Interior Design | Charlotte Moss

C'est Inspiré is simply that - what is inspiring. Where the words end, images continue to speak. Seeing all that is around us, we seek some aspect of something that is life enhancing... something that you would like to be reminded of - to revisit. Something to capture and bring into your world, not leave behind... . That is why I take a camera everywhere; have spent countless hours organizing images in scrapbooks and pouring over them later to revisit the place, the people, the memory.

So, C'est Inspiré may be a single photo - or it may be 50, it may mean one thing to me, another to you - the meaning isn't important. Did it inspire? Did it make you smile? Did it bring back a pleasant memory? One or all of the above will do.

During a brief period of his life, the legendary art historian Bernard Berenson kept diaries where he wrote about how to see - and what he saw. These diaries were published under the title The Passionate Sightseer and edited by Raymund Mortimer.

Anyone, anywhere, anytime can be a passionate sightseer - just look.

Interior Design : The One & Only Elsie de Wolfe

Credited by Diana Vreeland with “banishing Victorian gloom,” Elsie de Wolfe made a name for herself as a pre-eminent interior designer in the early 1900′s with some of America’s most famous families as clients. Hilariously enigmatic, Elsie was famous for her morning exercises, her fresh, feminine and often outlandish sense of beauty, and her surprising marriage to Sir Charles Mendl following a lengthy “Boston marriage” to heiress and New York theatrical agent, Miss Elizabeth Marbury. Elsie’s motto, “Never complain, Never explain,” later appeared embroidered on pillows, but made her no less desirable of a dinner guest, nor subject of gossip.

The prolific life of Elsie de Wolfe changed more than just the dark interiors of the late nineteenth century. She was a trailblazer and an inspiration to women. Her homes in Beverly Hills, New York, Paris and Versailles were fantastic, and well published even at the time, but it was her own richness of charm that made them so remarkable. Among her circle were many of the creative personalities whose legacies shaped the 20th Century.

Today marks 60 years since her death. Once again, we celebrate Elsie.