Vermont Cottage Guestroom

Aaarrrggghhhh!!!!!

It's snowing.......

Where are the palm trees???????

Where's the sun?????

What's the matter with the thermostat?????

What the hell am I doing in Massachusetts when I have a house in Flerida?????

I love my family, I love my family, I love my family, I love my family, I love my family, I love my family.

The good thing about being in the grey cold dreary bleakness of New England.....

is

I love to complain!!!

OK, enough feeling sorry for myself.

Let's get back to decoratin'!

I will now show you guys more of Connie and Chris's Vermont home.

The house has three floors.

That's 3 floors that Connie had to pay me to decorate!!!!!

She started out thinking I would only do the living room and the kitchen,

Silly, silly, silly woman.

I got my stinky little hands on every inch of this place and then she had to bring me down to Flerida, to do her house down there.

(hahahahahahaha)

On the third floor are two rooms and a bathroom.

We made one of the rooms into a guestroom and the other into Connie's computer room.

Since these are at the top of the house, they are tucked under the peak of the roof.

The previous owners had put in these honkin' big skylights.

They give the room a sort of garret feel.

Les, the architect I work with, added a closet at the end and the arched window that really opened the space up.

Under the slanted roof line I placed a couple of split reed chairs from Palecek,

 finished in a rustic red to give them a somewhat Adirondack feel.

These are from the same furniture collection as my TV chair in my living room in Flerida.

It's called the Presidents Collection and Palecek has carried it for years.

I LOVE it.

Doing it in a dark natural finish gives it a little of that West Indies flavor.

 We also used it in Connie's cottage in Florida in her den.

We painted it white for a beachy feel.

I love how this style can work with so many different looks by just changing the color of the paint.

Here's a side by side by side to see all the looks!!!

I've told you about split reed before, but for those of you new to the class.....

According to  the Old and Sold website.....

"Reeds: The raw material for reed furniture is a trailing vine cut on the rubber plantations of the Malay Peninsula and the South Sea Islands and shipped to Singapore, where American and German experts buy up the better grades and the Chinese buy the rest. Quality depends on size and color, a pure white reed with a diameter of three-eighths inch being considered excellent. The Chinese reed, as it is known in the market, is almost black and must therefore be bleached before it can be used. Bleaching robs the reed of much of its strength and only a poor grade of furniture can be made from it. Brought to America, the reed is peeled. Some is left in its natural shape; the rest is cut into half-round, oval, and fiat shapes. The more the reed is cut the more liable it is to split when it has been manufactured in furniture.

Stick Reed: This is the natural round material, which gives its name to the best type of reed furniture. The method of construction is to nail the reeds to a skeleton frame of ash or rock elm. This makes a sturdy product which retains all the native strength of the reed; and it also permits a wide variety of patterns and facilitates designing for comfort.

Woven Reed: Furniture of this type is made from cut or split reeds, which, as we have already seen, are less durable and weaker than the stick reed. In these products the material is woven by hand and the pat-terns which can be used are more limited than where stick reeds are fitted and nailed into more intricate designs."

This Palecek collection has pieces that are replicas of the furniture FDR used on his yacht, the USS Potomic, during his presidency.

I love some of the styles from the 1930's, and this is definitely one of them.

Here is a shot of the bar from this series.

I LOVE THIS STUFF!!!!!

I saw this in a store in Florida that had painted it in an old white finish.

Isn't it fabuloso?????

I just get weak in the knees for split reed.

I have a bunch of antique spit reed in my Flerida home, but all the stuff above is reproduction.

It's extremely sturdy and will last forever, so you better like it it you buy it!!!!

This was not a paid post, I just love this stuff!!!!!

On that note,

Latah, Gatah