A Pink Château in France for Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is Sunday and to get into the spirit, today we are taking a virtual trip to an 18th century château near Paris… painted pink! Decorated by Phoebus Interiors, the château required almost complete restoration, and previous alterations were reversed. Existing furniture was reupholstered, and all new additions to the decoration were chosen to blend in seamlessly. Traditional fabrics in soft, timeless colors – many from 18th-century archive documents – were selected to complement the classic interiors. And a new kitchen installed, using traditional tiles from the region and featuring a classic chequerboard floor. Let’s take a peek!
This fairytale castle would be a perfect Valentine gift! If you are still looking for additional Valentine ideas, please visit The Glam Pad’s Gift Guide… Lacelliese just added some new treasures! to read more about this pretty-in-pink château, please visit Phoebus Interiors.
Alessandra Branca in Palm Beach
Those of you wintering in Palm Beach will want to pop by designer Alessandra Branca‘s new showroom, Casa Branca on Worth Avenue. The studio and showroom features Casa Branca’s fabrics, wallpapers, and decorative objets alongside vintage and antique pieces. With the activity and development in home and design in Palm Beach and the greater Florida area, Alessandra is excited to expand her brand into the South East in addition to current locations in Chicago and Los Angeles. Let’s take peek with photography by Carmel Brantley.
To learn more, please visit www.branca.com and follow @abranca on Instagram for ongoing inspiration. To see more of The Glam Pad’s favorite highlights from Alessandra’s portfolio, please click here. We also recommend her timeless book, New Classic Interiors.
Style Profile: Molly Moorkamp Shakes Up Fashion With Timeless Style
By Lacelliese King
Over the past few years, I have come to know and love the New York City-based designer Molly Moorkamp for her line of ladylike basics that are anything but basic: her classics like silhouette-skimming shifts, swishy separates, and simply-executed sweaters all promise to stand the test of time in both form and in function.
(Personal recommendations include the white Dodie shift, the Nina sweater, and the perennially sold-out Amelia skirt and Daphne sweater.)
When Molly and her brother Sam Moorkamp launched her collection in November 2018, Molly was deemed the “designer dressing a new generation of uptown girls,” by Vogue. Two years later, she has proved that her talent for dressing women extends well beyond the boundaries of the Upper East Side, and is equally befitting of girls of 17 as much as girls of 75.
A few other qualities to admire in Molly: she navigates the fracas of social media with an enviable elegance that hearkens both vintage glamour and modern sensibility—very tokens of the Moorkamp brand itself. She is a walking Rolodex when it comes to knowing the crème-de-la-crème of NYC bakeries, florists, and cafés, and is my current go-to source for film recommendations, having curated an extensive two-part list of classics that made it off the “MM” cutting floor.
I find Molly’s style to be boldly demure; sophisticated, yet unpretentious; non-conforming, yet utterly appropriate. And upon even closer consideration, in a world of fashion excess, it would seem that she has mastered the art of restraint in everything from accessorizing (for the style-minded) to merchandising (for the business-minded). And, she makes a mean “Molly martini.” Or two? The art of restraint, after all, includes knowing when not to exercise it!
Shake it all up, and you get a mixture of style savvy and design derring-do that makes just the right recipe for a fascinating style profile. With that, it is a delight to welcome Molly to The Glam Pad today. Grab the olives, cue the vodka and sit down with us for this edition of Style Profiles!
Q: How do you describe your personal style?
A: Feminine, Classic, no twist. We need to stop twisting.
Q: Who are your top five favorite fashion designers and top five interior designers (past/present)?
A: Fashion Designers:
Cristobal Balenciaga, Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Oscar de la Renta (my former boss), Bill Blass, Sam Moorkamp (my brother and co-creative partner of MM).
Interior Designers:
Daniel Romualdez, Renzo Mongiardino, Mario Buatta.
Q: What are five (material) possessions you could not live without?
A: My charm bracelet, a mechanical pencil for sketching, Elnett extra strong hold hairspray, Stubbs and Wootton monogrammed velvet loafers, my personal collection of MM shifts.
Q: Describe your go-to, everyday outfit.
A: An MM shift or Daphne sweater with white jeans and nude ballet flats paired with a frosted lip and a fresh haircut. Never a lot of accessories. We’re in an extended period of over-accessorizing.
Q: What is your single must-have piece from the Molly Moorkamp collection?
A: Anything from our bridal collection – particularly custom.
Q: Where do you find mentorship and/or inspiration for your business?
A: I was lucky enough to be Cheree Berry’s first intern when I graduated high school in St. Louis, way before moving to New York to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. I worked for her every summer in college. Seeing a boss and mentor of mine grow a small business into a thriving company was an excellent example. She helped me nail my first apprentice-ship at Oscar de la Renta, and the rest is history.
Q: What are some of your favorite design-oriented places in NYC to shop and explore?
A: My neighborhood! I study the goings-on of Madison Avenue retail like a credit analyst…also I always pop into the best florists in my neighborhood when I need a break from work for some inspiration in color and composition. Plaza Flowers or ZeZe specifically.
Q: We know you love a good cocktail hour: what are your five “bar cart” essentials?
A: A proper bar needs not only to be stocked, but also back-stocked, and in close proximity. That’s number one. I think a range of glassware is important too: it’s good to have something you use every day such as these simple basket weave crystal glasses from Pottery Barn; something for a special occasion like Baccarat Harmonie from Scully & Scully, and something unique but not too delicate to “wow” guests (vintage or something picked up while traveling with some color, such as these tumblers from Houses & Parties).
Guests should not feel scared to break a glass, but it should inspire nonetheless. There should be generous bowls of cut lemons and limes regardless of serving 2 people or 10. One last thing – it’s important to think of your bar as any other service area of your home – it should be beautiful but also make sure it functions completely as a space (even if it’s just a tray on a console). Nothing is worse than an uncomfortable guest watching you fly around your house getting ice, mixers etc. from various spots. I could go on…
Q: Tell us about your ideal day in the life of Molly Moorkamp… where did you go, who did you see, what did you have to eat (and drink!)?
A: I’m an early bird, up before most. I most likely will not go to the gym and scan the NY Post instead (awful habit). Grab a cappuccino at St. Ambreous and hit the ground running. I make a to-do list every morning, and attack my emails (a la Melanie Griffith commuting on the Staten Island Ferry in Working Girl).
My brother and I will head to the garment district almost every day to check in on our factory development and production. We’re really a bunch of old school 7th Avenue slickers. I’m a wild creature of habit, so we both eat the same silly salad every day (yawn) and drink far too much coffee.
The Molly Martini playlist revs up around 4:00 and the martini is poured around 6. I’d love to find myself at a neighborhood haunt freezing outside with friends. Donohue’s (UES ladies you get it), Match 65 and Orsay have been my go-to’s during quarantine. If it’s a night in, I’m reviewing movies for our next MM movie list. Cold cream and lights out.
Q: What can we look forward to from MM in the next six months?
A: We have a lot of exciting top-secret developments planned this year, including expanding on all our major categories: cocktail, knitwear, bridal, swim. While I’d love to expand into every dream category of mine this year, slow and steady wins the race.
A closing thought: As all of Molly Moorkamp’s patterns are hand-painted by a team of MM illustrators, we can only hope that Molly’s design expertise won’t stop at the closet, but might extend to outfitting other areas of the home as well… stay tuned! Thank you, Molly, for sharing your time and lovely thoughts with us! Shop the Molly Moorkamp collection here, including bathing suits and new releases for Resort 2021!
Design Spotlight: Marchioness Home & Garden
Don’t you love it when you find a kindred spirit on Instagram and end up scrolling for an hour? That is what happened when I discovered Bethany Berk, interior and garden designer and founder of Marchioness Home & Garden, a beautiful antiques and textiles shop. Today we will take a peek inside her beautiful historic home!
With 25 years of experience in home remodeling, retail, antiques, textiles and manufacturing, Bethany developed Marchioness Home & Garden as the culmination of her expertise, travels and passion for design. A California native who has called San Francisco, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles home, Bethany now resides outside of Boston in the New England countryside, where she recently finished renovating a historic property on the Charles River.
Her house was built in 1905 and given as a wedding gift to Christina Hunewell from her father H.H. Hunewell. The house has had only two owners since the early 1980s. It was solidly built and kept in excellent original condition. However, all the systems – electric, plumbing, air, heating and chimneys – had to be updated. “Breaking into horsehair plaster walls to remove 100 years old cast iron pipes that go three floors up and down was painstaking work,” said Bethany. “The inspiration behind the updates was really the house itself and the natural setting on the river in which its situated. Once on the grounds and inside the house it feels as if you’ve slipped into a time warp to 100 years ago.”
While her journeys in search of antique treasures have taken her around the world, Bethany’s greatest joy is delighting in the country landscape of her own home, from admiring a family of swans on the river, to seeding and planting in her garden, or harvesting honey to share with others.
Bethany has such exquisite taste, and you can shop her beautiful curation of antiques, linens, botanical prints, tapestries, garden accessories, and more via Marchioness. For daily inspiration, please follow @marchionesshg on Instagram. Bethany is also featured in the January/February issue of Victoria magazine on the Art of Correspondence.
