Year: 2017

Urban Christmas Decoration via belle vivir blog

We’ll be heading to Chicago soon to experience Christmas in the City for a few days.  Yes, this is what we do when we live in Dublin, Ohio.  We have spent Christmas eve in New York City almost every year, however this year the farthest we’ll go is Chicago.  For now I just dream of next year when our new home will be ready for a Christmas decor overload.

Urban Christmas Decoration via belle vivir blog

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Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent's Los Angeles home

Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent are behaving a lot like Ellen and Portia lately.  When they are not selling their homes, they are buying and renovating others.  There must be something in the California water.  By all means this isn’t a complain.  We all benefit from these beautiful creations, including us, mere virtual consumers.  Designers Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s Los Angeles home is what dreams are made of… it’s what uplift spirits and.., you get the point.   Nate Berkus’s refined eclecticism is on display in every room of the 9,000 square feet 1928 Spanish Colonial home.  The landscaping is like something out of a fairy tail, encircled with stunning vegetation and a colonial courtyard.  The couple told Architectural Digest that the house was in great shape when they bought it and as a result they didn’t have to do more than just decorate it.  The decorating process required stripping, bleaching, and waxing mahogany paneling in the dining room, replacing fireplace mantels, replacing the kitchen fixtures and surfaces.  The overall aesthetic of the design is a bit on the masculine side as Jeremiah prefers “We go for a very clean, masculine look. We don’t like to live with a lot of color,” Brent.  If you haven’t watched the couple’s home renovations Amazon show Nate & Jeremiah by Design, make sure you do.  It’s full of inspirations and design ideas.  At the end of this post, you can watch the video where Nate and Jeremiah show their beautiful new home.  But first, see below the beatutiful images of Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s Los Angeles home.

Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent's Los Angeles home

The living room is furnished in European mid century pieces and objects.

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Don’t think because it’s winter you have to stop wearing skirts.  There are two ways to approach this.  One is relying on winter appropriate fabrics, winter boots, socks and other methods, and the other is to pretend that cold is all in your head.  Since the last one is only good in writing, I say let’s go with the first one and let’s not freeze to death.  As this roundup shows skirts can be used year-round.  To prove that, Here are 12 Winter skirts that will make you actually love wearing them in the cold…

18 winter skirts via bellevivir

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Instagram has become more than a social platform where to share images and showcase our work, aesthetics or ourselves.  For many, it can also be a very resourceful travel guide to find everything from best destinations to visit to hot and hip restaurants to explore.  Instagram is more than a travel guide and besides the trolls that rely on low tactics of following to then unfollowing to gain follows back for a day, it’s still a fun social platform to be part of.  So of course it’s uber magical to experience Christmas via Instagram with its endless source of virtual travel experiences on steroids.  One minute you are outside Atlanta Holiday House and the other you are in the lobby of Claridge’s Hotel in London.  For sure Instagram has its pros and cons, you may have heard about Selena Gomez erasing her Instagram app once she realized she had become the most followed person on the social platform, “As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out,… It had become so consuming to me. It’s what I woke up to and went to sleep to.” Selena Gomez told vogue.  Now that. Is not healthy.  There are a lot of sad stories out there about people who accidentally died while taking a risky selfies, others go as far as almost getting naked for a few more followers.  Is that really necessary…?  I prefer to take things as they are… a simple social platform that can provide great source of inspiration.  There are other things in life that are far more important… like family, health, food on the table, friends, and most importantly enjoying our surroundings.  As I’ve been saying for years our surroundings influence our deepest being.

Christmas via Instagram belle vivir

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