Getting Goodies in Gordes

 

 The ever jaw-dropping entrance to Gordes in Provence

 It’s been almost a year in the making, but one of our Paris Provence trips kicked off today in Provence, and the other one is kicking off Friday in Paris!  It’s an exciting time for us although a huge lesson in coordination.  Luckily, some of us are more organized than others (not me!) and so between us, we hope we’ve covered all the bases.

 

 Linda loves figs more than anything and she said these were so sweet, they tasted like fig newtons!

The fun part started for me a few days ago.  I’m the lucky one who got to prep the house for the prep.  I arrived to glorious sunshine on Saturday, and just had to prep and fluff for Linda’s arrival.  Then Linda breezed in with more gorgeous weather in tow, and the two of us set about to prep and fluff for the week of ladies:  It’s a great and eclectic group that spans four decades, includes two mother and daughter combos, and has a smattering of northern and southerners.

My first stop, when I arrived, was to one of the local farmer’s markets, where I found fruits and veggies that I knew Linda would love.

 Do you know about this sweet delicacy, Cavaillon melons? And the price? 10 euros for the entire plateau. Take that, Paris!

 A little display of Linda’s favorite things to greet her upon her arrival, including the happiest sunflowers!

Then, after she arrived, we went to the fabulous Gordes market and stocked up on more goodies for our girls.

It was a lot to carry, but we managed … and then we had to take the requisite photo to document it.  Ooh la la, will this be enough wine for the week?  Doubt it!

 

 We’ll take three bottles of this, four bottles of that, 6 bottles of this one over here … and yes, that should get us through the first night or two!

 Wedding reception anyone?

 

 We love to give our ladies lavender sachets … and this is one of our favorite vendors in Gordes.

 Oh and let’s also tuck a little sweet smelling soap into their welcome “kit.” It will make their suitcases smell so good!

 We were lucky to find the prettiest monograms for our lavender sachets … and luckily we got everyone’s initial!

 

 Oops, we’ve bought a little more than we’d planned. It may be time for a new market basket (or two!).

 

 It’s so tempting to stock up on pottery, especially these adorable shapes and colors.

 Obviously, with all this hard work, a girl’s gotta eat … so we headed to one of our top favorite restaurants in the area, Le Jardin du Quai, and indulged Chef Hebet’s wonderful menu of fresh ingredients cooked to perfection.

 

 We just love everything about the restaurant at Jardin du Quai, especially the garden setting.

 

 Cheers Madame, and has anyone ever kept track of how many of these poses we now have?

Then it was just one more stop, to the florist for a couple of welcome bouquets:

 

 Ahhh … just love the cabbage roses.

And a touch of color to brighten the living room.

Is our driver booked every day?  Check. Are our restaurant reservations all made (it’s not always easy to get in to some of our favorites, like the Bistrot du Paradou or Le Fournil in Bonnieux).  Check.  Are the rooms pretty, prepped and welcoming to our ladies? Check!

 We know someone will sleep very soundly in this bed tonight! Notice the foutah at the foot of the bed. They’ve replaced all of our pool towels at Les Murets, and we just love them. They get softer with every wash.

 

 Bienvenue! Welcome!

Is the terrace welcoming and ready for the big arrival? Check. After all the t’s have been crossed, the i’s dotted and the checks checked, it’s time for me, sadly to depart.  Because we get to do this fun check list all over again in Paris, as we await another group of ladies from the U.S. in Paris, before the giant change over on Monday, when they go to Provence with Meg and Linda brings her group to Paris!  Oh it is complicated.  And there will be lots more to organize in the next two days with Meg.  But somehow I don’t expect anyone to feel to sorry for us.  We love these trips for everything that they give us:  A chance to bond with new friends, a way to show off some of our favorite parts of the world, and an opportunity to get away and see what’s out there …. that might catch our attention for the store or the gallery.

So how’s Linda doing, greeting the group in Gordes?  Looking good! One mother daughter team has just arrived, and another guest has already dipped her feet in the pool.

 The first adorable mother/daughter team and our fabulous driver Christophe, in his colorful converses and his signature Lacoste shirt. We are soooo lucky to have him!

 Aaah …La vie est belle! We hope you have a wonderful week in Provence and Paris!

 Check, check!  Can’t wait to see these ladies in Paris in a few days!

Ta ta,

HH

We're Live...For Real!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 18 months it’s that the minute you think you have it all figured it out, it’s time to change, catch up and adapt.  It’s an understatement to say this keeps us on our toes…but we thrive on this sort of stuff, so it’s fun.

Such is the story of our little website. If you’ve been following us since we were just a fine art gallery, you might remember the first rendition of our website. Ann, who is very tech-y and has a great sense of media design, literally generated the first go-around of our site all by herself.  It was wonderful.  If you were viewing art, it was easy to see images and get information. Behind the curtain, it was a breeze for us to update and manage.  All we had to do was some clicking on the keyboard and images miraculously appeared clearly on the screen.  There was plenty of room to add our little messages and gallery news and we had great fun with that. So we all happily cruised along for a good many years with Huff Harrington Part One.

Remember this?

 Fast forward five years later to the opening of Huff Harrington Home…and our frantic realization that we really needed a multi-faceted website to handle all the product we were offering at the store. We had fine art from the gallery side and then a myriad of product from the Home side.  What do to? We put our heads and hearts into it and hired a talented outside team to help us design Huff Harrington Part Deux. (We had gotten a glowing recommendation on Mara and Kristi of Works-Progress from one of our favorite authors, New York Times best-seller, Emily Giffin.)

We had a blast coming up with the creative part and spent hours and hours agonizing over cute icons and logos that perfectly summed up who and what we are.  We didn’t want to be too serious, but we didn’t want to be too frivolous, either.

 Our designers came up with these adorable icons that we fell in love with.  Meg’s on the left and Ann’s on the right.

 

This little chair is perfect as the icon for the store.

 

A cute frame pops up for the gallery.

 And just like any other proud parents, we have now thankfully forgotten the painful first round of photography that didn’t quite mesh with what we envisioned in our heads.  We’ve also glossed over the endless cropping and re-sizing of images that seemed to go on for days on end.  We finally started to get the hang of it and the result was beautiful, really capturing our personality and our vision for the branding of Huff Harrington.

 

 Our site’s home page. We’ve always loved the elegant imagery and clean white space.

It worked well for a while but then we started noticing little glitches that we didn’t just love.  The art had become a hyper-sensitive sliding screen show and I, for one, could never manage to get my mouse exactly where I needed it to be to view a painting.  We had too many messages bombarding our viewers.  And, although it was absolutely gorgeous, we felt it was a little clunky and hard to move around.  In the back of our minds, we were both thinking “uh-oh….”

And now a little backtrack:  in December, right after the blur of the holiday shopping season had passed and we actually had a couple days to recover, we assigned each other a homework project:  pour yourself a big glass of wine and write down our goals and objectives for 2013.  Since we’re basically always on the same page, it wasn’t a surprise that we both listed “E-Commerce!” as something we wanted to get up and running this year.

 

Our very important annual board meeting.

Guess what that meant? A whole new website designed specifically for e-commerce and the easy-peasy click of a button to purchase whatever it is that captures your fancy.  Sounds like a breeze, right?

 

It was high time to get into e-commerce even if we did go kicking and screaming…

So, it was back to the drawing board….and the stark realization that we had to upload literally every single item we were planning  on selling.  Oh, and re-photograph it, too and make sure item numbers, prices and quantities were correct. And then because we like to give as much information and character as we can to anything we do, we had to go through every item and write a fun description.

 

 One of the never-ending descriptions we wrote over the course of a month or two.

 It doesn't sound like much but we knew we were in for the long haul when we hit 2,000 skus on our inventory.  And don’t get us wrong. We both love to write but after a few weeks of mind-numbing descriptions, we started mumbling “we simply couldn’t resist this 19th century something-something-something” or “add a little ooh-la-la with this one of a kind…” in our sleep.  You get the picture.

 

 Luckily, we had our secret weapon lurking in the back office with us: smart, efficient and adorable Emily who’s been with us since before we opened our doors to HHH.  She’s an excellent and clever writer, knows all there is to know about managing social media and such and it was no surprise to anyone that we happily promoted her to help us with marketing the gallery and the store.  But it didn’t take her long to start mumbling in her sleep either and we all started talking just like our descriptions on the website.

 Emily has been spending the last few months measuring, measuring and measuring.

In the meantime, we were fretting about the idea of giving our e-commerce website a little personality.  After all, we like having fun and think that’s an important part of who we are. Struggle as we did, we just couldn’t come up with the right personality for our e-commerce.  Was it a little character called “Shoppy”? Was our cute little bag icon cute and easy to understand? In the end, we decided on our adorable shopping bag icon as the clickable front door to our site.  But there were plenty of sleepness nights.

 Click here and Shop will get you straight to Huff Harrington!

While all that was going on, we had lots of boring financial stuff to figure out (including a couple 4 a.m. wake-ups thinking “Oh no! Did I give them the right account number for the websales??!!”  Of course we did, but you know how it is at 4 a.m.

 For a while there our days were starting at 4 a.m. with racing minds and panic attacks about all the little things we were afraid we forgot. Luckily there weren’t many.

The whole time, our quiet and supremely efficient and capable web-designers, Mara and Kristi were calmly holding our hands.  We kept begging for one more day to fix an image, or another couple hours to repair some copy on a description.  Finally, they had enough of our whining.  ”You’re never really ready. It’s like having kids,” they told us.  ”Just hit the GO button and be done with it!”  So we took a huge, deep breath and said “GO!”

Before we announced it to the world, we decided to very, very quietly go live and figured we had some time to check and double-check that everything was working the way it should.  We ran some test sales.  And then, when we were least expecting it, we got our very first web sale and we were ecstatic.  We actually had the product in stock and…that’s when we came to a rumbling stop.  Aggghhh!  The control key we needed to use on our point-of-sale system had mysteriously disappeared so we couldn’t clear the sale through inventory.  We hadn’t gotten the correct link from UPS to begin our service with them.  But it was great because we were able to work a couple kinks out.  Two steps forward…

 

 Our very first web order is for one of our favorite products: the Laduree bath line. We’re one of a handful of retailers in the U.S. Ohh la la!  Our lovely customer is as crazy about them as we are.

And then today: in the very hours before we announce our cute new site, we beg our accommodating designers for one more thing: a little banner proclaiming we’re live.  They, of course, oblige…and the banner is there in top left corner wherever you are on the website. How smart is that?!  This is a screen shot, but please, please check out the real thing!

 

 At the last minute before announcing our new site, we begged for a little banner that would announce our e-commerce arrival.

So you get the idea.  Unlike your kids, whom you basically love all the time, we tend to love the website one minute and hate it the next.  But we figure we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future so we better learn to get along.

So, please…click here to arrive at our new shopping site.  Have a browse and let us know what you think. We hope you have positive and happy comments but we’ll take the criticisms very maturely and hopefully learn from them.  In the meantime, huffharrington.com is still our little baby and we love it to death. And we hope you do, too!

Ta ta.

Normandy Chateau, non merci?

 

 The Chateau de Beaumesnil, non merci.

 Last week, while one Huffington regaled us with her escapades to the Bahamas, relaxing island style (and had most of us salivating over her days of endless beach walks, long restful naps and extensive reading – did she really read seven books?), the other Huffington Madame headed to France, expanding her horizons and visiting Normandy for the first time. We chose Normandy to celebrate my daughter’s college graduation, and in honor of her love of France and interest in history, we focused on the D-Day invasions and all the emotional events wrapped around world war II.

 

 My idea of a beach vacation: Utah Beach in Normandy. I know, who goes to the beach carrying a purse and wearing a skirt? OK, this was NOT a beach vacation – I just had to compete a little with Bahama Mama!

Although art history and houses are obviously my thing, and while my husband might tell you that I scour every real estate magazine no matter where we are, I loved being in Normandy on vacation with family and wasn’t the least bit tempted to go off hunting for a chateau — or art — to buy. Besides, although owning a chateau in Normandy sounds like a cool thing to do, it’s never been on my radar screen and I’ve never felt the slightest envy towards chateau owners. In fact, when I conjure up a “Chateau in Normandy” I think of some huge turreted bleak and grey medieval manse that would most likely be haunted, cost a fortune to heat, and have very bad plumbing.

This has always been my image of a “Normandy Chateau”:

 Chateau d’O. Too pointy for me!

Chateau Carrouges: Hmmm … I am not a turret fan!

 

 Chateau at Pont St Pierre. Perhaps a little too haunted looking for my taste.

I’m happy to say that we had a marvelous time, visiting art-filled sites, marveling at cathedrals and inhaling all of the history that surrounded us without giving any thought to the Normandy chateau thing.

And then on the very last day, when we were driving out to Omaha Beach for the second time, meandering through gorgeous fields and admiring the cow pastures, this gorgeous architectural apparition reached out and grabbed me:

 

The perfectly proportioned, gorgeously majestic chateau that took my breath away.

And the rest is history: All of a sudden, I get it, I’m hooked and I want in. The Normandy chateau doesn’t have to be that big scary turreted Disneyland concoction: It can be something with gorgeous proportions, elegant in its setting, close to historic battle fields and within a stone’s throw of magnificent beaches. In short, a Normandy chateau could be paradise – or at least an extension of Huff Harrington Home.

I loved the vacation and the visit to Normandy, but now that I’m back, I can’t help but dream about that gently proportioned, 18th century chateau that sits gracefully on a hillside, surrounded by French manicured gardens, with rolling fields sloping into the distance … and the wheels start turning. I instinctively start the real estate search (and I have to admit that I’m an expert at searching the French real estate listings!), and this is the first one that piques my interest.

 

 My first foray into chateau hunting turned up this delightfully proportioned 18th century beauty!

Here it is with its adjoining guest house. Pas mal!

Replete with original chapel, caretaker’s cottage and orangerie.

 

 I love the “boiseries” of the interior walls. The purple couches would have to go … but that’s an easy fix, especially after I got Sam Jones involved.

 And the kitchen has lots of potential. It reminds me of something else I love …

Charles Spada’s kitchen in Normandy – see more on that, below.

So how much is his gorgeous 18th century property which includes the 5,000 square foot chateau, a two bedroom caretaker’s cottage at the entrance of the property, a guest house with 3 bedrooms, a private chapel, stables, garages, an orangerie, a vegetable garden and formal gardens, all of which sit on 27 acres of rolling hills, within a 2 hour’s drive of Paris?

Well, we’re not really in the real estate business so we don’t want to get in to prices, but to give you an idea : Our Normandy estate has the exact same asking price as this 875 square foot apartment in Paris 7th arrondissement (Photos: Explorimmo.com):

 For the same price as a Normandy estate, you could buy this apartment in Paris

 About 875 square feet in Paris’ 7th arrondissement

 

Not exactly an eat in kitchen, but it does have a view … sort of!

 Rm w vu?

Or for the same asking price, you could purchase this NYC apartment, on Bank Street in the West Village:  (Photos courtesy Trullia) 

 

The listing reads:  Rare and amazing sponsor unit. Completely renovated two bedroom/one bathroom located in the West Village on picturesque, tree-lined, cobble-stoned Bank Street.

 

 Newly renovated windowed kitchen is well equipped with granite counters, white cabinets with lots of storage and stainless steel appliances including a Wolf range, Liebherr refrigerator and Bosch dishwasher.

Extremely sunny East and West exposures with street and city views.

 100 Bank St #5H

Which one would you choose?

I love Paris and New York, and the Normandy thing is admittedly more of a crush than a serious affair at this point, but I know I’d start by doing some research and fantasizing about the Normandy chateau, and maybe get some inspiration from Charles Spada’s wonderful renovation that was featured in Veranda Magazine last year..

 I remember loving this article when I first saw it in Veranda last year

 I love the boiseries and the color that he painted them

 I may be more of an art person than a plate person, but I’d still take this room any day!

 

 Sadly, we just sold our leopard skin rug at the Huff Harrington Home today … and I was fantasizing about covering a couch with it!

 Again, it’s the boiseries that gets my heart racing, although everything he has done in this house is absolutely charming

And then I’d get our magnificent design diva, Sam Jones involved (she is the one who helped me with the Paris apartment), and … well, can you see where this is going?

Are you coming along for the ride?

Ta ta …

HH