HOUSE TOUR | The Eclectic Louisiana Home of Textile Designer Rebecca Vizard

on today's episode of homeworthy we're taking you to the Louisiana Delta for a look inside textile designer Rebecca vizard stunning home nestled within a bed of oak trees her grandfather planted in the 1950s Rebecca's home is a wonderful celebration of artistry community and most importantly family her vast collection of Rich textiles artwork and tokens from her travels are graciously layered in each room Rebecca's imagination continues Outdoors where you'll find a former trailer base turned into a Chic wagon where they watch movies and eat popcorn and not to miss a flourishing Garden overflowing with the most beautiful zenyas enjoy but first a big thank you to ag1 for sponsoring today's homeworthy episode truth be told when it comes to diet I need a little boost in the Nutrition department and that's why I like taking ag1 every morning all you have to do is fill this Nifty little bottle they send you with 8 to 12 oz of cold water then get your little scoop one scoop of it top on we're going to go like this Bon a petitte it's made up of 75 high quality Whole Food sourced ingredients carefully curated to nourish your body's systems Hol ically it's delicious so head to my link in the description box below to get a free one-year supply of AG vitamin D3 plus K2 plus five ag1 travel packs with your first purchase of ag1 enjoy you're watching homeworthy where we believe every home has a story like And subscribe for more hi homeworthy I'm Rebecca Welcome to our home in the Louisiana Delta on Lake Bruin come on in [Music] hi I'm Rebecca vizard and this is my sweet rescue beagle Lulu and we live uh in the delta in the middle of nowhere between natch's Mississippi and Vicksburg on the other side of the Mississippi River so we are in the Louisiana Delta on lake bruan near a town called St Joseph and uh I actually grew up here and I tried to escape I thought I wanted to live in the big city but um accidentally I ended up back here and it's been a good thing when we first moved back here I stayed quite frustrated all the time because uh I remember going to the grocery store and um they didn't have limes and I just had a meltdown one day and just said it looks like a lemon but it's green can you please get them because I was drinking gen and tonics at the time and you know you can't have that without a lime so anyway uh what I can say is uh since Amazon Prime has come around I love living here because I don't have to worry about running out of uh printer ink or uh I can get whatever I need and the you know in two days it's just it's incredible and honestly it living here and not being able to get everything you want has made us a lot more resourceful we now grow the vegetables that we can't get at the grocery store and we love doing that and then we figured out it's a lot it's even better than whole food to grow your own so living here we have adapted and we've learned a lot and I think it's really enhanced our lives and I would have never believed that I I really was pouting the first four years we were here but uh it's like I say I love it now I wouldn't want to live anywhere else well once we moved back and uh I figured out that my dad was so happy having his grandchildren here my husband was so happy hunting and fishing and playing golf and uh I could tell my children were so happy here and I could see it was going to be a good healthy place to raise children we decided to build this house which was a huge statement that we are okay we're staying now so we built this house in 1988 uh well we moved in in ' 89 and um so when we designed the house I worked with Michael carbine in New Orleans and William son and it was it was quite an undertaking because I was 29 years old and we said we're trying to build our forever house on hopefully not our forever budget and they got it and they were great and so we built a wonderful big shell and uh every year we just added something it just and it's turned out after gosh from 89 to now we've been here quite a while so we've had a lot of fun projects uh and the house is not quite finished but almost there this is the part of the house we call the Breezeway uh the original house is over there we added this space and the studio because my business was starting to make our house quite mess so now we uh this is where I work every day this has been an area I love having all my textile books close to the studio because if I have to research something I usually can find the book um and I've I have learned a lot from all of these books and yet I guess my knowledge of textiles has come from flea markets museums books and my mentor who just died of 100 at 102 in France and she taught me a lot because she taught textiles in Florence Italy uh before World War II and then moved to Paris where I met her but anyway my my books I don't know what I'd do if the house caught on fire I would be throwing books out to everybody because I I I've I've collected them from museums all over the world and elsewhere the other thing in the Breezeway I really love is how this fig Avy Vine came in and it came in through one spot kind of in the corner and it used to green up in the spring and then sometimes it would die down a little in the winter but um one time I was having my Gardener cut back some things cu the Fig Abby was growing up the side of the house and I said cut everyone back except this one Vine right here and I pointed to it and I I Put A little dab of um Sharpie marker on it and of course he cut it and so now we have this dead Vine in here but I kind of like it I'm having a hard time thinking about taking it down um and my husband actually is very glad it's not growing anymore because he thought it was going to take over the whole place now let's go to the kitchen y'all follow me we'll go through the Breezeway to the original part of the house down the hallway of memories crazy pictures of the family welcome to my kitchen uh really my husband is the chef in the house and it's kind of crazy but our number one seller in our business business is the seasoning salt which is hysterical because uh it was such an accident that I put it in and somebody bought it and gave it to people all over the country and so we finally had to put it on the website and now we sell tons of it but he's the chef and he's really kind of a scientist and he just makes up things all the time he doesn't need recipes and he chops the herbs and then whatever he doesn't use in our me throws in in this bowl so every batch is a little bit different and um it's really it's really fun when people are hanging out here on weekends everybody tends to like turn it and so it's very I guess it's kind of cathartic to sit here and turn salt but um this table is one of the first pieces I bought for the house and it came from a great shop in in Baton Ridge called Fireside Antiques and the cool thing about the table is it is um it has all these different storage places it came from a restaurant in Paris and it even has an area that's kind of dug that was dug out on the end where they said they had a meat grinder so the funny thing too was our kitchen was not complete and I bought this just knowing it would fit I don't I mean I just knew it would and my husband every when they saw it they said there's no way that's going to fit I'm like sweetheart Pro I promise you it is going to fit and we brought it in and it fit perfectly and actually my husband said good because there were four men that came and it took my husband and six men to move it and he goes good because it's not leaving but anyway um the other thing I really love is our sink but what I really love is if I have a dinner party and it's too late you can hide the dishes on this side and this side is really a deep piece so you can hide a lot in there any anyway and uh we have art by friends and I love being here looking out the window when you're washing the dishes and sometimes we have Wildlife that comes up and occasionally we'll have a bear that gets a little close and I can't stand when I look down the road and see a bear it's a little frightening I do get the dogs in but so far they haven't gotten too close but it's kind of like Wild Kingdom out here well while we spend the most time in the kitchen we did spend every evening uh in sitting around this table when the kids were growing up and this was our nighttime routine and it was so I mean I just can't believe that I was able to raise a family that ate dinner around a table every night uh this is a wonderful uh sculpture by Bradley Sabin who is just it's so incredible and this is another piece from Fireside actually both of these are and I've Loved this I've used this in so many ways it's at one time it was our bar uh another time I used it in the big room for our books uh it's a very versatile piece uh the art this is a hay fredman that um I just love I love the mood of it as I said I was an art major so I do I do love the art and these are two pieces that I bought at a flea market for $25 uh and I just I loved them and now now when you find them they're a lot more expensive but that th those were early purchases for uh this house um the fabric is so fun I kept thinking I had too much wood in here and it was driving me crazy and I was either going to paint that or paint this table and my friend Janette witson who has Garden variety design had this fabric on some of her chairs and so I got her to uh order some for me and it kind of cooled it off in here and I think made it okay to have this much wood so um once I did that I'm I'm not as anxious about painting everything but but I may someday I don't know one of the things I love about the layout of our home is that we can we can use this place to eat or we can set all our food out and open the doors and go to the porch which is the place where we really hang out and uh I would love to show you the porch and show you where we have many meals out here the funny thing about the architectural style when I was talking to the Architects I said I wanted a New Orleans style Farmhouse Lakehouse hunting lodge and they kind of laughed and said well yeah good luck with that and as it turned out um that's really kind of what we got uh and we used a lot of old elements from old buildings around the area and it kind of feels like it's been here forever I've ended up with quite a mix it's sort of uh traditional farmhouse style but we do have really high ceilings which kind of is the New Orleans influence um I've gradually decorated and I love vintage and antique things I love things with the history uh and things that um you know will tell tell a story basically and particular I love textiles as you know uh I am uh I would say I've gradually collected things and the other thing is I was an art major in college and so I really love art and I really love Contemporary Art so it's kind of a mix of antique textiles Contemporary Art a few traditional pieces of art I don't know I'm just just whatever whatever inspires me comes to the house and it seems to to work I don't know why but it does and this is our screened in porch that I really love it's funny when we first built the house we didn't do the screens because I thought well you know it'll it'll impede the view of the lake well we probably screened this in about 10 years ago and this is where we live now we live either in the kitchen or out here and most of our meals are eating on this porch because you know even I mean we have 75 degree Christmases a lot of times and so it's more fun to have a dinner party out here than in the house for some reason everybody likes eating outside um my husband and I hang out here a lot in the afternoon evenings he will grill on a little baby green egg and we'll have a little wine and we just talk about the day and it's this is just magical out here this is that we're going to have some company tonight so I went ahead and and set the table the way I would for company and um what's great about this table we got these other two tables that work as a bar at the end but also if we have two more seating we need we can just pull the tables to the end and we can see 16 people out here and um it's just it is really fun every everybody wants to eat on the porch and sometimes when it's even a little too cool we'll just grab I have a lot of cantha blankets inside and we'll just wrap in those and and everyone will eat out here and the people who haven't been here before I always let them sit on this side because usually at night the Moon is is glistening on the lake and they I love for people to see that it's just really special sometimes we do candles but sometimes there's a breeze and we can't um we can't use candles but I love these because you could turn the lights on uh they they recharge and these actually were a gift from uh a bunch of friends who were up here and the electricity went off at their house so they called and I was out of town and I said we'll just use our house and so they were having a dinner party out here and uh they couldn't figure out how to turn the lights on on the porch and so next thing I know I get a box of these lamps she they said everybody was eating with their iPhones over their plates so uh that will not happen again and this is one of my favorite vases because it's so easy to make an arrangement and the nice thing is when you're sitting at a dinner table you can see over it um I uh carry these in my shop uh even though we're out right now but I just love the design of that and they've been around for years I just think they're Classics and um and they they don't stress you out trying to make an arrangement and the zenyas from the yard you will see a lot of zenyas the plates actually were my mother's uh my parents wedding uh presents and these are spoed and it's a pattern called gisha that they don't make anymore and when I was getting married I I told Mama I did I said I can't find any uh any uh plates that I like better and she said well look I never use those those are my fancy plates and finally I just decided she had something like 18 so I just decided they' become our every day plates and I just I love them and they make me think of my parents being young and in love and getting married one of the other best things about the screened in porch is it's right off our living room and when we have parties for more than 16 I mean we've had as many as 30 or 40 here and everybody ends up being able to to sit for dinner because we open up the living room well hi birdie this is our living room and um I love this red color and the funny thing about this color I think this was about the 10th time I painted it I couldn't get the color right in here for anything and finally I got a red and I really wasn't happy with it and my dear friend Anne connley said B I think this color is just too aggressive for you and so I went you're right that's the problem so I mixed up a glaze having been an art major and the funny thing was I hired a high school student and he uh he wiped he painted on the wall and I came along behind him and wiped it off and it just toned down the red where it reads as red but it's really kind of a pink and the cool thing I think is that it doesn't look feminine you know I went in a place that my husband was real happy in it but it's a pink but not a a pinky pink not a girly pink and the other thing I realized um is how much I like mixing all the Reds now because it's got different uh different shades of Reds in there so it got kind of goes from an orange to a pink and um for instance when I bought these chairs at an antique shop I thought oh I'm going to have to recover them and I brought them in the room and I went you know they kind of work and as well as this pink piece that I got from U Watkins Culver in uh Houston and I thought it was going to go in the living room and when they brought it in I thought it looked great with the walls and I just didn't believe it when I bought it one of the things I'm learning the longer I'm playing with color is that you know Reds and pinks and oranges can all kind of blend together uh particularly when you have a big eclectic mix with all kinds of things in there um I love these birds these came from a shop in Houston called ARA and I actually bought these for a client and when I brought them home my husband said he can't have them I want them and so I went oops all right um so we kept them as I've said before I love the way our house melts with nature and I love bringing in natural uh pieces this is a great example of um a stump from um an old cypress tree and um I just think it's it's phenomenal it's so architectural it makes you realize that really nature is probably one of the best AR Architects or artists there is um I love uh the way the colors in the gold kind of go with the wood in that um I love the way our dogs just get everywhere in the house and feel very comfortable um I also love um this chandelier I'll have to tell you more about my projects but this one we called a cork delier and it's made out of wine Corks And um I hire atrisk kids to help me make all these chandeliers so I'm going to show show you another one in just a bit but these projects are just dear to my heart because they are um helping the the needy in our area and they have fun and they get very excited about making their own money I try to catch kids when they are about 16 or 17 before they sometimes get sucked into the welfare system or something but once they get that little itch and love making their own money they tend to get jobs and and do well um my first Group of Seven kids six of the seven all have done well have gone on and they're all working and good productive citizens and happy so it's just one of my favorite favorite things that's come out of living here um the things in here that I find the most interesting the table uh the coffee table here is from Mac maon in New Orleans and the legs are from the W the old Woolworth Building in New Orleans that was part part of their balcony and the top is an old um Limestone piece that was used for making lithographs uh that was also an early purchase for the house uh the other thing I love this particular artist Deon matsuo he uh lives in New Orleans and my friend an Conley has an art gallery in Baton Ridge and I walked in one day and just said an I have to have that and it was the first piece she had gotten from him and I just loved it because I love the movement I love the structure and then I realized it's a man holding a baby and the woman's pregnant and I thought well it could represent my family so it's pretty special um then I've just collected a lot of different art from different people I have a couple of hunt slums um I love this is actually a Picasso um and it's got a different um drawing on the back the um I just just you know I love art I can't seem to get enough art and I don't mind mixing the really valuable with the kind of fun um you know one piece my nephew did uh when he was in high school and then we've got serious artist and this is my friend Bill Joyce who um is a famous uh cartoonist he did the characters in Toy Story for U Buzz Li ear and Woody and he's done several movies that have been pretty successful well this room originally when we built the house we didn't have a lot of money so this room wasn't even finished and I mean we just had a bare light bulb hanging there uh my children learned how to ride their bikes in here and they learned how to rollerblade in here I mean there was one sofa in the middle of the room with a little table and they would just go around it like the NASCAR drivers but anyway um the room just kind of evolved I mean we knew we needed a bigger space for eating and the dining table actually came from my aunt and it seats 16 uh it has a lot of leaves but the funny thing about it was um all the leaves were different colors of wood and now I'm so sorry I painted the table because I thought it kind of looks like striped wood in the middle but now I look back on it I think I can just picture them well they needed another link and they just went out and cut whatever tree and made and made these different um pieces to go in the table and I I don't why I didn't think that was cool at the time but now I may strip that table one day but I do want to show you the funniest thing here the Hat Box the Hat basket this is um where uh a lot of fun goes on and whenever I can find vintage hats at a good price because you know they get way overused we we pulled them out and um and it and it's hysterical how everyone seems to take on um you know a different Persona when they put their hat on and the other funny thing is Michael and I will be in the kitchen cooking and you know the party started when all of a sudden someone pops around the door and they go and we look at each other we go oh my gosh and of course it happens every weekend so we pretend like it's the first time we've ever seen that but everybody seems to really get going with the has let's go upstairs and mind this it we originally use this for the kids to keep them coralled in here and now we use it for the dogs when they get wet so they can't go upstairs and jump in our beds let's go welcome to the bedroom this is obviously one of my favorite spots because I'd love to get in bed and read a good book um but we love having this porch off the bedroom and the screen so when the weather's really nice we leave um we leave the doors open as a matter of fact one morning um we were lying in bed and all of a sudden we heard this huge just it was so loud it felt like the house was shaking and I was horrified I thought maybe you know there was a bomb or something was happening a plane crashing and my husband and I jump up and we run out and evidently it was the beginning of a bass fishing contest and like right at 6:00 a.m. every boat went and it just the everybody's house I think vibrated there were so many boats on the lake but uh that was also early when we moved here now we sleep through it we don't even know notice it um this is really a great the our bed spread is old we made out of old sheets of course I love putting a long pillow on a bed this is one as a matter of fact this is the easiest thing to sell to men because men hate beds with like 10 different pillows on it so you just have your pillows you use to lean back on and one decorative pillow so if anybody wants one of those that's how you convince your husband you're going to get one anyway um and once again I love the SE donn's over here um this is um a really amazing piece we now are representing a man from usbekistan who produces the most beautiful suzanis on real silk uh not on polyesters or bamboo and the threads are all silk and he just does an incredible job and I can't tell you we must have I don't know at least 150 suzanis in our stock right now and this is one of my favorite pieces uh in the room because really for a bedside piece it's got so many nooks and crannies that you can put your you know your cuticle cream or your lip stuff and all your little nighttime things right there and um I actually found this on eBay and I was so nervous to buy it but it was came from California and I talked to the guy and he just said he was redoing his house and going all modern and I just am tickled to have this piece um it holds a lot um the other thing I can't wait to show you are these [Music] curtains uh when I was early on the nean trip when I was buying things for the Neiman's job I found uh this beautiful tablecloth and the amazing thing was it was already cut in half and I thought what a shame that big beautiful piece and it's got this amazing ribbon work and embroidery and um I was about to cut it up to make pillows and then I started thinking I needed drapery in my bed room and so I just took a smaller piece and added it to some fun silk and I mean I think it just transformed the room to have this uh now my very favorite thing in the room is my line and witch and wardrobe moment but I saw this in France uh at a famous artist atier when I asked to use the restroom uh in French they pointed at the amoa and I thought how did I screw that up anyway I opened their onwa and it was the cutest little powder room so for years I look for the right piece and this has added so much to our uh bathroom because we have so much more storage now and it just makes me feel magical when I walk in and out of here I think something Good's going to happen but we have a great space in here and um you know another thing that is one of my favorite tricks I used to do with interior design when you have a great View you hate to have curtains going to the top so I always have little shutters made like this so that you can have privacy but you can still see the stars so at night if I get in my tub and read a book and the stars are out it's just once again it's a it's my happy place so and this is our porch their screen porch up here we uh we love it as I've said because the breeze could go through our room and we hear all the nature sounds in the birds um I love this tree out here it looks like a bonsai it's been my favorite tree for the longest time that was one of the biggest ones and now these are catching up and I'm almost sad that I I don't have such a good view anymore uh this is an old swing for well it was a dayb bed from France and we just converted it into a porch string one of the funny things about this porch is we didn't have two doors but years ago my son when he was about two locked himself into our bed room and uh I was totally panicked cuz he was two the key came out cuz it was one of those oldfashioned locks he we couldn't get in we were just completely panicked so I climbed out that window and we didn't have the door here so I had to like Edge along the go along the edge you know like I don't know Batman or something and then come in the door here and thank goodness this door was open so I could get in and he was having a blast in the bathroom just digging through all the cabinets underneath and pulling everything out and I'm like no telling what he would have gotten into if I hadn't been able to do that but we love being able once again to open up our house to Nature and uh this really this helps a lot and this is a nice contemplative Place sometimes to sit and read a book and this was my son Ross's room which of course didn't look like this when he lived here but we love um it was such a small room and it was perfect for him but we you know always tried to make it work with we didn't have much room for furniture and we stayed in a hotel one time in France that we were laughing my husband actually walked in he goes you got to be kidding me because there was about two feet all the way around the bed but they had these built-in pieces on the sides of the bed and places to hang your clothes inside and it turned out that it was perfect and we were very comfortable in there and uh and so we said while we were in Paris we said this is what we have to do in Ross's room so um this worked out great we love it because you can plug your cell phone in in the side and there's plenty of storage and then I love the curtains in here because you know I love so many different textiles and particularly a lot of Eastern things so this is a Elizabeth Hamilton textile and of course I love having the fortuni in here because fortuni is one of my favorite Fabrics it's hard to beat a good fortuni and then the other thing that's so fun from being up here is it feels like you're in a treehouse when you look outside because we have these giant oak trees that are uh that are right in front of the house and really surround the house and um all of our guests love it and one problem is all of our dogs love it too and so they love to get on every bed in here and watch out the window and look for squirrels and so I have to keep a lock on the outside to keep all the rooms closed and uh because all the drawers are very old and so when our guests come they usually what is that hook lock on the the door for they think we're going to lock them in the room but uh anyway it's just to keep the dogs from uh they've learned how to open doors they're very clever speaking of that couldn't have been better timing this is see what I mean and um most of our guests are very dog friendly and actually bring their dogs with them when they come but every now and then somebody doesn't want any dog hair on their bed okay Lulu you ready to leave are you ready to leave let's go show them something else one of thing great about the porch is we have all the doggy doors so the dogs go in and out all day long and uh I don't know if you can hear the birds but they're magical right now I want to show you the playhouse this is the pl the the building I was talking about that we moved here after Katrina um we nestled it here in these big Live Oaks and at night we have lights so they shine up in the Oaks and it gives us a nice uh you know area that we can see at night even though there no lights out here um my husband loves to cook out here but as you can tell this building was built in the 1940s welcome to the playhouse um and it was called the playhouse because when the soldiers in World War II built it this was where they played poker and this was all they did was play in here and so uh we still call it the playhouse and it is funny sometimes people come and go okay y'all are staying in the playhouse and they're like well that sounds fun they don't they they don't know what it is first thing I wanted to show you is the beard delier um when we moved this this building here uh I knew it needed a light fixture over the table but I just didn't want anything too serious I don't know I felt like um I don't know I just couldn't find anything and once again I just hung up bulb there until I figured it out and then one day it dawned on me I started thinking wouldn't it be fun to do something with bottle caps like I started thinking about uh a transition from a room like in the 60s and 70s when they had the beads hanging and then I started thinking wouldn't that be fun to do it with bottle caps and then I thought what if we do the chandelier with bottle caps and bingo so this is the first one and I hammered most of these though anybody that came to visit for a weekend down on the dock we would all sit there hammering when you took a break from swimming and after I made it I started thinking this is brilliant because we can teach people how to make things out of trash and teach them a to pick up the trash and B you know to make some money off something that doesn't cost anything so that's when I started my little beard delier Enterprise um this house is so special the stove even is the original from the 1940s and my husband cleaned it up and it still works even though it kind of scares me but he trusts it I usually leave the house when he when he turns it on um this is the area where everybody hangs out you know during hunting season my son and all his buddies will come here and just pack this place um I have to say my sister-in-law is an artist and U and she has uh very proudly put our family motto above the the fireplace which is smart it's smart it's stupid it's stupid and usually whenever somebody in the family does something stupid that's what they say and then also when they do something smart we all say smart is smart and stupid is stupid but anyway um this is just a mix of furniture uh after a trip to South Africa I became very enamored with all these bead chairs and started thinking in my black and white in here I just had to have it and then this was a chair that I found at uh Fritz Porter in Charleston and I just love it the playhouse has several rooms rooms um this room is almost exactly like it was the termites had eaten up so much of the back that we had to take a lot of boards off the walls in the back to replace things here and so the back rooms are are painted but my favorite thing in here are the ducks look at the ducks on the wall and you're not going to believe this but as we were flipping through her uh old guest book we found this one and this is probably 11 2742 uh this was Lou s vider from New York New Jersey so it was probably Thanksgiving it was too far for him to go home and he says you put me in a f in fine shape for the war effort thanks from the bottom of my belly and we think that the guy that did these cartoons of the man with a bandage on his nose and the horse was probably the person who painted on the walls and his name was Lewis ravelli and I looked him up online and evidently after the war he was a cartoonist so his says I honestly can say I never had so much fun breaking my nose on Honey's neck and honey was her her horse so it was really this is such a special place and I will do everything I can to preserve it I just love it oh when people walk inside our home I want them to feel welcome I want them to feel like oh boy this is going to be fun and uh oh yeah we we keep a party a big basket of party hats in the corner I mean you know if it starts raining outside we can't play outside or or be barbecuing or whatever we then have a hat party we start the blender up and just you know have fun and uh and we play games with kids with the hat so we play dress up and then if somebody if people have their kids here we would uh make them do a show for us and so we'd all set up with cocktails in hand and watch our children perform and with all the a hat basket is highly recommended everyone should have one when you walk in a a home and it's not so perfect which you know and it has a little patina and it looks like it's lived in I feel like that is what makes you feel what what makes you feel at home and feel like the people who live here don't just live in a structure it's part of their life and it's just um I'm feel very lucky we got that at age 29 I don't know how I got this lucky I I I'm amazed that we I could come up with this and um and still love it at 64 so I uh I don't know the problem is I haven't slowed down and uh at 64 I still try to do everything I did at 29 so and this house makes you uh have a little more energy probably than some places let me take take you to the the the real treat is uh the vardo or a gypsy wagon and I got a great story about that but also love these big live oak trees my grandfather bought this property in the 1950s and believe it or not he planted these then you know it's this Rich Delta soil you would think these were 200 years old but anyway let me take you over there and we hang out around the fire pit a lot particularly in the fall but I really can't wait to show you the uh the gypsy wagon because my husband says I travel so much I'm really kind of a gypsy here birdie here birdie I bought a book called uh shed Chic a while back and my husband loved it and he had been looking at this old uh trailer base that was just out in the pecan Orchard that was grown up with weeds and he kept thinking what can I do with that that trailer and so he got the idea to surprise me and make this gypsy wagon for me and he did a great job I mean he had an architector draw architect draw up so that it's got the little slanted walls and here it is we have lots of fun in here sometimes we come out here with a big bowl of popcorn and we can pull this out and make a bed and we spend the night in here and it's like you feel like a kid at a slumber party it is just a blast and so we drink wine we watch a movie we eat popcorn and then we snuggle up in the gypsy wagon but um it was so fun just finding things for it and it's really a great place to um to have fun and come in and read books this is the book shed Chic that inspired my husband and the funny story about the gypsy wagon is uh he kept leaving on Saturday morning saying he was going to he was going to go get some extra work done at at his office and and I didn't pay paying attention to it and I just kept about my business and he was doing this for a long time and I never thought about it and then one day I was cooking something and I ran out of the ingredient and so I called him and I said hey I'm getting ready to run in the grocery store do you need anything because the grocery store is about 10 miles away so uh he goes no no he goes I'll go get it I'll go get it while I'm in town and I said no that's all right I need it right now so I jumped in the car I went in of course I drove right by his office and didn't even notice his car wasn't there and then uh got what I needed drove back and then he walked in the house that afternoon and he said well I guess you realized I really wasn't at the office today and I felt my bottom lip going uh and he goes you know I'm I've been lying to you and I was thinking oh my gosh who is he having an affair with in this town of 700 people and uh I was just like blown I I was really about to crumble and then he goes every Saturday morning I I've been working on a vardo for you and of course the first thing I said was what's a vardo but anyway I couldn't believe it he brought me down to see it and he said I'm building it and he had a carpenter friend helping him and he goes and you can decorate it so it's just been fun to find things here and there and I mean this is some fun paper that I got years ago at creative Co-op and I didn't know what to do with it and one day I went I'm just going to staple it to the walls in here because my idea is I think I'll have this for a while and then I'll get tired of it and I'll change it to another wallpaper but anyway it was ingenious the way the carpenter figured out to just pick up the bottom and pull this out and U the two mattresses go down and it makes a queen bed and I love the suani in here it hides our little refrigerator and and all the things under it and the best thing and the worst thing about staying out here we love listen to the birds in the morning when you're waking up and it's just so magical but all night long the dogs hear all kinds of things and they are howling and jumping up and everything and we're letting them out and letting them back in so that does kind of spoil a little of the magic but it is it's a fun place as I was telling you about this guy representing usbekistan look for instance look at these little stitches around here and this is why I think he makes the most magnificent suzanis I've ever seen um this is called a flicker Stitch see how one stitch is white the next one is is black and it just it makes them pop uh after you see these with the flicker Stitches the other ones while they're beautiful they just don't have the depth that these do this almost gives it a ra a real raised feel and and a liveliness to them so this is these are my favorite kind of sell the ones with the flicker Stitch what I think I I just love our home because it also is so interactive with nature and it's so durable we did concrete floors I don't freak out when kids come running through in wet bathing suits I mean I think I'm what I'm so proud of is I've managed to make a place that looks really good but is as you can see dog friendly it's very kidfriendly I guess what I I've done is we've created a weekend house that we live in every day and it's and it's really been fun I mean you know we have a nice life we during warm months which is about April to October we uh go down on the dock take a lake bath watch her hair uh put on Macon and sit down there and have a cocktail with my husband and then come up and eat uh it's really pretty nice and on weekends the house is full of people we have company every weekend and it's gotten to be nobody we don't even ask anyone people just call and say okay we're open this weekend and that weekend which which one works for y'all and we go oh okay and and so we're happy to have all this and to be able to share it with our friends and family welcome to the Garden uh see this good Delta soil it grows grows things really well uh this is so exciting though I've had such a wonderful variety of zenyas come back up uh I'll usually come out here and pick zenyas just about every day and because zenyas love to be cut and you go down and cut just where the next one is coming up but these these are some of my favorites look at the different colors in this paddle and they blend so well with the other pinks I just I love using these to to put Arrangements together um and then the thing the reason I have so many zenyas is I go through and when I find a bad one I just clip it and throw it in and so these reced every year uh you have to watch out sometimes I have to pull out the purple ones because the purple ones seem to be dominant and if I don't watch out they'll all be be purple so I did that this year the first ones that bloom purple I pulled about 75% of them out and now I got this mix of all these other colors so to me the fun thing to do go okay you plant there I would like for you to go there and let's do some of these uh these seem to be so healthy they almost look like dalas they're just fabulous um I love these colors and I have a great vase I'm thinking of putting them in that a friend of mine made um some of my favorite are these kind of they're like zenyas with perms if you notice they're a little bit frizzy on the ends and these are called Cactus zenas um when Sarah my daughter was little she would always go mom can we go cut some Happy Flowers and then one time I came in with roses and she goes but no those aren't the Happy Flowers anyway uh so zenyas actually remind me of my sweet Sarah look at that color in there just great oh this is a good one too more of those mixed colors all righty maybe just a few more and we'll have it we'll add some little purplish ones purpley pinks this is an area where we grow our citrus trees and last year at the Nashville antique and Garden Show I found this little um Greenhouse from Belgium and so we've been so excited because now we have a great place to to roll the trees in and save the Citrus if it gets very cold last winter we had one day of eight degrees which we have we've very rarely get single digits here it usually gets down to freezing Maybe once or twice in the winter but most of the time we're almost tropical but not quite um this is another little good patch of zenas because I just threw any other seeds left over and I'll have to show you my seeds after I do arrangements and um one thing about the uh my Landscaping I have learned I was very excited after the um Chelsea garden show that I went to a few years ago and I decided I wanted this waddling everywhere in um my Gardens because it was everywhere in England and um once my friend Janette witson with Garden variety design told me where to get it which I can't remember right now but I was so excited and I have figured out that the climate in Louisiana is not going to work for these they really start deteriorating pretty quickly but it's okay that I tend to like things with patina so we'll just see how long they last but I do recommend being in a drri clim CL it oh and these are the kale that made it through the freeze and I have learned if you cut your kale from the bottom and um keep doing that you can end up with topiary kale it's kind of looks like something from Dr Seuss but you know I love anything weird this is a vase that I just love my friend uh chip Sloan made and it's it appears to be a Chinese vase but these are actually the cypress trees from our lakes here in Louisiana and um I keep hoping he will make more but he seems to be one of those artist types that's in and out of town all the time and changes and does different things and I so love everything he does but I think these are my favorite this is going to be a very basil batch in the winter we have more cilantro but this is this is summertime salt and we just let the salt dry out the leaves and then the more we stir it the more they break down it's kind of fun well in college when I was an art major my dad said what are you going to do after college and I told him I would like to go to New York and work for an interior designer and see if that's what I want to do and then I would like to go to interior design school and my dad said honey that's just for Rich ladies to have fun you're going to have to make living so I was really frustrated but I thought oh darn okay so I got out of college and basically uh had a few different jobs but when I got married um and I had Sarah who is now working with me uh I was trying to figure out a way to work from home so I started handpainting baby clothes long story short I ended up splatter painting socks for Marvin's JC Pennies and Dillards and socks were coming to our house in 18 wheelers and so if you are your if if you are your daughter had uh splatter painted socks in the 80s and early 90s they came from here and they were painted right outside of this house and that's actually when I made a nice amount of money and so I decorated my house and then many friends would come visit and I had they would insist I come help them and very quickly it turned into flying all over the country doing interior design for lots of people in New York and Nashville and Houston and all over the place and then I realized I was about to lose my mind because it was too much for one person and uh and all my clients were whenever I made a pillow for somebody just a plain pillow cost a lot of money and I kept thinking gosh there somebody ought for this amount of money you should be able to get something really special so originally I just I made these pillows for my clients well people love the pillows and so more people wanted to hire me because of the to get the the pillows and um eventually it I just I had to give up the interior design and it was difficult because you know you end up loving your clients and then they become friends but uh Katrina hit and at the time a lot of my work was in New Orleans and so everything was dead I mean nobody cared about their houses they were just trying to you know get electricity build back U they needed sheetrock they didn't need pillows and so it gave me a lot of time to just focus on the pillows and start reaching out to other designers and other uh other stores and the pillow abses really took off why don't you come in the studio this is where I work every day uh when I'm not on the road and um what we do in here is I find textiles for instance this came from a Turkish C and what we do is we cut out all of the little areas and you have to be so careful not to cut the stitches in the back or the piece will come undone um this is also something called a b um a Devol Stitch if you notice on the top it's gold threads and what they would do was they'd bring the gold threads over and then catch it on the back with a cotton thread because they were trying to save the valuable thread and they didn't want to waste any on the back um we have I've learned a lot from taking textiles apart and this process or this stitch has taught my ladies how to uh sew them back on to a better velvet a stronger Fabric and learn that's taught them how to hide their stitches so we've just I mean it's every day is a learning experience um this is where I actually design and I dig around and pull out something and I lay it out here and normally you will see me like this because I keep keep a tape measure around my neck all the time and half the time I run to town and I forget I have it around my neck but I measure everything out and um and then I have a design sheet where I draw the the picture and uh anyway I'll draw it out I'll make a description I figure out the price and the funny thing is uh I actually started out as a math major in college because math just came easy to me and I'm so glad because every day figuring out the cost of these pillows is one big it's like one big algebra problem and I go oh thank you you math you know people always say how are you going to ever use math well it's important but we have some beautiful pieces I particularly love this one look at the sequin work on this it is just amazing and uh and the good thing is it's in it's in good shape a lot of times the sequins are are coming up we will have to trim very closely as we put it down and you try to tuck this under so that um so that it doesn't show when we finish the pillow uh this is just an amazing Cape from probably the Ottoman Empire um you know I think I think from uh turkey but it could be anywhere in that area uh I just thought that was amazing and I'm surprised an LSU fan hasn't bought it with the purple and gold but the other thing that people don't realize all my trims are antique and so for instance when I go to use a piece I only have this much and I may go ah this this is the perfect patina and then when I go to say this isn't quite the perfect patina but I'm just showing you how to do it when I go to put this around I'm like okay this is looking good and then I get to that and look I need two more inches and so I like kind of go uh okay let me go back to the drawing board and throw it over and find some more but if you want to look in these drawers I have quite a collection of these metallic tapes that in France are called galon and we have the smaller sizes over here and I'm always looking for these kind of pieces the when I first started out I used to it took I was so slow at designing because I didn't have so many uh trims and one day uh in France I found uh in a flea market a huge box and I mean there must have been $10,000 worth of these trims already taken off of things because a lot of times we have to take them off pieces like this um so that's time consuming but anyway the guy I was telling me how much they were by the centimeter and I said okay will you start measuring and I'll uh come back I'll go have lunch and I I came back and he said um he said well I've only gotten about a quarter of the way through and will you start picking out from these and I said okay and he looked so mad that he was having to to measure everything so I said okay well what about what would what about for the whole box if I just buy the whole box and he goes H he goes how about 3,000 and I mean that was when designing became a lot easier because I had so many different patinas in that one box and I tell you what it weighed a fortune because this is all metallic I mean these pieces these are heavy pieces and um I did pay a lot to have it shipped back but that was that was a turning point in my business because I ended up with so many different options but I feel very fortunate that while I was doing interior design that the businesses kind of overlap because the interior design basically um helped me buy so many of my textiles so that gave me a nice inventory to start and then gosh in 1996 or seven I think demons bought for 22 of their stores and so that's when I really got into the business very heavy I had to I had to go to France with um bags and bags and and back then I try I dragged them all home myself which was not fun my my friends would who were traveling with me would call me pig pin because I'd have these big rolling bags and I would drop them and dust would just flop out of them and it was really kind of embarrassing they didn't want to I'd have to take a cab by myself cuz they didn't want to be in the cab with the with the bag so but um it was you know it was a lot of digging learning and fortunately I was you know very curious and I've been doing this so long that it's funny how like I have found the same priest robe I found the first one in France I found the second one in Italy and then I found the third one in Mexico and they were both from the late 1800s and I thought that must have been the most popular vestment during that time I mean it was just crazy to find the same thing in three different countries home means a place where you just want to go in and Cocoon and you just love it and and honestly I love having land I think it's the home is part of the landscape even and if you have a home that opens up to the outdoors you are happy in any season in the winter I love being in this big red room that's so warm and with the fireplace going and in the spring summer and fall the doors always open to the screen porch and you know we love hanging out there and cooking on the porch and eating dinner on the porch so I just think home is where you're comfortable and you feel cozy and you feel L thanks for watching for more homeworthy content be sure to like And subscribe

Channel: Homeworthy

Views: 548,435

Keywords: home, home tour, house, house tour, homeworthy, architectural digest, veranda, quintessence, louisiana, textile, designer, interior designer, textile designer, eclectic home, eclectic design, home decor, traditional farmhouse, lake, lake house, pillows

Id: vh-okSF9s6Q

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023