One Love: Alameda Flea Market

Their Trash Can Be Your Treasure!!!


Flea Markets are a great place to find items for your home.  Our favorite place to go is the Alameda Point Antiques Faire.  It's  every first sunday of every month at the 7-25 Alameda Point.  Here's a few images from one of our trips to the faire.

One Love: I Say Good-Bye and You Say Hello

It's a Visual Jill changing of the guard: our Senior Designer, Kyoko, is moving to Providence, RI to get her Master's in Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. We are so excited for her and know she will have an amazing experience. She has been an invaluable part of Visual Jill and while we will miss her a lot, we know there are great things in store for her.

Thank you, Kyoko, for all you have done during your time at Visual Jill! We look forward to hearing about your adventures on the east coast (maybe as a guest blogger here at the Visual Jill blog...?)

As we bid Kyoko a very heartfelt adieu, we'd like to give an equally heartfelt welcome to our new Assistant Designer, Aisha! Aisha recently received her Bachelors in Interior Design from the California College of the Arts, and we are just thrilled that she will be joining our team.

 

Welcome, Aisha, we are so happy you are here! We look forward to having your creative talents and skills in our company!

One Love: The Marimekko Shop

Marimekko is one of our first and favorite loves. The bold, graphic prints, bright, beautiful colors, and playful patterns from this Finnish design house are timeless. Crate and Barrel has had a partnership with Marimekko since the early '60s. They've recently launched The Marimekko Shop, which carries everything from kitchenware to furniture to accessories and clothing all designed with the colorful, joyful prints of Marimekko. Stores are on the way, but until one opens in your area, visit The Marimekko Shop online and fill your home with some fabulous, classic design.

One Love: The IKEA Leather Karlstad Sofa

Overarching Lamp - West Elm :: Karlstad Sofa - IKEA :: Panama Braid rug - West Elm

We got a new sofa! And we LOVE IT. The size is perfect, the price was great, the leather is nice (and allows for super easy cleaning when living with dogs), it was amazingly easy to assemble, and look how light and bright and clean the living room looks now! (For a view of the LR-Before Sofa, check the photo from the One Love: Bliss Pillow post). To top it all off, it goes great with the other new additions to the living room, the Overarching Lamp and the Panama Braided rug, both from West Elm. Bring on the summer--we're ready!

One Love: The Balancing Barn

Elle Decoration

How cool is this house?! The Balancing Barn was designed by a Dutch company, MVRDV and sits balanced on a hill in Suffolk, England. Visit the MVRDV website for more photos of this project and a bunch of other really interesting projects that they have worked on. Of course, I'm dying to know what happens when you put a bunch of people in the room at the very end and tell them all to jump at the same time...I'm sure I'm not the only one.

One Love: The Eames Molded Plastic Chair

The New York Times Style Magazine

This chair hardly needs an introduction or description. It's a classic with clean, simple lines, a plethora of wonderful colors, and a shape you could probably recognize with your eyes closed and one arm tied behind your back. We love it, and most everyone we know (and don't know) loves it too.

One Love: Meklit Hadero

The jazzy, soulful, singer-songwriter sounds of Ethiopian-born and San Francisco-based artist Meklit Hadero are perfect for the bright, crisp, sunny-but-not-yet-hot-and-lazy spring days we've been having this week. Her music is beautiful, dreamy, complex, and a little mysterious, like a flower just moments before it bursts into full bloom, or the sky just before the sun rises. Buy or download her debut album On A Day Like This from her website and treat yourself to some serious Bay Area talent!

One Love: The Happy Place

inhabitat.com

This amazing rooftop garden designed by Green Door Solutions in Japan is officially my new happy place. With it's lush, enchanting mossy walls, the beautiful flowers, a feng shui balance of wood, stone, and water, dreamy furniture, and even a waterfall cascading off the roof and down one of the walls, add a good friend or a good book, a nice glass of wine, some cheese and dates, and it's pretty much perfection.

One Love: Inspiration

This is our inspiration board. We love it. It motivates us, excites us, gives us ideas, reminds us of what we love. It tells us stories, keeps memories, and helps us to see the future. It is an ever-changing constant in our office, growing, shrinking, being reinvented, serving as the thread that ties it all together. It's our one love this week, but really, it's our true love all the time.

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography

One Love: Vintage Berkeley Wine Shop

Of all the wine shops in all the neighborhoods in all the cities in the East Bay, we love Vintage Berkeley the most. Not only do they have great wines for great prices, the people working there are super nice and unpretentious, which is not something you can say about most wine shops. As much as I like to drink wine, I really know very little about it, so there's nothing I love more than an unpretentious wine store. I can go in, tell them "I know nothing about wine", and they don't bat an eye. Get to know their knowledgeable and friendly sommeliers at free tastings Monday - Saturday, or get an extended tasting of 5 wines for $5 on Thursdays. Be sure to say hi if you see us there!

One Love: NOWNESS

NOWNESS.com

Everyone always wants to know what the leaders of the design, fashion, and art worlds are following. As forward-thinking as they are, they have to draw their inspiration from somewhere...probably a collection of somewheres, actually. Well, our inside connection to the world of the fashion leaders says NOWNESS is part of that collection. We of course signed up for daily emails right away to see for ourselves, and wouldn't you know it? Those fashion-world leaders are on to something. We don't love every post, but just knowing about the sleek, minimal/modern-designed site and having access to the veritable plethora of edgy/artsy/iconic topics makes us feel very hip and "Now"!

One Love: The Bliss Pillow

ABC Home

This pillow was a special New York treat from ABC Home, one of our absolutely favorite home stores anywhere. Ever. We love the balance of bright color on the soft neutral ground, the clean, modern, yet organic and natural shapes, and it plays so nicely with the other pillows on the sofa. It even coordinates with Paul and George! How could we not love it?

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography

One Love: Converse Sneakers

 

We saw this window display in New York and it just made us think about the everlasting coolness of these icons of footwear. Funky, sporty, preppy, glam, there's a color and style of Converse for everyone. My first pair were navy low-tops, like the cool skater kids wore in Jr. High School. Now I sport off-white hi-tops like the ones shown here, though I just saw the Marimekko Collection online and might have to make a new addition to my stash. What about you? What's your Converse of choice?

*Credits: Allie McCoy - Photography

One Love: The Mid-Century Dining Chair

Dining Chairs - Klassik Living

This classic mid-century dining chair was designed by Kai Kristiansen, a Danish furniture designer. We discovered these colorful originals the other day at Klassik Living (the relocated and reincarnated Klassik by Lynne), and loved the bright, eye-candy fabrics, the simple, clean lines, and the rich, warm tone of the wood frames. Can't you just imagine an entire dining set in fabulous mix-and-match colors? How delicious!!!

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography

One Love: The First Signs of Spring

Spring is in the air. The last few weeks of unseasonably warm, glorious weather convinced the bravest little buds and blossoms to shed their winter coats, and seemingly overnight the landscape became dotted with soft puffs of trees bursting in pink and white. It's so beautiful. And even though this week the rains have returned, it's a spring rain, softly soaking the dark earth, intensifying the vibrant greens of new growth, and sending tissue-paper petals swirling into the wind.

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography

One Love: The Revamped Lamp

What's a lamp without a shade? An opportunity, of course. We found this fantastic lamp base at the Alameda Antique Fair, and despite the missing shade we knew it was a keeper. A trip to the local lamp store yielded a simple, white linen shade, and suddenly we're seeing things in a whole new light!

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography

One Love: The Striped Tee

Striped Tee - Slash Denim

Consider the striped tee. Everyone who is anyone has worn one, from Brigitte Bardot to James Dean to Picasso and Audrey Hepburn. The question is: do you have one? Our current faves are made by Robert P. Miller and come in a bijillion different colorways. The boat-neck and 3/4-length sleeves allude to strolling along the Seine, while the daring color combinations give off a subtle rocker vibe. So get on out and earn your stripes! Bay Area folk can buy one in every color at Slash in Berkeley.

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - photography

One Love: The Time Teller

"The Time Teller P" watch - Nixon

Everyone has a clock on their mobile phone, so why not go retro and wear an actual watch? This sleek, sporty, and super affordable one from Nixon is making it so much more fun to be on time, and can you believe all the great colors it comes in!!! We got the seafoam color with bright yellow hands--an edgy yet chic combination. If you live in the Bay Area, Nixon has a new retail store down on 4th Street in Berkeley that carries "The Time Teller P" plus all their other amazingly cool watches, headphones, bags, and accessories. And if you go now, they're having an awesome 40%-off sale...! Be sure to tell them Visual Jill sent you!

One Love: The Tribal Bracelet

Tibetan bracelets - Tibet Imports

New feature! "One Love Wednesday" is our mid-week post highlighting one thing we're really loving for the week. This week it's all about these colorful Tibetan bracelets, which are the unofficial Official Good Luck Talisman for Visual Jill this year. Everyone in the Visual Jill tribe is getting one: our designers, editors, photographers, advisers, and contributors. We love their simplicity, whimsy, and cheerfulness, and the tribal influence is so Now!

*Credits: Kyoko Jackson - Photography