This girl {moi} fashions herself as a bit of foodie and I do enjoy all that tasty delights that Los Angeles has to offer. I recently grabbed a few bites at Stark Bar before touring around LACMA on a lovely Sunday afternoon. The bone marrow was beyond deliciousness and the goat meat and goat cheese flatbread was smokey and just great. I look forward to going back….

I’d definitely be up for more camping if these were my digs. I really do enjoy the concept of “roughing it” in the great outdoors, but I also like to be comfortable and warm. Perhaps I’m just more of the glamping type?

Heading off to beautiful Bass Lake to boat on the lake, make s’mores, and enjoy time with nine friends; great end to the summer.

 {Image via Pinterest}

My latest new obsession and favorite pastime is pinning photos to my virtual tackboard online with Pinterest. Do you Pin? Well, I highly recommend it. Here’s a roundup of a few of my pins…hard to pick my favorites, that would be like picking a favorite child or pet, so instead, here are a few that I have curated to share here. I love seeing what others find pin worthy too.

Endless hours of discovering and visual enjoyment!

I’ve always loved the color blue and I have noticed that my projects often reflect that; it may just be my go-to color and I really enjoy working with blues of all shades. While selecting paints for the interior of a current project, I realized just how much I really love dark teal. Could this be my favorite color? At the moment it certainly is. A deep dark shade of what I like to call Peacock!

Just painted the back of some bookcases in a Victorian home in Dunn Edwards’ Encore Teal; really loving it!

And how about these glossy walls below – so groovy….

{Images via Pinterest & Decorpad (glossy painted walls interior)}

This bathroom is calling my name. I would love to come home after a long day to decompress in this space; very serene and just the right mix of  minimalist and glam…. love the tub faucet detail, nice touch. I’ll take one of these please, yep.

{photo credit: lakejane.com via Pinterest}

Be sure to hop on over to Apartment Therapy’s House Tour that posted today. It features the residence of my client and his very crisp and stylish remodeled condo. He’s a good sport – posing for the photo.

{image via Bethany Nauert}

Check out yours trulys’ bedroom in the article Home on the Grain on page 50 of this new online magazine. The article is a feature on Chad Petersen and Dakota Witzenburg of todosomething, but it just so happens to feature the bedroom of my warehouse residence that Chad and I share and the lovely kitchen belonging to Dakota and his family.

Krista & Jessica of Collected have curated a great first issue – hats off to you ladies for all your hard work! I love the aesthetic that they’ve created.

{photo via Destined to Design}

I am working on a beach house project and would LOVE to use this first Knotty Bubbles fixture in white by Lindsey Adelman Studio over the dining table. So unique….

I find myself tempted time and again to rewrite my website bio and create a more authentic blurb that expresses how I feel about the experience and process of working with my clients. Often this happens when I read the “about” page of a fellow designer and I realize, “wow, that is exactly what I think too”.

So until the day that the just-so-perfect words find me and I revise my bio, here are the thoughts and comments from two interior designers about their processes that I really did enjoy reading. I hope you do too.

I am very collaborative designer. My goal is to help my clients create the house of their dreams. It isn’t my dream, it’s theirs. But my approach to decorating for myself and for others is similar. I ask a lot of questions and collect as much inspirational imagery as possible. Then I write what I love about each image on a post-it. All the pictures help me build the room in my head. I also spend time thinking about how the space is going to be used

Brooke Giannetti – via Rue Magazine

---

*******************************************************

My car is filled with fabric samples, old coffee cups and crumbled up paint chips.  My office is not the beautiful neat organized office you may see on the pages of a magazine. The glossy white walls and perfectly p-touched folders are an illusion. I am proud of the homes I have decorated. I think they look wonderful on my website. But people live in them and there are stains on the ottoman and the peonies only make it to the mantel for the photo shoots and parties. I feel my success comes from something one can not photograph. The most fun I have  aside designing sassy bars and cute powder rooms, is creating livable rooms and becoming part of someone’s family. I watch their purse carefully and in return I gain trust.  And a great house is the outcome.

So . . . I am just a decorator. Big staff, great store or small garage office.. I have not changed. I have realized that my goal is not do so many things in this industry that I forget to decorate. I still schlep lampshades in my car and the highlight of my day is going downtown to check on carpentry in a old warehouse. Glamorous this job is not. However, I live and breathe to have a relationship with a home and the people that live in it. My goal is not have people remark at parties that Ruthie designed the most amazing aubergine lacquered room. But it is to hear that they were treated carefully, honestly and creatively. And that . . . is all I need.

Ruthie Sommers via her website

What a great surprise  to find that Marcia Prentice from Apartment Therapy included me in her recent article that featured seven interior designers to watch. It was great to be recognized in such great company. You may see one of my projects showcased on AT’s House Tour in the coming months; I’ll be sure to update when that happens. Read the article here…enjoy!