Just to introduce myself

You know you must have been around an awful long time when something like the following anecdote happens to you. I was walking down Madison Avenue in NY a couple of years ago and saw a newish  furniture/design shop. I went into it and was more or less  immediately confronted by my first book English Style (published 1967) opened up and resting on a plinth. 'Good Heavens,' I said. 'Where on earth did you get that?' 'Why do you want to know' said a couple of young men in attendance.  'Because I wrote it.' I said. 'It was my first book.'

'Are you Mary Gilliatt?' they said with some astonishment. 'We thought you had died years ago.'

So there you go. But I'm still around and grateful for it. Not least because over the last 5 decades that I have been involved in decorating, decorators and architects I have seen things go round and round again and again and again. And I am still working. I have a job with clients in NY with whom I have been working over 20 years. Not because I'm particularly slow but because they always seem to have something new that they want done. I finished the house of some clients in the South of France last year and a new restaurant right on a lake also in the Luberon in the South of France, called Le Restaurant du Lac, mentioned this year as one of the 100 best new restaurants in France by the Michelin Bib Gourmand guide. They even mentioned the designer which is unusual for the Michelin Guide.

I'm also still the design consultant for the US franchise decorating company, Decor & You. And I still travel regularly between the UK and the US, Europe and Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. In the circumstances I decided it could be a good time to start a decorating blog and try to answer questions and needs on design as best as I could. Or anything else to do with life style for that matter seeing that I have been around so long, travel so widely and seen so much.