I’ve been redecorating the boys rooms and while trying to find inspiration for their own personal man-caves I stumbled on this photo of Steve McQueen at home. I kind of love the idea of borrowing some of these looks for the boys and am now trying to sell one or both boys on a tiger rug. It’s also still really current–even the goofy lanterns–below are some quick ways to make this your own.

Couch: Crate & Barrel

Rug: Williams Sonoma Home

Coffee table: Restoration Hardware

Side table: Oly studio

Lanterns: Twos Company

Chair: Hero Eames Lounge

Candelabra: Pottery Barn

Foliage: Rubber plant

Maybe its because I’m up in my attic and I get bored with just me and the dogs and miss having coworkers, or maybe its because I always regret not buying that series of portraits of the Golden Girls our dear friend Tiffany painted, but lately I want to collect portraits of women. Not any women, ladies I’d like like to hang out with, maybe work with, perhaps start some cool new online magazine with, maybe one about life in the suburbs…. I have two though they are not exactly what I’m after. The Gibson girl was my grandmother’s and there’s so much sentiment in that one it can’t count, the other my mom was selling at her antique booth and I just tiptoed away with one day, I know, childish (but then I’m her child). The blonde with the fluffy hair in the second row is a painting being sold on OKL and I’m 99.99% sure it was painted in the 60s by my mom’s best friend Ann Reiger, it looks exactly like her style and signature (and is signed/listed as A.Reiger portrait). The rest of the thumbnails are paintings I’ve spied around and am considering for my collection. I can see these ladies getting along, and then not, and then bitching about each other and then maybe even bitching about me when I’m not hanging out in the office—and now I’ve either stumbled on some amazing thread for a scary ass novel or I’m on the verge of my own “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Erin and I spied this bamboo Knoll-inspired chaise at Ikea. The kids took to it instantly but I wonder if it its worth $499 price tag when you still have to put it together?

The Missoni launch at Target was a success if you measure success by being surrounded by lots of tan ladies with Van Cleef clover chains blatantly trying to cut you off from the melamine tabletop display with their carts. Bergen, Clifton, Livingston, Ridgewood are all sold out. By the time I arrived at 9am the Clifton store shelves were as barren as the water aisles before Irene. I fully underestimated the Jersey-Italian Missioni relationship. Of course its a sell out in Clifton and the lack of stock made some customers competitive if not down-right Chanel sample sale bitchy. I asked two women carrying bedspreads if they knew where there were home accessories, they said no and when I turned around I heard one say, “Run to towels!”

Lucky for me I saw the stock girl unloading some and I politely asked her if I could take the last turquoise two out of the box. How could I have been so naive? I tracked down a manager who told  me there were many more customers waiting outside at 8am for Missoni than for Liberty or rising star designers like Thakoon. They expected crowds but the speed, intensity and triple digit instant purchasing was unlike anything they’d seen in a while. But its not just Jersey. Another customer told me the site crashed at 4am and its still not working. Here’s the best of what was left.

Bike, $399. Bra, $20. The towels ($13) and notebooks ($3) I snagged.

Introducing “Cat’s Galore!” Conrad’s new furniture line inspired cats and cardboard. His first creation is the “cat table”.

How did you come up with idea? “Before I made a cat just out of recylcling and then I thought how can I make this more useful and really do something with it.”

What do will you use it for? “Well you can put whatever you want on it, like I put my marbles, chess trophy, bunny that dad gave me and cool Pokemon boxes. It’s a good size.The right size for playing marbles, but too small for Pokemon games.  It’s also good because its sturdy.”

What was the toughest decision? “Deciding if it should have a cloth or not.”

Why did you choose the cloth? “Because I thought it would be more fancier, but it also means you are never getting the cloth back I’m keeping the cloth forever, its taped on.”

What are you planning on making next: “A cat fortress. It’s not for people, it’s for cats.”

You know dad is allergic to cats? “Yeah. I’m also making little cat guys. He won’t be allergic to them.”

Last night was a doozy: In very quick succession the following occurred:

Conrad got a bad splinter. Became hysterical with pain/terror. I tried to get it out with a tiny scissors, he screamed that I was “Going to cut his foot off!” and tried to run away jamming the splinter further into his foot.

The splinter incident made me forget about the pad thai I was making and I burned dinner.

I went downstairs to get extra paper towels and found the basement flooded.

I came up stairs and Chewie was so stressed about Conrad’s crying he threw up.

Then he ate it.

Dashiell saw the dog eat his throw up and then started to gag and cry. When I tried to comfort him I realized he had a fever.

I chucked dinner let the boys have Carnation Breakfast Drinks for breakfast and put them to bed. While falling asleep, I asked Dasheill what was hurting him and he said, “I feel like a bad person is ruling the world.”

Me too. I need a serious escape and since we are not able to take a Caribbean vacation this year, I’ve decided to co-opt those fantasy sport games with fantasy decorating. Here’s how it works. I’m going to take rooms from vintage homes or scenes from movies and recreate them with furniture I’d find today.

I’m starting small with a simple room by Tony Duquette, the legendary designer of Auntie Mame and countless Hollywood fantasy homes. Once I was in Bergdorf Goodman looking at some exquisite bib necklaces he designed and this really lovely salesman asked me if I would like to try on a morganite encrusted bib, it was just insane chunks of sparkling pink gemstones. The necklace was so dramatic I suddenly felt shy and said, “Oh no, it’s okay.” And he said, “Well if you don’t I will!” as if he’d been waiting for a customer to admire it so he could unlock it from its cabinet for weeks. Naturally I told him to hand it over and he fastened it around my neck. As soon as I had it on I was transformed into a movie star. Truly. It was one of my most memorable retail moments, right up there with buying my wedding dress even though it lasted only a five minutes. So desperate times call for real drama, and I’m hoping recreating a Duquette room would deliver the same glam to any old house, even one in my dreams in suburban New Jersey.

Below is the Duquette inspiration room…

Now I love the set up, but the thing about vintage furniture, even the finest, is that it can look kind of crusty over time. Admit that you can smell the cigarette smoke on the couch from here. So here’s the fantasy of how I’d recreate it.

I’d update the color scheme and set the tone with one of these couches:

Both are from Jonathan Adler, about $2600

Oly Studio, Wren table, shopcandelabra, about $1500

Worlds Away side table about $500

Ateriors Cassidy lamp about $260, though I’m on the fence we could use some color here.

Baker made a stunning reproduction of Duquette’s snowflake screen in gold. 100% gorgeous.

And perhaps I’d add that color with a red rug….I’d have to experiment with that.

Oh and just another reason I love the internet, here’s a picture of the necklace I tried on. Holy crap, right?!

The dollhouse diaries is writing I’m experimenting with about the similarities I’ve noticed between my dollhouse decor and my real life aesthetic. For instance:

David, my real life husband.

The husband in my dollhouse.

While setting up my dollhouse, I realized it’s not just furnishings in my dollhouse that share uncanny similarities to the furnishings in my real life—it’s the people too. My dollhouse family was not Italian. I knew from the moment I unwrapped them from their plastic packaging that they could never be distant, considerably smaller relatives. Their skin was too fair and their features too angular. They were Swedish or German with no-nonsense fashion sense: a cheery floral apron for the mom, and a gingham dress for the girl, V-neck sweaters for the men and boys. This family would have looked equally comfortable in lederhosen. The faces were calm and even-tempered. I imagined them playing checkers and eating gravelox. They were everything my outspoken, unpredictable, easily angered, easily forgiving Italian family was not. The grandmother in the dollhouse family would never hit her hard-of-hearing husband on the forehead with a head of celery to stop him from feeding their poodle brocolli. The mother wouldn’t smoke while nursing her baby and casually brush the cigarette ashes off her daughter’s head. The father wouldn’t laugh so hard in Peter Seller’s films that his son would move a few seats away. The brother wouldn’t scare his sister in the middle of the night by bursting into her room wearing a ski mask. The daughter wouldn’t have a fetish for chewing off her Barbie dolls feet. This family didn’t not curse, slam doors or fart.

But they did look like people I would meet. My dollhouse family shares an uncanny resemblance to my husband’s family.

I didn’t make the connection until I had unpacked the dollhouse in the attic and looked at the husband. Naturally, I think David, my real husband is much more handsome than the dollhouse one, but the expression and demeanor are the same: A kind smile, a ruddy outdoorsy complexion and dark hair and eyes watching to see what unfolds. The dollhouse mother and dollhouse grandfather resemblance is so striking to David’s parents that I bet if I buried them in the ground they would grow into my inlaws.

David’s family does all the things I imagined my dollhouse family to do: They believe in early to bed, early to rise. They eat sandwiches on white bread. There are always fresh baked cookies. They make shopping trips to Freeport, Maine. They ski and hike and camp. They know what to do on a boat. They drink at five o’clock. They take walks together after dinner. They play scrabble; go to cocktail parties and read books in the sunroom. It’s quiet, but not uncomfortably so.

After David and I became engaged my mother and I became inseparable. We talked everyday and if we weren’t on the phone together we were shopping for bridesmaid gifts, debating between organza and duchess satin and making lists for our lists. I often joke that when I got engaged, I actually ended up marring my mother. We were both so happy and relieved to have something to look forward. In addition to a wedding to plan, it was as if now that David was in my life, I had become the person she was hoping I would  grow up to be. I wasn’t quiet, but David was so in a way I was now quiet by association. I  was calmer too. I was in love after all, and all my anxiety about  if-when-and-maybe he’d pop the question was over. Now that we both had a happily ever after guarantee in the form of a sparkling engagement ring, my mother and I could relax and enjoy talking to each other three times a day.

But if my mother thought I had chilled out, I’m sure David thought the wedding made me only more intense. I was armed with a three-ring binder, tear pages from Martha Stewart Weddings and a list of the best “groom cake” bakers in New York City. I like to think that when we first met he was charmed by how quickly I rushed into everything—jobs, roommates, our romance. I told him I loved him way before he could tell me the same. I threw parties and invited acquaintances I met at coffee shops but didn’t remember their names. “Who are all these people?” David once asked me when our San Francisco apartment was packed with people, smoke and sticky bottles on the bar, “I don’t know, friends or friends of friends?” I loved the crowd, but David felt out numbered in his own house and went up to the roof with a six-pack and three close friends. Now, after seventeen years together, it’s not unusual for our kids to hear him say things like: “Honey, you need to take it down a notch.” Or, “Okay bossy, ever since I got home I feel like it’s ding, ding, ding, times up!” and my mother’s favorite, “There’s a line Chess. Why must you cross it?”

I always want a little bit more. I want to ride one more rollercoaster, invite one more guest, read one more chapter before bed, pour one more drink, dance one more dance, wiggle in one more hour of sleep, add one more teaspoon of sprinkles, linger over one more kiss, adopt one more dog, make one more baby. But David doesn’t budge on boundaries. In the same way that the dollhouse dad’s face is set with a look of contentment David has a satiation nerve that tells him when enough is enough. The man of my real house, like my the man of my dollhouse, has a natural inner peace that I doubt I’ll ever have, no matter how many times I get to ride the Runaway Train at the Magic Kingdom, or no matter how often I get to redecorate my house. I have this dream that one day, I’ll toss a throw pillow on the couch, look around at my life and say, “ah, there,” and feel the calm that David walks around with everyday. But I know myself and expect it may take a long time. Until then David remains my real shelter.

Everything is cuter when it’s small. I’m a fan of tiny notebooks, miniature paintings, toy dogs and little kids. So it should come as no surprise that I was smitten with the growing trend of high-end furniture lines for children. My favorite were those done by Oly Studios and Johnathan Adler. What lucky children will get to climb, nap and accidentally write magic marker on these shrunken pieces? I don’t know. Certainly not my boys. They prefer to play on the grown up sized furniture anyway. But if I could decorate a playroom with a few of these items, I would.

Oly Studio zebra chair, side table and goat stool in size 6x.

Johnathan Adler petite parsons couch.

I thought the clover motif was fading but I was proved wrong at the New York Gift Show this past week, which is fine by me because I love it as much as I love cane motif, if not more so because it can be casual and elegant, whereas cane always feels casual.

Here were some of my favorite examples.

The booth of Mr. Brown used it on oversized pendants, pillows and mirrors. Oh and there were lots and lots of oversized pendant lamps. Lots!

At Oomph they used it in a darling side table and on dainty serving trays.

World’s Away is a company that’s been flirting with the clover motif for a while but even they couldn’t resist putting it on a trash bin.

More trends to come: look for British flags, exotic prints and oversized light fixtures.

I’m experimenting with some writing about my dollhouse and its impact on my decor aesthetic because I’ve noticed that the decor in the house I grew up in influenced the choices I made for my dollhouse and the choices I made for my dollhouse so long ago still influence the way I decorate my current house.

For example:

Statement mirror in my childhood home.

Statement mirror from my dollhouse circa 1978.

When I was 8 I spent a lot of afternoons dancing to the soundtracks from musicals in front of a large carved mirror in our living room. My favorite show was A Chorus Line, particularly the ballad At the Ballet, a song about no matter how gritty and tough your life is, everything is beautiful when you’re a ballerina. The mirror was an ornately carved with flowers and leaves and I’d heard my mother’s decorator refer to it as “a statement piece” and though I wasn’t clear on what that meant I understood that it meant the mirror had power. And it did. For me this mirror became a window into my imaginary world. I’d dance in front of it fantasizing that I was better known for my piroutes rather than being voted “clumsiest camper” year after year in the camp poll. I’d come up with all sorts of heartbreaking pre-teen fantasies that had lead me to be sweating out my troubles in Capezios and a chiffon wrap skirt at the barre—my father was being held hostage in Iran, my brother only had a month to live, my 3^rd grade crush was moving to Minnesota. This was my idea of imaginative play: pretend soap operas that matched the intensity of the lyrics and then would change to match the tune of whatever song was next.

My actual life was steady and sheltered: my parents were together, I had two cats, a brother that insisted I watch Star Trek not Three’s Company and who would ignore my constant taunting until he’d land me with a knock down punch that left me running breathless and crying to Irma, our housekeeper. At 6:30 dinner was on the table, pasta was always the first course, though my mother rarely ate it preferring instead to smoke while eating escarole salad.

I wanted my life to be as dramatic as the lives I projected into the mirror but instead it was filled with typical mother-daughter power struggles, like the time my parents went out one Saturday night and Irma braided my hair into cornrose like Bo Dereck’s in “10”. I woke up the next morning almost forgetting my braids until I saw my reflection in the mirror. Immediately, I ran downstairs, put the needle on the soundtrack to A Chorus Line and cast myself as runaway ballerina from an exotic Island ready to blow the choreographers mind with my unconventional style—until my mother walked into the living room and informed me that it was Palm Sunday and there was no way I was going to church looking like Bo Dereck. At first I thought she was kidding but I could tell by the way she blew her cigarette smoke though her nose that this was not a joke. I had 40 braids in my hair, each with three to four beads and rubber bands. It had taken hours and it had hurt. I had fallen asleep but Irma kept braiding, pulling my hair with a tug when she’d snap on the rubber band and when I woke up Fantasy Island was over and my hair sounded like a wind chime. I pleaded with her to let me keep my braids. I cried. I screamed. A braid wacked me in the tooth when I yelled that she was being unfair. But it was not use, not even my worst temper tantrum could not save my hairstyle.

I tore them out in a fury. The beads gave me split ends and the rubber bands pulled out my hair. I got so frustrated I took a scissors and cut an entire braid right off from the top of my head. I went to church with my hair crimped and frizzy as if I just rolled in from a night at Studio 54 except for the Alfalfa stump where there had been a braid. People stared when I walked up to receive communion. I spent the whole service, praying I had my braids back and that my stump would grow fast.

On the way home my mother tried to smooth things over by suggesting we take a trip to the miniature store to pick something out for my dollhouse. It didn’t take long for me to me to decide what my dollhouse needed. I picked out a gold, ornate statement mirror for the living room.