I love shops in a bonkers allsorts fashion. By that I mean I am as happy to wander around furniture or haberdashery emporiums as I am to gaze at the latest fashions in a boutique or department store. This love of shops doesn’t equate to a love of spending (though naturally I do from time to time).
Tag Archives: Travel
♥ Retail Therapy
Filed under Paris, Shops/Shopping, Travel
♥ Paris: Lunch at Merci
Merci is a whimsical wonderland of a concept store that is large, bright, airy and chock full of eclectic and interesting stock. Merci seems to sell almost everything: clothes, furniture, perfume, household items, books, stationery, haberdashery…
Filed under Paris, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
♥ Bonjour de Paris
I cannot think of another building or structure that is more symbolic of Paris than the Eiffel Tower: it’s named after its creator the engineer Gustave Eiffel. Built as an entrance archway to the 1889 World Trade Fair and to celebrate the centenary of the 1789 revolution, the original plan was that the tower would be a temporary structure to be demolished when its twenty year building permit expired. Still standing proud in the twenty-first century it’s a magnificent sight especially at night when every hour on the hour the 20,000 light bulbs, attached to it to celebrate the millennium, twinkle magnificently.
♥ Favourite Shops//Liberty
Liberty is by far and away my favourite department store. Aeons ago when I lived in London, Liberty was a short bus ride from home and I took it so much for granted that I could pop in to browse when the mood took me. It was great deal larger back in the day when I lived close by but fortunately the essence of the store hasn’t suffered from its shrinking.
Filed under London, Shops/Shopping, Travel
♥ Chanel: 31 Rue Cambon
I find it difficult to explain the why and the wherefore of my fascination with Coco Chanel and the brand she created. When I mull over this fascination I sometimes wonder if Chanel is either simply a monumental marketing triumph or more complicatedly a form of Jungian archetype and part of our collective unconscious. That is not to detract from the magic the brand creates or to underestimate how much and how enduringly Coco Chanel, in her time, changed the way women dress. Gone were the restrictive clothes of previous periods and she introduced many style classics: the little black dress, striped Breton tops, long ropes of pearls…
Filed under Chanel, Paris, Shops/Shopping, Travel
♥ London Lunch: Rose Bakery
Whenever I am in Paris, for more than a few days, I try at some point to head to the Rose Bakery for lunch. The Rose Bakery at 46, Rue des Martyrs is a bakery/café/shop which sells and serves uncomplicated, flavoursome and mainly organic food at affordable prices. A throng of hungry and subsequently happy diners have beaten a path to its doors since Anglo-French couple Rose and Jean-Charles Carrarini opened it in 2002. A London outpost opened in 2007.
Filed under London, Paris, Restaurants/Cafés
♥ Built for Love
Kylemore Castle (now know as Kylemore Abbey) in Connemara owes its existence to Mitchell Henry scion of a wealthy Mancunian family. Mitchell fell in love with Connemara when he and his wife Margaret honeymooned there in 1849. When he inherited the family fortune he returned to the West of Ireland and purchased, as a romantic gift for Margaret, 15,000 acres in an idyllic situation beside two lakes and overlooked by a multitude of magnificent mountains. There he built a gothic fairy tale like castle made of granite and limestone; the castle was completed in 1867.
Filed under Travel
♥ Breakfast in London: The Parlour at Sketch
I think the decor at The Parlour at Sketch is best described as truly madly eclectic; it shouldn’t work but it does. There is an assortment of different styles of sofas and chairs, covered in a bewildering selection of clashing fabrics, dotted around the large high-ceilinged room. Tables are of different designs and heights. The interior is dim despite an array of unusual lights which include vast chandeliers dangling from the ceiling and a large light, made of fibreglass, in the shape of a moose’s head, mounted trophy style on the wall. There is more, much more but I feel The Parlour at Sketch is best seen rather than described.
Filed under London, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
♥ Island Shopping: Inis Meáin Knitwear
Some clothes, well in truth, few, very few, live on in my memory long after I have consigned them to a charity shop and when they come to mind I wonder what was I thinking in that misguided moment when I placed them in the to-go-pile. One such item was my Inis Meáin Knitwear cardigan with a shawl collar which I bought in London when I lived there (that’s quite a while ago – the late eighties and early nineties), it was warm, cloud-soft and comforting to wear.
Filed under Designers, Fashion, Shops/Shopping, Style, Travel
♥ Coffee on an Island
The three Aran Islands are dotted across Galway Bay and beyond them, before the next stop America, is the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean. I visited the middle island Inis Meáin (population approx 200) yesterday, it’s said to be the least visited and the least commercial of the Aran Islands. (Inis Meáin is reached from the mainland by plane or foot-passenger only ferry).
Filed under Coffee, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
Just Add Attitude 