What nice people you are! Thank you so much for your kind comments. I love to spend time in the garden. I am only half joking when I say I work to support my garden habit. To be honest, I have not gotten the use from the composter that I should. I need to start over with the proper combination of browns and greens. (I have an old fashioned compost pile too, and it isn't as fussy.) The statues were a Christmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law a couple of years ago. I painted them to match everything else in my garden, mainly because I was foolish enough to leave them outside the first winter and it led to some damage from freezes. The tags are from Oakes. I love to know what a plant is named and otherwise could not remember all of them. There are about about a hundred and five or ten TB iris. I love the really bright ones. (Sheer Elegance is probably my favorite.) Mostly they are tall bearded iris, but I have Dutch iris and a few little tiny things that just appeared this year: I believe I did not get an item I ordered and got these little things instead. I do have one Japanese Iris that I've had for several years, and another odd type that is new... Can't think of the name, but it starts with an "S". Some of the iris are rebloomers...Village Tryst bloomed three times last year! I love the Japanese Maples too. I've had these for several years, and they are growing nicely. I have to prune the one in the back somewhat severely or it will kill off the others by stealing their sun. The one on the right was a gift from DH, and it has a lovely distorted almost sculptural look even when it is leafless in Winter. There is a smaller one that a storm knocked a big oak limb on that almost split it into two halves. I went out with duct tape, taped it back, and it healed up beautifully. Duct tape will fix anything, even a tree. I love to see the pictures of your gardens. I am enjoying this forum and the people who write here. kay

I won't be able to come. We will be in Oregon that weekend. I was hoping we would be leaving the following Sun or Mon, then I could come, but we're leaving on the 12th.

Oh, yes, I can imagine myself chilling out in that room any day, any time. I LOVE everything about that house. I could move right in and would not have to change anything, and I cannot say that very often (if ever). I linked the architects website below with more pictures of this house. If I won the lottery, the first phone call to a non-family member would be to this architect, LOL! Here is a link that might be useful: Red Beach House

I will probably have more to say on this later, but briefly: right now I feel that when it comes to interior design we are in a stasis, and it will be so until there is a new technology that is applicable to furniture design and construction. The last cognitive leap, so to speak, in furniture design was in the mid-century period, when new technologies allowed designers to create wholly new designs--e.g. the Eameses and George Nelson and others who applied steam formed plywood splint technology and plastic embedded fiberglass (from aeronautical sources?) to create now Iconic plywood and fiberglass chairs, etc. Expanded foam technologies lead to the gigantic foam furniture, such as the Ligne Roset Togo. And then people got experimental with blow-up furniture and bean bags. AND --this is key-- they were all processes that allowed Inexpensive Mass Production. The next major furniture movements, the Post-Modernist and Memphis Movements (see "Ruthless People") were cartoonish riffs on existing styles...a sure sign that there was nothing essentially new. Crooked shelves, slanted tables, and chairs made out of glass are interesting expressions, but they don't really add much to the vocabulary of good approachable pieces. There are some high tech applications and materials used to make furniture currently (Graphite Fibers and such) but they are expensive and not accessible for mass production. So, while we are surrounded by technological advances in the "envelope" of our houses (mostly artificial intelligence stuff), I think the interiors are going to be reiterations of what has come before, until an innovative material comes along.