First, by way of explanation, a little background:

Back in the day, Carmel Plaza had an I. Magnin’s that was eventually replaced by Saks Fifth Avenue when they moved from Del Monte Center in Monterey.

And also, back in the day, Carmel Plaza had an escalator to it’s garden level and fountain…an escalator that continually broke down. When Saks Fifth Avenue left the Plaza and was replaced by Anthropologie on the second level, the escalator and the fountain were removed and the courtyard was rebuilt.  But Anthropologie didn’t take the 12,000 sq. feet of the garden level that had been the Saks Men’s Department.  So the empty space with the ugly facade that had been hidden behind the escalator and fountain just sat and sat.  And sat. For 5 years.  Empty.

And that’s where Homescapes comes in and why I’ve been busy.

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

During construction I had every intention of blogging progress reports with photos.  Praising Level 5 and the construction team, discussing the design process working with architect Ron Brown, listing the steps BuildingWise was leading us through to get our LEED Gold certification.

And then the thought of all of the things we needed to accomplish to get back in business in downtown Carmel pretty much freaked me out and I REALLY didn’t feel like talking about it.

But now I’m back.  Homescapes is literally bigger and better and now it’s on to the future.

Stay tuned!

]]> http://www.thearmchairtraveler.net/2010/12/14/new-and-improved/feed/ 0 http://www.thearmchairtraveler.net/2010/09/08/we-travel-ed-the-world/ http://www.thearmchairtraveler.net/2010/09/08/we-travel-ed-the-world/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:56:38 +0000 Thompson Lange http://www.thearmchairtraveler.net/?p=973 Back in the day, we were all over the place for the store.  And Beau and I plastered our mugs all over the television screen talking about it.  And now we’re doing it again…the plastering not the traveling.  We’re running a retrospective type commercial to let people know we’re still in business, even though the Carmel Plaza store still has a couple of months of building left before opening.

It’s funny about the new Homescapes.  Beau was counting up the number of stores and warehouses we’ve had since opening in 1996 and he realized that the Carmel Plaza store will be our 10th location.  For truth in advertising he suggested we change our slogan from “We travel the World so you don’t have to” to “We travel the Peninsula so you can’t find us.”

Homescapes Carmel retrospective commercial

So I came up to Seattle again to do another presentation.  This time the topic was “Enhancing your Brand: Making Good Works work for You.”  Probably should have called it: “Paparazzi: How to get free press.”  I could have given the exact same presentation without scaring people off with the whole volunteerism thing.  Of course, the only way to get a lot of free press is to be active in your community, otherwise the Press wants to be paid via advertising.

Even though the 5 or 6 people who came stayed, which is an accomplishment, I guess,  I wish I could have reached more people.

Oh well….found GREAT stuff for the store, so HA! I win.

I can honestly say I never envisioned seeing an article about myself on the Sports page.  In the old sexist days of my youth, I would have had to acknowledge that I’m totally un-athletic and throw like a girl.  In today’s enlightened age, I humbly admit I don’t even throw THAT well.

But apparently in some ways slow and steady may not win the race (which would be newsworthy), but it DOES make for a different perspective.

If you haven’t…DON’T. If you have, well, then you know that you CAN’T get a million things done at once and you’re BOUND to piss someone (or everyone) off.

I’ve been running around like the proverbial headless chicken.
Sidebar: I was looking for something a little less Hallmark to use as an image here…and, FYI, I don’t recommend doing an image search for “Chicken with its head cut off.”

But back to the narrative: Somehow I thought I could expand the garden store at the Barnyard, get a Design/Construction office open at Carmel Plaza, volunteer for the Big Sur Marathon and the Carmel Art and Film Festival, sing with a jazz group, community chorus and a group performing the Rutter Requiem at Lincoln Center, all WHILE working on opening the all new Homescapes Carmel downtown.

And now I’m WAY behind with everything. Including running…I haven’t gotten my fat butt outta bed to run since I finished the 7-Continent goal.  Then Tuesday I got the (good?) news that I made it into the New York Marathon in November, so now I HAVE to get my fat butt outta bed. I don’t know where I think I’m going to get the time to do any (or all) of this (even though I really WANT to do all these things).

I think I need to learn how to say “no” to at least SOMETHING. Better to do a few things well than to….well, you know the rest.

And so do all the people who are waiting on things from me. Yikes!

It was 1970, I was with my family, and much to my un-dying shame my younger brothers and I were dressed in identical clothes.  (Even the Brady Bunch kids were cooler than that…sheesh..but our step-mother, Momma Sue, liked the look and so whatchya-gonna do when you’re 9?)

Anyway, I was daydreaming about how life would be when I was an adult and in control of my own destiny (and clothes), musing about my future life on water. I was walking along “balancing” on the edge of a walkway, acting like a tight-rope walker and thinking how cool my life would be…and then Momma Sue, who was walking ahead of me,  fell off her mile-high wedgies.

S0 I moved away from the edge.  If an adult couldn’t even balance herself on her SHOES, the certainty of my remaining high-and-dry on the walkway’s edge instead of wet and floundering in Richardson Bay was suddenly questionable.

Ahhh…the 70′s.  Good times, bad fashion.

While I HAVE lived in Sausalito as an adult (twice, actually),  I still hadn’t full-filled the old houseboat dream.  Until this week.

My friend, Joe rented a houseboat to celebrate his birthday and I got to share in the experience.  He found a great boat on the VRBO website,  booked it and away we went.

Tiny little place that rocked with every step…which I loved (being a Californian I’m so used to the earth moving under my feet now and then that I don’t even notice it…usually).

Houseboats of Sausalito by Phil Frank

Great time, great boat, great to have finally “lived” on a Sausalito houseboat.

Clearly the Herald’s graphic artist wasn’t aware of the implications the adornments they added would suggest.  The picture now seems to suggest a need for…ahem…censorship.  It looks like Paul and I will go to any lengths to promote the show.

As always, the Dallas Market Center did it big (even going as far as a stick-thin model coming out in a unitard and headdress before – BOOM- opening her cape, raising it up and becoming a ” peacock.”)

Other than her and the poster, the rest of the evening stayed peacock-free (though one winner had thought ahead and wore a peacock feather in his tux pocket…or maybe he just plucked the model.)  There was even a shortage of preening from the winners, which I found interesting.

The mood in the room was more thankful than joyous, it seemed to me.  Many of the speeches gave thanks to people who had perservered and put up with the winners through 2009, so the bright side was that I wasn’t the only one in a wistful, sorta shell-shocked mood.

Or at least it seemed that way to me.

But don’t get me wrong, the evening was fun and worth the trip, and not just ’cause we won again.  Over the years I’ve gotten to know a number of the people who were in the room not just from doing business with them but  from conferences, roundtables and panel-discussions, so it really did feel like being surrounded by friends.

My speech, I’m told, went fine (though I always sort of black out about that kind of thing), but I hear the hi-def 15 foot screen was a bit “harsh.”  I overheard a friend tell another friend of mine that he’d never realized she had so many freckles.  “You looked like you had leprosy,” he said.

Yikes!

I do NOT want to see the DVD.

Long-timers know Beau and I opened our first store in 1996 in an old, condemned laundry we rebuilt.

We did the ol’ build-out trick again in 1999 when we opened in downtown Carmel.

When we opened Homescapes Carmel, we had NO idea that we would be running a store in downtown Carmel for 10 years.  We thought that we were only opening a temporary store to test the foot-traffic of Carmel shoppers against business in Pacific Grove.  But then our “owners” sold the building and thus began a long, often arduous tenancy in a building that became increasingly controversial.

Not to say that we aren’t thankful for our time in the building.  It’s led to some great opportunities for me and Beau, not least the new garden store we opened last May in the Barnyard.  But now the time has come to end the bank building chapter and open the Carmel Plaza chapter of Homescapes Carmel.

That’s right…those rumors you heard are true.  We’ve been approached by the Plaza to relocate to the 12,000 feet right below Anthropologie.  Perfect location for us and we are THRILLED with the neighbor…talk about stylish and in many ways similar (the buyer even has a television show, Man Shops World, that is a way-better version of what I’ve been doing on this blog for the last too-many years.)

The new space will have a Tasting Room Cafe where we’ll do wine pairings and classes, a specialty book-store with travel, decor and design books and magazines from around the world and an interior design studio.  In the long-term we also intend to partner with someone and bring the Flower Shop aspect back into play.  We’ve always credited the late Michael Weidner and the flower shop he created for us in The Grove Homescapes as the leading factor in our being so quickly embraced by  locals.

So if you drive by and see the empty bank building, don’t dispair!  We’re still open daily at the Barnyard and we’re working hard to transform yet another unattractive space into something beautiful that will make y’all proud.  Until then,  here’s a few pictures of the duckling before it becomes a swan.

Trust me, it’ll be beautiful.

and cuddly…

…but I’m not one who’s all that big on Christmas (evidenced by the fact that of ALL the Christmas”y” images I could have used to exemplify the season, I picked the ones that were on the tip envelopes I got this morning from my garbarge-men).

You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch

It’s not that I’m anti-Christmas.  I like it fine when I’m traveling or doing something outside my normal life.  But here in Carmel, “cute” as it is, it’s more sigh than yippee.

Maybe it’s ’cause I get moody from light deprivation and Christmas is usually accompanied by cloudy, gray days and damp, starless nights. Or maybe ’cause I’m not big on amping myself up to be happy just because it’s the season when you’re expected to be happy. (Same reason I’m not big on New Year’s Eve parties…who cares about it really unless that’s the only time you’re allowed to stay up to midnight and drink champagne.)

Still, I’ve done the requisite stuff to be in the spirit community-wise.

I put up the tree in the store…

I built my yearly snowman in Caledonia park for the kids in Pacific Grove…

And I sang Christmas music with a community chorus.

But completely by coincidence and not in any way of my doing, I’ve agreed to loan out the garden store for the most UN-Christmasy thing I can imagine.  (Not the event, itself actually.  A book-signing is kinda season-friendly…lot’s of people give books at Christmas.)

But THIS book is about terrorism and the insurance industry.

Ahh, pull out the eggnog and sit on Santa’s knee.

Th p.r. blurb for Terminal Policy reads:

Well, it may not be glad tidings and cheer, but it kinda fits my mood.