Moi Parkhurst now stocks Romantic, Vintage inspired accessories

Kloche hats, alice bands, feather pins, scarves and feminine bows...

Bring out your inner French Vintage Goddess with these girly items. They make great gifts too!

Pop into Moi - Parkhurst to get yours!

The French Country Kitchen

The French Country Kitchen - We have recieved a lot of questions relating to creating a "French Country Kitchen look." So here are a few of our ideas to help you with your own creative kitchen decorating. French Country Kitchen is all about creating an environment of relaxed easy living to enjoy life's simple pleasures; warm conversation and hearty food. The French Country style is pretty much centered around the countryside's elements; Provencal landscapes, textured sandstone walls, clear blue skies, cobbled streets, lavender fields, olive trees and roosters. A common visual to all these elements is colour. Use natural hues in your kitchen or even what we call 'tired' colours (these are colours that are less saturated and have more grey in them, for example a kitchen door painted in an off blue).

The colours of a French Country Kitchen...

The kitchen is one of the most important rooms in a French Country home. This is where everyone gets together, so it has a distinct ‘lived-in’ feel to it. You can create this effect easily by miss-matching furniture and having an odd piece here and there, this way you get that special quaint charm. Our favorite way to do this is to use free-standing furniture pieces. It also helps if you have pieces handed down from previous generations or a treasured antique or two. Reinvent your furniture by giving it another use. You can use a small dining-room table as a work space or you can display your linen or crockery in a bookshelf. Make it a charming focal point. The whole idea is not to match items but to place miss-matched items together.

et voilà

Furniture and Plastered walls should be light in comparison to the ceiling. Wooden beams and stone floors are also part of this style, but if you are not lucky enough to have stone floors, cement your floors to achieve a similar look. If you have old boring kitchen cupboards, paint them in a light natural hue in a distressed finnish and change the knobs/handles. Paint is always fantastic for a new look and it is inexpensive. Try using pretty lace for a more feminine feel on your windows or natural textiles for a more rustic look. These windows are used mostly to allow the sunlight in and are not really for privacy but that is why French Country homes have shutters on the outside. Even simpler ideas to help you achieve this look are to adorn your open shelves with fabric, display jars with interesting items in them, place woven baskets on the floor or on the counter and put a blackboard in your kitchen with french words on them like Bon Appetite! We also love Iron hanging pot racks. Add some dried herbs or lavender here and there et voila! Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts.