Save D. Landreth Seed Company

On Facebook today, America's oldest operating heirloom-seed house, D. Landreth Seed Company, posted a plea to ensure that an astonishing garden resource will not go out of business in 30 days. This cannot be the fate of this extraordinary business and its centuries-old legacy.

Help reduce its looming $250,000 debt, which has been called in by an investor holding a note: buy a $5 mail-order catalogue now, buy two, buy three, buy more if the spirit moves you. If the debt is not wiped out by the end of September, D. Landreth Seed Company, founded in 1784 and owned today by Barbara and Peter Melera, will be no more.

Click here to read about D. Landreth Seed Company's time-sensitive plight.

Details Count: The Vicomte de Noailles

A salon at L'Ermitage de Pompadour, a former home of Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, and his wife, Marie-Laure, in Fontainebleau, France. The 18th-century building—which was constructed for royal mistress Madame de Pompadour and is now owned by Noailles grandson Carlo Perrone—and its six-acre grounds are being sold for $9.3 million.

“My grandfather also planted scented flowers beneath the guest room windows so when they were opened in the morning, guests would smell their fragrance.”

So said Italian newspaper publisher Carlo Perrone in The New York Times on 30 June 2011, recalling one of his family's French residences, L'Ermitage de Pompadour, which recently came on the market after nearly a century in private hands. The six-acre estate in the commune of Fontainebleau, near Paris, was purchased in 1919 by Perrone's great-grandmother Madeleine de Noailles, Princesse de Poix. It is being sold through Emile Garcin.

The scent-conscious grandfather to whom Perrone refers was French society figure Charles de Noailles (1891—1981), an inspired patron of the arts who created some of the most inspiring gardens of the 20th century. The Vicomte de Noailles's strategic positioning of perfumed plants at his Fontainebleau residence is worth remembering when the subject turns to gardens or even spare rooms, for that matter. I, for one, would cultivate tuberoses beneath all my bedroom windows or perhaps Confederate jasmine or great masses of Oriental lilies.

Many Thanks!

What a pleasant and unexpected surprise!

Interior designer Charlotte Moss called An Aesthete's Lament one of the three blogs she can't get enough of, along with The Style Saloniste and All the Best. She mentioned us in her recent interview in last Thursday's Home Section of The Washington Post. To read the whole thing, do click here.

I guess this means I'd better start producing more content, tout suite!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Filmmakers are always seeking evocative locations for their movies, so it should come as little surprise that a handful of iconic houses have found their way onto the silver screen as integral plot devices. My favorites to add to any design groupie's Netflix queue?

The Hunting Lodge, decorator John Fower's famous country house near Odiham, Hampshire; for decades now it has been the week-end residence of British interior designer Nicky Haslam.

John Fowler's renowned Hunting Lodge, a Tudor-era folly given a fanciful brickwork façade around 1720, served as Vanessa Redgrave's residence in the 1968 Tony Richardson movie "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Fowler smartly used the location fee to build a garden pavilion on the grounds of the house.

A bedroom at Château de Groussay, longtime country house of Charles de Beistegui.

Château de Groussay, the widely admired country house of silver-mining heir Charles de Beistegui, was used as the primary set for director Marc Allégret's 1970 movie "Le bal du Comte d'Orgel." Yes, the movie is in French, but if you don't understand the dialogue, there is enough of Groussay on display, indoors and out, to make this romantic drama about aristocratic adultery in the 1920s (based on the posthumous 1924 novel by Raymond Radiguet) a cinema-library must-have.

Members of the cast of "Le bal du Comte d'Orgel" (1970) in Groussay's Salon Hollandaise.

Well Said: Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz

Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, circa 1940, from Mo Amelia Teitelbaum's "The Stylemakers: Minimalism and Classic Modernism, 1915—1945" (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2010)

"Everything has its place in life. Even objects guests don't normally see should reflect one's tastes and beliefs."

So said Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz (1860—1951), arguably the aesthete of all time, after a visitor to her house noticed a scarlet ribbon stylishly tied around the handle of a common household broom. A Bolivian-born mining heiress who sat for John Singer Sargent, inspired Jean-Michel Frank, supported Stravinsky, and collected Picasso, she left a lasting mark on interior design, choosing soulful minimalism over extravagant folderol.

Outreach Program

A woven fabric used in the London flat of Pauline de Rothschild. Private collection.

Does anybody out there have any idea what company manufactured this pretty stuff, as the U set calls fabric or material?* And if it is still produced?

Woven with chinoiserie motifs such as lanterns and chrysanthemum-like blooms, it was used to drape the canopy bed in Pauline de Rothschild's London flat, in the early 1970s. She apparently brought the fabric to this much admired project, not her interior decorator John Fowler. Its original source remains, thus far, unknown.

Per the baroness's idiosyncratic directive, the graphic black-and-silver fabric, which has a subtle moiré pattern worked into the background, was used on the reverse. She preferred that side's more subtle, silver-and-black colorway (see below).

Rothschild preferred the paler reverse of the fabric. Private collection.

* When Princess Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon, born a commoner, told her how much he hated the material used for the dress she was wearing, the royal snapped, witheringly, "We call it 'stuff'."