Bidding on the Ritz: Paris hotel auctions furniture
Furniture from the Chanel Suite
“The Ritz hotel in Paris is auctioning off 10,000 pieces of furniture and decorative objects. The hotel, founded in 1898, reopened two years ago after four years of renovation. The hotel’s first bathtub is among the items being sold by auction house Artcurial between 17 and 21 April”
Source: Bidding on the Ritz: Paris hotel auctions furniture – in pictures | World news | The Guardian
This is my favourite sort of sale. You get very attractive, built to last and well maintained items for what are normally quite low prices. The gorgeous chairs from the Windsor Suite are estimated at 2 to 3 thousand euros. They’d look wonderful here, but this year we’re finally doing the dining room, so all our energy and funds have to go towards that.
Chairs from the Ritz Windsor Suite
Speaking of which, I’ve been going through wallpapers again and saw something that’s just wonderful by Cole & Son. It’s clever in that it works sort of as a low border. So it’s the average size roll but you lay it sideways instead of vertically. Then you paint above it the colour of your choice. Here it is:
My Mazamet 
It’s lovely 🙂
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Your house really, really needs those chairs…
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Is that the archipelago border? I was looking at stuff for a friend’s house in France and that looked ideal.
Those chairs would suit this house…but by the time I had had them shipped and paid the exorbitant customs tariff they would be ruinously expensive…so I will have to disappoint the dogs.
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It is the archipelago border indeed 🙂 A great way of papering a room with a whole lot less money.
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I’m going to IKEA later to buy the least expensive, small bookshelf I can find. My tastes align with yours, but my ability to fulfill them aligns with an old church mouse scrambling for bread crumbs. I’m certain all this will change once I FINALLY receive my Nobel Prize for overall greatness. 😉
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😀
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I’m sure it will be soon. Right after I get a Hugo and Nebula. 😀
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🙂
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😀
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If you put those chairs in your dining room for a day or two, would you be able to acquire them? They are pretty awesome. Perhaps you could justify it by the fact that everyone else’s inferior posteriors won’t be able to fully enjoy such comfort and style.
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If I put them in my dining room it means I’ll probably be arrested for theft in the near future 😀
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It’s not theft if someone you know buys them and you borrow them indefinitely.
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I quite like the chess set! 🙂
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Hmmm…. looks like ivory to me, you elephant murderer!!!!!!
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Oh … in that case, that is just vile, so, no thanks.
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I’m just being annoying 😀
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What Ark said!
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Sorry Pinky, but I’m confused by that wallpaper. You say you paint /above/ it, but doesn’t that leave a rather obvious demarcation line?
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It does unless you match the off white. But I think if the wall colour is something like coral or dark taupe it could look quite interesting.
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Like a frieze but low down? I’m a neat freak in some ways so I’d have to put beading on ‘the line’, but I can see how it would be very attractive in the right room.
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Beading would work well 🙂
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-nods- Okay, that sets my mind at rest. 😀
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I need to lie down in a darkened room … the very idea of that auction and the sure knowledge that I can’t buy a single thing is too much for a girl to take 😢 That said, the wallpaper is a triumph so the lie down need only be brief and the revived me can give real thought as to where on earth I could use this triumph …. it keeps me off The streets
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No, no, no!!! I promise you *can* afford all sorts of things. The chairs are at the higher end of their listings. There are tons of things in the low, mid and high hundreds. From cheap silk cushions to an Empire sofa at 800€ – and table lamps for a couple of hundred etc etc.
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I’m in! I have two houses to furnish so really it would be rude not to do we think? As an aside, in my previous life, I was an agent with The William Morris Agency …. I can’t even begin to imagine how many meetings I had with clients at le Ritz though I never stayed there myself. Where does life go?
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The paint stores have computers in them now that exactly produces paint matching a sample you bring in. I wonder, I wonder if you brought in a sample of the paper if you couldn’t get an exact match in the paint. I think it might look nice to paint the walls the same color as the sand on the bottom of the wallpaper.
It especially looks nice above that tall baseboard. I doubt it would look as nice with a shorter baseboard.
You must have already done this, but have you done stenciling lately? I did some last year and am very happy with it. One was a huge 3ft across zinnia, I had a huge wall and it came out nice. It was the first time I had ever done stenciling. All said and done it was not as easy as the promos lead you to believe, at least with the zinnia pattern I worked with. But then I found a solution for the next time, and that is a stencil manufacturer that has an adhesive already applied to the back of the stencil. On one of the reviews someone wrote that after about 10 repeats it wasn’t adhering to the ceiling, they were cheap though, easy to buy a couple of the same pattern. Most of their product is kidddie style but there were some nice grass and plants as well.
On Amazon USA search for
MyWonderfulWalls stencil
I like the curly grass stencil although that mouse stencil kind of intrigues me as well. The fact that they are self adhesive, makes it easier to paint into.
The only thing holding me back on the border wallpaper is I would have a hard time with the top straight edge of the wallpaper showing on the wall. If the top edge had some type of a wave shape to it, or shall we say rolling, then I don’t think I would have a problem with it, but the straight edge I think I would have a hard time with. Years ago I had put a bottom border in our son’s bedroom but that room had an oak chair rail all around so there was a boundary for the paper to abut to.
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I had a serious stencil phase in the last house because a Moroccan artisan taught me how to decorate the doors and I ended up reproducing his work on every door in the house 😀
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Oh, I do love that paper! Though we can’t ‘do’ wallpaper here in the subtropics. Not without air conditioning. Which is wholly unnecessary, what with the tradewinds most of the time. xo
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Love that paper. And bring back the dado, I say. Very useful and under-rated
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Speaking of which – what a ridiculous little selection of wood mouldings in this part of the world! We’ve had to order skirting boards online from Germany because what’s available here looks too dinky.
And yes, Cole & Son do the most wonderful, interesting papers. I want to do the dining room in their monkey paper (Scimmie) but Mike’s not yet entirely convinced… He thinks it’s a bit cold.
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I’m with Mike on monkeys in the dining room. Generally unless I can eat it or it is a pretty bird, I’m not a fan of animals in the dining room. On a similar note, I once saw a bumper sticker, ” I love animals, they are delicious.” Ha-ha-ha.
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By the way, here is another website I LOVE!
I mean I seriously drool over these products.
http://www.interlam-design.com/
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“I had a serious stencil phase in the last house because a Moroccan artisan taught me how to decorate the doors and I ended up reproducing his work on every door in the house 😀”
Oh I absolutely KNEW you had to have stenciled before. Your doors look GREAT!!
Because you have done stenciling you can appreciate how nice it would be to have the stencils self adhere to the area being painted. I never worked in small stencils only big ones.
I bought this stencil but instead of using it up and down, I turned it sideways and used it down the length of a long boring corridor, I painted it about 2/3 down the height of the wall, the pattern gave me 3 loops so it dd not go full on down the bottom of the wall, basically it bisected the wall. It came out really nice. One thing I learned the hard way on these big stencil projects is that you do the correction using the paint color of the existing wall and and artists paint brush.
http://www.cuttingedgestencils.com/serenity-allover-stencil-trellis-design-wall-pattern-diy-decor.html
The older you get the more we are able to refine what we really do like. I find I am really attracted to curves, ovals, waves, and also geometric designs. And BIG, I figured out I like BIG designs, not smaller prints. Like I like this Tea House Trellis design as well.
http://www.cuttingedgestencils.com/tea-house-trellis-allover-stencil-pattern.html
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