Hooray for Hollywood — and Palm Springs, too!

It's Modernism Week in Palm Springs, so we picked up a couple of self-driving maps (one for architecture, one for celebrity homes) at the Visitors Center (a former gas station designed by Albert Frey) and set off on a beautiful and sunny morning to see what we could see. Turns out it was mainly a tour of gates, but we had a terrific time nonetheless. At just $5 a pop the maps are fun little investment. The only lament is that the star map tends to overlook mentioning the architects, many of whom became stars in their own right. Perhaps they'll remedy that in a future printing. But for now, a virtual tour. 

Happy peering!

Elvis and Priscilla Presley's home (um, the owners go above and beyond making that clear) on Chino Canyon was built in 1946 for Richard McDonald, co-founder of the hamburger chain. Elvis purchased the house in 1970 (for $85,000) and he still owned it at the time of his death in 1977. Ronald McDonald *and* The King. Does the National Trust have a Pop Culture award? 

Zsa Zsa Gabor's place (or so it's believed, there seems to be some disagreement) just a few doors down from the Presley house. The curious finials gave us pause...

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's hacienda is visible through a couple of gates but this one is the pedestrian entrance (and I think a relatively recent addition). The house meanders back quite a bit, so it really must have felt like a true hideaway. "I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun," Hepburn once said. We couldn't have agreed more, lazily driving around the old neighborhoods and sipping our coffee.

Nancy and Ronald Reagan called this place home while he was governor of California, but they eventually sold it and stayed with the Annenbergs at Sunnylands on desert trips during his presidency. Can't say that we blame them. Sunnylands was—and still is—the epitome of desert chic.

Built by a Vegas tycoon in 1924, this is also the former home of Elizabeth Taylor. Just driving by the gates you do get a pretty good glimpse of the living room—and it looks like the interiors are just as beautifully maintained as the exterior. It reminded me of La Mirada, the most romantic house in Monterey, where Taylor and Richard Burton stayed while filming The Sandpiper in 1965. Perhaps it reminded her of that historic little adobe, too.

Kirk Douglas' family get-away, which he kept until 1999.

This home, which belonged to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, may have been my favorite of the day.

The former (and astonishingly accessible) Alexander-designed home of Dean and Jeanne Martin.

Peter Lawford's place, long-rumored to be the site of a Kennedy/Monroe rendezvous. She did live just up the street...

In fact, right here. Marilyn's former home is a quirky little bungalow with beautiful tilework and a patio to the right that looks directly up to the mountains. The house is in slightly sad shape (or maybe it's just the landscaping) but there's still something glamorous about it, especially the black and white awnings.

Debbie Reynolds' former home. “She is one of the most delightful persons you could ever meet," Frank Sinatra once said of his co-star in 1955's The Tender Trap.

Twin Palms, Sinatra's legendary estate was built by E. Stewart Williams in 1946. Don't be fooled by the maps that say it's on Alejo, that's the service entrance. Drive around to the other side of the block, where you'll find this, the main entrance, and the iconic palms that still stretch skyward from the piano-shaped pool.

And no driving tour would be complete without a spin around Ladera Circle for the hugely famous Honeymoon Hideaway, home to local builder (and local legend) Robert Alexander, and later rented by Elvis Presley in 1966. Elvis and Priscilla had intended to marry at the house but celebrity gossip (and neighbor) Rona Barrett blew their cover, and they married in Las Vegas instead, thanks to the loan of Sinatra's jet. The couple lived in the house until 1968.

Dressed for love: a look at Queen Victoria's wedding gown on the 172nd anniversary of her marriage to Prince Albert

A portrait of Queen Victoria in her lace wedding dress, painted by Franz Winterhalter seven years after her marriage to Prince Albert.

On this day, in 1840, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert married at St. James's Palace. So it seems a perfect opportunity to take a closer look at the dress she wore—a dress that influenced the future of bridal gowns.

There's a common misconception that Victoria was the first bride to wear white, when in fact it had been a long-standing tradition for wealthy or noble women. She was, however, the first royal bride to shun the traditional robes for a more common (though still fanciful) style of dress. Marriages, which were primarily secured for reasons other than love, were largely displays of wealth, and the dress—with its rare fabrics and precious jewels—was a potent symbol of the bride’s dowry. The choice of white had little to do with purity (that’s a 20^th-century application) but rather the sheer value of white textiles. Before the invention of simple bleaching techniques white was a very hard color to achieve, and extraordinarily difficult to maintain. 

But for Queen Victoria, who came to the marriage not merely as a youthful bride but as a head of state, the dress had to reflect more than wealth. It needed to reflect power, and to make a firm political statement. In an era of new technology and the mass-production of goods, Victoria chose a gown of hand-made Honiton lace, giving an immediate and much needed boost to a dying trade. While white did still symbolize wealth, the making of the gown represented her support of British arts, duty and patriotism. 

Engravings of the wedding were widely distributed, popularizing the couple's personal and trend-setting style. Although white was still a pricey option, brides throughout Europe and America followed suit.

 

But there were sentimental symbols, too, woven into the queen's wedding regalia. Rather than a tiara, the queen wore a wreath of orange blossoms (for purity) and myrtle (for love). It’s said that a small branch of the myrtle from her bouquet was planted, and that cuttings from it have been used for every royal wedding bouquet since, including that of the Duchess of Cambridge.

 

Kate Middleton's bouquet, designed by Shane Connolly, featured myrtle, lily-of-the-valley, sweet William, and hyacinth.

Queen Victoria was so fond of her wedding dress that she was painted in it many times, and long after 1840. She lamented the fact that photography had not yet been introduced at the time they married, so years later she and Prince Albert recreated the ceremony to capture it in pictures, like the one below.

Victoria made numerous alterations to the dress over the decades, and its original lace skirt no longer exists, but conservators at Kensington Palace in London have been hard at work preparing it for a new permanent exhibition, Victoria Revealed, opening this spring.
 

A conservator at work on Victoria's dress.

A detail of the lacework on the sleeve.

Victoria's silk wedding slippers.

A detail of the manufacturer's label.

To learn more about the upcoming exhibition and other royal wedding objects in the collection of the Historic Royal Palaces, click here.

Follow the leader

Timothy Oulton may be best known for his furniture lines, but his accessories and showrooms offer a plethora of inspiring design ideas that can be culled for your own home. From vintage cobblers' forms (an easy find at flea markets), to massing collections of pewter tankards or ceramic mugs, to framing old equestrian gear—all sorts of fun and easy displays to replicate. The examples below come from the designer's space at H.D. Buttercup in Los Angeles.
 

The Union Jack's a perfect fit. Now imagine them painted with colorful stripes, polka dots, Magritte-like umbrellas or even flowers...

Duchamp celebrated the bottle dryer unadorned, but this is a cute and practical reuse of the rack. (Love the coronation mugs—a timely nod to Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee.)

Mounted bits and stirrups: simple, clever, chic.

A walk in the park, and through the shop

Last Sunday I decided to take advantage of living in Los Angeles and signed up for a morning garden tour of my neighborhood. It was organized by horticulturalist and landscape designer Mike Brown, though Urban Landscape and Garden Walks of Greater Los Angeles. I'm not usually a joiner, but I'm so happy that I did this. We all met at Shaky Alibi (coffee + waffles = yum) and from there headed out through the neighborhood and Pan Pacific Park. It had rained the night before, so everything was particularly fresh and pretty. Mike focused his talk mainly on trees, but touched on broader landscaping issues, too. (Admittedly, trees aren't much on my radar since I don't have a yard, but it was interesting information to learn—the architecture of pruning, so to speak.) The hour-long walk ended at Rolling Greens, my favorite spot for houseplants and fun gifts. The shop is just starting to bud with new spring items, so I couldn't resist taking a few snaps after the tour. It's a gorgeous place, and allows even apartment dwellers like me the chance to feel like full-fledged gardeners.

A triumvirate of blooms, books, and candles. The blossoms may be faux but they could fool a bee.

Vintage furnishings sourced from... wait, it was whispered to me... maybe I'll just tell you that they make several trips a year to the state that was 28th to join the union.

That pink-and-green throw almost came home with me.

While landscaping plants are kept primarily to the outdoor area of the shop, the interior is filled with houseplants of all types. (I found the perfect bird's nest fern for my office in the back room a few months ago.) And a special note for pet-owners: the staff at Rolling Greens is terrific about looking up information on whether or not plants are toxic. I learned the hard way a few years ago with a hydrangea from a grocery store. We ended up OK, but it's a risk I'll never take again. It pays to shop where people know—and care.

Something old, something new...

While doing a little historical research for my friend Jo Lauria's upcoming lecture on the jewelry designs of Tony Duquette and Hutton Wilkinson, I came across the intriguing set pictured above and had to know more.

The necklace, bracelet, and earrings belonged to Lady Enid Layard, whose husband, Henry Layard, excavated ancient Mesopotamian palaces between 1845 and 1851. To mark the couple's marriage in 1869, Henry had his collection of Assyrian and Babylonian chalcedony cylinder and stamp seals mounted into gold settings. Archaeological digs had ignited a fashion for jewelry "in the antique style" but most of the contemporary Victorian pieces were made of new (or at least more readily available) materials, like the pendant below. Lady Layard's nearly 4,000-year-old pieces were quite a thing to behold, even catching the eye of Queen Victoria, who admired them at a dinner party in July of 1873.
  

A modern interpretation: a gold, agate, and enamel pendant brooch designed by the London firm of Phillips Brothers, circa 1863-70.

At first glance, Lady Layard's jewelry seems quite delicate, even small perhaps, but a portrait of her wearing the set clearly shows their heft, and even implies their weight. Upon her death in 1912, the set, and its original box, were donated to the British Museum.

An 1870 portrait of Lady Layard wearing the ancient artifacts, painted by Vincente Gonzalez Y Palmaroli in Madrid, Spain, where her husband had just been appointed British ambassador.

The original case, lined with black silk and purple velvet.

For more information on the Layard pieces, click here. All images are taken from the British Museum.

A selection of jewelry designed by Tony Duquette will be coming up for action at Bonhams in Los Angeles this April. For more information on the sale, Talismans of Power, click here.

An intimate view of Lyme Park

Lyme Park, in Cheshire

Lyme Park is one of England's most famous country houses, a popularity no doubt enhanced by the 1995 television production of Pride and Prejudice. That above is, after all, the very pond that co-starred with a half-naked Colin Firth. Don't pretend you don't remember. 

Over the years I've read a fair amount about the history of the house (even visited the grounds long ago) but I've only just learned of Dulcibella Jane Legh, a daughter of the family who owned the house for some 400 years, until it was given to the National Trust in the 1940s. There's not much written of Dulcibella (who went by Sybil), but she was born in 1859 and died in 1960. Quite an accomplishment, yet one outdone by her sister Mabel Maud, who lived to an extraordinary 102.

It seems Sybil never married, but she lived at Lyme for much of her life, and took quite an interest in the arts. She even helped organize several painting exhibitions in London. Her watercolors of Lyme's interiors date to 1898—the year her father died—and are a tender, impressionistic study of the rooms. One can't help but wonder if, at that difficult time, she somehow anticipated the changes ahead and saw a very different future for her family home.

View from the Drawing Room to the Bright Gallery North

The Grand Staircase

Window Bay in the Library

Plant Stand in the Entrance Hall

The Yellow Bedroom

Reproductions of Sybil's watercolors are available through the National Trust's site (click here) and can be ordered as prints, or even note cards. Now if we could just have more of her story, and perhaps a portrait, too. My curiosity is absolutely piqued.