Many appreciaters of TR cocktails have been asking for updates from the homefront…. We are doing our very best to make our Houston home as cool as we possibly can. And rest assured, in the meantime we are absolutely welcoming visitors and serving cocktails of many sorts.

Some of the moving process is kind of glamorous and exciting, at least for those of us who enjoy domestic adventures: choosing wallpaper, hanging artwork, planting herbs.

Some of it is not glamorous or exciting at all: fixing broken toilets, replacing 1930s electricity, installing insulation, & painting, painting, painting. Luckily we are not doing all of this ourselves, but we’ve done our fair share. The guy who loads large purchases at Home Depot recognizes me, R, both our cars, and says the next time he sees me he’s “giving me an apron.”

When we first toured the house, I saw everything I liked about it (still like). The symmetry, the clean proportions, the beautiful light. The location. I loved the things that are really hard to change, which is why we bought it. The second time I toured the house, I saw all the issues, and there were many of them. It seemed everything was filthy; everything was broken; 87,000 things needed to be fixed/replaced/improved. Between buying the house and now, I’d say we fixed about 70,000 of those 87,000 issues.

In the first installment of Before and Mostly-Afters, I present: the laundry room.

The laundry room (I guess you could also call it a mudroom?) of our house was a major selling point, despite its relatively decrepit state under the house’s former neglectful owners. I think lots of people can appreciate the convenience of a big utility sink and full-sized washer/dryer right off the kitchen, but for us, moving from Manhattan….. this felt like a HUGE luxury.

Here’s what we toured when we first visited the house. I wonder what it looked like before all the cleaning and staging to put the house on the market? Eek.

And here’s what it looks like now:

(pardon photos from iphone b/c we can’t find our camera charger, weekend t0-do list on the chalkboard)

The key improvements:

• Refinished the hardwood floors (we did the whole house, but the laundry room was in  especially bad shape)
• Found the original cabinet doors that had been ripped off to make room for the wine fridge and reinstalled them
• Built a counter over the washer/dryer
• Put in marble countertops. You can’t see in the photos, but the bizarre Formica, faux-butcher block counter that was around the sink was split and rotten, because the faucet was also broken/leaking all under and through those cabinets. 
• Painted everything
• Installed new hardware/faucet/chandelier, put down new rug, etc.

I am thrilled with it. After years of shared laundry machines in freaky Manhattan basements with maybe the occasional dead roach in the corner, taking laundry out of my own dryer and folding it on a clean, marble counter in a sunny room feels like a miracle.

Right now the utility sink is doing double (triple? quadruple?) duty since we ripped out our kitchen and we wash our dishes there. But it is also perfect for the main activities I originally envisioned: arranging flowers, washing Dahlia’s paws, and rinsing out paint brushes. And I’ve been doing a lot of painting.

Other rooms soon…

My grandparents’ home bar, off their living room.  (Entrance in the hallway. No doorknob – pull the painting) Midland, Texas

I can’t honestly say that my grandparents’ home bar inspired my mixology habit from the time I was a child (most of the time its crystal-lined shelves were simply a liability as we ran around the house), but it has always been my standard of the sweetest addition to a living room.  Separated from the living room by a shining stainless counter and hidden door, their bar was always a mysterious land of adult-things.  At this point, it strikes me as simply awesome.

Why is this relevant?

Because this Christmas (like most Christmases of my childhood), I’m hanging out at my grandparents’ house in Midland, Texas.  And because I want to inspire people with a variety of home bar styles (my way is not the only way), I will be conducting home bar/mixology station tours periodically.  Hopefully these tours will show a range of home mixology styles.  If you want your station featured, invite us over!

Now, if you’re not familiar with Midland, Texas, it does have a lot of the attributes you might imagine: oil rigs, ranch houses, Suburbans, more than a few people in Western hats and boots, tumbleweed, mesquite, and – my favorite part – a big, wide open sky.

My Granddad was kind enough to give me a quick tour of the bar – and more importantly, to share a little of his cocktail-drinking history, from age 12 to present.  Things were different in his childhood home in southern Louisiana back then:

Another view of the bar.  My Grandfather was the artist’s model in the painting next to it.

A little more detail on the bar and the home cocktail lifestyle it was created for:

When my Grandparents built their home in 1976, they entertained frequently, and they still do.  Their entertaining is a mix of informal and family events, as well as structured dinner clubs, bridge clubs, and other such social clubs that thrive in a place where restaurants just aren’t a big deal.  Wine was less common, and most of their entertaining would involve liquor-based drinks.  Given the circs, a decent bar was a natural feature to include in the design.  My Grandmother now thinks the architect and designer may have gone a bit overboard (that a simpler mixing station along the wall would be sufficient), but she brushed aside offers to include shutters so the bar could be hidden from “churchy friends and pastors.”  She figured since they were certainly going to serve alcohol, people may as well see where it came from.  Lesson: don’t hide your bar away!  Let it shine!

The drinks of the day were simpler mixes than many of the drinks commonly featured on this blog: whiskey with water or Coke, vodka and 7Up, Crown Royal on the rocks.  Though they did have a friend named Gus who made his own martinis.  Guests were encouraged to mix their own drinks.  Interestingly, rum wasn’t very common, despite my image of tiki drinks being popular during the era.  One favorite, though was frozen margarita mixes (the kind in a cardboard-wrapped can that comes frozen).  I think I would have followed Gus’s lead.

Bertessa with his Granddad in the home bar.

(And yes, with any luck, I will look just like him in  about 50 years.)

Yesterday’s New York Times included this article referencing the movement of men’s fashion – with some shout-outs to interior design – towards 19^th-century inspiration.  I love the article.  And I don’t. 

Honestly, I think I like the article mainly for vain reasons.  This year’s trends validate some of the more distinctive choices I’ve made in terms of fashion (Winter 2005: a fox collar for myself and an enormous, muskrat, trapper hat for Bertessa), as well as home design (antique china plates on my walls).  But I don’t like the idea that wearing old-fashioned styles, and having old stuff in your home, is cool just when carried out by Lower East Side and Brooklyn hipsters.  And I don’t say that because I live on the Upper West Side.  Vintage is cool when it’s authentic, but authentic is different for everyone.  It can’t be purchased in a few choice locales, no matter how well curated the stores’ merchandise may be.

Making the “19^th-century” an of-the-moment trend trivializes a very legitimate, untrendy, Tessin Rinpoche goal: living a modern life in a style that honors the best of our personal and cultural history.

I have always loved what the article terms “Victorian-era clutter.”  But I think it’s coolest is when it’s not actually clutter, but something that you personally value and appreciate having on display in your home.  For me, the bit of Victorian clutter I’m enjoying having in my living room right now is my grandfather’s old steamer trunk.

Victorian clutter in the living room

My grandfather was born in Perth, Australia in 1906, and immigrated to the U.S. as a very young man in the 1920s.  He and his brother Ken spent a number of years working and partying in New York, traveling all over the Americas, and generally growing up.  Then Hitler invaded Belgium and Holland in May of 1940; he and Ken immediately set sail for New Zealand, where their family lived, to enlist.  They were strongly opposed to the ongoing U.S. stance of neutrality and felt called to defend others’ freedom – incredibly courageous.  Ken was killed in North Africa; my grandfather served until the end of World War II, and then returned to the U.S. with my grandmother (his new New Zealander bride, who’d been his pen-pal through the war) in 1945.  His trunk, which I’m told he bought second-hand when he was young – possibly literally Victorian – accompanied him on many of these journeys.  It sat in my parents’ basement, under the stairs, for most of my childhood.  I was always intrigued by his hand-painted name and the many stamps and stickers from around the world.  There are even some train stickers from when Auntie B took it on a trip or two in the 1950s. 

Now it serves as a mini coffee table, and I really love having it there.  Can we agree that having something personally meaningful is better than buying an old trunk simply for the sake of having one?  Or buying a new one that’s trying to look old from Restoration Hardware, Horchow, or even one of my favorites, Jayson Home & Garden?

 I like homes that clearly reflect the identity – both present and historical – of the people who live there.  I guess it’s nice that 19^th-century decor is “in” … but it doesn’t really matter.  It is not a good reason to buy taxidermy, antlers, amateur portraits of strangers, and antique leather-bound books in bulk on eBay; that’s just silly.  Perhaps it IS a good reason, when you’re visiting family over the holidays, to identify some basement/attic clutter you particularly like … and perhaps request that it relocate to your living room! 

P.S. – No need to regale real-life guests with the tales of your clutter.  Just offer them a cocktail.

Check out EE’s vacuum review on Apartment Therapy’s Re-Nest!

Yes, this is shameless self-promotion, but it is a good review.  If a justification is necessary, then consider it a backgrounder on the Tessin Rinpoche milieu.

So, you’ll find a lot of focus on cocktails.  This is because I really like mixing cocktails and playing with flavors.  It sounds weird to call mixing drinks a hobby, but it is one, and it provides joy to me and those around me.  It seems like this endeavor requires a Theory of the Cocktail – some organizing force guiding my drink-making.

I haven’t honed my theory yet, but I have a start.  If you come by TR often, you’ll get to taste its development.  I do think people should drink Locally, Socially, and Seasonally.  I would even take LSS down to a micro level: drink what is appropriate to the temperature in the room, the humidity, the food you are eating (or not eating), and the company you are keeping.  This means one should not always drink the same thing.  I also know some things my theory isn’t: I am not overly focused on brands and I don’t care if a drink is “cool” or “what I should drink.”

While drinkers should not be asking “what should I drink?”, they should be asking “what are you having?”  Asking “what are you having” allows us to gain experiences with new flavors and combinations; how else can we know what we like?.  Don’t be afraid to pour out a bad idea – it’s just a drink.  Part of the fun in mixology instead of cooking is that the sunk cost is much lower.

Of course, there’s a lot to my living room beyond drinking.  So you can expect to hear about other topics from time to time, and from other contributors a bit.  A prominent example may well be style and design because under the LSS theory, your drink should complement and enhance the existing (stylish) milieu.

Anyway, enough with all that.

Welcome, what are you having?

Bertessa