Hi Friends! I hope many of you are able to vacation in beautiful places with cool breezes and bodies of water that don’t feel like a warm bath! Here in Houston, the only “cool” I am experiencing is following my team vicariously as they have traveled to some pretty special places to install a bit of Segreto!

Our SegretoStone team went to Carmel-by -the-Sea California as it is properly called! Founded in 1902, Carmel is known for its natural scenery and rich artistic history. In 1906, early City Councils were dominated by artists, and several of the city’s mayors have been poets or actors, including Clint Eastwood!

In 1910 The San Francisco Call reported that 60 percent of Carmel’s houses were built by citizens who were “devoting their lives to work connected to the aesthetic arts.” Carmel is also known for several unusual laws, including a prohibition on wearing high-heeled shoes without a permit, enacted to prevent lawsuits arising from tripping accidents caused by irregular pavement. The pace is a bit slower here shown by the two sea lions our guys saw while strolling sea lion cove!

One of our sweet clients sold their beautiful Houston house and was calling Carmel home. I am sure she didn’t get the same deal there as the lucky ones there who moved to this beautiful city after the 1906 San Fransico earthquake. The then village community was inundated with musicians, writers, painters and other artists turning to the establishing artist colony after the bay city was destroyed. The new residents were offered home lots – ten dollars down, little or no interest, and whatever they could pay on a monthly basis. What a deal!! This house called the “Gingerbread House” at 17-mile drive was built in 1944 by an artist. It was intended to serve as a temporary living quarter during construction of a main house, which was never completed. The unusual roof was made of hand poured concrete formed into colorful tiles. Read more about the house here.

We have done several of these European designed kitchens where the SegretoStone coats the entire box and wraps onto the counters. This one featured in Segreto Impressions was this clients Houston home! Check out more on this kitchen in our book Segreto Impressions on pages 308 and 309.

We created the same style in their new home. The architect and building team did an amazing job in the construction allowing us to give that seamless look with our SegretoStone!

Completing our part first, the construction team can now lay the stacked stone creating the feel that the counters are imbedded. This is from our signature color “polished pebble” available in SegretoStone, plaster and paint!! I can’t wait to share with you the project when it is completed!!

The SegretoStone crew that went to Carmel, had so much fun, loved the weather, the scenery and the history of this charming American village by the sea!!

Our second team- the cabinet crew flew to the beautiful city of Honolulu to stain mahogany! Honolulu acts as a natural gateway to the islands’ large tourism industry, which brings millions of visitors and contributes $10 billion annually to the local economy. It also is a trading hub between the east and the west!

Did you know that only 3.2% of the population in Honolulu are native Hawaiians? The majority of the population is made up of Asian Americans. Honolulu is the most remote major city in the U.S. and one of the most remote in the world! The guys discovered that with their long plane flight!

The view from the home was incredible and the guys loved working looking out at the expansive views of the ocean. The homeowner did comment they whistled and sang while they worked!! So why fly a crew from Houston to stain Mahagony?

Mahogany is a straight grained, reddish-brown tropical hardwood indigenous to the Americas, and has been used in construction and furnishings due to its durability! In many instances when bookcases, kitchen cabinets are large studies are built from a stained grade wood, the paneling is constructed from solid pieces for the frames or door surrounds and a thinner veneer for the large inset panels of the same materials. Since they are cut from different trees, you can see both the tone of the wood and the grain can differentiate.

If you are wanting a consistent finish, or a tone which is not too red, each piece may have to be treated individually. A one-step stain treatment will not even out the wood’s tones without going very dark in color or applying the stain with a heavy hand. Both of these options will cover the wood’s natural grain. Applying multiple layers thinly while altering the stain color with each pass will give you a more consistent result without covering the grain of the wood.

I was really excited that my crew chose to tour Pearl Harbor on their one day off! The original Hawaiian name for Pearl Harbor is Pu’ulua (long hill) but was later renamed Pearl Harbor in connection to the oysters harvested there.

My crew was amazed on how small in square footage Pearl Harbor was! They also were so emotional when seeing where so much was lost on the “day that will live in infamy”. December 7, 1941 will always be embedded in history as the day where a surprise attack from the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service killed 2,403 U.S. military personnel and civilians and prompted the United States to enter World War II.

I found this article in the Houston Chronicle on the Pearl Harbor attack quite interesting and a good refresher course from my college history class days.

They also went to Park West Gallery’s major new museum and art gallery where they were sending me photos of original Picasso’s, Salvador Dali’s, and Rembrandts with a small sketch selling for $68,000. Other highlights of the trip?

Rooftop views, nighttime strolls on the beach and …………………

……..and of course, a Taco Truck!

We are so honored to go to such beautiful places for these two clients and what an experience for my fine crew members! I hope you are having a wonderful summer full of new experiences and bonding time with family and friends! Till next time! XO Leslie