A "Thing" for Otters

Commenter Lady Jicky says she has "a thing" for otters. The moment I read that I went to fetch my "Otter and Frog" figurine by Border Fine Art. I seem to remember that BFA had a series with young animals and that the otter and the frog were part of it.

While the BFA figurines are probably considered chocolate boxy by many, I was never selfconsciously into "good taste" and I admit that I enjoy the few I have, all of them of wildlife, enormously.

I found a (bad) photograph of the "Otter and Frog" figurine in the Internet and therefore scanned the one I have. Scanning a three-dimensional item is a bitch, but I think the one detail that intrigues me most, the bewitching little face of the otter, has turned out quite nicely. Click on the picture to enlarge it.


The figurine is by Ray Ayres and dates from 1983. If I remember correctly, I got it sometimes in the late Eighties.

Here is some additional information on Ray Ayres and here the (not terrifically informative) Border Fine Arts website. Aren't blogging and the Internet educational?

Schloss Augustusburg

I have been to Schloss Augustusburg and I am totally smitten. The former hunting lodge of the Dukes of Saxony contains, among a wealth of other features and exhibitions, a collection of historic hunting weapons, a very well presented exhibition of the wildlife in the ore mountains -- and a cornucopia of inspiration for everybody interested in historic houses.

Here we have the Hasensaal, decorated with a witty recurring theme of anthropomorphised hares.

The Tafelstube, the dining hall.

This is one of the smaller rooms used now for the performance of civil marriages.

Here we have two views of the Venussaal, arguably the most spectacular feature of Schloss Augustusburg, not really suitable for interior decorating inspiration, just for admiration.
It shows an elaborate mural of the Venusberg saga, an important part of German mythology. The pictures can't even begin to convey the impact the room has on its visitors.

Hunting and Wildlife in Art

I first introduced Bert Fricke in an earlier entry. Here are a few more water colours and drawings. More to follow.

Red deer

Otter at a trout stream

Pheasant shoot

Roe deer with fawn

Symmetry

This post  was first written as part of the project of doing up a Wilhelminian style villa in a village in the Ore Mountains. Alas, this project, like so many others, had to be abandoned once it was three quarters finished. However, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way for those interested in doing up an old house.

In April, The Peak of Chic discussed at her blog the concept of symmetry in interior decoration, which made me acutely aware of my biggest problem (well, my biggest DECORATING problem) at the new place, namely the difficulty to achieve symmetry.

A truly formal room DOES require a high degree of symmetry. For about 15 years now I am living with an electric fireplace [frightfully unsmart, I know, but where I am is the top anyway ;-) ] that has moved with me to the fourth place in the meantime and it always served as a pleasant focal point and "symmetry-achiever". My last place was blessed with a living room of generous proportions (5 x 8 m I'd say) and one door in just the right place. Dark brown walls, heavy dark sofas and dark velvet curtains looked great, as did the oils in their gilded frames. It was the first of my living rooms that could almost claim drawing room status. Symmetry was ruling, and the challenge was to relieve it now and then, not to give the place an un-lived-in or boring feeling. Now I have a living room of maybe half of that space, with two doors at awkward positions and, although it is the first one with a working chimney, this very chimney is in an incredibly awkward place as well and thus totally unsuitable to host a fireplace as a focal point. I will get a tiled stove once I am over my cash-flow problem and try to acquire some symmetry and formality in a different way. But how?

Dark brown walls, heavy dark sofas and dark velvet curtains are a no no here as well. I had the walls painted in a bright yellow and, already living in the shell, am contemplating an alternative solution with entirely different fabrics different furniture and different pictures. It is a big challenge and I wish I always had no bigger problems, but the loss of symmetry truly hurts.


Every cloud has a silver lining and living in the empty shell has saved me from making considerable decorating mistakes already.

I wonder where that craving for symmertry comes from. The human body is symmetric. I am sure there is a certain craving for symmetry deeply ingrained in the human mind, quite independent from "good" or "bad" taste.

More on "Period" and Very Real Bathrooms

This post  was first written as part of the project of doing up a Wilhelminian style villa in a village in the Ore Mountains. Alas, this project, like so many others, had to be abandoned once it was three quarters finished. However, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way for those interested in doing up an old house.

When I put up my first "bathroom entries" any realisation was a matter of a far-ish future and a different house. The fact that the house where I am living now can firmly be identified as being from a post-wooden-bathtub period makes things infinitely more easy. Once I saw the pictures I have published in this entry (see one below), I knew how my future bathroom was going to look and that the period feeling could be acquired by relatively simple means. Because of a limited budget I bid a fond farewell to any gadgets like a high level cistern and "nostalgic" suite and fittings. An embedded cistern (I am not at all sure whether that is the correct term), a standard white sanitary suite and standard, though not aggressively modern, fittings had to do.


I am very pleased with the overall-impression created by stark white tiles and a black and white border made from standard black-and-white mosaic tiles. Considering how the bathroom looked when we bought the house, it's probably the most stunning improvement. Cheap and horrible PVC-flooring was coupled with horrible and cheap wooden panelling and plastic-sheet "tiles". The solid-fuel-heated hot-water boiler was cute, though, and, I presume, still in working order. But convenience is a great eye-opener when it comes to period features. However, the modern, electricity-heated boiler is placed in the basement and thus doesn't at least interfere with the period feeling.

To prevent the bathroom to look like a cold store or -- worse -- like a mortuary, I am right now toying with the idea of a chandelier with two matching wall lamps framing the mirror and a black and white toile Roman blind.

Richloom Confection Charcoal or...

...Golding Cantata Onxy would come very close to what I'd like.

In an older entry, The Peak of Chic showed, in the context of Georgian style, those absolutely gorgeous bathrooms. Granted for arguments sake that I could afford anything like that: I am asking myself how it is kept clean. What does one do about soapy and oily splatters or -- heavens forbid! -- splatters of haircolour? Do those lucky people have a simple, usable, easy-to-clean bathroom hidden behind those museum pieces?



I admit, I am a lousy "housewife". I don't like dusting and my kitchen was never up to gastronomic standards, cleanlinesswise. But I draw the line at the bathroom. Those curry-yellow tiles and sanitary suites so popular here in the Seventies and later or -- worse -- that English fluffy bathroom carpetry give me the creeps. With white tiles and stuff one can at least SEE what is there (and then clean it away).

Bathrooms in Old Houses Redux

This post  was first written as part of the project of doing up a Renaissance townhouse in the Ore Mountains. Alas, this project, like so many others, never came to pass. However, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way for those interested in doing up an old house.

In an earlier entry I contemplated sense and nonsense of creating a "period" bathroom.

I always found the goal to create a "period" bathroom in a historic house, with the possible exception of Victorian houses, futile. After all, they simply DID NOT HAVE bathrooms in the sense we have today. Roman luxuries don't count. And even if one would be hell-bent on creating a period bathroom older than the Victorian period, I doubt they'd want to carry tubs and hot and cold water to the kitchen every time they feel like bathing, let alone empty nonflushing water closets and dispose of the content.

By mere chance I found a bathroom design that looks "cleaner" than the Tadelakt design and is much less fussy to apply. It may look agressively modern now, but I am sure it will find its place among the timelessly beautiful designs. We may want to add a bathroom or two to the Renaissance house soon, so this is certainly an option:


This is PERFECT! The water disappears in the "shadow gap" between wall and ground. It is, like the other two ground-level showers below, from the "Poresta" line of the German company Illbruck Sanitärtechnik. Who said we Germans don't have good taste?



Those showers are, so to say, invisible and with their clean lines they blend in perfectly with houses that require stark, clean designs -- like Renaissance houses.

Bathrooms in Old Houses

This post  was first written as part of the project of doing up a Renaissance townhouse in the Ore Mountains. Alas, this project, like so many others, never came to pass. However, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way.

Racist (or is it culturalist?) that I am, I'd never dreamt that I'd find ever pleasure in things that come out of Morrocan bathhouses. Well, I was wrong.

But let me digress first.

I always found the goal to create a "period" bathroom in a historic house, with the possible exception of Victorian houses, futile. After all, they simply DID NOT HAVE bathrooms in the sense we have today then. Roman luxuries don't count. And even if one would be hell-bent on creating a period bathroom older than the Victorian period, I doubt they'd want to carry tubs and hot and cold water to the kitchen every time they feel like bathing, let alone empty nonflushing water closets and dispose of the content.

But I have found something that might create at least the FEEL of a bathroom in a Renaissance house, and here, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Tadelakt. Tadelakt is a waterproof or nearly waterproof lime plaster, the traditional application of which includes being polished with a semi-precious stone and treatment with a special soap to acquire its final smooth, even shining, finish and water resistance and it stems, well, from the bathhouses of Morocco.

Here are some pictures from the Tierrafino website.









There are two minor throwbacks: Tadelakt is prohibitively expensive and incredibly difficult to apply. I am looking for alternatives, but they will be hard to find, or so I fear.

By the way, did you know that an Englishman who went by the eminently apt name Thomas Crapper (1836 - 1910) is credited for inventing the flushing toilet, or having at least added considerably to its development? Blogging is SO educational!

Some highly non-PC musings on sport

Or: If I'd want to see pretty figures in tights I'd watch WOMEN figure skating

I keep hearing time and again that women soccer is oh-so "technical". If I want to see women getting technical I'll watch figure skating or ballet, not some dykes fighting for a ball getting all sweaty and dirty. If I want to watch butch women I… well, I don't.

Now figure skating! Let's talk about men's figure skating. I don't find that very entertaining as well. Male figure skaters look like gays, they act like gays, some even SOUND like gays, for example "Elvis Stojko". Now what sort of a name is THAT? Surely his parents decided when their little blessing was born: "We'll name him Elvis, then he'll be gay and can become a figure skater!"

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against gays, some of my best friends are gay, I just don't want to look at them figure skating. If I'd want to see pretty figures in tights I'd watch WOMEN figure skating.

Yeah, hunky!

What is the essence of sport? I think it is performance first with aesthetics a very close second. All the feminists out there may crucify me now, but what sense makes a sport, which makes a sad joke of aesthetics and at the same time will never grant, for biological reasons, women a chance for top performance? Women's weightlifting comes to mind. If somebody can tell me WHY a woman should want to undergo such an uglifying and ultimately senseless ordeal, I will be forever grateful.

Yeah, hunky!

I am not, mind you, speaking out for the sissyfication of women's sports. There are cases where women outdid their male counterparts once they were allowed to compete in a sport that had once been considered unsuitably for the weaker sex, and they did — literally and metaphorically — beautifully so. A notable example is three day eventing, which once started as a military competition for commissioned officers (I thematized the beginnings of this sport here, by the way) and remained a men's domain until the English girls arrived in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Lucinda Prior-Palmer, Jane Bullen, Virginia Holgate, Princess Anne -- entire chapters from Burkes Peerage & Landed Gentry showed their male competition the irons of the back hoofs of their horses. None of them ever stroke me as masculine, in spite of all the silly (although not entirely untrue) jests about Princess' Anne's horsey appearance. (I've seen her in the flesh at the Munich Olympics 1972 and, although she's not "pretty pretty", she's not a bit butch either. Gorgeous hair, too!)

Zara Phillips, the Queen's pretty grand­daughter, who is, like her mother was 30 years ago, at the top of eventing in her country, and thus the world.

Another highly performance-orientated sport, which is, nevertheless, an aesthetic pleasure to watch, is fencing, or at least so I think.


And that applies, amazingly, to both sexes, even though the men don't look like a bunch of queers in tights and the women not like bulldykes.

Let The House Tell You Its Colours

This post was written in 2007 after I had moved from West Germany to a small town in West Saxony. And although it's history now, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way for those interested in doing up an old house. 
It sadly never occured to me to take photos. It was, alas, the time before the advent of the smartphone.

Colours are the first that comes to mind when tackling a new project. Coming from West Germany, I am currently living in Saxony in a townhouse (left) built around the turn of the 20th century, for which I chose very bright, saturated colours. A dark, warm brown for the drawing room (and yes, it's the first room I have that merits such a description), a darkish, peachy pink for the bedroom, a brilliant red for the dining room and a dark emerald green for the office/study. Due to the circumstances, it had to be done in a hurry, all I could do was to look around, let the rooms briefly talk to me and then take a deep breath and choose the colours from a chart. I saw the finished work only when I moved in. I was lucky, however, the housepainter had done a good job and I was basically pleased how the colours worked, specifically together with the house.

By the way, I had the whole place laid with terracotta tiles because of an old, incontinent dog. They go well with almost any style, or at least so I think. The house has a lot of original period features, not for the sake of them, but because the modernisation after the reunification was performed as cheaply as possible.

The brown is just lovely for a big, high room with a lot of decorative china and gilt-framed paintings. The room has three tall windows and a lot of light until in the afternoon, but, frankly, I would have chosen the colour anyway. "Light" was never anything that appealed to me in terms of living space. I have no idea what a shrink might make of that, but that's how it is.

The pink of the bedroom goes a bit on my nerves now after almost 16 months and I don't think I'd have it done like that again, although the colour scheme (dark peachy pink/gunmetal grey/black) turned out very well. Maybe it's a bit too "camp" (a word I've just learned) to be truly comfortable.

The bright red for the (small) dining room was a catastrophe at first. Had I had enough courage to go for an oxblood-red, all would have been fine, but the bright red looked just ghastly with a typical dark red Afghan rug, dark red velvet curtains and oil paintings. Like a downmarket Victorian horror. One was virtually looking for the gaslights. Being out of a budget, I was pretty desperate. No way that I could employ a housepainter again and I am lousy at DIY-jobs. Too clumsy and too easily bored and irritated. So I bought a simple rug, woven from natural wool (€50.00), a remnant piece of curtain fabric with wide bright red and white stripes of which I had curtains made (material and work €35.00) and exchanged the oil paintings for engravings. The result was pretty much like the picture on the left (in fact, I found it in the Internet and it gave me the idea for the changes in the first place), although, of course, much less grand.

I love the dark emerald green for the office, although one of my best friends hates it and calls it, rather wittily, my "fishbowl".