Winter is the time for nesting and making your home environment cosy and inviting. At our house I like to fill our sofas with french ticking pillows and vintage wool blankets, great for snuggling under next to a toasty fire. I often make a pot of tisane and serve it with an assortment of "sables", delicious french butter cookies, that we eat with our children in front of the fire.

Wine bottles carriers

This is an item I wonder whether Marcel Duchamps toyed with. The wine bottles carrier (porte-bouteilles) couldn't be more of a French invention.Purpose? Carrying-up full bottles of wine from the cellar and the reverse trip down with the duly empty ones. The frequency of these trips is an accurate gauge of your thirst.

Not that we care or that it matters.

The porte-bouteilles, and this is where it gets interesting, come with 4,6,8 and possibly 10 slots and usually in metal with a wooden covered handle for comfort and grip. Swinging one of those loaded with ten full bottles up a narrow humid stoned stairs is a skill almost worth putting on a resume. We, in France, would have the advantage: it often falls onto a youngster to take on that job on the request of the parents, too enthralled in an intellectual conversation and therefore badly in need of wetting their throats.

Metropolitain has an astonishing collection. It simply looks cool and whimsical on a kitchen counter loaded with wine or olive oil and vinegar. Then again, if you want to take over where Duchamps left it, elevate the porte-bouteilles to an art piece.

vintage fabric pillows

I have had a love affair with vintage fabrics since I was a child, which would help to explain the trunks and closets of fabrics I have collected over the years. It's not enough to have the fabrics, little bits of textile history, but the satisfaction that comes from creating something fresh and new with something so old. The pillows made from these amazing fabrics sell quite well in my store with prices ranging from $95- $295. a bientot! Elena

new table

In France, everything happens around the kitchen table. Here's a great example of the classic french farm table. We have one like this in our own dining room and have thrown many a soiree gathered around it for hours.