People

At Home w/Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton Gets Into the Design Game NYTimes

Diane Keaton is going strong, actively involved in preserving, then flipping homes in Southern California. The actress is on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy, showing off her Spanish Colonial Revival house in Beverly Hills for Architectural Digest.

The latest design venture for the actress is a tabletop collection that she created for Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The stoneware cups, bowls and plates, which are available online and in some stores now, have her trademark whimsy (some are stamped with the words “eat” or “bite”) and lack of pretension (prices start at about $5). But they also reflect Ms. Keaton’s latest obsession: the heartland. The “farm-y, landscape colors” she used, she told a reporter, were inspired by wheat, grass and bark.

NYC Urban Farmer

Fellows Friday with Viraj Puri TED Blog

Viraj Puri’s Gotham Greens was created in 2008 with a mission of providing New Yorkers with local, sustainable, premium quality produce year round. Puri’s associates grow everything, from seed to harvest, in a 15,000 square foot hydroponic rooftop greenhouse.

There are a number of ways to farm responsibly and sustainably. Gotham Greens has selected methods based on a unique geographic, urban location and a largely underused resource of rooftop space. There are plenty of large, unshaded, unused rooftops in New York that may be well suited to some form of urban agriculture.

This interview is brimming with insights from social entrepreneur and social citizen Viraj Puri, who volunteers that he spent years working in Malawi working on the development of fuel-efficient stoves. In 2004 Viraj develop a company that implemented green building and renewable energy installations in Ladakh, India.

A Martha’s Vineyard Escape

New York restauranteur Keith McNally’s island farm ELLE Decor

When New York City–based restaurateur Keith McNally sets up house for the summer on his four-acre farm in Chilmark, he works the land instead of plying the sea. In addition to his wife, Alina, and five children, McNally shares the property with several Berkshire, Tamworth, and Gloucester Old Spot pigs, as well as goats, sheep, lambs, and free-range chickens and ducks. Although they have all the fixings for some pretty great dinner parties (and the famous neighbors to round out the guest list), McNally and his wife like to lead a low-key life on their mini farm. “I have the need to produce my own food when I’m always around people consuming food,” says McNally, who has even taken to making his own goat cheese. “I cook a lot too, sometimes for dinner parties but mostly for the family.” More photos at ELLE Decor

Leave it to the French to do everything more beautiful, more chic, more manicured. Do those gay Parisian wome let anything run wild, besides their libidos? Yes, but this Chef’s Kitchen garden at The Château de Villandry garden in the Loire Valley does not look like a wanton French woman.

The Château de Villandry garden in the Loire ValleyDesigner Karen Rogers explains to the Financial Times how kitchen gardening is really catching on.

“The interest in decorative vegetables is widespread. People now want to grow their own food on such a scale that their garden (if it is attached to a small townhouse, for instance) is often dominated by edibles. Why not? The allotment can look as pretty as the rose garden and attractive vegetables can be grown in borders amid the flowers. Once upon a time if vegetables were labelled “ornamental” it meant they were grown for looking at, not eating; nowadays people want them to be ornamental and edible.”

Kitchen Gardens were also big stars at this month’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in London. The Growing Tastes Allotment Garden won the prize for Best in Show. (See brief guided tour of allotment garden.)