MILIEU Spring 2020

One of the great gifts in life is work. Moreover, when that work really speaks to your innate talents, the results are especially pronounced. Not only will you be satisfied with your work, but so will everyone who experiences it. Every interior designer, furniture maker, industrial designer, curator, architect, and artist we feature in our pages has a recognized talent. I do think that the best form of leisure is to do the work you love. MILIEU celebrates the creativity. When we first saw, for instance, the beautiful watercolor paintings of houses by Michael Imber, a prolific San Antonio architect, we wanted to highlight them in our pages. Cris Briger, who runs a successful antiques gallery in Florida, has an uncanny eye for finding new treasures wherever she goes, particularly in the…

Pam Sessions Pam Sessions is co-owner and president of Hedgewood Homes in Atlanta. Her company develops neighborhoods, designs and builds new houses, and manages upscale furnished rental homes. Sessions received her BFA degree from the University of Georgia. Upon graduation, she studied photography with Ansel Adams and Dave Bohn. Her company is a full-service design-build company that provides architecture and interior design, as well as land planning and landscape design. Cris Briger When Cris Briger opened her antiques business, Casa Gusto, in West Palm Beach, Florida, she was intent on stocking it with antiques, objects, and artworks that are immediately “provocative.” Her space is filled with goods old and new, most of which are purchased on Briger’s regular buying trips to Europe. She also heads her own namesake full-service design firm, which includes…

Ideas grow not unlike flowers. Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld were like two seedlings, eager to create something other than law briefs and tortes. Prior to founding their Oxfordshire-based company, The Land Gardeners, in 2012, the two met while picking up their respective children from nursery school. They admit in The Land Gardeners: Cut Flowers (Thames & Hudson; $60) to a preference for “talking plants to avoid talking play dates.” Apart from their work as lawyers and mothers, they discovered a mutual passion for cut flowers. Elworthy and her family had moved into a magnificent Jacobean house, Wardington Manor, whose legacy included cutting gardens from which London society often procured flowers. But those grounds had lain dormant for decades. The women decided to restore those planting fields, while also entering…

IRISH HOSPITALITY Set on 600 acres in the Irish midlands, Ballyfin, built in the 1820s by Sir Charles and Lady Caroline Coote, remained a family seat for a century until it became a boys’ school for some seventy-odd years. By 2002, though, Chicago businessman Fred Krehbiel bought the property with the idea to turn it into a hotel. For the next nine years, workers restored moldings and floors, fixed the roof, and rebuilt the conservatory. London-based interior designer Colin Orchard deployed period color schemes, textiles, and wallpaper designs to luxuriant effect. Landscape designer Jim Reynolds reestablished walled gardens and created a Neoclassical folly. The result is both grand and intimate, a five-star domain offering fine dining, spa treatments, and activities ranging from clay pigeon shooting to falconry. —Jeff Book ART OF THE PRINT During…