Who would you invite to your dream dinner party? A twist: what ghosts might happen by—nothing on the agenda, just a standard night of the strolling dead—and find themselves slowing down at your cast of characters, eyebrow up, easing over to listen, eventually squeezing into the end of your velvet banquette? Earlier this month, I traveled with six fascinating designers and several industry friends to the
@tefaf art fair in Maastricht for
@verandamag . Some designers I knew well, others I’d worked with for ages and never met in person, but we all spent our days looking at 7,000 years of fine art and antiques and jewels (seven. thousand. years.). A gobsmacking treasure hunt and time-hop—you can hardly believe what is right there in front of you. So every evening, over martinis and wine and ginger tea, stories of what we saw would spill into our dinners and after-hours, threading in and out of our own memoirs. I can’t help but wonder—given the old stone buildings we found ourselves in, the rowdy energy of the city during the fair—if a Dutch master or two might have wafted in, drawn to late-night stories of American life and design and dating and marriage and stranger-than-fiction chapters. Sure, they’d curse themselves for getting sucked in, deny it later to their friends, like snapping off a soap opera when someone walks in. But with this crew, I wouldn’t be surprised if those long-dead painters lit a smoke, poured some tea, stayed awhile. Or maybe took brush to canvas over the whole affair—we’ll never know, hence these gazillion photos I am popping in from the trip.
