yay.

no pictures, no humor, no sarcasm, no irony, and certainly no gloating. just a small, quiet, hopeful, and somewhat tear-stained, yay.

let's take a break from this whole election thing, k?

as you know, the maison21 blog is completely non-partisan- we are only in favor of pretty 'round here, so until the "pretty party" is invented, maison21 will never publicly endorse any political candidate, or try to influence anyone's vote.

so we thought we'd take a break from all this election stuff, to share a photo of the prettiest 'lil buccaneer we know, our friend lucy- who along with her parents, joined maison21 in attending his neighborhood association's completely adorable halloween carnival. isn't she the cutest?

now, after that cute break, you can get back to fretting over the outcome of tomorrow's election. remember, maison21 is completely and totally non-partisan. swear.

oh happy day!

it's the little things in life that make maison21 happy- like finding mrs. meyer's now makes a scented dryer sheet, so m21's towels and sheets can have his favorite lavender scent- yay! a little more 'spensive than bounce, but in belt tightening times, it seems like a truly affordable luxury at $7.99 a box. who says money can't buy happiness?

a royal proclamation

bath renovation preview

we recently briefly touched on a bathroom renovation project we are currently working on, so we thought we'd give you a bit a sneak peek at the room in progress.

the idea was to take a bathroom so tiny and depressing, that no one in the family actually wanted to use it, and turn it into a little jewel box of a bath- something people will actually want to be in (a variation on "if you build it, they will come", in this case- "if you make it pretty, they will use it").

we are going from this (taken the first day of construction):
to something looking a little more like this (m21 concept elevation drawing):

as stated, bath is teeny-tiny, so the challenge of working with such tight space was actually turned into a virtue. since wall and floorspace are so limited, we could splurge on materials- in this case white carrara 1" x 2" tiles for the walls and 2" x 2" carrara hexes for the floors, all capped by a sexy carrara molding. in a bigger room, this could have been cost prohibitive, but here, it totally works within our budget.

same concept on the fixtures- since we eliminated the too small to be used tub, and turned the space into shower only- we could take the money saved on buying a new tub (and faucet, etc.), and buy slightly more glamorous fixtures than the total budget would normally allow.

if budget was not an issue, we'd probably purchase everything from urban archeology, as they do the particular look we are going for better than anyone else, or we could also happily go with the glamor of waterworks (how we love BOTH of them), but we managed to get the look we wanted by selecting more reasonably priced fixtures from restoration hardware, and ended up saving quite a bit. restoration has been having fabulous online weekend sales lately, and we got everything for 20% off (and the weekend after that sale, they offered $100 off any purchase greater than $400.00, so it pays to check the website before buying). they also are offering no interest-no payments for one year, on purchases greater than $750.00, so buying selections from their "dillion collection" was a no brainier- the collection has the 20-30's vibe we want to reflect the architecture of the home, but the prices were easy on the pocketbook:


we also went with restoration's sutton grand sconce- a terrific value right now, on sale for $199.00!
bath should actually be finished fairly quickly, so we'll post the results in a week or two, and you can decide if the finished room lives up to the concept! we're pretty sure it will- we are quite excited about it!