“Summertime and the living is easy” crooned the first lady of song Ella Fitzgerald. We couldn’t agree more because some of our most durable (and beautiful) products are faux-bois benches, chairs and tables, which take centerstage during the warmer months. Given it’s all about the garden this time of year, we thought we’d show off a few of our weather-worthy designs, but first a reminder about our summer markets.
Atlanta market gets underway today so stop by and have a respite on one of our faux bois offerings, such as the Arbor Bench above. The showroom will be buzzing through July 15thso come by and see us in the AmericasMart Building 1. You’ll find us on the 14thFloor in Suite 14F10. From July 28ththrough August 1st, we’ll be in Las Vegas where you can find us in the Las Vegas Market in showroom C398, and you can bet we’ll have faux bois in the mix of our newest offerings.
Once you see the pieces in the showrooms, you’ll understand why we say how “at home” they are indoors. The Elwynn Bench, above, for instance, is as pretty in an interior space as it is in the garden. Don’t you think the glamour shot lends the artful piece a moody beauty,? Appearing to be a rooted, sprouting tree, growing up from the ground, this substantial piece of furniture makes a fantastic addition to outdoor and indoor spaces in any number of design styles.
Summer nights are all about inky skies and we have you covered when a bit of illumination is needed. The Ripley Outdoor Wall Sconce is one of twelve fixtures in our Twelfth Street collection of outdoor lighting, each of which has been treated to our phenomenally weather-worthy Trilux coating. The metal on this sconce, in a midnight finish, encases seeded-glass panes that turn the light into a soft glow when it is switched on.
In this beauty shot, our lovely Oyster Shell Birdbath is nestled into a verdant scene at the Elm Street Gardens, owned by our founders Robert and Suzy Currey. We just love how this piece combines uncommon materials to make a whimsical design, transforming the humble oyster shell and unrefined concrete into a functioning outdoor art piece. Though the birds may not realize they are splashing around in an artisanal masterpiece from the Hayes Parker Collection, anyone visiting the garden will.
The team in Sparta is in the midst of the busy growing season so our Arbor pieces tucked beneath the voluminous magnolia tree above aren’t just sitting pretty; they serve a purpose when a quick respite is needed during the hottest part of the day. The enveloping tree makes this the perfect place from which to contemplate the lush landscape filled with growing things, the green extending in all directions from the gem of a house that serves as the farm’s centerpiece.
Back in Atlanta, we’ll be immersed in the subject of growing things during “ADAC in bloom,” which gets underway on July 17 at the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center. The day’s festivities, from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., are sponsored by Flower Magazine, whose editor-in-chief, Margot Shaw, is an avid gardener and floral savant. The events will include lectures, book signings, floral demonstrations, and a morning panel discussion featuring designer Jeffrey Bilhuber, architect Eric Smith, designer Mark Sikes, and floral designer Holly Carlisle.
In the Foreword to Shaw’s recently released coffee table book Living Floral: Entertaining and Decorating with Flowers, Charlotte Moss says of Shaw, “Like Nancy Lancaster, Margot has been ‘always searching for beauty,’ and for her, it is, in a word, the flower.” If you haven’t bought the sumptuous book, it’s filled with lush photography that illustrates how savvy tastemakers use floral arrangements when they entertain. The beautiful vignettes, such as the one above, were captured during photoshoots for Flowermagazine. Shaw says of the effort it takes to produce the magazine, “I’ve learned to appreciate beauty so much more.”
In closing today, we thought we would pay homage to one of history’s greatest gardeners, Vita Sackville-West. Like Shaw’s floral extravaganza’s that unfurl on page after page of her book, Sackville-West’s articles on gardening have been gathered between the covers of Vita Sackville-West’s Garden Book. In the introduction, Philippa Nicolson describes the collection of pieces the gardening doyenne wrote for theObserverfrom 1947 to 1961 as a veritable workshop. This is such a terrific description of the instructive articles that cover so many subjects. Sackville-West begins the chapter for July with the suggestion that anyone who is building a garden, and hers at Long Barn and Sissinghurst are proof that she knew the subject well, should be fastidious about collecting seeds.
In her second entry in the July chapter, Alstoemerias,she writes, “There are some moments when I feel pleased with my garden, and other moments when I despair. The pleased moments usually happen in spring, and last up to the middle of June. By that time all the freshness has gone off; everything has become heavy; everything has lost that adolescent look, that look of astonishment at its own youth. The middle age spread has begun. It is then that the Alstoemeriascome into their own.”
For the most part, these articles were written in no-nonsense prose because the purpose of each piece, published as a column over many years, was to offer readers a dose of garden-smarts with each reading. Proving how poetic she could be, Sackville-West described her favorite varieties of old-fashioned roses as “rich as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, flecked as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes.” We hope you are able to stop and smell the rich aromas of summer and enjoy the eye-catching beauty that nature brings during the next few months. And don’t forget to stop by and see us during our summer markets: our faux bois pieces await!