Inspiration for a spring soiree
A champagne bucket from Tina Frey Designs is handmade with resin and accented with leather handles.
At the Architectural Digest Home Show in New York a few months ago, I was charmed by California designer and artist Tina Frey’s booth. Her pieces, which are also carried by interior designer Liz Caan’s Design Studio & Retail Store in Newton, Massachusetts, and at the gift shop at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, range from bowls and vessels to serving ware and jewelry. All are all made of lightweight resin, which gives the surface an alluring frosty look. Though she often works in bright colors, I covet Frey’s milky white champagne bucket accented with leather handles and know just what bubbly I’d pair it with for a stylish impromptu evening soiree.
These Riedel Sommeliers Sparkling Wineglasses, crafted by artisans at the Reidel family’s Austrian factory, are modern and fun, and I’d fill them with Céline et Laurent Tripoz Crémant de Bourgogne Brut Nature 2011, a sparkling wine made entirely of chardonnay and selected by The New York Times as one of its top 20 wines for spring, describing it as “creamy yet light, dry, straightforward and graceful.”
To deliver the beverages to my lucky guests, I’d play off the champagne bucket’s matte look, which has an almost prehistoric earthiness yet the smoothness of a beach stone, with a high gloss blue lacquer serving tray and colorful seersucker cocktail napkins finished with a wave stitch. Then I’d whip up some of Reuben Reynolds and Bill Casey’s Bacon Nuts (in Design New England’s November/December 2012 entertaining feature “Music Men”) as indulgent comfort food snacks.
Champagne bucket aside, Frey’s collections are infused with glowing colors that can either gain a more frosty appearance with regular use and washing, or shined up with a small rub of vegetable oil.
Also, Frey’s Flower Necklace with hand-sculpted resin beads on a leather cord makes a striking statement and her sculptural egg cups are understated darlings.
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