PARIS VINTAGE HAUTE COUTURE

Here I am looking in the window of the shop of a dealer in vintage fashion. The well-known dealer whose shop is in Palais Royale shall remain nameless since the staff was not too nice to us. Beautiful things though.

AMIENS

We went to Amiens which is famous for its cathedral. The cathedral is huge but everything else in Amiens is charmingly small-scale: narrow little canals snaking through the old town, itty-bitty houses and a tiny, lovely, botanical garden. The excellent museum (photos below) is not so small; in fact it's a rather large small-museum but does not seem to have its own website. One of my favorite things in Amiens was an interesting small garden-housing development called Square Darlington that must have been built around 1950--like Stuyvesant Town but with just 5 or 6 buildings; you can see one of its brick "towers" (3 stories) just beyond the beds of the botanical garden, below.

MONTFORT L'AMAURY

Monfort l'Amaury is the charming village near the Chateau de Groussay. It is a wealthy area, so wandering around reminded me a bit of browsing around someplace like Old Roslyn, with cute, expensive little boutiques and restaurants and lovely historic architecture. Below is the cloister of the cemetery.
http://www.ville-montfort-l-amaury.fr/

MORE GROUSSAY

More photographs from the Chateau de Groussay including Charles and me in the Chinese pavillion:

CHATEAU DE GROUSSAY

Thanks to a very gracious invitation from Jean-Louis Remilleux, the owner of the Château de Groussay, we visited the chateau and toured the rooms with Mr. Remilleux himself. As you may know Groussay was the home of Charles de Beistegui from 1938 until his death in 1970. Throughout that period Beistegui remodeleled the 1815 house, adding rooms in various historic styles and building a series of follies in the park. Beistegui's heirs sold his meticulously chosen furnishings at auction several years ago, however Mr. Remilleux has done a splendid job of reconstituting Beistegui's fantastic vision.

http://www.chateaudegroussay.com/

FRANCE - NORMANDIE

I'm back from France and still recovering from my state of exhaustion. I will be posting pictures from the trip in installaments. After arriving in Paris we commenced our whirlwind itinerary with a visit to the Musee Jacquemart Andre, http://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/fr/jacquemart/, followed by dinner with Liz O'Brien (http://www.lizobrien.com/) who was in Paris for the Biennale des Antiquaires.

Musee Jacquemart-Andre:

The next morning we left Paris to spend a few days in Normandie with my friend artist River Dillon, aka Denis Angus, aka Denis Dandurand, in his beautiful beachfront home at Grandcamp-Maisy were we joined a delightful, international group of friends:

http://www.riverdillon.com/

http://riverdillon.blogspot.com/

http://riverdillonlife.blogspot.com/

Denis and me:

Lunch on the lawn:

Beach in the background:

The house:

More coming soon . . .