Thierry Buisson’s parents met in a French military hospital in Marrakech, Morocco. She was a local nurse born and raised there. He was a doctor from a farming village in the south of France.Growing up in Paris, Buisson spent time in both places, from his grandparents’ rustic farmhouse to the colorful marketplaces of Marrakech.Buisson, who came to the United States two decades ago, is a personal shopper at Neiman Marcus in San Francisco and does interior design work on the side. A dining room he decorated with zebra skin and a custom-made topiary of his dog Winston, of all things, was featured in the Summit League’s “Homes for the Holidays” tour last Christmas.

His love of collecting started with his father.

When Buisson was a boy, he and his father would spend weekends at Paris flea markets and antique shops, searching for

“just that magical piece that turns you on.”

It was there he learned “the patience of finding something that makes your heart beat.”

His father would often collect small things, silver and china.

“The biggest piece he ever bought was an 18th-century Aubusson tapestry. My mom just freaked out,” Buisson said. “My dad had to justify every purchase, either hide it or bring it out for a birthday.”

In summers, they would often visit his grandparents in the village of Le Breuil. He remembers two things about the farmhouse in particular:a huge fireplace in the kitchen along with a “gigantic dining room table,” as well as the handmade, white linen sheets in the bedroom that were so cold “it would take us hours to get in bed.”

And every Christmas, the family would travel to his mother’s homeland of Marrakech, where he absorbed the spicy aromas and the colorful textiles. “It’s the most phenomenal, magical place I’ve ever been to,” he said.

And now the home he shares with his partner is filled with the influences of his youth, inside and out.

The front walkway is lined with potted citrus trees, giving you the feeling of approaching a French “orangerie.” Inside, a 19th-century, hand-painted French vaisselier for storing and displaying china sits in the living room — a find from friend Darin Geise who owns the Coup d’Etat showroom across from the Design Center in San Francisco. Atop a leather ottoman is a bright green tray and a Moroccan lantern. Louis XVI chairs are covered in charcoal grey Pierre Frey toile. French doors lead you to a deck that looks like the courtyard of a boutique hotel, with topiaries and Moroccan-tiled wrought-iron tables. On an end table in a guest room is a collection of miniature porcelain busts he collected from the Alameda Point Antiques Faire. In his room, he keeps a collection of antique boxes. His sister, who owns an antique shop in the seventh arrondissement of Paris called “Fauve,” sends him a tiny box for every birthday.

And in an ode to his grandparents, on his bed he keeps French linen sheets. But unlike the farmhouse in France, in his masterbedroom, he has a fireplace to keep them warm.

(Thierry Buisson can be reached at thierryinteriors@gmail.com or 408-828-1685.)

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Saffron and Genevieve

The black and white striped awning catches your eye as you are strolling down Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz. As you approach the large Victorian windows—it’s apparent—you must stop in. Owner Scarlett Reed, is a self-proclaimed buyer extraordinaire. Her shop Saffron and Genevieve is proof that she has got a great eye for unexpected gems.

Growing up in the Bay Area, she has always had a passion for design. After working with many designers, she took the plunge and started her own design business.

Front Window Display

Metal Garden Chair

Saffron and Genevieve has been offering the most wonderful treasures of antiques and furnishings for your home and an eclectic collection of gifts for the past five years. Her shop is always evolving. One of her many talents is taking old vintage pieces in desperate need of care and redesigning and reupholstering. Classic well made frames are the only requirement to get a new lease on life. Scarlett seems to know where to find great handmade items from local artists. Finding that special one of a kind gift is a snap at Saffron and Genevieve.

Leather Boots

Scarlett has recently partnered up with Oak & Company, an organic, fair-trade, sustainable clothing label and together they are hosting an celebration on January 14th. Tea and treats from 11am to 4pm and an opening party from 5pm to 9pm. I love these boots—they are handmade and the soles are crafted from recycled tires. No two pairs are alike—you can even see the white wall on some! Keeping old tires out of landfills and looking fabulous at the same time—now that’s an amazing feat!

Saffron and Genevieve
910 B Soquel Ave.
Santa Cruz, CA 95062
831.462.4506

What started as a simple ranch house built in 1954 has been transformed over the past 20 years by the Kenny family into a French Chateuu in the country manor style. And Linda Floyd of Linda L. Floyd Interior Design has been with the  homeowners every step of the way.  The home decor is French inspired with trims and tassels and elegance.  Linda also decorated the living room for the holidays and the Summit League Homes for the Holidays tour.

The dining room was spectacular for the tour, as Sharon Watts of Peony created an astonishing table display.

David Stonesifer of David Stonesifer Interior Design and Decoration appointed the family room, including a couple of oil paintings he created himself.

Debi Campbell of Cover Story on Main Street in Los Altos added sparked to the kitchen and bath.

Upstairs, the daughter’s bedroom was decorated by Wahlberg Designs, The Duke & The Duchess of Morgan Hill. Saffron and Genevieve in Santa Cruz created the boy’s room with wonderful linen bed spreads and the master bedroom and bath received the special touch of Warmth Company from Aptos. Tiffany and Co. created a special display in the upper hallway.

Lulu Pom of Los Gatos appointed the study; La Jardiniere brought whiteness and light to the backyard and Color in the Garden from San Jose created an inviting front entrance.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Inside, you will see vintage decor, from wrought iron garden chairs to sparkling chandeliers; sterling silver pieces to crystal compotes. (Not Too Shabby is where my Lookiloos partner, Desiree, and I fought over a set of ultra-cool Asian fretwork iron chairs and where I found a mirror that is going to be the centerpiece of my remodeled bathroom.)

Not only can customers rent the charming new space for parties — the interior setting with vintage tables, chairs and china is perfect for showers, bridesmaid’s luncheons, mother-daughter teas — but some of the garden arches and benches can be rented out for special occasions as well.

An open house is set for this weekend, 11-4 on both Saturday and Sunday. Mention Lookiloos and enjoy 10 percent off of items in the new store!  In the short term, Not Too Shabby-ette will only be open on weekends, but once Vikki is up and running, expect full hours.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

When Nora Sandoval first stepped into this house in 1997, lockers lined the entry way, desks were scattered through the living room and baby cribs lined the library. Surely this wasn’t a house for sale, she thought. In fact, though, it was a home for some 16 teenaged unwed mothers run by the Volunteers of America.

It was time for this 1912 home originally owned by a dentist and his wife and their six children to revert to a single family. But with stenciled rattles painted up the stairway and each bedroom painted in a flower theme (daisy, rose and violet) it needed a lot of work.

Still, said Nora, a Realtor with the Sereno Group, “when I came in here, I felt good karma. There was a lot of love in this house.”

Over the past 13 years, Sandoval and her husband, Adobe executive Digby Horner, and their now-grown son, Matthew, made it their own. Digby did most of the detail work himself, including stripping hinges, and adorned the ceilings throughout the home with his collections of antique light fixtures and shades. They splurged on Bradbury and Bradbury wallpaper for the living room, which hadn’t been produced by the Benicia manufacturer since it ran the 17-color paper for singer Linda Ronstadt 11 years earlier.

A century-old pool table from Pennsylvania adds gravitas to the room. The couple recently finished a major kitchen remodel, adding a sunny breakfast room with a beadboard ceiling they had milled to match the original laundry room walls.

Upstairs, the house has what appears to be twin master bedrooms connected by a walk-through closet. The couple is waiting to finish the front landscaping until they determine whether their efforts to save the oak tree out front are successful.
For years after they moved in, people would leave bags of baby clothes and diapers on their front porch. When the mailman left soap samples, he would stuff 20 through the mail slot.
“This house has wrapped its arms around a lot of people,” Nora said, “and now we’re wrapping our arms around this house.”

The couple readied the house for the Rose Garden Homes Tour, benefitting St. Martin of Tours school. Hill’s Flowers providing the floral arrangements.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

The first time the Los Gatos house got a makeover, Betsy and Dan “Whizzer” White just needed a bigger house for their growing family. The house they bought in 1977 was 900 square feet and with one child and another on the way, they added a second story in 1984. In 1991, they did a major kitchen/family room remodel. Then on New Year’s Eve 2003 while Whizzer and Betsy were at a party, they got a call from a neighbor: “Your house is burning.”

A lit candle left  on her daughter’s bedroom desk had destroyed nearly the entire house. With the help of architect Phoebe Bressack of Bressack and Wasserman Architects in Los Altos, ) Chateau Construction (theirr builder for 30 years), interior designers Ann Sonnenberg of Palo Alto and Susan Hoffman from Los Gatos, the house was redesigned, rebuilt and redecorated. With all the loss, chaos and rebuilding, Betsy said, “The day I cried was when I found I could have the same tile in the kitchen,” that she had loved when she remodeled it in 1991.

As much as she loved her house before the fire, the third incarnation has it’s benefits. Along with increasing from a three bedroom, two bath, the house –built in a Bernard Maybeck craftsman style and shingled — now has four bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths. They reconfigured the downstairs space to add an office and laundry room. All the bonuses came inside an extra 400 square feet.

The stair railing also saw an upgrade, from what Betsy affectionately called “barnyard chic” to an elegant iron railing with a leaf motif modeled after the magnolia tree outside the window. The couple enjoyed weekends at garage sales and antique shops to replace their furnishings and collected Mexican pottery and other crafts from one of their favorite destinations: San Miguel de Allende.

The house sits on nearly a third of an acre and the grounds are gorgeous, from a shady patio  in front to a lush vegetable garden in the back.

While Whizzer’s wife considers her husband a “farmer,” because of his 60 tomato plants, chili peppers and other fruits and vegetables, Whizzer simply considers himself a “foodie.”

With his heirloom tomatoes, “I  freeze 50 pounds a year for cooking and give away about 200 pounds,” he said.  He’s also proud of his “pimientos de padron,” a chili pepper made famous by writer Calvin Trillin that is popular in Spanish tapas.

 Whizzer is well known in Los Gatos for supplying the enormous squash for the annual march of the “Cucuzza Squash Drill Team” in the town’s Christmas parade. “We’re the successors to the Pigmy Goat Herders that were kicked out a few years ago,” he said. “They got too outrageous.”

And while Betsy still finds herself “going for light switches in places that were there for 20 years,” she loves the third makeover of her home. The couple have no plans to do it again. Knock on wood.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Well, Stephanie Peters did when she invited Linda Marx, an independent-minded bargain-hunting maven, to have at it.

“I wanted the challenge to do it as inexpensively as I could,” said Marx, who loves nothing better than finding a cast-off sofa here or discarded end table there. “They’re little orphans. I like giving them a home.”

Peters, a Sunnyvale marketing consultant, wanted a home makeover that “shows my personality,” emphasizes comfort and reflects her penchant for all things Asian.

She lives in an Eichler, the 1950s-era, one-story homes with open floor plans, atriums and courtyards. Mid-century modern furnishings are experiencing a resurgence of popularity these days, but Marx was reluctant to shop in that direction: “I lived through that” era of design, Marx said, “and I didn’t particularly like it then.”

And with popularity often comes a big price tag, and that simply is not Marx’s style. Marx promised she could completely swap the decor of the living, dining and family rooms for a grand total of $4,000, which included everything from furniture delivery to moving lighting fixtures. (That would buy mid-century purists one Eames lounge chair and ottoman, thank you very much.)

The last time the house had a makeover was in the early 1990s, a few years after Peters bought it. As was the style at the time, she decorated with a palette of black, white and chrome, including white marble flooring in the living and dining rooms. But over the years, the space had grown tired and cold. And Peters had little time to pay attention to it. She made brief attempts at repainting the interior, but when her artwork came down, including her collection of Asian masks, she never put it back up. In her entry hall, all she had was a plant.

“All right, enough,” Peters told herself. “I entertain a lot. I’m sick and tired of people coming over and I’m embarrassed.”

She called Marx, who calls her fledgling redecorating business “Shoestring Design.” The women became friends through Marx’s son, who worked with Peters years ago. Peters had been to parties at Marx’s house and while there, couldn’t help but admire her home. She asked for help on hers.

“I said I wanted modern and Asian,” Peters said.

“I wanted the house to feel warm and nice,” Marx said.

“I wanted chrome bar stools,” Peters said.

“I didn’t bother with it,” Marx said.

“Never mind,” Peters conceded. “Do it.”

With that, Peters cleared out the entire living, dining and family rooms of furniture, handed Marx the key to the front door, and took off for three weeks.

“I had never done Asian before,” Marx confessed.

She began her thrift store circuit up and down the Peninsula, stopping in the Salvation Army on Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, where she found a dining room table and chairs for $149; to the Consignment Store in Westgate Mall in Saratoga, where she landed a living room sofa, and the Goodwill on Almaden Expressway in San Jose for the Asian bar for $89. She bought a bamboo wall hanging at Cost Plus World Market for $49, Asian coin wall hooks for $3 from Savers in Redwood City for the entryway, a coffee table from Not Too Shabby in San Jose for $49. A large Persian rug ($120) that covers the cold marble floor came from D.G.W. Auctioneers and Appraisers in Sunnyvale.

Marx mined Peters’ garage for lost treasures, pulling out her old trunk and a collection of masks. She hung Peters’ prints and some Chinese silk panels she had bought at auction and arranged everything just so. For finishing touches, she displayed martini glasses on the bar and filled a glass vase in the kitchen with fortune cookies.

Then she waited. “I was sweating bullets when she came home,” Marx said.

“I stood in awe in the entryway for 30 seconds,” Peters said. She barely recognized the place. “I walked back in three or four times. There was so much and it had changed so drastically.”

Peters loves her new decor and “everyone who comes to my house is flabbergasted. I’ve had wonderful feedback.”

Now on to the bedrooms! As soon as Peters leaves town, Marx will be ready.

If you like bargains and didn’t see the story Desiree and I wrote about the Asian fretwork chairs we bought for a bargain price at Not Too Shabby, read this:

Smackdown:Lookiloos-style

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Depression-Era Charm, with Sparkle

depression era charm-breakfast nook

Tin Ceiling Kitchen in Eclectic Shingle Style House

Tin Ceiling in Kitchen of Eclectic Shingle Style

(keep scrolling for more kitchens..)

Neoclassic bungalow kitchen

Eclectic neoclassic kitchen remodel

Which kitchen do you like best? Anyone dreaming of a kitchen remodel?

Amazing Fretwork Iron Chair

Are you ready for a Lookiloos smackdown? We’d love you to weigh in on this good-natured competition between two Lookiloos founders, Julia Prodis Sulek and Desiree Northend, who had a Lucy-and-Ethel tug-of-war over a set of very hip, very vintage chairs. The coolest part? They each paid under $40 per chair, but spotted a nearly identical reproduction at a chic Carmel shop for $625. Using their own sense of style and bargain shopping, Julia and Desiree made their chairs their own. Which do you like best? (You won’t hurt their feelings, really.)

By Julia Prodis Sulek

When Desiree told me she had just purchased four Asian fretwork chairs, I was happy for her. Really. It didn’t matter to me — that much — that I considered myself the fretwork girl. I so adored the geometric, intersecting lines of the Asian style, whether on the back of a chair or along a balcony railing, that I made a file of fretwork photos just to gaze at longingly. Trendy interior designer Kelly Whearstler was making wallpaper with the motif. Surely, Desiree must have known my inner obsession! And now, with one grand purchase, she would luxuriate in … well … what should have been mine, mine, all mine?

My mouth went dry as she described the 1960s-era high-backed chairs. They were made of sturdy iron for the outdoors and rolled on casters. I felt faint when she told me she got them for the bargain price of $39 each at Not Too Shabby, a home and garden shop on South Bascom Avenue. It’s one of those places you just never know what treasure you might find. Desiree bought four chairs. Three were left. I desperately wanted them. But would I be breaking some friendship code by adorning my backyard with the same spectacular chairs? I flashed back to an episode of I Love Lucy, where Lucy and Ethel fell in love with the same dress to wear to their “show,” and each promised the other that neither would buy it. Well, they both did, and while singing “Friendship” in the identical dresses on stage, they began plucking each other’s dresses apart! Well, call me Ethel to Desiree’s Lucy.
In our case, with Desiree’s gracious permission, I bought the remaining three. Since one of them had lost a caster and the odd-number of three remained, I bargained with Not Too Shabby owner Vikki Graham and purchased each for $29 a piece — a $30 savings compared to Desiree’s bargain.
Not only did a Carmel shop called Partington Ridge sell a reproduction for $625 a piece, but Val Perez-Ibardolasa, who owns Retro At Home in Emeryville, a chic mid-century modern shop, figured that a vintage set like the one we bought could fetch upwards of $5,000!
The only problem with our chairs? They needed cushions, the somewhat unusual size of 19 inches square. I priced custom cushions at an upholstery shop at $100 — and that didn’t even count the fabric. Determined to find a cheaper solution, I was amazed to find fabulous, retro-style cushions in orange and brown floral at JC Penny for a sale price of $19.99 a piece! I bought a second set to keep in reserve. I kept the chairs in their bronze-green patina, set them under my orange tree and admired the scene. Perfect for a spring afternoon with a glass or lemonade or an evening glass with a glass of wine.
Well, Desiree, you’ve seen mine. Now show me yours! And let our readers decide whose they like best. Don’t worry. We can handle it. Like Lucy and Ethel, they remained great friends, no matter what.

**********

By Desiree Northend

The gauntlet has been thrown–a challenge.  Well, this girl never backs down from a challenge.  Slightly competitive–you betcha! (Please no Sarah Palin references). It’s a family trait I’ve passed down for better or worse. Just ask any kid of mine.
Now, Julia — my wonderful partner in crime at Looikiloos — seems to think she is the only one who can appreciate fretwork.  I didn’t realize I had broken the cardinal rule “Thou shalt not admire fretwork, if your Lookiloos partner has already claimed it.”  That was my faux pas. Besides, as you can see, there was plenty of fretwork to go around and I was only too happy to share in the bounty. Take a deep cleansing breath, Julia.
As soon as I saw the chairs, I knew I had to have them.  I have wanted outdoor iron furniture since my boys were in their fort-building phase and demolished those old, nylon folding lawn chairs. I wanted something substantial, something that could really take a beating and still look fabulous when not in use as the corners of a castle. What really drew me to these particular chairs was the high wing back shape as well as that fretwork. But I wasn’t wild about the color — a muddy bronze. And they needed cushions. I consider myself a crafty type, so to complement the wrought iron fence in my backyard, I pulled out a can of gloss black spray paint and went for it. I first considered sewing my own cushions, top and bottom, with fabric I purchased years ago from reprodepot.com. But when Julia told me she found the perfect size bottom cushions in a variety of colors at JC Penny, that was too good to pass up. I bought the last four poppy-colored ones. (I hated to tell her that when I went,  the cushions were on close-out and I got them for 40 percent less than what she paid. But, she did get the chairs at a cheaper price, so we’re even right?) I made my own top cushions with my own favorite fabric, fluffed them up a bit, and now admire the whole set from my kitchen window.  At the end of the day, I think we both did pretty darn well. Don’t you? Please leave a comment and let us know your opinion.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

"Meat" sign for sale at Briarwood Antiques. Who wants it?

When one of our readers snapped a picture of this “MEAT” sign in the window of Briarwood Antiques and Collectibles on W. San Carlos in San Jose, I knew I had to use it as a centerpiece.  As our gracious reader put it, “Things are getting interesting at the local antique store.”  I’ll say.  If I owned a nightclub, this would be my welcome sign. It’s priced, we think, at about $900. I’ll try to get more info later, including about the gun-wielding guy in the background. Tell me: where would you put the MEAT sign?