Blog — Bridget Beari Designs

One of our many excursions took us to the Alii Kula Lavender Farm. They grow over 100 varieties of lavender. A beautiful setting and the gift store includes wonderful treats made with lavender such as sconces, lemonade, chocolate, creams, and gifts.

Down the mountain from the lavender farm is the O'o organic farm. This farm supplies the vegetables for 2 of the local restaurants, Io and Pacifico. Everything that is harvested that day is delivered in boxes to the restaurants. That is as fresh as it gets!

This is our guide Steve. He is cutting our lettuce for the lunch salad. The farm grows vegetables, fruit orchard, and a newly constructed beanery for roasting coffee beans.

We were allowed to sample the vegetables right from the ground. This is a kohlrabi - sweet like a cabbage!

After walking the farm, the chef served us a fabulous organic meal - red carrots, kohlrabi, radishes sliced raw on salad green, beets and onions sauteed with grilled tofu, grilled fish, crusty homemade bread, homemade chocolates and our course organic wine!

This is group gobbling it up.

If that wasn't enough, that evening we went to IO for a 5 course dinner: a bottle of Conundrum to start, calamari ( big fillets), broth based fish , pink snapper, those wonderful vegetables from the farm, and a glass of champagne to end. The chef sent out a sweet dessert as a thank you for the whole farm experience. A memorable excursion in Maui!

Happy Travels.....

Funny that I never travel out of the country for projects and in one month I have traveled to 2 different countries. This is our Costa Rica trip. Painting and redecorating a house in 5 days! Here's how it went:

An all day plane ride from Virginia to Liberia Costa Rica. We stayed in Tamarindo which is about a 45 minute ride from the airport through roads filled with pot holes, cows, ranchero cowboys, chickens, dogs, children and other cars driving where ever they wanted. Once we were at the house the beaches were gorgeous as well as the sunsets. Notice the huge pot holes in picture #1.

We had a time with the American painter boy who would not put the paint on the walls because he was on CR time. Whatever! This is Joe stressing over the painters.

This is Joe after the painters finally started or maybe the stress of it all drove him to have a drink!

Here are the before pictures of the house: yellow walls too matchy with the tiles, black ceiling made the rooms too dark and small, no artwork or focal points but great features like the pool, outside courtyards, glass, outdoor showers, and interesting windows!

Here are the after photos:
I found a great furniture store way out in the country down dirt roads. It took a while but well worth it. Check out the Ikat throws I used for the bed covering and the carving over the bed. In this room the walls were painting a softer cream. I would have liked to paint the trim but changing the black proved to be a real problem with time and the resources that were available to cover it up. There is only one hardware store and that's it no bondo, no regular paint brushes, no sealers, no black caulk, etc.

Blue is such a strong color in CR. The pool has this electric blue color so I wanted the kid's room to reflect this vivd color. I love the Moorish windows.

The next few pictures are the main rooms. I painted the ceilings my signature echo color that I had made up. The walls are a light gray and there are 2 accent walls in a darker taupe. I chose these colors to accent the concrete colored brackets that are in the window frames. I would have loved to paint the cabinets and the trim or at least the outer layer but there was not enough time.