Photo by Fran Brennan
Well, I got to meet the people from Milieu last week as Houstonian Pamela Pierce and her entourage — Brooke Stuckey, Peter Vitale — descended upon Dallas and did up a party at Jan’s exquisite Greenway Parks home, that was as rich, bountiful and elegant as Pierce’s thickly-paged glossy shelter pub. (Or their five and a quarter by three inch thick business cards!) This event was notched right up there with my dear friend’s 50th birthday party in Kona, could have been one of her five pre-parties.
As I perused Jan’s dining room table overflowing with food (see below, but it was dark) — great Mexican food, including halves of verdant avocados topped with sour cream and caviar — and sipped the fantastic margaritas in a huge glass loaded with blackberries, a half-orange and spinach leaves — I had three of those mamas — I thought wow, this party is as good as the magazine. It said something about Pierce’s publication that no one had gone “value” on a single item at this party, from the live mariachi’s outside that you could hear all the way to Inwood, to the cracking fires, so many candles smoke alarms were going off, and pool-side heaters.
There were even cloth napkins.
Clearly, this was a party reminiscent of the good old days in print when budgets flowed as freely and fat as those margaritas. The top designers in town were there — Josie McCarthy, Beverly Field, E. David Goiti and Brian Latham from Design Within Reach — Milieu comes out only four times a year, but isn’t that enough? After all, how many times can we hear that violet is the new hot color to have when the paint is still wet on my aqua walls? How many embellished jewel boxes can we cram onto our coffee tables? Most women I know are desperate to streamline tchotchkes and divide up knick-knacks between a few homes. I also love seeing homes in other cities. Mileu is definitely a jet-setter class magazine.
Here’s the other refreshing thing about Milieu: the publisher is an interior designer, not a publisher/journalist with writers who don’t know the difference between Empire and Biedermeier.
Here’s what Pierce told the New York Times:
I wanted to bring a different perspective to editorial. And I wanted to search for designers who haven’t been published that much. It’s a little schizophrenic right now in the design world. It’s like people don’t know what direction to take. I love antiques and I think you need some in your home to bring the past in along with the future. I’m just seeing a lot of throwaway furniture in houses. I want to show people that you can mix the new with the old; you can still honor both.
The design world schizophrenic? How about bi-polar? I had the pleasure of traveling with one of Dallas’ finest interior designers a while back and we played truth or dare — laying bare our truest feelings on the design garbage that is sitting in so many places with a swelled ego.
Wish we could have played after three of those margaritas.
One of my favorite designers of all times, Dallas interior artist Dan Nelson, is featured in the white rose laden Winter 2014 edition, since he has been working on Jan’s home for the last 20 years.
Mileu cleverly has a digital edition that can be downloaded if you subscribe, which is all of $20 for the four stunning editions to get “Mileu’d”: the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth, development, ambiance, atmosphere, climate and what design is really all about: our environment, and our souls.
