MILIEU Winter 2022

you, our readers, for many reasons, but one in particular is it includes a very special feature about our MILIEU family. When I first envisioned this magazine several years ago, it was my intention to bring together and foster a family-like staff made up of people who would bring his or her own strengths and experiences to help create MILIEU—a place where everyone contributes, where no one is more talented than another, and where all input is valued. I feel such joy in this very realization now. I look forward to arriving at the office and seeing everyone interacting, brainstorming, connecting over the phone, checking each other’s work, and supporting one another. For those of us in Houston, we all come together around the table for lunch to take a break and…

Christina Cole Abboud Christina Cole Abboud is a designer and LEED Accredited Professional in green building practices, based in Austin, Texas, who has more than twelve years of experience in the design industry. She complements her professional practice with her academic career, having taught architecture, urban design, and history at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. A former Director of the Barcelona Studio and Foreign Studies Program, she was most recently Director of International Programs in Architecture at Catholic University’s School of Architecture and Planning. Beata Heuman For her original and vibrant work, Beata Heuman, a Swedish designer living in London, has received the highest praise in the design industry and earned for herself a dedicated following. Heuman’s first book, Every Room Should Sing (Rizzoli), presents her innovative approach to design and…

BY TOUCH When Emma Cassi fashions curtains made of silk for her home, she anticipates the day they will unravel. “When silk stays in the sun for too long, it starts to fall apart,” the fiber artist says from her home in Madrid, “and that’s what I really like. I take those fine threads and start to make one of my fabric bowls.” For years, Cassi was known for her jewelry creations, but after feeling the effects of her artisanship in her arms and hands, she embraced other mediums, notably fiber art, rechristening her one-woman company, Silk by Emma Cassi. Now, she makes bowls, pots, and baskets from recycled wool, cotton, and silk—works that are decorative and practical. “I like to make things that are beautiful and useful.” Cassi also uses…

Scotland’s Drummond Castle was recently cast in a starring role. Such is its likeness to Versailles, complete with terraces linked by staircases, a magnificent parterre, sculptural topiary, and busts and fountains, that it served as the (smaller) set location for the archetypal French garden in the historical television drama Outlander. The imposing Scottish castle keep and its later chateau-style mansion house preside over a parterre of spectacular proportion. While visitors are struck by the sheer geometry of the plantings and manicured shapes, Drummond is particularly memorable when its grounds are whitened with winter frost. The formal garden design was devised in the seventeenth century to beautify the fortified stronghold, a sober edifice built in the late 1490s by the first Lord Drummond. Subsequently, the “pleasure” garden rose and fell with political…