Trudi Romeo in the VW Home booth

The Bridgehampton Antique Show was a new venture for us. This past weekend was hot, muggy and there wasn’t a breeze to be found anywhere. You wouldn’t believe that, despite the horrible conditions, we were able to sell a wonderful indonesian desk, chairs and accessories to the point that we had to restock our booth with items from the showroom here in Manhattan.

I was there for parts of it Trudi Romeo, the VW Home showroom manager, was the one who braved the boiling heat without much of a break – I believe she lost 3lbs over the weekend!

Did you manage to pop by? What did you think of the event?

As we speak, my shipments are starting to arrive from India and Thailand. It’s so nice to rediscover these things that I shopped for months ago.

That’s the best part about owning VW Home. I just love extending my travels and the memories that go with it when, months later, these shipments arrive. I found some wonderful objects during my round the world trip in December through February and am also receiving some new marble designs that I had made in India. I’m so excited about seeing it! My biggest anticipation is for a beautiful large stupa that I bought in Burma, which I’m going to keep in my apartment for a while. I’ll share some photos here as soon as it’s all unpacked!

I’m always like a kid in a candy store when I’m traveling and buying things for VW Home and a highlight once I’m back is getting the various shipments from all over a couple of months after I get back. In a couple of weeks, we are expecting a huge shipment from China, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Mali and I am needing to get rid of last year’s toys to make room for the new acquisitions. (There’s something to be said about being compulsive.) But I cannot wait for the new merchandise to come in and the old to find new homes.

What this means for you are discounts up to 50% on some of the items in VW Home. We’re not calling it a sale, merely an opportunity for last year’s favorites to find a new home somewhere nice!

We just received another shipment at VW Home – this time from India. Some of the pieces that I bought had been painted and the dealers I bought them from stripped and polished them to restore the original wood. Many times people who have been living with furniture pieces paint them just to bring a punch to their space and I find that in its own way, this painting protects the pieces from damage. When you strip the paint and go down to the original wood the piece ends up looking like new.

These were originally used as hookahs to smoke in the mogul period, but here they’ve become really wonderful objects because of their scale.

When shopping in India I do a very different thing… I have pieces I design manufactured out of marble. My approach there is to find classic Indian pieces and alter the scale to a much more modern point of view, which is always so funny, because when I go back to the workshops I see my pieces displayed, but because most of the people who go to these places are looking for the traditional scale, my pieces never sell in India. Once they arrive at VW Home, they become pieces of sculpture.