The Eye has to travel, Documentary, 2012

I have been confined to my home for a bad back - which has the great advantage, that I can really do nothing else than watch telly, read and sleep. Actually I sleep and think a lot. Yesterday I finally watched a DVD which has been waiting for my attention already quite a while. I think the film was just showed very shortly here in Belgian cinemas, but it is a must for every style conscious person, who happens to be interested in beauty and art and fashion.

The film is quite short, a little bit over an hour, and is a documentary about the "empress of fashion", Diana Vreeland - the women who was for decades editor in chief for American Harper's Bazaar and then American Vogue. It was her who made those magazines into some form or art, not only talking about fashion, but about society and fashion, about stars, new technologies and everything a wide awake woman was and should be interested in.

For her style was something which came with self-education and curiousness for life, not only throwing money at interior designers and fashion popes. The most interesting bits are of course the moments when we hear her speak in an interview she gave already in her 80ies in 1983.  What glamour, personality and what a sharp mind. I was really flabbergasted and got a rush of regret, not to have lived in times like that - for  me the 60ies are perhaps not the ideal adult time zone to have lived in, but the 2 decades before would have been worth inventing a time machine right now on the spot.
All she says has to do with all we live, still today. Off course she is the master of exaggeration - not all is to be taken literally, which sometimes people don't get. "The eye has to travel" - indeed, imagination is something of a wild animal which has to be tamed and then used for bring more fun, more conscience of beauty and more longing in our lives.  Exaggeration for her was the instrument to highlight those  of years gone and years to come. If you note her clothes in the interview, they are always the most simple cuts and colours - nothing loud there. The background is full of colour and fun and wisdom. Today, much of what she did as an editor would not be possible, simply out of economical reasons: who will ship 500 orchids to the Arctic for a single photo shoot?

I watched the film with my daughter, who is in her teens and not particularly - yet - interested in fashion - but she got the essence of the film: Beauty matters and the live we want to live is the life we have to create our selves. In times of internet-shopping and floods of information, cheap heaps of cheap clothes, the art is to source for the things which MEAN something to YOU. Dare it, be somebody,  be yourself, the best self you can be, not just a weak copy of a some magazine's make over story. Dare to be somebody of your own. That is her message, in a nutshell.
If you can get your hands on a copy, watch it.

Interior Decoration

In a next life, I will decorate houses in the dozen. Not just clippings out of magazines and a house in my mind, but the real thing - in the country, in town, at the beach, on a mountain and one in France, too. Preferably an old winemaking chateau. Or better an old and desperate country house in England, or Bavaria?

Interior Decoration is something which never bores me, never. I just feel elated when I get hold of a good interiors decoration magazin, can snuggle up the sofa and have a good read. After this I am refreshed and would like to start right away - but alas, there are nor will be all those houses to provide for all those pleasures. One cannot have it all: the dreams and then the reality..
So I go on doing it in my mind and until now have not been bored with this neither. The advantage: It involves no costs ( unless in the foreseen future we have to pay to have a right to think for ourselves?) and all is possible - you have always to see the bright side of life.
I have changed houses many times in my life, but almost ever I have lived in nice places. (A dear friend told me once, that I would owe him a new addressbook, if we would keep up the speed of moving - his M-Page was full in a mo!) Not big houses or appartements sometimes, but nice. In my childhood I had the privilege to grow up in a big house with much space and a huge garden. There were not enough rooms for each of us, but it did us no harm to share. I had also the privilege to see and take in many old country houses, some of them now altered unrecognizably, some still intact - with the oldfashioned courtousy and Gastfreundschaft which is a rare relict of olden golden days.

When I started to study, I was lucky as well: in Munich I lived always in a nice neighbourhood, in Nymphenburg, in Schwabing, then more or less on the Maximiliansstrasse and at last in the upcoming quarter of the Johannisplatz. I have always felt well in my flats, as small as they were - and I enjoyed to live in a WG  ( Wohngemeinschaft - shared flat) - even if this meant that the chap living with Lilli and me never cleaned the bathroom, considering this to be a girls job. It also meant, that my expensive face cream was shared as was the milk I bought. But the company was great and the fun we had together is unforgettable. The start of a wonderful and still ongoing friendship.
All my rooms and interiors seem to look the same - I have very early developped a style of my own, being more "mine" as the years advance and I see the world. Or at least I hope.

Entree of House Wittgenstein in Vienna

Recently I get more and more interested in modern art and architecture - most of it is still a mystery to me, but I could imagine to live in a very modern and streamlined house - but only with my own furniture and my own way of arranging it. It could look very interesting indeed. The idea is not mine - alas. I picked it up most certainly in the fotographs of the interiors of the villa Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. One of the most refined interiors I have ever seen - timeless, elegant and without any dust and historic ballast. Shame, that the house nowadays is only to be visited in its empty shell - almost impossible to imagine the interiors as they were meant to be as such. ( for  more information about this marvelous house, please have a look in wikipedia and also on www.wien.info/sights) . The pictures of this post are all found in Google.

Why don' t you....? Miscellaneus...

 Yes, several things:

- Cut your hair yourself? No need to pay huge amounts of money for some fringes and "degradees" - start slowly and get lost.

- Buy a long evening dress at Zara, H&M or Mango - great stuff out there, for very affordable money. After all it is mad to spend huge amounts of good cash if you do not walk the Red Carpet in Cannes on a regular basis. And then the girls there always rent their clothes....

- Find a seamstress ( and then please share the adress...) and get going to design your own dresses? Look out in magazines and make a lookbook for yourself alone.

- Promise never again to buy coloured loo paper? White is the colour to have. Basta.

- Give 5/10/20/ $/ £/ Euro for a good cause in your area ( easy to be found out if you ask...) and once a month give an afternoon to help out there. You know where the money goes to and the feeling of doing something good will do you good as well.

- Think about purchasing a real carpet? They should be as big as you can squeeze in your living room and not, I repeat, not 1 meter long and 50 cm wide. Go to auction houses, there are thrown out there at a prices which make me weep.

- Start painting and pottery and gardening in your sparetime instead of going only to the gym? So much more refreshing and food for thought too.

- Invent a new signature dish and cook it at least once a week? I learned only late in life that I have a son who for years and years lives on Nutella,bread and milk but loves Curries in all varieties. Off we go!

- Promise NOT to use Botox. It ALWAYS shows.

- Use organic oils to moisturize your face instead of  super expensive face creams? So much more natural and cheaper - and great value in skin maintainance too. Go in an organic shop and have a look for Macadamia or Sesame oil, Hazelnut or Wheat germ. Mix your own stuff.

- Laugh more?

- Hear  your old Charles Aznavour and Yves Montand Cds on a rainy sunday afternoon while cleanining up your desk?

- Sleep with open windows and let the light and birds wake you up at dawn - use the time as "Me-Time" before the rest of the house has to get up. ( Ok, better advice for summer, but until then I will forget).

- Throw out all bedlinnen made of polyester? Gasthly stuff. Nobody wants to sleep in it. Money is no excuse ( I only say: Ikea...). This is a horrid mistake in good taste.

- Edit your summer clothes, now, as the winter months have started.
Get rid of everything, which does not fit/please/talk to you any more, is not in pristine condition and make ROOM for thought, not old clothes!

- Allocate Beauty in all its forms a much more prominent place in your life? Every day of your life counts.

Anyway, your life and happiness lies in your own hands.

Colours and Rooms 2 - Thoughts about Dining Rooms

So I allow myself the pleasure here to chat to you about favourite colours for several rooms. No need to agree with me, but bare with me the pleasure of thinking about it.

One thing is important and experience has taught me one universal truth: different countries have different needs in colours for  the interior decoration of a house. The colours which work well in Portugal or in Turkey do not easily work in Belgium - the light is different, as is the climate and the "feeling " of the place.

Here in Brussels colours are naturally more muted and calmed down. The sky is flat and most of the time a nondefinitive sluggish colour of grey. Rare are the days with clear blue skies and white clouds - what I miss about Bavaria...  No wonder that the shop "Flamant" is all over the place with greys and browns, blacks or mushy whites combined with wood and a lot of silverish stuff.
When  I arrived 10 years ago from Turkey in Belgium, the yellow striped sofa did not fit into the feeling of the country any longer. I have since changed the furniture tones more to muted terracotta, soft greens and some creamy whites. Strong, bright colours do not work in this climate - they can look out of touch. Strong dark colours are another thing - friends of mine have a dark red diningroom, which is lovely and cosy, definitively made for long dark winter evenings and one can wonderfully imagine the celebrations at Christmas in this jewel coloured, cosy room.




Provisiorial dinning room

But then only fools do not change their mind: I have painted my new dining room in a bright  Canari yellow, with bright yellow curtains and a red carpet. And it is nice as well. I have a dark grey stone floor and big white windows, which pulls it all together. The dining table has been dressed in a soft terracotta coloured  tablecloth with a wildly flowered greyish table square on top. Sounds adventurous, but is nice and until now we have had many a wonderful meal in this room and the children use it as the place to do their homework, when they come home in the dark afternoons from school.
It has the big advantage of having sun in the morning, so it doubles in the true sense in being a classical breakfast room, small, square and friendly, full of light and  generating a happy athmosphere and/or a square smallish cabinet of a dining room in the evening, ligthed by candle light and only a soft lamp in one of the corners.

Always remember, please: NO light from above in a dining room. It makes people always look sick and tired. Better have two or three lamps in different places and lots of candles - so much more becoming to the teint and putting a sparkle in your guests eyes.

Another lovely combination for dining rooms are soft old rose tones and or a muted green with soft rosecoloured curtains. Again thought out for eating in the evening - there is rarely a colour which is so beautiful in daylight and electric light as the right shade of pink. Many people are afraid of using it, but in the right combination with furniture, curtains, flowers and porcelain it is hard to beat.

Naturally many of you will prefer the current fashion of having  a very high tech and cool dining area. Not everybody of us has the luxury or (with the kitchen being too small) the need of having a room or designated area in our homes for the purpose of eating alone.

Funnily enough the dining room is a quite recent invention - until the beginning of the 19th century, i.e. 200 years ago, people used to eat in the place they just where. A small table was brought in and set out to eat where it was convenient. The last  left-overs of this attidute today are the hotel's "Room Service" and, more ironically reverting to olden times, having your dinner in front of the telly.
Dining rooms came up when the upper middle classes became more influential and more keen on displaying their riches and newly aquired tastes and habits.
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Sometimes a dining room seems a waste of space especially in times where only few of us still have personal to wait on us - good bye, Downton Abbey..... So, in the sense of practiciality and also common sense,  there should always be a second or third use to them. The fact of having a huge table in a huge room, as we can still see in may old houses nowadays, was also the pure necessity of making space for big families and their doings. Dining tables do still today double as working tables, to do your homework, sewing or sweating over puzzles, playing monopoly and sitting around with a cup of tea and happily chatting away. I have seen the most beautiful dining table set in a small room full of books - unforgettable athmosphere.

But also very stylish and coming back in fashion is having kitchen dinners - so much fun and so beautiful. But about those more in a post about kitchens - I am thinking already about it.

 Back to some more colour ideas....
Some other very chic chic combinatioon of colours for a dining room is cappuchino brown, white and a third colour - you can choose whatever you think would go well together. Or a simple white room, dark wood furniture and lovely flowers. Or a dove blue with grey and cream... the combinations are endless, just make sure that you do not use more than three dominant colours get the light right, have a pair of candles and some flowers on the table.
Then you need only  a few lovely smiling faces sitting around a good pot of stew, fresh baguette and a good glas of red wine to be perfectly happy.
Sure one of the things you do not need to be rich to achieve.

Why don't you....

This time of the year brings us back to stay put at home and invite some friends over in the dark evenings.

So, why don't you...

- invite a couple of friends for playing society games: Good old charades are almost lost to human memory and even a session of very competitive Monopoly opens up new horizons and traits of character. Provide some good wine, enough water and a huge tablett full of sandwiches ( not for nothing the Earl of Sandwich invented the stuff while gambling away and not having time to get up for dinner), or hotdogs, or Brezen with butter - something easy and simple to eat out of your hands, just with a papernapin around. Place all of it on a small table and let people help themselves.

- start to do a huge 1000 piece puzzle on your dining table. Just leave it there and every time one of you and your family passes by, there is the temptation of having a look and finding the right piece. Work in progress.

- dress your house or flat up for winter. You can change the covers for your sofa to a more cosy texture with some throws and cushions on top, hanging those thicker curtains to help keep out the cold, think about getting an artificial fire going in a corner of the room and use a lovely warm scented candle in the evening to make the house smell good of joys to come.

- put your flowers in a context of winter - with bare pieces of wood, found in the woods when on a walk, or with the flowers which are right now in season - no tulips now, please!!

- revive the wonderful tradition of making a "Jour Fixe" - almost lost tradition of keeping  an open house for friends and aquaintances on a certain day in the month - let's say every last saturday of the month from 16.00 - 20.00 during the winter months. People need no special inviation but get in september an ivitation with the dates until end of  february and can come if they like. Your job is to be at home, have enough tea, water and white wine at hand, some sandwiches and huge bowls of nuts, olives and what ever comes to your mind. And then relax and look forward to your visitors, may it be many or just a few. If you have a cosy home, people will love to come and look forward to those evenings once a month. And if they bring a new face, even better!

Colours and Rooms 1

I have moved house several times in my life, and fear, that those moves are not over yet.

One of my great regrets is that I always had to live - that is, from my 19th year - in rented houses and appartments, so that the feeling of being "chez moi" never could sink in really really deep. I wonder how it feels? Must feel nice though...
But I do not complain, as I am very near to house heaven right now in my new abode here in Brussels. It is coming slowly together and I have tremendous fun in choosing colours and curtains - in a small way and even smaller budget, but all the same.

At home, in Bavaria, my parents, and especially my mother was most indulgent in letting me and my brother Gotthard live out our dreams of interior decorations - in a sort, she was "happy that we did it". We were polishing floors, painting rooms and doors, discussing houses and concepts, studiying the Villa Wittgenstein in Vienna, looing through books without end and hearing Caruso while dreaming up THE necessary ideas of making our house and home beautiful. I was feeling as happy as could be in those years. I still live on them now.

 I remember distinctly deciding a day, that the guest loo in the ground floor was in dire need of being done up - so I went to the villages chemists, bought a small sack of pigments for a really small sum f money, made my mother drive me to the next little town to buy some paint and off I went, happily renovating the guest loo. There were some things I could not change, but I changed the mirror for a nicer one which I had found in the house, my mother got inspired too and sew some garmets to cover a hitherto plain wooden  table, which afterwards looked so much more pretty and welcoming than ever before. I painted the space around the little sink with oilproof paint and the door and the window in a gleaming new white: we had a framboise coloured loo, white and lovely doors, a display of white kleenex, some new soap and fresh white guesttowels piled up - and that was it.

I still do admire my mother for her nerve. If one of my children would start to do my house up in their sort of idea of being chic and elegant, I would most probably go ballistic and get most certainly horribly protective about my home. My mother was more the type if joining in, with great fun and following our lead. We had a lovely home, believe me.

I only late had a room for my own - I was 17 I think and I painted it in a first go in a sky blue, later then in a deep and warm peach - more tending to terracotta, if I think about it. I asked one of my other brothers to drive me to Ikea and bought a lovely little sofa. Mami made me simple white cotton curtains and I got the old iron bed down from the attic -  today my youngest son sleeps in it. I loved my room at home.

My rooms as a student in Munich were always nice and simple - and as G. says, looked "always the same" - I suppose, my house now here, 20 years later, looks all the same again.

When I moved to Portugal, we restored a rented appartment and painted the whole flat in a deep yellow, unheard at the time in Lisbon. There it was the habit of painting rooms generally always in white, because of the heat, I suppose.  And, I do admit, it looks very beautiful with the 18th century Azulejos, blue and white tiles on the walls and an ox-blood red tiled floor. But I felt more at home with yellows - remembered me of baroque austrian walls and all.

After that,  my colour choices have been decided by landlords ever since - until now. I have reverted to all the colours of the rainbow - very un-chic in the current times of belgian colourschemes like taupe, brown and off white in the now famous Style Flamand. Which can be very elegant, I admit, I was there at the Sablon with friends only yesterday and am always impressed in the sheer scale of presentation of a full blown decoration scheme - "from the cradle to the grave" -  to be found there. No need to have ideas of your own. It is place for pilgrimage for all coming to Brussels and I pop in, whenever I have time to know what is going on.

But as the weather is already grey and darkish, I somehow want more colour for my own home and have painted "my little hut" in bright yellows and greens. Until now, I think it is wonderful and cosy.

As you now me by now and might well imagine, I have always ideas about interiors. Will write a post soon with some ideas about colour schemes for rooms. Give me just some time....

Film: "AMOUR", by Michael Haneke, 2012

It has been a long time that I have been in a cinema at all - and on top of it to see a film, which really moved my heart and made me think hard.

This film is a french/german/austrian coproduction and has received a Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival this year. I suppose  this was more for the fact that three legends of  The French Film, Jean-Louis Trintignant , Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert  have been starring in it and we all know, that France is one of the last countries left, which knows what their artists are worth.

This film is different. First of all the story could be told in one sentence: Old couple faces death. Not normally a sujet which will fill the cash boxes. But then the cinema was pretty full. And very silent ( might have helped that in the cinema I went there was no popcorn available). It is a very quiet and slow movie, painfully slow sometimes, not, as we have to get used to more and more, running and anticipating,  leaving you breathless only by watching it...
Here feelings  and thoughts are expressed, often without words, but so clear and so courageous that you stomach twists and turns. Impossible not to be drawn into the  story, into the relationship between those two old people. To start thinking about it. Then the relationship with their daughter, here Isabelle Huppert:  a mirror to all of us, showing selfishness and helplessness in the face of the truth. Impossible not to react to that too.

I am not sure, who of the both main charactes/actors are more to be admired - Emmanuelle Riva takes the plunge in looking the part - and when she is proud and haughty, the fear and helplessness is there as well to be felt and seen. Jean Louis Trintignant fights despair and memories but keeps the stiff upper lip - and this will slip as well in a moment of letting go.. Both are old in reality too, which gives this film a tone of truth, which is heartbreaking. If there ever was a need to prove that old age has its own courage, there it is. There is hope for us all. Inspite of everything.
What stays is dignity, independance, despair and joy, clearness and awe. A beautiful film. And not for the faint hearted.