I was inspired by Dior • Le Jardin de Rodin • Le Château de Chambord • the Antique dealers on the Left Bank • The Louvre • the aromas of Lavender in Provence • the antique street fairs at 6am…
MY IDEA OF A COLLEGE CAMPUS WAS PARIS!
When I was 14 years old in 1970, my parents said that if I got good grades I could go to any school I wanted. After 3 years of high school (because I went to night school every night, made pizzas every weekend to earn money, and went to summer school religiously), I was able to be in Paris in 3 years, instead of spending my senior year in Illinois.
After attending the American University in Paris, I took the Queen Elisabeth II back to New York City to strike out in my first career – fashion!
I was hired “tout de suite” to regularly travel to Paris as a personal assistant for a high-powered NYC Fashion trend reporter. My job was to stay up all night in Paris with a polaroid camera and gobs of film packets and photograph all the fashion windows of Paris, then deliver the photos to the trendsetter first thing in the morning over café au laits. She was staying at “L’Hotel” (where Oscar Wilde lived — and died with this favorite quote “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”). I was staying in a 2 star hotel several metro stops away….
After several shopping trips to Paris with the Fashion trend reporter, I decided not to go back to the US, and stayed in Paris — to discover it all over again! But this time, I went shopping in the flea markets and antique dealers all over France. I lived on trains going to all the antique fairs in France — collecting, collecting, and collecting. I was in heaven!
Real estate became my next adventure. I loved selling and helping my clients buy fix-er-uppers in New York’s most UN-chic addresses. I worked with the banking crowd, first selling lofts downtown, then penthouses above 90th Street and single family houses to movie stars/magazine moguls/plastic surgeons who wanted total privacy for themselves and their clients. This is where I learned the importance of LUXURY and started furnishing my clients with antiques from Paris.
This was my first venture into French Limestone! Supplying the Who’s Who of Las Vegas with French limestone flooring instead of Mexican travertine (which was the stone of choice at that time)! Working in Las Vegas for private clients, who were building palatial-scale mansions and houses and wanting authentic EVERYTHING. This was a new era for antiques and flooring from France. This was full-time traveling back and forth from Las Vegas to Paris with container after container crossing the ocean to the desert! Each container was filled with antiques, fountains, paintings, fireplaces, iron gates, gilded lampposts, lighting fixtures, hand-made dishes and linens — the works. This was when Las Vegas went from gilt styrofoam to gilt wood.
In addition to shopping for my shows in Round Top, Texas, I work for clients from around the world from Paris, Moscow, Los Angeles, Houston, New Mexico, London, Sao Paolo, and more. My clients want a true, personalized shopping experience that covers everything from their hotel stays, to their chauffeurs and pilots, to their antique negotiations, to the restoration of their works of art, to the final packing and transport by ship or air to their doorstep. All this often happens in one brief shopping spree of just a few days to fill a home or a store!