TOP SHOPS:

Interior Illusions: Shop a wide range of glam furnishings, rugs, lighting, artwork and accessories, almost all in a bold palette of black and white. Pictured above. interiorillusionshome.com

Insolito Home: Find cool and quirky limited-production furnishings, including “Seatbelt” chairs from the Phillips Collection, sculptural “Peacock” chairs by acclaimed designer Dror Benshetrit and one-of-a-kind hand-blown-glass lighting fixtures. insolitohome.com

Modern Way: Pop in and browse an ever-changing selection of real-deal furniture, accessories, lighting, rugs and art from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s (think iconic Warren Platner lounge chairs, Bertoia Bird Chairs and a groovy Milo Baughman lambswool pouf). psmodernway.com

And don’t miss these fabulous places to see and stay…

SEE: Tramway Gas Station (Palm Springs Visitors Center)

Designed by architects Albert Frey and Robson C. Chambers at a time when many businesses commissioned works of architecture to reflect their success, this eye-catching former gas station, now the Palm Springs Visitors Center, is a fitting gateway to the town. Click here for the complete list of must-see architecture.

STAY: Desert Star Hotel

This hip Midcentury Modern property—designed by Howard Lapham in 1954—may be small, but its five bungalows are anything but modest. Each light-filled room is nearly 600 square feet, furnished with modern designs by Eames, Nelson and Bertoia, and includes a king-size bed, lounge area and fully equipped kitchen. From $140 per night, desertstarhotel.com. Click here for more hot hotels in Palm Springs.

Find your complete itinerary for a design getaway to Palm Springs at mountainliving.com.

So now we’d like to return the favor.

For a limited time, we’re offering all home design and real estate professionals a free three-year subscription to Mountain Living magazine!

There are no strings attached, and subscribing takes just a minute. Here’s what to do:

1. Visit www.mountainliving.com and click the “Subscribe” link at the bottom of our home page.

2. In the Promotion Code box, enter ZPROFA and click the “To Discount Offer” button.

3. Answer a few quick questions and provide your mailing address.

That’s it! You can expect to receive your first issue approximately 8 weeks after subscribing. If only everything was that easy.

Enjoy!

Denver Restaurant Week

From February 25 through March 9, nearly 300 restaurants in Denver (and Boulder) are serving up multi-course meals for the delectable price of $52.80 for two—a nod to the Mile High City’s elevation—or $26.40 for one (tax and tip not included). Word to the wise: Get your name on the books ahead of time as eateries will be packed. Click here for more info. (Photo above by John Fielder.)

John Fielder Photography Workshop

See Steamboat Springs through the eyes of famous nature photographer John Fielder during a hands-on workshop, March 3 to 4, that takes veterans and amateurs alike into the most picturesque backcountry spots. Includes field shoots, lectures, photo editing and critiques, personal instruction from Fielder and some meals. $850 per person. Click here for more info.

Aspen Fashion Week

High fashion meets high altitude at this haute event, March 11 to 14, which delivers outdoor runway shows, après-ski affairs and on-mountain parties in and around Aspen. Designers will reveal the latest in sporty couture (think resort and technical wear). Click here for more info.

Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective

More than 200 of the iconic fashion designer’s spectacular outfits are coming to the Denver Art Museum, the only U.S. venue to host this big-time exhibition, March 25-July 8. Marvel at Saint Laurent’s evening gowns, discover the famous mavens who wore his clothes and gain insight into the creative mind in the color gallery, which features hundreds of fabric samples. Click here for more info.

Taste of Vail

Get to know the Bavarian-style mountain town of Vail during this three-day food-and-drink extravaganza, with highlights including the Colorado Lamb Cook Off and an alfresco picnic atop Vail Mountain, April 5 through 7. Click here for more info.

Browse more high-country happenings at ML’s online calendar.

Clockwise from top left:

Elizabeth Tullis, owner, The Modern Hotel, Boise, ID: “My favorite midcentury piece has to be the Noguchi table [1948] by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It has such a simple form that’s organic but incredibly sophisticated.”

Michael and Katherine McCoy, designers, Michael McCoy Design, Colorado: “Florence Knoll asked her friend Eero Saarinen to design a chair ‘that she could curl up in.’ The organically shaped Womb Chair [1948] uses the advanced (for the time) technology of molded fiberglass for the generous and curvaceous shell that floats on slim steel supports.”

Dorian Ferlauto, sales representative, Mod Livin’, Denver, CO: “My vintage arc lamp [1962] is the most-talked-about piece in my house. Not only is it unique and gorgeous, but it has a vintage room key hidden within the travertine base. I can only guess why the key needed to be tucked away.” (Arco by Achille Castiglioni pictured.)

Hugh Grant, director, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver, CO: “This console table [1941] designed by Gio Ponti, with rare colored tiles (also Ponti’s design) fabricated by the enamel master Paolo de Poli, is one of my favorite works. Its streamlined design with pointy legs—so typical of Ponti—is particularly wonderful.”

Jennifer Brash, owner, Fullhouse Modern, Vancouver, B.C.: “I love the Chieftain Chair [1949] by Finn Juhl. This timeless and rare piece showcases true Danish craftsmanship with its elegant, sculptural arms, and Juhl’s use of organic shapes and an innovative floating back and seat conveys movement.”

Click here to uncover more midcentury favorites.

The residence is open to the public, so if you’re in town for the Sundance Film Festival, stop by and check it out. But no matter where you are, you can recreate the ultra-luxe look in your own home.

Tomorrow, Thursday, January 19, on One Kings Lane, members can purchase rustic-chic items inspired by the Montage residence. The “Get the Look” sale will feature home décor, artwork and furnishings, all similar to those hand-selected by Philip Gorrivan and Alison Pincus.

To check out the sale, and a before-and-after video of the residence, click here. To become a One Kings Lane member (it’s free and takes just a second), click here.

Our desks, nightstands and coffee tables are always piled with design books and magazines, and the stack just keeps getting higher, thanks to the season’s newest reads. Here, a few at the top of the pile:

Katie Ridder Rooms

Gorgeous photos, useful design tips and page after page of elegant, confident rooms. The design devotee’s perfect bedtime story! $50; The Vendome Press

Design*Sponge at Home

Step-by-step tips (and more than 600 photos) for giving your home the “it” factor—without spending a fortune—from super-blogger Grace Bonney. (Scroll down or click here to read ML’s recent chat with the style maven herself.) $35; Artisan

Mountain: Portraits of High Places

Spectacular images of the world’s loftiest peaks, collected by lifelong mountaineer Sandy Hill. $85; Rizzoli

CE: I’d love to hear about your book Design*Sponge at Home. How and when did the idea come to you?

GB: We’d been thinking about doing a book for a couple years. I’d been hearing from publishers starting around 2006, and we’d been going back and forth, but everyone wanted to pitch a pre-made idea, like, ‘Oh, we already do this existing series, why don’t you edit it?’ But I didn’t want to put our brand on something else; I wanted it to be entirely ‘us.’ So I waited, and I kept thinking, ‘There’s no need to do a book. It’s going to be so outdated by the time it comes out and we’re known for being so timely.’ But eventually I realized there wasn’t a book that summed up the aesthetic we’ve been enjoying for the last 10 years, which celebrates a mix of high and low, and things that are imperfect and highly personal and sort of outside of the box and DIY—all of those quirkier, younger angles. So when I realized there was a hole in the market, that’s when I decided to do the book.

Tell me what’s inside.

It seemed natural to focus on the three biggest sections of the site, which are Home Tours, DIY and Before & Afters, and I turned that in to the publisher in November 2009. In 2010, we wanted to reformat it a bit, so we added two additional sections that act as 101 primers for every basic type of DIY skill a homeowner could need, from stripping furniture to rewiring a lamp and arranging flowers. I wanted it to include ideas and tips and tools. I don’t think it’s fair to give someone all of these beautiful homes—and inspiration—and not follow up with the tools and the techniques you need to make it happen. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

In his foreword, designer Jonathan Adler refers to the book as the long-awaited bible for the design-blog revolution you started. What did it take to bring all of this content together? Did you pull stuff from the blog?

We did. The book is a little less than half of the greatest hits from the blog and the rest is brand new. The older things were actually way easier to pull together because if you had to tell me to pick 30 of my favorite houses and 25 of my favorite projects, I could probably do it off the top of my head. Even after 5,000 or 6,000 posts in the history of the site, I still have houses that rise to the top in my mind, so picking those was really simple.

I actually wrote the whole book in about two months. I wanted it to function as closely to a blog as possible, and for sections to be cross-referential—and that’s a lot of editing. You can’t put in all of those page calls until the book is fully done because the page order keeps changing. I wanted readers to be able to look at a house and say, ‘Oh, I like this idea. If I turn to page 250 I can learn how to make that.’ That sort of overwhelming depth of information is what I feel the site is so good at, so I wanted that to carry through to the book as much as possible.

Did you know you wanted to feature your own home in the book?

I think that’s a given. I usually try to put myself out there as much as any other reader would. It bothers me when bloggers don’t share some of their life, because we’re asking so much of readers. We’re saying, ‘Let us show your house. Let us see your projects. Let us see your wedding.’

I think it’s nice for people to see that we don’t live in some perfect, fancy, amazing giant apartment. It’s a real, relatable space with quirks and flaws. We’re just people who are enthusiastic about design and doing our best just like everybody else reading.

Tell me what you’ve done around your house. Do you have any projects in progress right now?

We just moved into a new place and then the book became a full-swing project, so there are still boxes in our other bedroom. I’ve actually appreciated the white walls and the emptiness of it all, though, because my work life is so busy right now. Coming home to something neutral is actually really relaxing because I tend to be a collector of things in pattern and color, and that can be visually quite overwhelming after a while.

I can relate to that. The longer I’ve worked for a home-design magazine, the more streamlined and minimal my tastes have become.

It’s sort of a running joke among people in New York, including the much older editors, those in their 60s, as well as the newer younger girls. Almost all of us have really simple houses at this point because you just see so much color and pattern, and over the last six years highly ornamental, decorative art and design has been so popular, with the rebirth of wallpaper. It’s just pattern overload, everywhere.

In the field of design blogs and online design magazines, who do you look to?

I feel like a lot of the online magazines in my community all have the same look and they’re not about curating. I think I’m sort of a curator by nature, and so I appreciate when someone edits things out. I don’t want a magazine or a blog to be everything. I want it to be a specific take.

I’m sort of obsessed with Lucky Peach right now, which is a print food quarterly by David Chang, the chef behind Momofuku. I love Remedy Quarterly, and also the Edible city publications. I really appreciate any publication that’s trying to reach out to small-scale, artisan-level makers of some kind.

How is Colorado treating you?

It’s beautiful. My favorite thing about the West in general is just how new all of the cities are. You get a chance to really plan a city and think about things differently than you would with a city as old as New York or Boston or DC, so I just love how fresh everything feels. Especially out here—there are a lot of design and architecture firms, and a lot of new thought happening.

Click here to visit Design*Sponge to learn more about the book.

Broncos colors have never looked so chic.

Interior design by Steven Gambrel.

Photo by John Fielder, JohnFielder.com

If your photo skills could use a bit of polish, we’ve got just the fix.

On the weekend of March 3-4, celebrated nature photographer John Fielder is offering a two-day, hands-on photography workshop in and around Steamboat Springs. You’ll dive right into a world of white and focus in on winter’s unique forms and textures, from frozen rivers to ranch meadows to aspens cloaked in snow.

Photo by John Fielder, JohnFielder.com

Classroom sessions are held at the Sheraton Steamboat Resort & Conference Center and field shoots are in easily accessible locations around Steamboat Springs. The two-day workshop is priced at $850 per person and includes a slide show presentation and lecture, group-based critique, one-on-one time with Fielder, transportation to field locations and some meals.

Photo by John Fielder, JohnFielder.com

To learn more, visit www.JohnFielder.com or contact workshop coordinator Denise Robert at 303-368-5208 or Denise@DeniseRobert.com.

On Thursday, January 26, the professional interior designers at Slifer Designs are offering one-on-one input and advice—for free!—at their Cherry Creek Shopping Center or Edwards Riverwalk stores.

“No challenge is too big or small,” says vice president of retail Susan Ferrari. “Our team of interior design professionals, including several who are LEED certified, will be on-site at both our stores to answer questions and provide input and ideas on everything from a new color scheme to how to enhance a home on a budget.”

The “Bring Us Your Design Challenge” in-store event is one day only, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and again from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Appointments are encouraged but not required and walk-ins are welcome. But if we were you, we’d contact the store directly to confirm a time to ensure availability. Here’s where to go:

Cherry Creek Shopping Center
3000 East First Avenue, #233 (upper level, across from Neiman Marcus)
Denver, CO  80206
303-232-8200

Or…

Riverwalk at Edwards (Vail Valley)
216 Main Street
Edwards, CO 81632
970-926-8200

So gather up those fabric samples, paint swatches and pages torn from magazines and get some help! Want some inspiration in advance? Check out Slifer Designs’ gorgeous work online at sliferdesigns.com