ARE DOING VERY WELL,” she shouts into the phone.
O’Hana, a potter who lives in Spencertown with her husband, the photographer John Dolan, and their three children, opened LOCAL last December in the Lenox Commons shopping center on 
Route 7 “on a whim.” For the four years previous, she had maintained a 2nd-floor studio in Lenox, where she mixed her own porcelain, then shaped and fired her refined though unabashedly hand-wrought, pure white dinnerware, piece by piece. “It was not a retail space, so I did most of my selling at shows and sales,” she says, adding that the nomadic life, “was not fun.” So when her lease was due to expire last fall, she went looking for a storefront where she could maintain a studio in back, while receiving customers out front.
Priced out of Lenox, O’Hana settled for a shop in Lenox Commons, where she quickly concluded that her porcelain looked lonely on its own. So she designed and had fabricated some additional products to act as foils. She also invited select fellow-artists and artisans with ties to the region to let her represent their wares. “Before I knew it, I had a full-fledged shop,” she says.
Indeed she does. LOCAL is a find—a charming space filled with a smartly edited collection of sophisticated, well-priced things; some jewelry, clothing, and children’s toys, but mostly objects for the home, nearly all made by hand by some of the region’s most gifted artisans.
And how do customers, particularly tourists, find LOCAL, buried as it is deep within a shopping complex way out on the highway? “I"m right across from Chocolate Springs,” O’Hana says of the popular cafe/chocolatier. “Everybody seems to figure out how to find Chocolate Springs.”
“I already had the antlers,” says O’Hana of the smashing deer-antler-based household objects—trays, candlesticks—she designs under the LOCAL label. “I have the sterling silver bits fabricated by a jeweler, the wood by a furniture-maker, then I assemble the pieces myself in the studio.” Tray, $330
“It’s like cashmere,” says O’Hana of the high-fired porcelain she uses to make her pottery. “It’s a finer material; ethereal-looking, yet more durable than stoneware.” Cups $20 - $28; Saucers, $18; Pitcher, $35
O’Hana supplies the organic hemp-linen that Marsha Pillows of the Drapery Factory on North Street in Pittsfield fashions into bath towels. “They are a big summer thing in Europe,” says O’Hana. A set of two; one hand, one bath, $90. LOCAL also carries bedding created by the well-known Swedish designer Anki Spets, a frequent Chatham visitor whose own store, Area, is in Greenwich Village. Complete sets (2 sheets, 2 pillowcases, 2 shams, duvet cover, 1 throw blanket), $830 - $1,100
For the past twenty years in her barn-studio in Ghent, Lauren Mundy has been using modern colors and an old slip-paint technique to create her distinctive pattern-on-pattern redware. The group shown here, $35 - $160
Under an enormous bell jar, a stack of O’Hana’s porcelain—a complete espresso set—becomes worthy of sideboard display. $350.
LOCAL
Lenox Commons
55 Pittsfield Road (Rte 7)
Lenox
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/25/11 at 02:27 PM • Permalink
Not Just Another On-Site Estate Sale
photograph by Lincoln Russell
This is not a yard sale posing as an estate sale, it’s the real thing, where we get to wander through a large, beautiful, nearly-empty house, picking through the evidence of lives well-lived, in the hope of taking something life-enhancing home. Between Thursday and Saturday (maybe Sunday, too, if there’s anything left), Sawyer Antiques of West Stockbridge will conduct the on-site sale of an enormous range of furniture, art, linens, ceramics, silver plate (see examples of all these, below), decorative accessories (18th- and 19th-century andirons, brass fireplace fenders, hall lanterns, gilt valances with tie backs, Chinese lamps); cooking equipment (Le Creuset, fish poachers, casseroles, hundreds of dishes, sets of glasses and stemware); 165+ linear feet of books, several signed by the author; designer handbags (Chanel, Hermes, Gucci), and clothes (Pucci, Burberry), etc., etc. Whether we score something lofty, such as a Russian icon (see Home page), or something mundane, such as some well-broken-in Le Creuset, we will always remember the context of its former life.
A splendid black folk art textile.
Log cabin quilts
Furniture, including some English pine and several brass and iron beds.
Silver plate, including some Georg Jensen compotes
Ceramics, including 10 of these Spode plates, plus some Wedgwood, Chinese, Dresden, Royal Copenhagen, and Black Knight (sixteen exquisite fish plates)
The Home of Hannah and Ray Schneider
29 Prospect Hill Road
Stockbridge
Thursday - Saturday (and possibly Sunday)
July 28, 29 & (maybe) 30, 9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/24/11 at 03:30 PM • Permalink
Style Shopping: All About Weave
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by Scott Baldinger
One of the great things about Hudson, New York, is that you can literally fall out of bed (or your car, if you don’t live or weekend here) and into a new and wondrous world of the decorative arts. Sometimes you may even find worlds within that world. Such is the experience upon entering the tight quarters of Kea-on-the-Hudson, the upstate branch of Susan Gomersall and Azy Schecter’s Brooklyn store. Despite its small size, it contains an eye-popping variety of sophisticated mid-century modern looking rugs made from the 1950s to the present by various indigenous peoples in places such as Karapanir in Central Anatolia, Morocco, Syria, northeast Turkey, and Persia (Iran).
Some of the rugs on display at Kea looks as if they had been designed by Mark Rothko or the Eames. All, however, were hand made on looms in faraway lands, almost always by women working with traditional design templates and materials —primarily wool and goat hair (the latter often combed out into long strands and woven into a woolen backing rather than turned into a thread), in a style totally unique to the represented regions. Due, however, to the not infrequent times of sociopolitical and economic stress over the last forty years, they can also be fashioned from fabric recycled from Western clothing, sometimes made available by relief organizations.
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Though circumstances and materials have been subject to change, “these techniques and design traditions go back to pre Islamic times, and were passed on grandmother-to-granddaughter—mothers were too busy providing for the family,” says Gomersall. “What was different over the last century was color—previously the Berbers and other tribal peoples had only red, but other dyes became available.” Colored fabric from recycled clothing during the 70s and 80s also led to a whole new look for the weavers, who used their training as a foundation for startlingly original, softly shaggy creations called Boucherouites, Arabic for “scraps of material.” Gomersall and Schecter recently held an exhibition of these rugs at their Brooklyn gallery entitled The Untrained Eye: Freeform, Vintage ‘Rag Rugs’ of Morocco. “They look modern because our own modernist movements took a lot from tribal peoples,” Gomersall says. The Islamic proscription against figural representation was also a major contributing factor.
“The market is very much dictated by what’s happening in the world,” says the Yorkshire-born Gomersall, who started in the rug trade in the mid 1970s as an art student studying abroad in Greece. “I do much of the traveling myself to various countries to meet with various pickers I’ve cultivated over the years. But it all depends on the political situation. In the early years, I would go to Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Shah was deposed, I’d go to the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to places like Peshawar and Balochistan. After 9/11, we had to limit ourselves to Turkey and Morocco. This year, we were about to go to Syria but then it erupted.”
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Gomersall met Schecter, a textile designer who hails from Long Island, on much safer ground—a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village in the mid nineties. They opened their Kea headquarters in Brooklyn 10 years ago. After weekending at their house in Germantown for a number of years, they “decided it was time for a rug shop in Hudson” They will be in their current space until November. As for permanently joining the tribe of other cosmopolitan purveyors of the decorative and fine arts that currently carpet Warren Street from top to bottom (if not wall to wall), they both say, “We’ll just wait and see what happens.”
Meanwhile, hanging on the walls or neatly piled in corners of the 12-by-10-foot space are examples of an age-old art form brought to contemporary life: two shagadelic Turkish rugs called Filiklis (behind Schecter in the photograph) with long-strands of goat hair woven into them that were made in the 1960s and seventies; the group of those candy-colored Boucherouites described above (pictured at right); chicly monochromatic Siirts from Central Asia; and a stack of plush Beni Ouarains, soft woolen area carpets designed for sleeping that were created by a young Moroccan woman who recently took over over her father’s rug business after he was incapacitated by a heart attack. The series was commissioned by Kea and a woman’s economic empowerment group called Nest. Gomersall mentions that the woman’s father is far from happy, despite the continuance of the family trade, because he is certain that no man will marry his daughter now that she has become so independent.
In other words, Kea is not just a carpet store; it’s a petite précis of the adaptable artistry, resourcefulness, and craft of women weavers throughout the millennia.
Kea on the Hudson
409 Warren Street, Hudson
Thursday - Sunday; noon - 6 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/10/11 at 04:29 AM • Permalink
Style Shopping: Carolyne Roehm’s Big DeClutter
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We don’t normally alert readers to tag sales, as, without actually vetting the merch in advance (impractical), it’s impossible to tell which ones are worthwhile. But earlier this week, when style guru Carolyne Roehm, author of countless books, including At Home with Carolyne Roehm, sent us the e-mail below, we recalled her last tag sale in ‘08 and immediately cleared a space this weekend on our calendar. Quite apart from an opportunity to acquire new trinkets for the table, the event itself promises to be a charmer—part garden party, part souk. Even though our hostess insists that this one will be modest in comparison to that (which was shot as a story for Veranda magazine), there will be a stand with lemonade and home-baked snacks, the proceeds from which will go to the Litchfield Women’s Support Services, as will a portion of overall till.
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Dear Friends,
Having just had a “milestone birthday” and embracing some of the ideas from the book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, I decided to do more than clear a shelf or a closet. In my usual obsessive way, I tackled barns and attics, my studio, and the basement. Whilst I am not quite going zen in style (far from it), I am attempting to “declutter.”
This will not be the organized, “pretty” tag sale like the one I wrote about in Veranda Magazine a few years ago, but just your classic old fashioned yard sale, with a mix of things from garden hoses to some of my beloved ribbons and silk flowers. It has been hard for me to give up some of those, but this is an exercise in editing. There is a bit of everything.
If you are around the northwest corner of Connecticut, please stop by.
Best,
Carolyne Roehm
When we asked her if we could share the news with our readers, Carolyne added,
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“In the book, Gretchen Rubin writes about how refreshing it is to have some empty shelves and closets. That really resonated with me. Sometimes I feel as if I am drowning in all the accumulated stuff of endless projects. Some of the things are good, some are so-so, and some are just regular tag sale ware, like too many mason jars and terra cotta pots.”
There will be cook books, as well as other paperbacks and hard cover books, videos, wrapping paper, ribbons, silk flowers, cards, gift tags, good paper and scribble paper, some old appliances, bric-a-brac, some silver plate and copper pieces, baskets, limited furniture, a few antiques, fabrics, buttons, some sewing supplies, silk curtains, table cloths and table skirts, linens, napkins, some table ware and decorative items, old candles, some wrought iron furniture.
That’s the beauty of tag sales—you never know what you’ll find. If we’re lucky, we’ll nab some good stuff from Roehm’s real life, but, if history repeats itself (likely), we’ll return home with a car heavy with things that just look good, especially by candlelight—the detritus of one woman’s creative life becomes fodder for another’s.
Carolyne Roehm’s Clearing Out the Attic Sale
58 Main Street, Sharon
July 9 & 10, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/05/11 at 02:26 PM • Permalink
Style Shopping: At 3FortySeven Charisma Reigns
The building started life as an art deco service station. He started out as a Harvard-trained architect. Together, what they are in the process of becoming—3FortySeven is still very much a work in progress—is already far more exciting than either of those bio snippets would suggest.
Not that there’s anything wrong with service stations. “I’d been coming to Hudson for 20 years,” says Michael Davis, who has a house in Germantown and a thriving architectural practice, Michael Davis Architects, based in New York City. Five or six years ago, Davis went shopping for a building on Warren Street. Among the properties he found himself considering was a former gas station. “The site was so amazing,” he says. Initially he thought he’d buy it just for the land, intending to raze the station to make room for a retail complex that would be visually compatible with its 19th-century neighbors. But while he was working out his idea, the old gas station was working on him—its voluminous spaces indoors, the enormous garage doors that, once lifted, turn those spaces into indoor-outdoor rooms, the unheard of (for Hudson) amount of outdoor space.
“I still sometimes think about putting in some period-inspired buildings,” he says. Meanwhile, he’s having fun. Nary a dull object is permitted through 3FortySeven’s doors. The front room, where Reos and Franklins once got their tires rotated and their oil changed, has as its centerpiece an enormous chandelier by the Cincinatti glassblower Jason Weins, a spiral of industrial-salvage metal, resplendent with pendants of roughly pressed glass. Against one wall, a prim black lacquer and gold-wash Dorothy Draper chest of drawers, pure mid-century Hollywood, supports an exquisite 19th-century Chinese water urn. Above hangs a painting of polar bears that Davis is selling on consignment for his client, the actor Matt Dillon.
That much rock-n-roll in an architect’s soul could be grounds for expulsion from the AIA.
Davis clearly got off on the wrong foot in his chosen field by having seen a thing or two before he sat through his first lecture in graduate school. “I grew up in a 19th-century townhouse in Manhattan,” he says. “My mother was English, so I went to Europe when I was very young. She and her family came from a tradition of beautiful old houses. My uncle is David Mlinaric [a top British decorator, with clients ranging from Mick Jagger to Lord Rothschild]. When I worked in his studio one summer in high school, I came to appreciate the way he used furniture and decoration to complete architectural space and create ambiance.”
After Harvard, before going on his own, Davis worked for a number of firms, including Beyer Blinder Belle, specialists in historic preservation. “I received a good, classic foundation at Harvard. But everything I learned about design there, I have been unlearning ever since. Architecture falls short in its regard for the client.” Conventional wisdom holds that it’s the duty of the architect to “educate” his clients. Davis, in contrast, finds the untutored eye inspiring. “My clients free me up,” he says. “I get my nerve from them.”
And that’s some nerve! A lot of Davis’ new-from-the-ground-up houses look more like renovations. “I use salvaged materials to give architecture patina and ambiance that you cannot achieve with new materials,” he says. The furnishings he sells in his store are the same ones he steers clients such as the actor Zack Braff (Scrubs) toward. Jason Wiens, maker of that fantastic chandelier, also does a range of simple, utilitarian pendant lights with an added kick—shades made from thick glass that looks as if it’s almost still molten.
Now that 3FortySeven is in the capable hands of the affable manager Giovanni DiMola, Davis is focusing on his plentiful outdoor space. He already hosts one food truck in his spacious front “yard,” and shortly Tortillaville will be joined there by another, “a young fellow who builds brick ovens has installed one in an old FedEx truck. He plans to make pizzas.” Meanwhile, Davis has his eye on a surprisingly green space outside the commodious back room of 3FortySeven. Maybe a outdoor cafe? A place for live music? Outdoor movies in summer? Stay tuned.
3FortySeven
347 Warren Street
Hudson
3FortySeven’s official opening celebration
Saturday, 7 - 10 p.m. The public is welcome.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/24/11 at 02:41 PM • Permalink
Style Shopping: Mirror, Mirror
On Saturday, April 23, 441 Gallery, the upstairs exhibition space at TK Home and Garden in Hudson, will host the opening of an exhibition of twenty-eight mostly convex mirrors designed by Cristobal Morales, who lives in Spencertown. Beautifully crafted and elegant, it takes more than a moment to recognize the humble origins of their frames. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what each frame is comprised of— the brush from a street-cleaning truck, a rusted circular saw blade—not easy, since most frames combine at least three separate elements. “With just two,” says Morales, “it looks too much like what it is. The third transforms it.”
Cris Morales grew up in circumstances he describes as “beyond modest. There was little in the way of games and toys at our house.” Nonetheless, he recalls, “My hands were never quiet. I made things from stuff I found—sticks, bits of metal and cloth. My brother kept bees, so there was always beeswax around, and at noon, it was very soft so I could sculpt with it. I loved acting, writing, poetry, the arts.” Neither his mother, who had her hands full, nor any of his seven siblings shared his interests. “I always wished that I could find someone to encourage me.”
As a teenager, whenever someone would ask him if he knew how to do something, Morales’ made a policy of saying, “yes,” regardless. That was how he landed a job with a landscaper. “I found I was good at landscape design,” he says. “Then I decorated a friend’s house.” All of their other friends were impressed. “I was impressed with myself,” he says.
Morales photographed the project, which he now describes as “very Crate & Barrel,” and took the pictures with him on job interviews, hoping they would win him a position as a design assistant, the sort of entry-level job normally filled by recent 
Parson’s graduates. He interviewed with Michael Krieger, who, at the time, had a busy New York City design office. As luck would have it, Krieger turned out to be the mentor Morales had dreamed of as a little boy, the one who would encourage him. “I worked in Michael’s interior design business for five years,” he says.
It quickly came to light that the boy who played with beeswax had a natural affinity for rarefied taste. Several years ago, Morales came upon a coffee-table book filled with photographs of convex mirrors in elaborate, faceted-metal frames, the work of Line Vautrin (1913 - 1997), a French decorative artist who has been hailed as “a poetess in metal.” He was enthralled.
“One day I found a wheel from an old tiller, and I brought it home,” says Morales, who moved with Krieger to Spencertown full-time several years ago. “I thought it could be something. Then Michael gave me a convex mirror, so I put the two together, and I loved it.” With Krieger cheering him on, Morales began collecting cast-off bits of hardware, shapely commonplaces and industrial oddities, as well as all manner of discs, things in which he alone perceived decorative potential. His goal: to someday fashion from these bits and pieces assembled mirror frames, reminiscent of Line Vautrin’s. For three years, as his collection grew, Morales waited for an epiphany that would make the components destiny clear.
Then just five weeks ago, in what Krieger describes as “a breathtaking burst of invention,” Morales began making frames for mirrors. Instead of “seeing” the finished assemblage in his mind’s eye from the start, Morales learned that “it was a process of discovery.”
CRISTOBAL MORALES: New Reflections With Industrial Artifacts
441 Gallery at TK Home and Garden
441 Warren Street
April 23 - May 30
Opening reception, April 23, 5 - 8 p.m.
Refreshments include a tasting of cheeses from Couturier of France, one of the oldest goat-cheese producers in Europe, which is in the process of creating a production facility in Livingston, NY
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/19/11 at 04:16 PM • Permalink
Kamilla’s Brings Flower Power to Millerton
The brightest and most exuberant spot in Millerton’s retail scene is undoubtedly Kamilla’s floral boutique on Main Street (next door to Terni’s.) With its chartreusey walls and pots of blooming plants and refrigerator of flowers, it’s cheery and uplifiting even on overcast days. Opened three years ago by Kamilla Najdek, the shop feels like someplace you’d find in a small European city, which makes sense for Najdek grew up in a small Russian city on the Baltic Sea.
“I first came to the United States when I was 19 on a work program,” says the 29-year-old. “I wanted to learn English. I worked as a housekeeper at the Interlaken in Lakeville.” She returned for several summers, mostly because she’d met a local guy, Donald Najdek (who owns EcoBuilders, a sustainable construction company.) “He’s tenth generation Millerton!” she says proudly. “We would meet in the winter in Prague, which is where he proposed.” After they got married, she went to work for a florist in Millbrook, where she learned everything about running a floral business. “Special events are very important—weddings, birthdays, sympathy, holidays,” she says. “But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to have a retail shop where you could stop in and pick up something that could brighten your day.” Thus she stocks small items like “air plants” ($15) that live on moisture from the atmosphere and a large assortment of orchids and succulents that require minimal care. “They are very good for weekenders,” says Najdek, who says Millerton’s central location has allowed her to develop a clientele from Connecticut and Massachusetts as well as New York. She also sells a small assortment of paintings, jewelry, vases and teak furniture.
Kamilla first started working with flowers when she was housekeeping at the Interlaken. “I’d cut flowers from the garden and make arrangements for the hallways,” she recalls. Now, she tries to use locally grown flowers whenever possible, but the only reliable source is Cedar Farm in Columbia County. “Thank God for Marilyn [Cederoth],” she says. Kamilla’s arrangments tend to have a contemporary theatricality, which she attributes to her love of dance. “My mother was a choreographer,” she says. “I get a lot of inspiration by going to performances at Bard College and Jacob’s Pillow.”
One reason why Kamilla is such a conspicuous presence in Millerton is her delivery van: a bright green Honda Element with her logo on the side. “It’s my favorite shade of green,” she says, noting that the vehicle itself has beome a marketing tool. “Now, many people say that when they see any green Element, they think of me!”
Kamilla’s Floral Boutique
36 Main Street, Millerton; 518.789.3900
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/13/11 at 02:07 PM • Permalink
Style Shopping: The Royal Wedding and We
What, precisely, does the British royal wedding have to do with the likes of thee and me? Thanks to Selina van der Geest, owner of the Bangall (Dutchess County) shop NL-GB, quite a lot, as a matter of fact. This weekend, Red Devon Restaurant in Bangall, together with its nearest neighbor, NL-GB (code for the owner’s curiously unbridled-yet-somehow-still-discreet brand of British upper-class decorating chic) are conspiring to get us in the mood for the impending royal brouhaha with a Best of British shopping-and-dining spree.
NL-GB specializes in the sort of quirky-yet-correct-yet-modern home furnishings its owner, a British ex-pat, favors in interiors she designs for private clients. It also hosts trunk shows for some of the very fashion designers whose creations Kate Middleton wears most frequently. These include Katherine Hooker, whose streamlined, contemporary-twist-on-tweeds jacket the bride-to-be is wearing in the photo above, and Vivien Sheriff hats, which range from practical berets (also above) to the barely there 
(the feather-and-velvet “fascinator”, right, that Kate wore with a Katherine Hooker coat on her first official outing with Prince William) to Ascot-and-wedding worthy extravaganzas. (Kate, naturally, is expected to wear a tiara from the royal family vault at her own wedding.) Katherine Hooker and Vivien Sheriff’s son will be present to introduce new styles this weekend at NL-GB. “Since their alliance with Middleton has come to light,” Selina says, “they have been bombarded with inquiries from the U.S. People did an interview, and when I saw Vivien in London two weeks ago, she was being interviewed on NBC.” Also on display at NL-GB will be the paintings of Leora Armstrong, a Scottish artist who now lives in Stanfordville.
In a burst of hand-across-the-parking-lot camaraderie, the Red Devon restaurant and market bar, normally staunchly locavore in its outlook, will be featuring such traditional British culinary phenomena as bangers and mash, Welsh rabbit (or, “rarebit,” if we must), sticky toffee pudding, and treacle tart.
Best of British Trunk Shows
NL-GB
108 Hunns Lake Road, Bangall
845.868.7130
April 9 & 10; 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Red Devon
108 Hunns Lake Road, Bangall
845.868.3175
7 a.m. - 9:30 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/05/11 at 01:21 PM • Permalink
Style Shopping: Stair Galleries’ Albert Hadley Warehouse Sale
This Friday, Stair Galleries in Hudson will conduct an auction that includes items from the warehouse of Albert Hadley, interior designer extraordinaire, who is retiring at 93.
As Christopher Petkanas writing for the The New York Times recently observed, in the late 1970s through 80s and well beyond, Hadley was so in-demand that the switchboard at his firm Parish-Hadley routinely blew off prospective clients (at least those who were not friends of friends) with, “We’re very busy.”
In my experience, the same went for journalists the firm did not already know. In the late 70s, when I was starting out as a reporter covering the design beat for that newspaper, I made it my business to get to know all the players—Mark Hampton, Mario Buatta, John Saladino—and if I did not call them first, such was the power of The Times that they made a point of calling me. All, that is, except Albert Hadley, who neither reached out nor responded to my timid overtures. So imagine my delight one day on my lunch hour, when I caught The Great Mr. Hadley, 
Mrs. Astor’s decorator, shopping in my favorite junk store—the Doyle Galleries Clearance Center, where, in those days, they unloaded the leftovers from estates deemed unworthy of the auction block. As I had no reason to believe he knew who I was, I felt free to furtively observe as he gathered up item-after-item. (The only one I now recall was a slightly crude, but clever, seemingly homemade shoeshine kit—presumably not destined for Mrs. Astor’s dressing room.) When he was ready to settle up, coincidentally, so was I. As we stood side-by-side at the counter, pens poised over our respective checkbooks, he cocked his head slightly in my direction, and smiling shyly whispered, “Don’t tell Mark.”
The soul of charm—even at the height of his success, and it shows in his work, which holds up astonishingly well from first publication (a 1959 bedroom created for a Vogue editorial, “Summer on a Shoestring”) to last. Much has been made of Hadley’s technical proficiency, and surely he has that, but that is not something the untrained eye would necessarily catch—at least not consciously. What drew in Princess Diana (who, until the Queen put the royal kabosh on it, had planned for Hadley to do her and Prince Charles’ palace near Windsor) is that charm.
Now the remains of Hadley’s decorating arsenal are ours for the bidding, 40 lots within a sale of 400 lots of European and Continental furnishings. In other words, plenty of stuff. Now it falls to bidders to try to spin Hadley magic out of them.
Stair Galleries
549 Warren Street, Hudson
Previews
Thursday, March 31, 1 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Friday, April 1, 10 a. m. – 6 p.m.
Auction starts on Friday at 6 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/28/11 at 02:51 PM • Permalink
