Sprucing up House and Home

My wife and kids were out of town, and looking around my home, I noticed a distinct lack of anything that could remotely be considered classy. Or charming. Or having the quality of, say, a cottage in Provence or a farmhouse in Tuscany. The puppet that my son made in the second grade was cute, of course, what with the toothpicks stuck into the shrunken apple head, but it wouldn’t quite carry the day at, say, the Museum of Modern Art. Ditto the Wile E. Coyote-shaped mug that is frequently the only receptacle left in the house from which to drink fine, red wine.

Clearly, we needed to get to La Bella Casa, which has more taste exuding from its little finger than most of us have in our whole torso. They, after all, did the décor of the ultra-classy pied-a-terre apartment at Third Street Flats, which is what a McMinnville flat would look like if the Louvre were down the street (rather than the Spruce Goose, an entirely different story). Bella owners Andrea, Rhonda and Jennifer Feero delight in finding pretty, elegant things, displaying them artfully on their shelves and nudging us towards them in hopes of sprucing up our own domestic goose, so to speak. And that’s the last allusion I’ll make to being goosed by the Feeros.

They have lovely, rustic Italian dinnerware from Vietri that would make my wienies and beans look like risotto Milanese. The softest pajamas displayed near fragrant products from Crabtree & Evelyn. Soaps, Italian linens, handbags, shoes, lamps and even the hard to find Petunia Pickle Bottom Diaper Bag. And my personal favorite, a very large glass jar full of kumquats floating in some lucky liquid, the grown-up equivalent of having your own gumball machine at home.

Arranged In the right proximity, these things could even make a puppet with toothpicks sticking out of his head look like a carefully planned design objet. They don’t call it La Bella Casa for nothing.