Happy Canada Day!

It's a holiday in Canada today - it's Canada Day.

Most Canada Day weekends we go to George's birthday party. George Coletti is one of my all time favourite people. I met George the day we moved to Nelson in 1994 - we rented a very cool old apartment from him. Since then the Colettis have become like family to us and I'm really looking forward to this weekend because it's George's 90th birthday party. George and his family have owned the local junktique store in Nelson for a long time and I can genuinely say that most of the vintage furniture in my house is from their store. When we had the Dominion Café it was right next door to George's store and Lou, George's son, built the café interior for us. Lou is also the lucky owner of the best boat shed in the world - which I blogged about here. Here are a few pictures taken at George's store over the last few years . . .

SF storefronts

I always like to include a pictorial selection of my favourite storefronts when we get back from a city trip. Here's my selection from San Francisco. Love the trendy one-bright-colour look. This first yellow establishment is a newish, very hip, German Gasthaus - Leopold's. I think if you head there for a beer after work you won't be disappointed ;-)

Happy Monday!

Hello everyone!

Thanks for visiting today. It's so nice to be back here! What a great week we had in California. Doug took so many pictures, it was a bit overwhelming to organize them all last night. So today I'm starting with a few iconic San Francisco images and then on to a couple of favourite shops. In the next few days I'll show you some other highlights of our trip including the usual fab, vintage, store fronts and vintage signage that Doug always takes such great shots of. We had 3 days in San Francisco and then 4 days in Carmel - we had a blast and if you are interested in any details, hotels etc I'll post some of those tomorrow. But I can guarantee we will be heading back to Carmel again this year some time - we absolutely loved it. Enjoy the photos . . . .

New Cartolina retailers

Every so often I get a list of retailers from one of our distributors. Yesterday I got a new list from the UK. The UK is one of our best market and I love the interesting stores that sell our cards. There is a wonderful mix of funky boutiques and iconic museums and galleries. I always think it's such fun that we sell cards at Urban Outfitters in London - and also the Victoria and Albert Museum! So here are a few of our latest stores in the UK, which I am very proud of. Harrods is new for us(I wonder how much they sell our cards for there!) Liberty is also new for us and I am humbled to be among such amazing designer goods. The Royal Pavilion in Brighton is such an incredible, folly of a building - a fascinating place where I am flattered to be selling cards! The Victoria and Albert Museum is new to us in the last few months and I am very proud to sell our products in their gift store amongst the beautiful products that they produce themselves under their own brand. The Tate Gallery(Tate Britain) is new for us too and in the past, I have really enjoyed the store at the Tate - I've bought lots of postcards and posters, it would be such a thrill to see Cartolina there. And lastly one of our latest stores is Designers Guild in London. I'm thrilled to be included with all the pretty things at Designers Guild. I'm so inspired by Tricia Guild - I wonder if they sell our french fashion cards, so much pretty pattern and fabric detail on those cards.

Liberty

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton

Harrods

Tate Britain

The V & A

Designer Guild

(Images from Wikipedia)

Inspiration

You know how much I love vintage store fronts? Well I was alerted to a fabulous book of New York storefronts yesterday - thank you Linda! the book is called STORE FRONT- The Disappearing Face of New York by James and Karla Murray (Gingko Press) ISBN:978-1-58423-227-8 $65.00. I am definitely going to buy this book. Enjoy . . .

Manganaro

On Monday Doug headed off by himself to find some good food. He always researches restaurants before we go anywhere and has it all planned ahead of time. He was determined to find this Italian deli that was featured on one of Anthony Bourdains shows. Tony Bourdain insisted that Manganaros was the real thing - authentic, home cooked Italian food, a forgotten treasure in Hell's Kitchen. I have to say I love the store front and the chalk board out front (Doug managed to get these pictures before the owner ran outside an shouted at him for taking photos!) . . . . .

Above - a couple more store front pictures - I can't get enough of vintage store fronts in NY. Here's a link to previous posts on New York store fronts(these are some of my fave posts)

Pink Pony

I ran across this when I was searching for vintage storefronts the other day for my Blog It Forward post(which I am still recovering from - longest post in the world!) So the Pink Pony looks like my kind of place - have any of you been here? Lower East Side, NY? Let's go! You know, I have been trying to get Doug to write restaurant reviews on Cafe Cartolina - he plans all our eats when we go to NY, Vancouver etc and he does a great job. He's a very good writer, good photographer and good wine drinker - that would make him a good restaurant critic, right? I think we should get him to be a contributor here at The Cafe! (he recently started Tweeting - you can follow him here)

"Perhaps one of the best places for an uptowner or out-of-towner to observe the hipster in his natural habitat, this tin ceiling-ed Lower East Side café is the quintessential Bohemian hangout." --New York Magazine - I think Doug could have written that!

Inspiration

I love old store fronts and shop windows - you may remember Doug and I had so much fun taking pictures of our fave storefronts in Greenwich Village a few months ago. I love these shop pictures from around London and Brighton from This Flickr stream. Enjoy!