House Heaven - Pictures of the Day

To brighten up your Monday, here are some crazy and wonderful houses of all kinds. From treehouses shaped like bubbles and UFOS, hideaways in the woods and carved into hillsides, spacious windows and designer modern interiors - I just wish I were relaxing in one of these lovely places right now!

Reality is Forbidden

South American sunshine,

Helen Rödel and Ismael Caneppele
Rödel LA

Beautiful and Damned

Born in 1940 to Dutch parents in Indonesia, and growing up in England and the South of France, Talitha Getty's life seemed destined to be filled with exotic glamour even before she became the second wife of the richest man in the world: John Paul Getty, son and heir to the fortune of his oil tycoon father.

After a wedding ceremony at Rome City Hall in 1966, to which Talitha wore a white mink-trimmed mini-dress, the couple travelled to Marrakesh, Morocco, for their honeymoon and purchased the beautiful 19th-century Le Palais du Zahir, thereafter known as the Pleasure Palace. It was here that the most famous photograph of the couple (now held by the National Portrait Gallery in London) was taken - John Paul hooded and brooding in a djellaba, Talitha the epitome of rich bohemianism in her ornate silk kaftan over white harem pants, and here where the couple held lavish parties filled with celebrities of the Swinging Sixties set, surrounded by lush gardens and the beautifully decorated interior of their home.

When Talitha died of a heroin overdose at the young age of 30 at the couple's palazzo in Rome in 1971, she left behind the three-year-old son she'd had with Getty, Tara Gabriel Gramaphone Galaxy, and became a legend with one immense shadow. Her style - a steaming blend of exoticism, bohemian vibrance and deluxe glamour mixed with the hedonistic indulgence of the lifestyle she led - continues to influence and inspire, far outshining the darkness of her short life.

In the words of Yves Saint Laurent from an article in the London Telegraph, "'When I knew Talitha Getty,' he later recalled [of his muse], 'my vision completely changed.' He was entranced by her mixture of apparent innocence - the barefoot flower child in ethnic dress - and wild decadence (the drugs, the jewels, the Rolling Stones and Beatles as house guests). 'I knew the youthfulness of the Sixties,' said Saint Laurent, in 1984, almost two decades afterwards, 'Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future…'"

































(from her small role in Barbarella alongside Jane Fonda!)