Can You Finally Find An Authentic French Croissant in Vancouver?

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French Pastries, Patissieries

No, but apparently you can in Richmond!

Every time we come back from Paris, we search high and low for pastries as beautiful and delicious as the ones we have in Paris.

Sadly, we’ve not found anything to date. And believe me we’ve tried them all.

But from all accounts, our client and her newly opened L’Opera Patisserie and Tea House in Richmond has created just that. The authentic French Croissant. Not only croissants but pastries of all kinds that are apparently as lovely and delicious as anything you’ll find in France.

We knew of her enterprise a little over a year ago, when Janice and her Mother, Mei came to the Antique Warehouse to carefully furnish her tea house with authentic French vintage and antique furniture.

We’ve not yet tried L’Opera ourselves, but from the look of these photos, not only the croissants look fabulous but so does everything else!

We will definitely pay Janice a visit once we’re back from France.

Until then Good Luck to Janice and her lovely L’Opera Patisserie and Tea House.

Best of Luck to you Janice!

Bon Appetit

L’OPERA PATISSERIE

Janice Marta went to Paris eight years ago, and fell in love with French pastries.  Once home, she found herself frustrated she couldn’t find the same in Richmond, and decided to make them for herself.  This began years of a self-taught pastry education that’s now resulted in the creation of L’Opera Patisserie on Minoru Boulevard.  She and her mother, Mei, opened the business just months ago, and have slowly but surely begun to build an adoring clientele.

The shop’s interior is grand enough to match its name – it’s like being inside an opulent box seat at the Paris Opera House.

It’s wallpapered in a rich, red and gold brocade, with vintage-looking chandeliers and sconces.

Each day, they make all their products (including puff pastry) from scratch, and along with croissants offer a number of desserts and petite, colourful, French macarons.  Take note, gluten-free eaters!

Open from Wednesday to Sunday, they’re now offering High Tea every day, though still require tea reservations to be made 48 hours in advance.

The tea menu changes regularly, but always includes a pot of tea, sandwich, pastry, macaron of your choice, and four other sweets.  The tea pot comes on a  cast iron stand with a tea light below to keep it warm.

Goodies arrive on a lovely, two-tiered silver tea stand, with the sweets tucked in around the bottom and the savouries on top.

Note the lovely little details.

Sandwiches are carefully wrapped in parchment and sealed with “L’Opera” stickers

Dark-chocolate covered strawberries arrive in a finely spun caramelized candy basket.

High Tea at L’Opera is $25 a person and according to reports is well worth every penney!

Bon appetit!

L’Opera Patisserie

5951 Minoru Boulevard, Richmond BC

604-270-2919

Cash and cards accepted

Vegetarian and gluten-free options available

Reservations for High Tea must be made 48 hours in advance

Antiques Hot for 2013? Canadian House and Home thinks so!

While scanning through House and Home Magazine for 2013, I came across this article written by Alison Garwood-Jones called “On the Bright Side”.

It’s about a Torontonion homeowner who chooses a 21st Century contemporary loft with 14′ ceilings as her living space. It’s what she does with this space that sets it apart from the predictable and unimaginative  ’all modern’ interiors.

It was her choice of French Antiques were what drew me to this article, but more importantly I loved how this particular homeowner blended Antiques with stark ultra modern and successfully created an interesting, chic living space.

In this photograph below ( the title page ) the homeowner took an early 20th Century French Daybed, converted it to a sofa/settee (we have clients doing this all the time), flanked it with a bouillotte table and a small three drawered chest. Of particular note is the plexiglass coffee table and the contemporary artwork above.  It all works, and is sophisticated in its’ look without looking fussy or busy.

In this next photo the homeowner’s 14′ ceilings and soaring pillars create a dramatic palate in which the designer can work her interior design magic. Instead of defaulting to contemporary custom made furniture, we see more and more designers creating interest and charm with the combination of Antiques and Modern. From the Louis XVI Armchair to the French Cameo backed dining chairs, everything works harmoniously and elegantly. Note the Transitional Buffet placed in front of the wall of windows.

“Black white and red have always been my signature colors”, says the homeowner when interviewed for this article. In this next photo she is shown with her Maltese Schnauzer cross ‘Beta’

Photo below illustrates a bedroom that is ultra contemporary except for the French Transitional night table flanking the bed. It gives the punch of color that the room needs to create an exciting interesting look.

Look at Baroness Pauline de Rothschilds Living Space!

Tags

Antique, Antique Consignment Vancouver, Antique Dealers Consignments

CURTAIN CALL

Text by Mitchell Owens

August 6, 2012

The drawing room of Pauline de Rothschild’s London flat at Albany. Photo: Derry Moore

Curtains, however pretty, have a largely utilitarian purpose: to control light and soften the architecture of a window. For 20th-century style icon Pauline de Rothschild (1908-76)—an American fashion designer turned hostess of one of France’s greatest wine châteaus—the design of a curtain could, believe it or not, be an artistic and intellectual challenge, where inspiration intersected with erudition and resulted in a window treatment that could embody as many layers of meaning as it employed layers of fabric.

A portrait of Rothschild from the 1969 Vogue editorial, “Le Style Pauline.”
Photo: Horst P. Horst

The confection made for the London apartment that Pauline and her vintner-poet husband, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, owned from 1970 until her death in 1976 is the best-known example of her creative approach to curtains. As seen in the May/June 1977 issue ofArchitectural Digest, the floor-to-ceiling bay window in the double-height drawing room—the grandest space of the four-room residence at Albany, a famously exclusive, 19th-century redbrick complex in Piccadilly—was dressed in so memorably eccentric a fashion that it seems difficult to believe the curtains were produced under the watchful eye of interior designer John Fowler of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. His specialty, window-wise, was tassels and swags, and his decorative style was an inviting spin on classic English country-house elegance. Rothschild, on the other hand, possessed a sui generis aesthetic sense heralded by Vogue as “le style Pauline,” so when it came to the decoration of the apartment (a “set” in Albany parlance), the division of labor was crystal clear. The willowy baroness, then in her early 60s, would serve as creator, while Fowler and his assistant, Imogen Taylor, now a grande-dame designer herself, ensured that their client’s often startling ideas about decor became reality.

“Pauline had the mind of a mosaicist,” said Stuart Preston, the late New York Times art critic, when I visited him in Paris years ago. It was an insightful observation that proved to be the key to le style Pauline, and one later bolstered by my discovery of an unpublished manuscript written in the 1950s by photographer Cecil Beaton, in which he described her New York City townhouse as “a record of impressions alluded to, but not stressed, a remembrance of beauty rather than beauty itself.”

A similarly ornate style in Rothschild’s Paris residence, featured in “Le Style Pauline.”
Photo: Horst P. Horst

From her days as a designer at the renowned New York fashion house of Hattie Carnegie through her marriage to Philippe, the former Pauline Fairfax Potter magpied details from a wide range of sources—a painting, a book, a memory, a long-ago conversation—and then deployed them like a tile setter manipulating tesserae, carefully incorporating them into a dress she was designing, a room she was decorating, a dining table she was setting, the flowers she was arranging. Thus her admired creations come equipped with invisible footnotes that make them much more than what meets the eye.

Fashioned by London upholsterer Peter Atkins, the Albany window treatment is the best-known example of Rothschild’s idiosyncratic and intensely personal taste. For instance, the two layers of unlined oyster-colored glazed chintz that make up the deep valance have their edges cut into dramatic zigzags that would flutter slightly in every passing breeze. (The same crisp chintz is used for the inconspicuous draw curtains that provide privacy.) Though it appears to be a frisky alternative to the usual window dressing, that scissored detail evokes specific moments in Rothschild’s life—her cherished winter trips to the Soviet Union, where she marveled at the icicle-fringed windowsills of Saint Petersburg’s candied-colored baroque palaces.

An 18th-century Hubert Robert work showing the curtains that served as Rothschild’s inspiration. Photo courtesy of Veil-Picard Collection, Paris

As for the decorative dress curtains composing the window treatment’s outer layer, they are marvels of the upholsterer’s art, cataracts of citron silk taffeta at least 20 feet long, pouring down from the dentil cornice, past Ionic pilasters painted to look like lapis lazuli, and onto the marbleized parquet floor, where the shimmering panels fan out like the trains of belle epoque gowns. The baroness, Atkins once told me, called them “Madame Geoffrin curtains, though I don’t know why.”

The answer to that puzzlement I found in a 1773-74 Hubert Robert painting of the Paris bedchamber of Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, the Enlightenment salonnière and arts patron, who happened to be one of Rothschild’s spiritual idols. In that work each of the full-length curtains, which flank a pair of French doors and also the adjacent alcove housing Geoffrin’s bed, are gathered with tasseled cords into four long puffs. Rothschild copied the look almost exactly for the oval salon of her apartment in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, though in London’s Piccadilly she personalized the design. There the puffs were deflated and straightened out, and the discreet cords were eliminated in favor of large double bows mounted onto wide ruched bands; smaller bows terminated the ruched pulls that raised and lowered the bay’s three vast double-hung windows.

Two obscure inspirations equal one window treatment that remains a cut above the rest.

Design 2012: Antiques are HOT for 2012 (and not your Grandma’s Antiques either.)

Tags

Antique, Antique Consignment Vancouver, Antique Dealers Consignments, Antiques from France Vancouver

Hi All,

Don’t take my word for it, read the following articles recently published on HOUZZ online magazine!  You’ll see many new creative ways to use Antiques. Like a 1940′s oak teachers desk that was converted to a vanity for a bathroom!

Lots of gorgeous inspiring photos using French, American and English Antiques.  ( Most are available right now at the Antique Warehouse )

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/1050795/list/Design-2012–Not-Your-Grandma-s-Antiques

And for more ideas, featured in literally 100′s of photographs, on how to incorporate Antiques in the modern home, click on the link below.  The photos are professional and fabulous.  Remember to click on each page at the bottom of the first.

http://www.houzz.com/antiques

Happy Inspirations!

Mark

A Fabulous French Inspired Interior

Tags

French Armoires, French Chairs, French China Cabinets, French Commodes, French Daybeds, French Tables

It’s been awhile since my last post for which I must apologize.  But the arrival of a new container takes precedence above everything else.  The new container from France is now ‘IN” and if you’ve not been down to have a look at the exciting array of gorgeous new bits, I invite you to come down and have a look.  It’s a little like Christmas when these containers arrive.

This weeks ‘blog’ is a collection of photos I found while thumbing through this months latest edition of ‘House Beautiful’.  It shows an interesting use of French antiques in a 21st century home.  In fact, this designer has used sideboards in kitchens,  commodes in closets, a doorless Armoire in a closet to act as shelving for shoes and handbags ( the likes that would make any ‘housewife of Vancouver’ envious ).

Most of everything or a similar fascimile thereof can be had at the AW.

Enjoy!

In this dramatic kitchen, a Louis XVI Sideboard has been recently lacquered white and used for an island.  Click here to see our sideboards, chandeliers, and mirrors.  Please note that none of our merchandise is painted on our website.  We can paint anything at the Antique Warehouse as long as it’s not an antique of great value or rarity.  That just wouldn’t be right!

Great photo of a French inspired dining room.  Note the use of ‘all antiques’ in this elegant room.  Click here to see our chairs, tables and china cabinets. We have several farm tables at the AW that could be painted white as was this table in the photo above.

In this dramatic bathroom the gold giltwood sconce makes a great towel holder.  Click here to see sconces and chairs.

Magnificent Louis XV Armoires could give you look. Just remove the doors, have it painted and that’s all there is to it.  No need for expensive custom made shelving.    Many commodes at the store could give this look too! Please note, most of our commodes of this level are not listed on the website. They are raw cherry or oak but could be painted by us, or by one of our ‘faux finishers’ to whom we outsource.

Several beds in stock at the AW that could get this look.  Click here to see our beds.

Gorgeous  Louis XV style daybeds look sumptuous as seating in a living room. In fact, I have almost the same one in my living room, and it looks gorgeous. We usually have daybeds of all styles and price ranges. Click here to see our selection.

Thank you for visiting my blog.  Hope you enjoyed today’s peek into a lovely interior created solely from French Antiques.

click here to visit our store www.antiquewarehouse.net

A Look inside the New York Brownstone of Brooke Shields.

Brooke Shields has packed more professional accomplishment into her 40-some-odd years than many people twice her age, though it helps that she started modeling as an infant, acting at nine (she was 11 when she played the title role in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby), and that, at 14, she became the youngest cover girl in Vogue’s history. But just as her beauty seems to deepen without dimming, Shields keeps reinventing herself, as an author, a producer, a product spokeswoman, and a mental-health advocate. Her latest venture is designing jewelry.

When you wear that many hats, you need a big place to hang them. Last July—shortly after Shields joined the Broadway cast of The Addams Family, as Morticia—she moved into a discreetly luxurious four-story Greenwich Village townhouse, where she gets to play the role closest to her heart: passionate homebody.

Shields and her husband of a decade, writer and producer Chris Henchy, have two daughters, ages five and eight, and on a recent morning she had just returned from dropping them at school (by city bus). She settled at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee and embarked on the story of a poignant homecoming.

Shields, a real-estate romantic, toured brownstones all over Manhattan, she says, looking for “the one.” About four years ago she was shown a derelict (though landmarked) four-family brick house built around 1910, with a ramshackle ’60s addition. “It needed a complete gut,” she says, “but after a quick walk-through, I could see our future there. My bathtub in a niche by a window. Our daughters’ playroom on the top floor. A light-flooded, parlor-floor kitchen with a big hearth and a balcony. That kind of instant certainty is rare for me—I’m a Gemini—but for once, I was sure.”

The couple’s search for an architect, unlike their house hunting, was a one-stop, look-no-further encounter with MADE, a Brooklyn design/build firm adept at the innovative reconfiguration of historic buildings (founding partners Ben Bischoff, Oliver Freundlich, and Brian Papa handled the project; the latter two have since moved on). “We loved the way they integrated tradition with modernism and warmth of character in an interior with discipline of form,” Shields says of the partners. “That clarity was especially attractive to someone like me, who grew up surrounded by clutter.”

photograph of the living room. A French Empire Chest of Drawers ( to the right of the fireplace ) is flanked by a console on the left.  The two chairs are Reproduction French Bergeres.  ( likely brand new )

Antique Louis XVI marble topped Commode to the right.  (flanking the fireplace)

In this guest bedroom an American Empire Antique Mahogany Chest of Drawers is placed to the right of the fireplace.  A small french commode ( just peeking through the lower right of the photo ) is used as a nightstand.  We like the pile of antique suitcases to the left of the fireplace.

For more information and photos consult the March issue 2012 of Architectural Digest.

Mark LaFleur

The Antique Warehouse

226 S.W. Marine Drive,

Vancouver, B.C. V5X 2R4

www.antiquewarehouse.net