Glamour and elegance: The mutually exclusive age ends

If you catch me in a super market, I am asleep. Fair warning. You could gently remove that duck breast from my basket and take one solid whack at my head and there is a chance I might not flinch. It's become raaaawther mundane. Not unlike the chart-topping bore that is my dining room.

Look. I am in good company here, a lot of brilliant interior types, among them, long time friend of Blushing, Mrs. Blanding's for one; find that room a challenge. If not the worst kind. "The national disaster that is my dining room," is how she bravely referred to her own dining room, but just as easily to mine (only, more bravely, she published the photos).

Mine is in that category because it lacks imagination and the small swooshes of color and depth of texture it deserves and I prefer. It is, after all, housing the Fort Knox of porcelain, it should be treated with some reverence. Some glamour.

While that notion has been the battering ram my mind takes to that room whenever I find myself there, it was going no where. I was not in love, conceptually, with the modern notion of glamour although I knew the inspiration headed in that direction. And the old notion of glamour will only put bright rouge lipstick on an 1880 farmhouse. Mirrored tables and the like; just everywhere I look. And enough already; okay, okay, I got it. It does not spell glamour for me, and it is a toll call from there to elegance.

No apologies. I read all the interiors ink; I'm informed. Just because it is trend, no one expects me to love it. Only to tolerate seeing it all over and wishing the owners had a come-to-Jesus regarding fingerprints and Windex. Pay to play, I say.

I digress.

But then, like a raw duck breast to the temple, something elegantly masculine-come-glamour knocked me over.

The Veranda, 2011 cover is that duck breast. Dining room: consider yourself warned.