Designing our Dream Parisian Cocktail Space... with zero budget... 🕯️🍸🤫
Plus our curated guide to where you can discover your own treasures
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We don’t know about anyone else, but we at Stonefruit Diaries are ecstatic about the Paris sunshine. This Winter has weighed on us in Paris… and honestly, weighed on our Stonefruit Baby. More rain equals fewer people on the streets and in the bar… and if you work in hospitality, all you want in life is to be surrounded by people enjoying a cocktail or bite, sharing their moment on the town with you. The rain has encouraged nesting it seems… and the departure of many businesses in our neighborhood that we cherished. It’s been bittersweet.
That said, nesting also comes with its upside… for us, it has really highlighted the value of comfort and beautiful design. While this can feel frivolous during troubled times, it can also, at least for this writer, feel like a little spark of joy… in fact, this entire post was inspired by realizing the lavender pottery coffee mug I picked up in Santa Monica (next to me as I was working this morning) made a measurable difference in my mood. It was a little indulgent something serving no other purpose than to create delight for me in my daily routine, and I think the little things matter.
That’s been the aim of our DIY Abricot decorating, to create a space that delights, relaxes, and encourages a mood where people feel invited to come as they are… and maybe find a little sunshine in the connections, the cocktails, the community. It’s our raison d’être.
But how? When we got our keys, we had no interior budget, and have needed to rely on our own eye to create the mood we were looking for. Warm, inviting, layered. Paris provides the perfect palette for this - it’s not only the Japanese that embrace wabi-sabi…. stone pillars with layers of paint and holes left from the years under other people’s custodianship, imperfect paint, chipped dishware, linens that aren’t perfectly pressed… that’s seems somewhat de rigueur here (and as a recovering perfectionist, frankly I find it reassuring).
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A friend and mentor in the hospitality industry who has created many of my very favorite spaces worldwide once gave me the advice to build from little to large… it’s a little bit counterintuitive for me… I would have began with the big furnishings the paint colors… he on the other hand, always builds from little to the large. He starts with the glassware, the plates, then lets that suggest what table it belongs on. Where does that table live? And so forth. So as we waited for the keys to the space, we started buying up water and vintage amuse glasses… and the collection started to grow. By the time the space was ours, we had a little treasure trove already amassed to instantly stamp it as our own.
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Everything we buy or use at Abricot (& our personal spaces !) has been a collaboration, a search, a deliberate curation of pieces that mean something to us, especially the ones created or inspired by our community. This week we’re sharing our curated inspiration guide to how & where we furnished our first Stonefruit Baby - and where you can discover your own treasures…
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