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Category / Inspiration Vault

Step inside an Ali Baba’s Cave of Dried Flowers

Somewhere in between Paris and Provence in the small town of Bayet, a floral wonderland awaits. For 35 years, husband and wife team Véronique and Jean-François have been harvesting, drying and selling over fifty varieties of flower on their 7000m² farm in the countryside of Auvergne. And you’re invited to stop in anytime and frolic…

A Shipwrecked Sailor’s Guide to Castaway Depots

Get your sea legs ready, we’re setting sail for the bygone days of wild seafaring in search of a little-known piece of nautical history: the castaway depot. Also known as castaway huts, castaway depots were small shelters strategically placed on isolated islands by governments or maritime organisations and equipped with basic supplies and tools to…

Building Mr. Eiffel’s Penthouse Apartment: A Tower Under Construction

A Parisian friend dropped some very interesting photographs in my inbox this week, some that I’d never seen before of the Eiffel Tower in its earliest days. I had previously come across time-lapse photographs of the Eiffel Tower in its various stages of construction, but none like this; none that went behind the scaffolding, right up close inside the growing skeleton…

Her Apprenticeship with Le Corbusier Didn’t Go Quite as He Expected

“We don’t embroider cushions here,” said the man considered as the most important architect of the modern age, during his first encounter with Charlotte Perriand. She wanted to work for Le Corbusier, a name synonymous with those dramatically new brutal concrete buildings, rejecting the past, promising a utopian future. He would take some convincing to hire Perriand,…

10 Time Travelling Paris Movies to Cozy Up With

On these dark winter nights, is there anywhere else you’d rather escape to than Paris? In a time machine no less… 1. Monpti (1957) Starring an adorable young Romy Schneider, this is an often overlooked film for Parisphiles who can’t resist gorgeous streets scenes of the city in the 1950s. Many of the sights and…

On Dating David Bowie in the Seventies

From a distant galaxy, far, far away, Ziggy Stardust made his last public appearance in 1973 before David Bowie retired the glamrock persona and sent him packing for good. But the infamous last hurrah in London would also his first public collaboration with another equally unique being who would go on to make a profound…

Mirrors were Invented in 1835. So What Did We Do Before?

How many times have you seen you today? The fact is, the modern mirror as we know it today didn’t arrive until 1835, which means throughout most of history, people have been getting creative to know what they look like – if that’s what they were really looking for at all. The mirror’s relationship with…

A Brief Compendium of Egyptomania

Sphinxes, scarabs and obelisks, oh my! Egyptomania quite literally indicates a madness for anything Egyptian; a phenomenon most of us tend to associate with the 1920s when archeologists cracked open King Tut’s tomb and unleashed a new wave of excitement that penetrated every facet of mainstream western culture. But our fascination with ancient Egypt spans…

Found: A German Soldier’s WWII Scrapbook

There’s something enchanting about coming across an old scrapbook; more than just a photo album, a lovingly put together book of ephemera can be a unique window into a life lived elsewhere. We previously found a marvellous one once at the Brooklyn Flea Market, made by an aspiring young actress in the 1930s making her…

A Year of Not Being a Tourist with MessyNessyChic

It’s been a life-changing year for MessyNessy all thanks to four magic little words: Don’t Be a Tourist. So I thought I’d dedicate our “best of 2017” round-up to just that– not being a tourist. I’d like to make a New Year’s toast to thank you for being curious, independent, adventurous, and creative. Thank you for…

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