journal

Little known and regrettably short lived, the wildly cool Holiday House travel trailer was a thing of beauty and revolutionary design, and no doubt the source of many happy (and stylish!) road trips. The brainchild of the founder of Harry and David mail order catalogues, Holiday House trailers were a lark; a grass roots, off-season […]

Five years ago, if you had told Priscilla Carpenter Witte that one day she’d be painting a mural in a bathroom at a boutique hotel in Bali, she never would have believed you. The New York State native moved to Venice, Los Angeles in search of sunnier pastures but found so much more. She became […]

We’re delighted to announce the opening of our brand new store in Los Angeles. Come by and see what’s on offer! BoutiqueHomes Marketplace is a showroom for products and works of art by members of our community, and we’ve got some great items we think you’ll love. Pride of place goes to our striking multicolored pendant […]

Somewhere in a clean-lined office in Milan, a group of young designers are working to create the world they want to live in. And they have no intention of keeping it to themselves. They are Mandalaki Studio, and we encountered them when their minimalist prefab Rhodes Monocabin joined our collection earlier this year. Since then, Mandalaki have […]

What is it about the A-frame that inspires so much devotion? A little triangular cabin, hidden away in the forest or perched on a mountainside, this cool structure has an enduring popularity that defies time and place. It may be the simplicity of its lines. Or the fact that it’s all roof. Or the sheer […]

After eight years hunting for architectural gems, we recently teamed up with Cool Escapes and collaborated with architecture and design publisher Avedition to create a book that sets the design standards for vacation rentals. BoutiqueHomes – Handpicked Vacation Rentals (published October 2017) is a collection of more than 60 uniquely designed vacation homes, and we are delighted to announce that it […]

Introducing a new way to reward our members… BoutiqueHomes Marketplace Staying with BoutiqueHomes has always been rewarding. We handpick amazing properties we know you’ll love, and we never charge booking fees. But now we are adding one more benefit: a rewards program. Every time you stay with us, you’ll earn reward points. After your stay, you can […]

The best travel books make you want to hit the road. For those of us who love books almost as much as we love travel, we’re always interested in recommendations. So we were delighted to discover The Telegraph’s list of the top 20 best travel books of all time. It starts with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and […]

Filmmaker Federico Fellini, many of whose movies were filmed on location in Rome, once said of the Italian capital: “Rome does not need to make culture. It is culture. Prehistoric, classical, Etruscan, Renaissance, Baroque, modern. Every corner of the city is a chapter in an imaginary universal history of culture. “Culture in Rome,” he continued, […]

After finding out how many times the futuristic homes of architect John Lautner have appeared in movies, we decided to see if we could find some films featuring the works of his mentor. Surprisingly, given his remarkable legacy, there aren’t as many Frank Lloyd Wright houses in movies. And only one – the Ennis House – […]

With its year-round sunshine, diverse landscapes and wild-west sensibilities, Los Angeles was a natural choice to become the center of the movie industry. In the early 20th century, movies were made not only in the newly-built studios and in its backlots, but also on the streets of the city – streets that have changed a […]

If, like us, you’re fans of the legendary 20th-century architect John Lautner, you’ll know his space-age designs are bold, beautiful and like nothing else on the planet. And, rather impressively, five or six decades after they were built, they still manage to look futuristic. We couldn’t help noticing the frequency of John Lautner houses in movies, […]

For our new series of Movie Atlas articles, we’re taking a journey around the world using classic films made on location. In our last article, we traveled back in time to the California coastline of the mid-20th century. For this article, we’re staying on the west coast and visiting our favorite movie town. It’s Oscar […]

While we don’t usually promote armchair traveling over the real thing, there’s nothing quite like watching a movie that captures the beauty and spirit of a location. For this new series of articles, we are looking at movies made on location, films that feature their settings front and center. The best of them are set in […]

It’s that time of the year again! When we start seeing traveling pines strapped to cars around the neighborhood, and around the world. It’s a winter ritual that ushers in the Christmas season as well as the pagan festival of light during the winter solstice. We were inspired by seeing these trees on the roads […]

At BoutiqueHomes we love getting to know the stories behind our properties, but this time we were happy to learn that the owner of Villa G in Umbria, Italy had an interesting story as well. Kristian Septimius is a Danish photographer educated in England, in 1987 he started his own studio in Copenhagen. His photography style has been […]

At BoutiqueHomes, we love great design – but we also know how important it is to photograph it well. That’s why we have always admired Julius Shulman, the legendary American architectural photographer who took a vast array of modernist design masterpieces and froze them in time. His work captures the spirit of an era in […]

Sometimes you just have to follow your dreams… and figure out the details later. At BoutiqueHomes, we really get that. Our own properties, and many of those in our collection, were created from wild ideas. You fall in love with a space, play around with designs, and bring something unexpected to life. And the unexpected […]

The other day I baked my first homemade bread and it blew my mind seeing what you can create with just 2 or 3 ingredients: Water, flour and yeast. And while I was waiting for the bread to rise, 12-18 hours with the no-knead slow rise method, I started to contemplate all the different breads […]

It’s hard to compete with the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Sean Connery when it comes to celluloid appeal. But here are some architectural masterpieces that may even outshine their glamorous co-stars. Houses that served as movie locations, but weren’t torn down when the film crew called it a day. Design gems, from Capri to Canada, that are […]

Australian photographer Tom Blachford first caught our eyes two years ago, when the first Midnight Modern series was born. If you had told us that his lurking around at 1 am in the morning, wondering around in the darkness would lead to work being featured in almost every design publication worldwide and become their own […]

At BoutiqueHomes, we love the idea of simple luxury. When we say luxury villas, we aren’t talking about homes with all the bells and whistles and some extra bling thrown in. But to get what we mean, it helps to look at the history – and changing meaning – of ‘luxury’.

At BoutiqueHomes, ‘holiday homes’ and ‘vacation rentals’ are part of our vocabulary. We talk about them on a daily basis. They are, after all, the product that we sell on our site. The other day in the office, we had an interesting conversation about how these terms mean different things to different people – depending […]