4th of July & Giveway Winner!!

Well, our first party at the new house was a success!! My family came over for Christian's birthday party/ 4th of July party.

Below, my grandmother painted this cute sign for the event. (The realtor left the 'For sale' sign at our house when we moved in and after calling & leaving messages for her to come & get it & not hearing back for a couple of months, we figured it was ours- I think it'll be fun to repaint for parties/ events)

The kids had a great time (below) and my mom pushed them around in a Power Wheel Jeep. (It was being trashed on the side of the road so we picked it up but the battery's dead ;) How pretty is Natalie in her princess party dress?!!

Here are some [repeat] photos of the tables (below). It cracked me up when a guest was carrying a bunch of drinks in her hands and asked if she was allowed to set them down on this table or if it was "staged." hahahah uh-oh, have I gone tpo far with this?!! hahah (ps- I think EVERYTHING should be used- even pretty tables!!)

And the plaster of paris flag holders my grandmother made:

And how cute is Christian's mini wheelbarrow-turned-bar? (We used our big wheelbarrow too for the rest of the drinks but this pic is so much better :)

And here is the birthday boy (below)... He had the best time!!! We sang "happy birthday" twice so he could blow out the candles 2 times. He loved it.

And finally, we have a winner for the rug giveway!! It's Kristen Foster from falls Village, CT. She has her own fabric workroom & makes everything from curtains to bedding. Kristin, I sent you an email, so as soon as you get the chance, can you send me your mailing address at lauren@thepurestyle.com?

I hope everyone had a great weekend & thank so much for participating in the giveaway & for joining Pure Style Home!! :) I had SO MUCH FUN reading everyone's favorite smells & wanted to change my favorites a million times!!!

xoxo,

lauren

read more "4th of July & Giveway Winner!!"

Doggone Days of Summer

Well, summer is officially here for us (my husband, a teacher, is DONE FOR THE SUMMER!!!!) Which means we'll be spending lots of time outside & more time with our dog, Ashby.

(above pic from Country Living) A lot of us have dogs & they're like another member of the family. Unfortunately for our pup, when we had our son (about 2 years ago) she got less & less attention. We try, but those kids can be demanding!!! She was THE BABY before he came. She came on every vacation with us and was always in my lap (at 45 pounds!!). Now, she still sleeps with us, but she stays home when we vacation (with a 2 year old we have to stop and eat at restaurants on road trips & we can't leave her in the car) and she's much harder for me to carry because she's gained probably 10 pounds thanks to our son feeding her from his high chair!!! I also just don't have as much time to baby her in general. (Which I actually think she might be pleased about, because as I've said before I'm like that weird little girl Elmyra from Looney Toones with poor Ashby... loving & hugging & squeeeezing her) Anyway, she's such a sweetie & puts up with so much from our 2 year old, so I thought she'd enjoy this post. Here she is (below on the right) with her very best friend, Boudreaux, (an American Bulldog) who also recently became second fiddle to a baby. (oh it hurts to put into words!!!)


One summer in college during my PR internship in Washington, DC (my major in college!) there wasn't enough work for me. So what does a lowly college intern do with no work? She surfs the internet! (i hadn't even heard of blogs at this point in my life or we would've met sooner!! ;) Anyway, I desperately wanted a dog when I graduated, so I began researching all the different breeds, picking my favorites and lusting after ones that were so cute but would shed too much for me. Needless to say, I know a lot about dogs, thanks to that wonderful internship.




One thing I always love to see in people's homes is dsog art, sculpture & accessories, so I thought I'd share a few I found with you. How cute is the poster below?! (from Country Living) It's graphic & fun, and adds a colorful & quirky punch to the space.




The Egyptian dog statue (from Livingetc) below is a big presence in this sparse room. It adds interest. (and, obviously, the homeowners like dogs!!)


Surprisingly, a lot of rooms you see with dog paintings or prints, have a more serious, formal feel. (Or a more serious blue blood feel: Think of Ralph Lauren-type rooms with hunting pics.) In the image below (from houseandhome.ie) I think the dog painting works really well with the scheme of the room but its placement is a bit off for its small size.


Below, from Country Living, I love how this springer spaniel painting is just casually leaning against the wall on the ottoman. It makes the space!



In another Country Living pic (they must love dogs!! :) there are adorable dog embroidered pillows. (I think Lindsay from Everything LEB did a post that included these adorable pillows once.) Love their stately attire!! I found one really similar to these that looks exactly like our dog. (sans hat)



And, in general, I love it when prints are layered casually as in the image below. (Country Living!) This person really loefvs dogs, as she has a pillow, little figurines all over and a door stop under the table.



Below is one of my favorite images (via Simply Natural by Rob Lowe) as much for the room iteself as for the fact that it has a picture of my favorite dog, a German Short-Haired Pointer.



My dad always has a pointer and the one above & below (encoreeditions.com-- awesome prices!!) looks just like Hershey, the one I grew up with. Hershey was the best dog ever and a German Short-haired Pointer is the epitome of "dog" to me.



Below, I also love this tight grouping of breed prints. It's graphic and beautiful and the room has an elegant feel. (via House Beautiful)



So, the great theing about dog art is that generally, it's really affordable! (I'm not talking antique oils though!) Google it online & you'll see. Check out the painting below. They're too cute!!




This hunting painting reproduction (below) is of foxhounds, which are so commonly found in old paintings & prints. (reminding me of those Ralph Lauren hunting rooms)



And Ballard Designs has these great hand-colored prints ($119, below) of almost every dog you can think of!!! (I'm not so keen on the price though, and I think you could find a cheaper print of your dog (like one from encoreeditions.com) & write in pretty cursive around it! ha) But, I do love them. Below is of course, a white & liver spotted German Short-haired pointer who looks like my dad's dog (She was my 17th birthday present, but he couldn't part with her!!) Quaisley. (She's such a crazy cutie!) The painting below by SJ Merwin is of a Welsh Terrier, and looks just like my dad's dog, Bailey. (We got him when I was 12... )(I have included him later, after posting without poor Bails, because my dad left the first comment under 'Anonymous' and brought up Bailey, who I unintentionally left out! :)

This giclee (below) from Ballard Designs has been on my wishlist since before Christian was born. My original plan was to do a dog theme nursery for him with black and white photos of all the dogs my husband & I have had over our lives and then use this adorable canvas. I planned to use a glavanized steel tub like the one in the pic painted turquoise for his stuffed animals. The funny thing is, today, Christian reminds me a lot of the baby in the picture. This may be a theme for Baby 2, so let me know what you think! (again, I wasn't too happy with the price!!)


And finally, if you're anything like me, you love it when you find pictures or paintings that look like your dog. Ashby is a mutt (part Jack Russel, lab and Aussie Cattle Dog) so it's not as easy to find mutt pics as it is to find full breeds. But here are just a few I've found over the years. Here's Miss Ashby:

And here is a painting I found (of her, I'm convinced!!) at Lucketts:




And this drawing looks more like her now that she's put on some weight (wrong sex though! she wouldn't be happy with me if I bought this one.)
A
nd finally, I found an image of this antique oil painting with a pup who looks just like Ashby when we're eating and she's watching. hee heehee


So, go google prints & paintings of your dog. Lots of them really are affordable and with the right frame and location, they could be adorable in your house! Below, is one last pic of Ashby with her boy toy:

(This was when they were still our #1 babies, see the lifevests??!!! hahah)
xoxo,
lauren

read more "Doggone Days of Summer"

"Branch In!"

As I looked out the kitchen window yesterday morning, I saw it: Spring!!! The teeniest little lime green buds on the trees had appeared over the weekend!!! (I think it was that 80 degree weather!!) And they're even bigger today. So, it got me thinking of reaccessorizing & one of the easiest & cheapest (I apologize to those that hate that word but i love it ;) ways to do this is to bring in your yard!! (Or nice, unsuspecting parkland/ public property.... hahaha ok I probably shouldn't have said that! but as long as you cut carefully!)



Even right now before the buds have really even started, look how beautiful the branches in the image below (from House Beautiful) look!








To keep branches alive, cut the stem with sharp pruning shears and put them in warm water containing fresh floral food. Floral food helps keep nourished the branches and also keeps bacteria from growing. (check out http://www.stemsflowers.com/aboutflowers.asp for awesome details on different types of plants.) I'm saying to put floral food in the vase because I just learned this great tidbit of info from the site above, but I've always done it without floral food and had luck! (Also, sometimes they wilt for a bit & come back!! odd.)




Below, I love what I think is a maple branch (correct me if I'm wrong!) and how easy it is to do. It's so striking and probably took all of 5 minutes:

Below is (not a branch!) but a snippet of (evergreen) clematis vine from my old house and it was super-easy to do & they lived for over a month!! (I put them everywhere!!)

Here's some flowering quince from Jenna Lyon's apt featured in Domino:

And some more:
Forsythia is one of my absolute favorite things to bring in!!! You can really force the buds with the warm water & they look so gorgeous when they branches are huge!! (My aunt in NJ has a home office that's floor-to-ceiling windows on 3 sides and it's surrounded by forsythia bushes- can you imagine that in the spring?!!! I'll have to get pics from her!!)

Below on the mantle, I used rhododendron branches to fill up the antique pitcher & since then I really hope to have a rhododendron bush one day!!!

And finally, I couldn't resist this beauty from House Beautiful, although I doubt many of us will be bringing in olive branches from our yards this year ;)

Good luck with your pruning & I can't wait to hear what you do with your branches!!!

xoxo,

lauren

read more ""Branch In!""

Flowers: Adding something extra or carrying the room?

Greenery or flowers in a room: It's like the hair & makeup for a model before a photo shoot. They are always there in our favorite magazine rooms. To get rooms looking their best, photo stylists almost always add these finishing touches. And look how much they add:


I remember when I was younger, I used to look through catalogs & cover up the plant/flowers in the room & realize that I didn't like the room nearly as much without it. (I still do this & it's almost always true.) Sometimes the greenery stays (potted plants) and sometimes it goes (a vase of fresh flowers) but we rarely see rooms photographed without it. Sometimes I even don't like a room without the greenery... other times it's just another layer of beautiful, like this room from House Beautiful:

Without the Christmas tree, this room (West Elm) doesn't really do it for me:



In college, I filled my rooms with ferns I'd dug out of the woods (is that illegal?!) & slowly killed them as the school year went on. (oops) But because I didn't have the money to spend on the room (or the know-how), I let the ferns carry the room into this kind of conservatory-feeling place. But without them, the room didn't have much going for it design-wise. The photo below (from idealglazing.com) is what I was going for in an apartment bedroom -and haha ok on a really embarrassing sidenote, I actually went to the dollar store & hung a fake plant garland around as crown moulding.. WOW - hey, we all start somewhere, right?


Whenever I have rooms photographed, flowers or fresh leaves usually go in & I'm almost 100% positive that my clients don't constantly freshen their flowers in every room of the house. (Unless you're like Martha (image below) and/or obsessed with the way your house looks -like I'll admit I sometimes am- there's probably a pretty good chance that there aren't always fresh flowers or greenery in every room of the house- who's got the time?!) ... So it's really important that the room be beautiful on its own, without the flowers/ plants.


In a perfect world, we'd always have these little luxuries, but most of us usually end up doing it before parties, when guests are coming, when the seasons change or when we get a nice bouquet from the man. Which is what makes it special. (On another sidenote- Sometimes, because I'm constantly evaluating rooms/ homes, I feel this crazy pressure to have mine always looking its best. And right now it frankly does not. There are toys scattered everywhere, laundry baskets full of clean clothes waiting to be put away, and there's a dying branch of something that used to be pretty in a ball jar in my bathroom. AHhhh!!)

In the photo below from Martha Stewart, I love the old-discovered feeling of this room but it's the little bouquet of lilies that makes it really special to me. It brings the just a hint of the life that I think the room needs. I'm really not as into the room without it.

If the hit of life or green is what the room needs on a daily basis for the design to work, then put something that can stay there like moss or a living plant, like this room from shift (a blog I love and the room is done by Christine Lane Interiors who I will be writing about shortly as I cannot get over her amazing her rooms!):

Adding flowers and/or greenery to a room is something beautiful that we can do whenever we want to freshen up our homes without spending a bunch of money- it just takes time- but let's also remember that we can't let them carry the room either (like I did in college! .. If I had a picture of my room I'd put it up to give you a good laugh! :)
Have a great weeekend!!

read more "Flowers: Adding something extra or carrying the room?"

Inexpensive Nature Prints

Botanical prints can be expensive. A great way to have them (or any beautiful artwork for that matter) without paying a fortune for them is to find books with prints in them & tear out or photocopy the pictures & frame them.

I was lucky enough to find a beautiful book of botanical prints at a yardsale & have used lots of the prints in my home. I also scour second-hand stores for unique frames-usually with pictures I don't care for in them that I remove. I purchased all of the frames pictured (above &below) for $1.50- $3.00 each.

Here are some coral & lobster prints I used for a bathroom-in-progress in my dad's lake house:

I do mostly long-distance decorating since it's in Antioch, Illinois, but when I visit, I try to accessorize as quickly as I can on a serious budget. The prints are a great way to accessorize a lake house since they're so fitting and I only had to make 1 purchase so my dad doesn't gripe about me spending too much on decorating every time I come!

Here's a close-up of a fully opened page. You can see the fold in the center, but I think it sort of adds to the charm. Eventually I plan on matting all of the prints, but that's another project on another trip!

Happy hunting!

read more "Inexpensive Nature Prints"