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Bon Weekend: 10 January 2019

by habituallychic

01 . 11 . 19


Hope your New Year is going well. I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to get back on track while also checking out art exhibitions and visiting new places in my spare time. I thought I’d share them in case you want to explore the city but I’ve included a few other options in case you want to hibernate now that the weather has turned arctic.

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to check out the new Restoration Hardware store. They prefer to be called RH now but I feel like no one would know what I was talking about if I just wrote RH. The store is a massive 90,000 square foot six-floor showroom that also includes a roof top restaurant, a coffee bar, interior design services, private office space for design meetings, and anything you could want under the sun. I like how they juxtaposed antique statues and urns and gilt mirrors with their modern furniture. It makes me want to move to a loft now.


After RH, I walked over to the Whitney Museum to see the new Andy Warhol exhibition From A to B and Back Again. The best part that you have to make sure you don’t miss on the first floor is the room full of portraits. It was amazing to see so many in one space. Just make sure you pack your patience. The elevators take forever and they are usually packed, as are the stairs. Renzo Piano should have included escalators like he did at the Pompidou Center.

On the walk to 14th Street, I stopped by the new Dior Pop Up Shop. The chic toile filled space in the Meatpacking District includes signature fashions, bags, accessories, shoes, and a few tabletop and home items. The best part is the toile menagerie of zoo animals. I’m dying for the monogrammed Dior Book Tote since it looks like the perfect bag for traveling but at $2,700, it would be a big splurge.

Last week, I went to see The Favourite. This is not your grandmother’s period movie and it’s not for the easily offended but the costumes and historic palaces in which it is set are worth the weirdness. It stars Golden Globe winning actress Olivia Colman, who gained 30 pounds to play the always ill Queen Anne in 18th-century England.  Lady Marlborough, played by Rachel Weisz, and newcomer Abigail, played by Emma Stone, vie to be her  “favourite” hence the title. I still need to see the rest of the movies in award contention before the Oscars so I hope some of them are available on my next flight.

I also watched a few episodes of 7 Days Out on Netflix last week. It follows “the excitement and drama behind the scenes in the seven days leading up to major live events in the worlds of sports, fashion, space and food.” The best episode is number 7 that follows Karl Lagerfeld and everyone at Chanel as they are seven days out from the Chanel Haute Couture Fashion Show in Paris. Everyone from the seamstresses to the set designers work day and night to make sure it looks effortless on the big day. 
I love having a membership to The Frick Collection since I can always pop in when I have a little free time. Last week, I stopped by to see the Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth-Century Rome exhibitionLuigi Valadier was an 18th-century silversmith created extraordinary works in silver and bronze for popes, royalty, and aristocrats across Europe. The piece above was meant to sit on a dining table and was awe inspiring in person. I forgot to go downstairs to that part of the exhibition so I will have to go back for another quick visit before it closes on January 20, 2019.

I’m trying to log off earlier each evening and not get sucked into Instagram so I can read before bed. I’m currently A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts which I put on one of my holiday gift guides. The historical fiction novel follows Alva Smith as she marries into the newly rich but societally shunned Vanderbilt family to help give them respectability. The beginning has been a little cliche driven but I’m hoping it gets better. 


I posted on Instagram this week that winter in New York makes me crave the color green. The February 2019 cover of Vogue features actress Reese Witherspoon in a green dress is like a breath of fresh air. I’m not sure it’s on the newsstand now but should be available soon.

The event I’m looking forward to in the coming week is the Winter Antiques Show. It always helps pull  everyone out of the January doldrums. The show featuring 70 of the world’s top experts in the fine and decorative arts and runs through January 27, 2019. It will also include a loan exhibition, Collecting Nantucket: Connecting the World: Nantucket Historical Association which “celebrates 125 years of collecting by the Nantucket Historical Association and presents the best the association has to offer in paintings, craft, and folk art.” I fell in love with Nantucket when I first visited last summer so I am definitely looking forward to seeing this part of the show.

Hope you find something fun to keep you warm on these cold winter days.

Bon week-end! 

XOXO,

HC