The Maisonist

A charming approach to cooking, entertaining, and table-setting with all the chicness of Parisians at home. The Parisian dinner party is the ideal of entertaining chic: the style of the host, the quality of the food and wine, and the beauty of the setting. With this creative and invaluable book, Laurent Buttazzoni--renowned French architect, gourmand, and celebrated host of delightful dinner parties in Paris--shares his tried and true elements for Parisian entertaining.Dispelling the myths of expense and complexity that can intimidate hosts, Diner à la Maison is a guide to shopping, cooking, and entertaining the Parisian way. Led by beautiful color photographs made in the author's home, the book covers the fundamental ingredients for the pantry, followed by a guide to pairing 42 menus with it's own décor and table setting. From weekday hits to weekend entertaining, seasonal events, and holiday parties, each menu is accompanied by ideas for a decoration theme. For weeknight gathering, Buttazzoni offers simple seasonal dishes such as Watercress Soup and French Macaroni and Cheese or Rack of Lamb with Pan Juices, Green Tabbouleh, and Lemon Tart. For a more formal dinner party a menu of Belgian Endive Salad with Pears and Blue Cheese, Duck Breast à l'Orange, and Honey Glazed Turnips or Poule au Pot, Poached Vegetables, and a luscious Berry Trifle. With a candid guide to shopping for everything from good-quality groceries to eclectic tableware, as well as creative tips on the details that make any dinner party a success (pop your champagne in the freezer before guests arrive!)--and with an introduction by style icon Sofia Coppola--this book is an essential tool for all those who want to receive family and friends at home.

A delightful, imaginative, and thoroughly original cocktail compendium and bartending manual with 90 drink recipes from the popular and influential Brooklyn bar and restaurant. A major player in both the craft cocktail revival and the bar and restaurant renaissance, Maison Premiere offers an immersive experience that channels a time when cocktails were not merely a pleasure but an essential part of daily life in late-nineteenth-century New York, New Orleans, and Paris. As captivating as the bar itself, The Maison Premiere Almanac is both a visual delight—drawing on photography, illustration, and graphic design—and a detailed guide to the rarefied subjects that make Maison Premiere unique, including deep explorations into the art of the cocktail and cutting-edge bartending techniques and equipment. There are also primers on absinthe (a Maison specialty) and recipes for highly refined cocktails, including martinis, toddys, punches, and mint juleps. Tutorials on oysters include how to confidently select and prepare them at home and how to eat them with style. The Almanac is packed with curious information and useful knowledge on cocktails and bartending for both enthusiastic beginner bartenders and seasoned cocktail lovers.

The history of music at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr — the famous convent school founded by Madame de Maintenon and established by Louis XIV in 1686 as a royal foundation — is both rich and intriguing; its large repertory of music was composed expressly for young female voices by important composers working within significant contemporary musical genres: liturgical chant, sacred motets, theatrical music, and cantiques spirituels. While these genres reflect contemporary styles and trends, at the same time the works themselves were made to conform to the sensibilities and abilities of their intended performers. Even as Jean-Baptiste Moreau's music for Jean Racine’s biblical tragedies Esther and Athalie shows a number of similarities to contemporary tragédies lyriques, it departs from that more public genre in its brevity, generally simpler solo writing, and the integral use of the chorus. The musical style of the choral numbers closely parallels that of other choral music in the repertory at Saint-Cyr. The liturgical chant sung in the church was composed by Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, and is an example of plain-chant musical, a type of new ecclesiastical composition written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily for female religious communities in France. The large repertory of petits motets (short sacred Latin pieces for solo voice), mostly composed by Nivers and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, are simpler and more restrained than works by their contemporaries. A close study of the motets reveals much about changes to musical style and performance practices at Saint-Cyr during the eighteenth century. The cantique spirituel, a song with a spiritual text in the vernacular French language, played a significant role in both the education and recreation of the girls at Saint-Cyr. Cantiques composed for the girls vary widely in terms of their style and difficulty, ranging from simple strophic melodies to more sophisticated works in the style of contemporary airs. In all cases, the stylistic features of the music for Saint-Cyr reflect a careful consideration of the needs and capabilities of the young singers of the school, as well as an awareness of the rigorous requirements of Madame de Maintenon, who kept a close watch over the propriety of all things relating to the piety, behavior, and image of her charges.

For many years the byword for pretty and refined French taste, the esteemed haberdasher Maison Sajou was founded in 1857 and today is still supplying an eager audience with the finest materials money can buy, from embroidery silks and linens to ribbons for trimming. In this, Sajou’s first sewing book, 20 gorgeous projects for the home take the reader from basic embroideries to more complex, but still achievable, endeavours. Easy-to-follow and fully illustrated instructions ensure that you can tackle all the projects, whatever your level of sewing ability.

When the day comes that you are tested, will you be equal to the challenge? Jon Jameson, investment advisor, has always wondered if he'd have the courage to rescue someone by racing into a burning building. Not that he's likely to be called on to do so. He leads an easy life: a good job, a beautiful wife and one financial indulgence. Jon collects houses. House collecting is an expensive hobby, but he's not greedy. A bit of patience, an eye for a good deal and careful negotiation will bring the collection together. The rent he collects from his small collection is re-invested, one hundred percent, to bring his properties to the state he believes they deserve. One hundred percent. Not one penny for anything else, not even for his wife, Frieda, who handles the day-to-day business of maintaining those properties. That is not what she signed up for. When Jon's test comes it has nothing to do with burning buildings. One of his co-workers has crossed the line legally, and Jon is dragged down with him. Through no fault of his own, Jon Jameson is not only unemployed, he is unemployable. Frieda is not supportive. Jon screwed up. Jon can solve it. She continues to live and spend as usual, including her habit of purchasing twenty lottery tickets per week. While checking them for her, Jon discovers one worth sixty-million dollars. He should tell her, but they're not legally married. Frieda and her spoiled daughter getting rich while he remains a pauper? Unthinkable. He palms it. Life becomes complicated. Frieda buys lottery tickets. Jon never does, and everyone knows it. How to claim it? He needs to get Frieda and her daughter to go away - far away. He also needs a junior partner, someone with enough nerve to cash the ticket and someone who won't arouse Frieda's suspicions when the winner's name hits the media. A real-estate agent he met once, Adriana Compote, seems perfect. She agrees. There's a lot of work to do, but they need to avoid any kind of contact until well after the ticket is cashed. They need a go-between and someone to do the leg work. Fife, the man who accidentally caused Jon's downfall, and who is just as unemployable, is brought on board. Adriana will collect the money, use it to create a high-end, real-estate company and then hire Jon as vice-president and Fife as manager. All three will draw overly-generous salaries (plus bonuses). What could go wrong? Despite his desperate financial condition, Jon cannot get Frieda to leave. The morning of the day that Adriana is going to surrender the ticket, Frieda discovers a note from Jon to someone called "Adriana Compote", a name that will be all over the news by evening as a lottery winner who bought at the same kiosk and in the same quantity that Frieda did. Jon calls Fife and tells him to call it off, but it's too late. Adriana has already submitted the ticket. She sends back a message telling Jon to grow a pair and "handle it". He does. To the surprise of the three conspirators, their business, Vintage Properties, makes money buying and renovating high-end houses. Jon looks forward to adding the best to his collection, which at the time consists of nothing, because he had to sell his modest collection to cover expenses. As a joke, a business acquaintance tells him about a mansion north of Toronto that "needs work". The mansion is a ruin. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was the domain of Randolph Cranshaw a tyrant who liked to keep his wife and daughters isolated in a place where he had them under his control. Money came easily, but social status and a career in politics eluded him because of his reputation. Frustrated by those failures, Cranshaw poured his money into the house and, above all, into the extensive gardens that spread south to a cottage that he built to house a series of extra-marital affairs. Long after the era of the Cranshaws, a highway bypass cut the former estate in half. The rotting ruins of the mansion lie at the top of the north section. The cottage, still occupied, remains at the bottom edge of the severed southern part. The garden has gone wild for a century. The decayed mansion is beyond rescue, but the cottage is in good shape. Nestled deep in the trees along a secluded lane, it calls out to Jon offering seclusion and safety. He feels the need for both, because he is being followed. Is it because of the lottery win or is it the unexplained disappearance of Frieda and her daughter? Perhaps leaving their bodies in the deep-freeze of a basement apartment wasn't the best long-term solution. He carries their frozen remains to the remote mansion property for burial but discovers that digging among trees is impossible; there are too many roots. Instead he buries them in the cellar of the mansion. The graves will remain undisturbed as long as the land remains a wood lot. No sooner has the mansion been turned into a cemetery then a client turns up at Vintage Properties to ask about the property. Jon becomes even more paranoid. He convinces Fife to purchase the cottage property and rent it to him. Not only will it give him an untraceable place to rest, it will also allow him to keep an eye on the property to the north without attracting attention to himself by buying it. He investigates the history of the estate and concludes that the cottage was Cranshaw's love nest. More investigation turns up a name: Elizabeth Levisham. Elizabeth first visited the Cranshaw estate at the age of fourteen. Five years later, at the age of nineteen, she appeared in a picture of a skating party on the garden pond. In the picture, Randolph Cranshaw stands behind her, smiling and with one hand resting on her shoulder. Mrs Cranshaw stands off to the side, not smiling. In nineteen twenty-nine, at the age of twenty three, Elizabeth stayed in the cottage for an extended period. When she left, a gossip column in the local paper commented that she would be "much missed" by the Cranshaws. The columnist was fired the next day. Despite an extensive search, Jon can find no record of Elizabeth Levisham after the day she left the cottage. He becomes suspicious that she never did leave...... .

Part-Architecture presents a detailed and original study of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre through another seminal modernist artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Aligning the two works materially, historically and conceptually, the book challenges the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, makes original spatial and social accounts of its inhabitation in 1930s Paris, and presents new architectural readings of the Large Glass. Through a rich analysis, which incorporates creative projects into history and theory research, the book establishes new ways of writing about architecture. Designed for politically progressive gynaecologist Dr Jean Dalsace and his avant-garde wife, Annie Dalsace, the Maison de Verre combines a family home with a gynaecology clinic into a ‘free-plan’ layout. Screened only by glass walls, the presence of the clinic in the home suggests an untold dialogue on 1930s sexuality. The text explores the Maison de Verre through another radical glass construction, the Large Glass, where Duchamp’s complex depiction of unconsummated sexual relations across the glass planes reveals his resistance to the marital conventions of 1920s Paris. This and other analyses of the Large Glass are used as a framework to examine the Maison de Verre as a register of the changing history of women’s domestic and maternal choices, reclaiming the building as a piece of female social architectural history. The process used to uncover and write the accounts in the book is termed ‘part-architecture’. Derived from psychoanalytic theory, part-architecture fuses analytical, descriptive and creative processes, to produce a unique social and architectural critique. Identifying three essential materials to the Large Glass, the book has three main chapters: ‘Glass’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Air’. Combining theory text, creative writing and drawing, each traces the history and meaning of the material and its contribution to the spaces and sexuality of the Large Glass and the Maison de Verre. As a whole, the book contributes important and unique spatial readings to existing scholarship and expands definitions of architectural design and history.

Martin Margiela's pioneering and timeless designs made for the luxury house of Hermès between 1997 and 2003 are the stars of this book, highlighting this period in the iconic and enigmatic Belgian designer's career. The first edition was published to accompany an exhibition in the Modemuseum Antwerp. The new edition, accompanying the exhibition in Paris, includes images from the Antwerp exhibition, and more extensive essays by Rebecca Arnold, Kaat Debo and Sarah Mower, and a foreword by Suzy Menkes.This key period between 20th- and 21st-century fashion is evoked through interviews with Margiela's closest collaborators. Never-before-published material from the Maison Martin Margiela archives, numerous striking and exquisitely refined images from Le Monde d'Hermès, as well as new photographic material tell the story of Margiela's supreme wardrobe for Hermès.