Like Zora Neale Hurston said, “Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.” So it seems wonderfully apt that Lora and Frank Banzali — two magnetic Midwesterners who traded Illinois winters for LA’s endless summer — would cultivate their surroundings with...
“It started raining one day, and a guy came over to sit at the bar. I pushed one of the potted plants over and said, ‘Here, everyone needs a drinking buddy,’ ” our bartender Danny tells us right before he whips up a nicely balanced...
Bud vases should be in every plant lover’s arsenal because: (1) they show off the lovely peculiarities of each stem and (2) they let you maximize the mileage of your bouquets. When someone (cough, cough, cough) gives or sends flowers to C, she prefers to distribute...
We know we're spoiled out here in coastal Southern California, what with our 50-degree lows and all. And yet, C and her friends are always freeezing. So for when we're watching movies or football or entertaining outside, RB built this snazzy heater. It's especially helpful when...
When the Spring Home & Garden Show rolled into town last weekend, we made a beeline for the Del Mar Fairgrounds and jumped right into the flower-hungry fray. It was our first time at the exhibition. Initially fearing it would skew more “home” (that is, the...
A rosemary hedge says you've planned your garden for years. Besides freshening up the pasta sauce to turn around an afterthought dinner, your hedge will fend off insects and make the breeze smell like bread. Our Tuscan blue rosemary is surviving well in our lime-rich...
Amid the stark sobriety of the Fall 2013 collections shown at New York Fashion Week — which concluded last Thursday — there were some blooming bright spots. (Not that straight lines and disciplined palettes can’t have vitality or tenderness: see Proenza Schouler, "quiet giant" Narciso Rodriguez,...
Over at RB's blog, he fills us in on the latest addition to our family of woods, a mammoth gift from a coworker. It’s not every day you stumble across a piece of desert ironwood (Olneya tesota) of such striking size and complexity. I couldn’t turn down the...
We came for the lobster rolls and stayed for the 100-year-old trees. One of our neighborhood favorites, Herringbone in La Jolla, opened splashily last year to crammed happy hours and lively late-night dining inside an arching, blond-beamed former warehouse space. In keeping with the Mediterranean ethos...
Today we celebrated our very first California Christmas. Normally we head to D.C. and New York for the holidays, but, between work demands and travel fatigue, we were content to nest on the West Coast. Feeling nostalgic for her family’s Caribbean traditions, C made a brunch...