Melissa Hatch

August 26, 2015 So this is just for fun. A piece about rocking chairs. Really, just for fun. I became curious about rocking chairs quite a few months ago when I was rocking my son to sleep. Then I fell asleep. Since it’s August, I’m even more enamored with the things. They are a stationary staple of the vision I have of American summer. The thing that endears me most about the rocking chair—even more than its mystical place with mother and child—is the American porch. Rocking chairs are on relaxed porches across America in all types of settings—lake houses, tract houses, small houses on big acreage, farm houses, even the front porch of my aunt’s condominium. A couple rocking chairs flanking a screen door on a wood-decked porch, and bam, you have an image of an American home. I picture relaxing to the rocking rhythm on that porch with a cold drink in my hand, maybe even at sundown when the relentless summer sun finally breaks and all is calm and still. The symbol of the...

One of my best friends once told me that she is a great cook with a great recipe. A recipe-follower, I am not. Cooking was always a creative end to my day—a way to unwind with some colorful ingredients and a glass of wine. With a now-three-year-old, cooking has become an act of togetherness. My Wyatt loves to cook. He loves to measure, dump, stir, and flip, and like his mother, would prefer to just wing it and let the creativity stir up a concoction that someone may or may not want to eat on the other end. Other than telling my husband to spread “about 3 tablespoons” of olive oil in a pan only to be asked how much a tablespoon is, I’ve never really precisely measured my ingredients. But you can’t tell a three-year-old to just splash some vanilla in the bowl unless you really like vanilla. I learned in my mother’s kitchen, and now I have a little one to pass those skills to. Over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that in order to pass down the kitchen lessons that I acquired,...

  CALIFORNIA BEACH BUNGALOW In July of 2013, I completely gutted and remodeled a beach house in Huntington Beach, California.  I'd been searching for the right property for over six months, and when my husband and I had the opportunity to purchase this one, we pounced.  This 1960s bungalow was sound structurally, but everything was grandma original.  The real challenge came in getting the property to rent for top dollar on a budget.  Someday, my husband and I plan to live on the property, and when that time comes, I will want to do a complete rebuild with new finishes.  So I couldn't exactly create my dream kitchen.  Here's a peek at my fiscally responsible kitchen.  Before The cabinet that the microwave sat on was free-standing, so I opted to remove it since it didn't match the other cabinets, which were solid maple. Notice the ancient intercom?  The white thing next to the intercom below the top cabinets is a trash trap--one of my...

Design is not about perfection.  It's about meaning.  We build our homes—with our lives—over time.    They don’t just poof, come together, like some magical HGTV home show.    The vase you see when you walk through my front door came from a boutique I fell in love with in Albuquerque on a fun trip with my husband, then boyfriend. I delivered my first original research on that trip.   The top of the vase is cracked because the wind blew it over while we were trying to load it in the back seat of my BMW coupe.   Oh how I loved that car.   Oh how I fretted over that vase.   It’s glued back together now, and I see a memory.    We find ways to incorporate our memories into our homes, and that’s the real meaning of design.   The problem may be that those vases or those knick-knacks we pick up along our journey don’t always look so good when displayed.   But with the right eye, and the right surrounding ...

A few months ago, I spent two weeks in Taipei, and amongst many adventures like bathing in natural hot springs, indulging in MSG goodness at the infamous night markets, and viewing the city from the top of Taipei 101, I was on the hunt for art and fabric.  One of my favorite stops: the Yingge ceramics district.  There, I walked a cobblestone street lined with small potter's shops, and perhaps my biggest regret of the whole trip was not bringing home a gigantic hand-painted bowl that I knew could live on my dining room table all by itself.  Sigh.  But I did manage to cram silks, art, and jade into my suitcase.  The silks were incredible.  I couldn't get enough. After many self-control pep-talks, I limited myself to 7 prints.  I found the silks above on the shop-lined streets near the university in Taipei's fabric district.  I had a seamstress create a scarf out of the pink and gold geometric pattern on the bottom.  The rest are for f...

tobifairley.com After last week's post about columns, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the detailed old world Greco-Roman carved masterpieces.  They keep resurfacing in my mind as the crowning (no pun intended) embellishment to a modern space.  I was inspired by the goddess of love and beauty again last night while flipping through an issue of Veranda magazine.  I saw the antique dresser below from Carl Moore Antiques in Houston with a Greek key pattern painted on.  Since I'm such a sucker for combining the old with the new, I had grand visions of this thing in a modern room.   This green chest from Century is a gorgeous take on the Greek key, and with a little elbow grease, it could be re-created on an old chest of drawers by painting the outer pattern in gold or silver as a substitute for the the wood inlay/overlay pattern on the outside.  I'm not sure that I would put a marble top on it.  I might do something like paint a...