Savannah State of Mind

I’M HALF HOME in Brooklyn; my other half is still down south somewhere. Coming home from a vacation, even one of six days, always makes me wish I appreciated being away even more when I had the chance. Certain patterns and behaviors associated with “real life” — lousy sleep, money anxiety, word-game addiction, uninspiring routine, eating out of deli containers — reassert themselves only too quickly upon my return.

Happily, I’ll have the opportunity to test my vacation appreciation skills again, when I go to Mexico — the arty city of San Miguel de Allende, in the country’s heartland — in two weeks’ time.

Meanwhile, I’m not done with Savannah. Can’t let my photos of beachy Tybee Island, below, Savannah’s Hamptons equivalent, go to waste.

The last day’s urban wanderings included the Regency-style c. 1819 Owens-Thomas House, designed by William Jay, a 23-year-old architect from Bath, England, with early indoor plumbing, doors to nowhere and orange and blue stained glass windows. (No photos allowed inside, unfortunately.)

More Savannah street sights:

A local sent us to check out Alex Raskin Antiques in the Noble Hardee Mansion on Monterey Square, below, five floors of genteel decrepitude filled with 18th and 19th century furnishings and objects. Not a stick of mid-century modern to be found!

 

 

 

Coslick’s Cottages

SO HERE I AM, trying to renovate just one cottage, and along comes an e-mail from Jane Coslick, who has bought, fixed up, decorated, sold, and/or rented some three dozen of them!

She’s well-known as a cottage preservationist on Tybee Island, Georgia, near Savannah, where tiny workmen’s houses and fishing shacks built in the 1920s, some as small as 400 square feet, would have been pulverized in the name of development if not for Jane and others like her.

It’s the exuberance and care with which she does it, and her free hand with color, that has made Jane’s work a staple of such magazines as Coastal Living, Southern Living, and, before its recent demise, Cottage Living.

Jane has a website with links to all her press coverage, of which there’s been no shortage. Her vibrant cottages, with evocative names like Fish Camp, Calypso, and Hemingway, are like honey to magazine-editor bees. She just started a new blog, too. You can find it here.