Take it easy. Make it simple. Ah, the anthems of summer. Even the magazines know the words. While dwell magazine (the August issue, on newsstands now) lets supermodel Kathy Ireland test outdoor lounge chairs, Real Simple (June/July) finds a more bourgeois summer experience for the rest of us.
Readers answered “This Month’s (real simple) Question: How do you make the most of summer?” with thoughtful quickies that focus on little pleasures. Glamor not required.
This from reader Priya Cherian of Palo Alto, Calif.: “I make a point of sampling all the fruits and vegetables I can find at the local farmers’ market: the juicy strawberries and crunchy bell peppers of early summer, the sweet persimmons and luscious tomatoes of late summer, and everything in between.”
Erin Wilson, Redmond, Wash., tries “to have a theme barbecue each week”–always a potluck and a reason to dress up. Jeannine East, Oswego, Ill., joins her library’s summer reading program. “I take advantage of the longer daylight hours by reading in a hammock at the end of the day.”
The novelist’s tale: Joyce Maynard tells her own story of living more simply in the July/August issue of Metropolitan Home. After her youngest son left home last year, Maynard “decided to scale down for a while. I covered my car with a tarp and took the insurance off it, found a tenant for our house and went searching for a place where I could live very cheaply and simply–without the comforts of my 1,000 CDs, my fax machine and DSL line, my kitchenful of cookbooks and specialty baking pans and interesting spices.”
She found herself a “thatch-and-tile-roof casita” on the waterfront of a tiny village in Guatemala. No phone, no microwave, no washing machine, television or Internet was hers. Maynard writes a beautiful account of her stay there and her personal discoveries about possessing things and how sometimes the purest joy comes from letting go.
Small solutions: Back on the decorating track, Met Home takes readers to a city apartment and weekend retreat owned by the same client and done by the design team of Vicente Wolf and David Rogal.
The city place is a gem–and a must-see and read for anybody who feels lacking of space, but yearns to make something elegant out of it. Wolf-Rogal simply outsmarted these tiny rooms.
A dining room that is rarely used for entertaining becomes a cozy den and TV room thanks to a table that rises and lowers from dining height to coffee-table height. A tiny master bedroom becomes regal and roomy, thanks to a “dramatic wall of floor-to-ceiling polished-wool curtains” that hang behind the bed. “The curtains can be pulled aside to reveal the full wall of storage that replaced the bedroom’s original cramped closets.”
And how much better could that summer dreaming get?
