Book Report: Design-Obsessed Diane Keaton comes to AZ

Did you know that actress Diane Keaton is a complete house nut? She’s written two design books, is a Los Angeles real estate impresario who collects property gems (a Lloyd Wright home among them), and she has designed product lines for One Kings Lane and Bed, Bath and Beyond.

She has gooooood taste. I’ve long been inspired by her carefully edited style – both in fashion and at home. So when I heard over the weekend that our local Changing Hands Bookstore is bringing her to town to speak and sign books in April, I bought my ticket that minute. (Really, I did. What if they sold out? What if I missed Diane? What if she wore the best vest and tie ever and I didn’t get to see it?)

I couldn’t take it. And so, I’m going, and you can, too, and in the meantime let us have a quick Diane worship session.

This is her house in Los Angeles, which she restored. Note the killer ironwork on the address plaque.

This is her kitchen in that house. Those custom whipstitched lampshade pendants are stunning.

This is coffee table book #1: California Romantica — which I recommend most happily for your coffee tables. It’s a beautiful, fascinating book.

And this is coffee table book #2, House, featuring iconic houses across the globe.

This house is included in the book.

And now, she’s written a new memoir about beauty — personal beauty, and the beauty all around us. Let’s Just Say it Wasn’t Pretty also includes an account of the time she went to Victoria’s Secret with her teenaged daughter, who had a $200 gift card to spend.

The price of a ticket to see Diane at Changing Hands includes a copy of the book — and admission for two guests.

The event is April 11 at Dobson High School in Mesa. Order your book and ticket here.

P.S. This Remodelista interview with Diane is a fun read. And I was thrilled to see two of my most favorite home-shopping haunts on Diane’s list — Juxtaposition Home in Newport Beach and Big Daddy’s in LA. Both are must-visits if you’re in the hood.

 

By |2015-03-03T08:05:52-07:00March 3rd, 2015|Stories|5 Comments

Four Good Things to Read (and Nora Ephron’s pineapple milkshake)

1. I inhaled Jacob Bernstein’s piece in The New York Times last week about his mother, Nora Ephron, heroine without peer. Mr. Bernstein, she would have been so proud. My favorite part of the story:

Another thing she requested was a pineapple milkshake, so Max brought one from Emack and Bolio’s, made from fresh pineapple. But as far as my mother was concerned, a milkshake is one thing that’s actually better with crushed pineapple. Dole.

“When I get out of the hospital, I’m going to go home and I’m going to make a pineapple milkshake with crushed pineapple, pineapple juice and vanilla ice cream, and I’m going to drink it and I’m going to die,” she said, savoring the last word. “It’s going to be great.”

Read his story here.

2. And if you went on a Nora shopping spree after her death, as I did, only to find out-of-print titles, two classics have been reprinted in a single tome. Find it here.

3. In the new Vanity Fair, Craig Brown writes a little skewered ode to Downton Abbey that I loved particularly for the  spot-on dialogue he offers for each of the characters that have invaded our lives. (And after that season finale, I’m never watching it again. Perhaps.)  Vanity Fair’s Downton trading cards are here.

4. Ann Leary’s The Good House just moved to the top of my nightstand pile and boasts the best name of a character this year: Hildy Good, who is a New England real estate agent-alcoholic-witch. I’ve heard that reading it requires a couple bottles of wine and perhaps a housekeeper to come later. (Hildy quote:”Alcoholics, hoarders, binge eaters, addicts, sexual deviants, philanderers, depressives — you name it, I can see it all in the worn edges of their nests.”)

Have you read anything good lately?

 

By |2013-03-12T05:41:45-07:00March 12th, 2013|Stories|1 Comment

On Connecticut, by my mother, the kindergarten teacher

By Karli Rose

This morning…remembering my seven sweet, challenging years of teaching Kindergarten…remembering the innocence of each 5 year old life…remembering the magic we made in the classroom every day… remembering the parents who cherished those first school memories with their precious children….remembering how many of those children now continue to be in my world:  grown, beautiful, adults in the making.
Remembering also with absolute horror the day in 2005-ish when a shooter was loose in my school’s vicinity, remembering a 2 hour lock down in a classroom of 20 tiny, scared and confused children…remembering the helplessness knowing that I wanted to gather those 20 children in my arms and run, hide, comfort, protect….remembering what would I do IF the unimaginable happened…
My heart, my love, my tears are in Connecticut this morning.

JaimeeRose_Mom

By |2012-12-15T07:36:17-07:00December 15th, 2012|Stories|1 Comment

My big news

I have a thrilling new job.

You all know how I feel about local love. Supporting local shops and businesses is important to me. I am thrilled that I get to make this happen.

 REstyleSource.com is the national guide to local shops and restaurants, launching in January. Like your favorite blog or magazine, REstyle Source will show you beautiful places and designer spaces. But when you spot something that you’ve just gotta have, we’ll show you where you can get it in an independent store near you.

Also – we’ll be your tour guide to the best local shops and restaurants in the big cities we all adore. (My globe-shopping adventures have been well documented here, so that’s going to be fun.)

Leaving the newspaper after 14 years was heart-wrenching. During my last week, I drove around town listening to songs about lost love, and all the lyrics applied. I’ll continue my work as a journalist in freelance forums now, and I’m excited to make that great. And this blog, as ever, will continue right here.

REstyle Source is about everything I love: design, beauty, restaurants, cities, small discoveries, large dreams and the joy in sharing that with others. What an opportunity to be a part of something so right.

So, come find REstyle Source on Facebook and Instagram (@REstyleSource), where it’s all Christmas, and all kinds of fun. (Just WAIT til I show you the gift wrap we’re working on for next week.) Don’t forget to get on the list for our launch here. Come share the local love.

*”Joy” photo by David Mills, design by Kristin Alber for REstyle Source.

*Kitchen photo by Michael J. Lee Photography, design by Katie Rosenfeld and Rachel Reider Interiors.

By |2012-12-10T11:30:44-07:00December 10th, 2012|Stories|5 Comments

“Jaimee Rose Wedding”

When it takes place next year, when we find the right plans, this will be my second wedding.

My Web maestro Elle tells me that when you Google my name, the most popular suggested searches include “Jaimee Rose Wedding” and “Jaimee Rose Divorce.”

Lovely.

Oh ye searchers of “Jaimee Rose Divorce,” this time, I’m older, wiser, and not spending $739 on a cake. Wedding #1 was at the St. Regis, and there were only 50 guests.

That’s not why there was a divorce, though. It was a very good cake.

He was also a wonderful man. We were high school sweethearts who discovered that we had little else in common as adults. We were married for two and a half years.

These are the things that friends say to me now:

“You get a second wedding!” “Another dress!” “Another bouquet!” “I can’t wait to see the pictures!” “You’re going to go nuts with this wedding!”

No. I am not.

This one will be small – even smaller than the first. Our parents. My Grandpa. Or maybe even just us, in Italy. Maybe in the late spring.

I have my eye on a dress – nontraditional, something a little like the one above.

More than anything else, I have my heart set on finding a feeling.

It’s a different way to plan a wedding — a list of memories I want to make, instead of centerpieces to buy.

In my mind, there is a Beach Boys song and Tyson is smiling a particular way that happens only a couple times each year.  His eyes are tight on mine. He’s doing a funny shuffle dance with his feet. His cheeks are pink and puffed from the deep grin.

There are people swirling around us, and I can feel their love.

Just that.

By |2012-12-07T05:10:14-07:00December 7th, 2012|Stories|5 Comments

Thanksgiving

I am grateful for: peanut butter M&Ms, black leggings, The Container Store, my mother, my mother’s MBA, my mother’s MBA-informed advice, and the Nora Ephron quote that says to be the heroine of your own life. I am grateful for my fiance who always buys bananas so I can eat breakfast in the car.  I am grateful for my nephews who got into a fight on family picture day, resulting in this photo that makes me laugh and need to squeeze  them immediately.

I am grateful for the good journalists who showed me how to do what they do, and the writers whose words make me try harder, and the people in the world who share their stories and their hearts with me, both strangers and sisters and friends.

I love people.

I am grateful for kindness and those that give it.

I have been given so much.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Photo: Kapri Rose Roberts Photography

By |2012-11-22T05:19:30-07:00November 22nd, 2012|Stories|1 Comment

My Autumn Reading List

One of my writer friends likes to call me and tell me about fancy dinners he’s having with fancy literary people. I am always jealous for two reasons: the names I know make my head spin, and the fact that there are names I don’t know means that he knows more than me.  Here’s to catching up with him and long fall evenings under blankets with hot cocoa:

1. Many of the literary folk in my small orbit are speaking in sonnets about Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, a National Book Award finalist about growing up on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation. I’m really looking forward to this.

2. I love Sam Sifton so much that if he wrote a book about camping, I might buy it, just for his description of a s’more. But Sam Sifton on Thanksgiving? Pass the pumpkin pie. Sifton was the New York Times food critic, and is now the national editor, and offers gorgeous sentences even on Twitter. His small, smart book tells the best way to make and serve and enjoy the November American feast. (And is a brilliant hostess gift, if you need one.)

3. Michael Cunningham and Julia Glass and the  Empire State Building appear on the cover of These Things Happen, which I bought on a day when big things were happening for me in New York. I love everything about it and I haven’t opened it yet. Richard Kramer wrote for “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life,” and to me, little else matters. I’m all in.

4. The Heart Broke In is also worthy of devotion — a compelling, can’t-put-it-down read, I’m told. Those are the best kind.

5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan is about a bookstore in San Francisco where the occupants  prefer paper and ink to technology and think Google might be evil. Also they talk about fonts.  Jaimee porn.

6. Lastly, and quite possibly my favorite, just for the first line from the book description:

A woman embarks on a dazzling new phase in her life after inheriting a sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy.

Lydia Millet’s highly praised Magnificence is going to be the book I wish I’d written, I can tell. I grew up in a house filled with taxidermy. My father has a state record, and has placed in the top three in the world for shooting an elk with a bow. Once, when writing a story about taxidermy, I came upon my dad’s famous elk (head) in a source’s garage. That was a really weird day.

Millet is a Pulitzer finalist and a new Guggenheim fellow. I bet she hates all those paper antlers for sale in the mall.

P.S. Friday is a retail extravaganza in Phoenix/Scottsdale: Union opens at The Biltmore, Restoration Hardware opens its new concept at the Scottsdale Quarter, and The French Bee moves to 32nd St. and Camelback near Molina. Tonight I’m hitting the opening soirees for all three — tune in later for my after-hours report.

If you go to Restoration Hardware for the 9 a.m. Friday ribbon cutting — and you’re all invited — chairman Gary Friedman will be there. Yes, the man from the catalogs. Who is as nice-looking as the furniture in the catalog. You could see if he’d tell you where he got that leather jacket.

By |2012-11-08T05:39:12-07:00November 8th, 2012|Stories|1 Comment

Writing is the worst job in the world, Junot Diaz.

Writing is self-taunting, mind-aching, perfection-added punishment. It doesn’t pay well. It ruins your sleep, weekends, manicures. Also, all of the writers I know are at least 11 percent insane.

Junot Diaz is one of the best writers to come along in the last couple of decades. He has a Pulitzer, and his new book, This is How You Lose Her,  was shortlisted last week for the National Book Award. I hate him, because I want to be him. (Also, most writers hate each other at least half the time.)

The New York Times Magazine interviewed him for its Inspiration issue. It helped and entertained me immensely to read about the battles of a master. (Also, the book is coming home with me from City Lights in San Francisco. I’m just starting it, but I’m pre-ordained to adore.)

NYT: How did the writing go?

Diaz: Miserable. Miserable. The stories just wouldn’t come.

Did any of the stories come easily? “Miss Lora” was the absolute easiest. I tried to write the first page maybe a dozen times in the last decade, and I would never get past that, so I never wrestled with it too much. And then one day it just hit, beginning to end.

That must have been a good day. It was the only good day I had in this whole book. The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that’s all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely. I was so always heartened by people like Michael Chabon who write so well and seem to write so fast. Edwidge Danticat writes really well and really fast. I was always heartened by them. I keep thinking one day it’ll happen. It might.

Find the entire interview here. In the printed version that came to my doorstep, there were curse words. I appreciated that particularly.

By |2012-10-16T05:35:11-07:00October 16th, 2012|Stories|2 Comments

Sutton is here, and JR is on NPR, and you’ll fall in love

I came home from dinner last night and found my friend JR’s book on my doorstep  and his voice on NPR. Sutton is here — an important book at an important time, by a writer who has a particular ability to move in on your heart.

He owns a fair portion of mine. Last night, I listened to my friend talk with Terry Gross on NPR, wiping away tears as he told stories and talked about boxes of birthday presents from a ghost of a father, and how all he ever wanted was “a Dad.” And then, while he read Terry Gross all the big words he wanted to cram into his Yale application essay, I laughed like I do only when he’s sitting across from me at dinner.

And then I opened his new book, admiring the cover he so carefully chose, and the map that he walked on a trip to New York, texting me photos from all the important places, and I sighed again over the first line that he recited to me like a secret, long ago, long before he’d written much more.

From the first line, I knew he had something great.

In the back of the book, I found this — the proudest I’ve ever been to see my name in print.

Listen to his NPR interview — that’s what dinner with him his like. Read his book — he utters sentences that breathtaking in real life. (JR describing a prison: “the sound of men in cages, nothing can compare.”) And then you’ll understand why being on J.R. Moehringer’s list — with access to his mind, and heart, and his words — is one of my life’s great joys.

By |2012-09-27T08:40:38-07:00September 27th, 2012|Stories|2 Comments

Politics on Facebook – do you vote yes or no?

As a journalist, I don’t talk about my political views in public forums — Facebook, Twitter, or even on the bumper of my car.  No stickers. No campaigning. No contributions anywhere, ever. We’re not permitted. The press should remain impartial.  I was having a conversation last year with my friend Len Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post and current VP, and he said he doesn’t even vote for presidential candidates. He said he works hard not to form an opinion about the people his newspaper covers. (Then again, Downie is a man who has been summoned to the White House by the president for chats about said newspaper stories, so his issues are on another level.)

I’m a registered Independent. If someone wants to talk about politics or religion at dinner, I ask them about their shoes. And yet, Facebook. Facebook and politics. Facebook and people announcing their politics. Facebook and people announcing they plan to unfriend one another over politics. Facebook and the number of my friends who like Mitt Romney. Facebook and the number of my friends who like Obama. Facebook and my family and politics.

It would be so much better not to know.

Growing up, the mayor lived on our street, along with a town councilman. During election season, my friends had Cooper! Berman! campaign signs staked into their front lawns, and I asked my mother why our lawn was always empty. My parents weren’t journalists, but I know they thought it was important to vote.

My mother said the signs were ungraceful. She said that a Cooper! Berman! sign in someone’s front lawn wasn’t going to change the way she planned to vote.  And she didn’t want those signs to change the way she thought about the people who lived in those houses — or allow a sign to dictate the way that people thought about her.

Facebook is the new front lawn.

I’m keeping quiet – as a journalist, and as a daughter of a graceful, keen Mom. What do you think? Will friends’ political posts on Facebook sway your vote? Or will it sway the way you think about your friends?

I kissed a Democrat/Republican gum from Design*Lab in Mesa. In my house, we have both kinds. Because Tyson and I? We’re not voting for the same person. And neither of us wants to talk about it.

By |2012-09-26T05:04:49-07:00September 26th, 2012|Stories|3 Comments

Title

Go to Top