The Parlor on Elegance of the Eternal

Happy Halloween!

Summer Is Almost Over...

...so, here is a newer version of the Destin, Florida beach house rendered from the sketch in The Witches' Companion by Katherine Ramsland...

The Parlor Renders on YouTube

A short little video of Mayfair Witches house renderings...

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Has Passed Away

The Mayfair Witches' Garden

The flowers are chicory, which is used in Café au lait for its added taste

San Francisco and Victoriana

Tulane University Libraries Special Collections

 A very brief update: The Parlor has added a new section to the Site Resources and Bibliography page.

Lasher Appears

Replacing an earlier video with some of my own family in it with this Mayfair Witches-related video to keep content Mayfair Witches-related, this is the first upload with the new AI feature requirement.

Afternoon In the Haunted Garden of the Mayfair Witches

The Parlor's Dammit Doll

The Mayfair Garden In 3D

Spring is approaching.  One thing I have wanted to do for a long time is do my best to recreate the Mayfair garden in 3D.   I've already built most of the structural elements, the "hardscape".  The pool patio, the balustrades, even the swimming pool...

The smaller buildings on the property appear as they do for the moment as placeholders for the actual buildings around the pool and patio area.  The cabana won't still look like this when I'm done:

This is before I made the patio feature the flagstones it actually does.  And before I added the remaining fountains.  

One thing I've wanted to do with a 3D model of the Mayfair house from the novels is to use the garden as a way of showing the types of flowers, shrubs, trees and other features that are described.   A fun way of identifying what grows there that might also appeal to garden enthusiasts.

The garden itself plays a major role in the stories of the Mayfair Witches.  There is Deirdre's Oak, which is also what marks the graves of (spoiler alert) and Emaleth.  The garden is what Deirdre Mayfair saw every day of her life for so many years, and up until she died.  The side porch is where Deirdre sat in her rocking chair, looking at who knows what and inspiring one local to refer to her as "a nice bunch of carrots". WH Ch 1

Nice.

The garden is where Michael Curry saw Lasher, and where Mona Mayfair found a trash can to use to get through a first floor window into the house to search for Michael.  But the area of the garden that really plays a role is the swimming pool.

It's hard to imagine what is, in reality and real life, a beautiful swimming pool being full of muck for decades and surviving.  I do not know when the actual pool was built on the property, but we can be reasonably sure it was not built by the original owner, Albert Hamilton Brevard.  

In The Witching Hour, the swimming pool was added by Stella Mayfair, whose party guests would often amuse themselves in it.  So, the pool was built in the 1920's, in the novel timeline.  Swimming pools actually scare me somewhat, but I also find them fascinating for some weird reason.

Imagining a swimming pool like this being emptied by shoveling out several decades' worth of muck and then restored is more than a little creepy, I think.  But fascinating.  And definitely a haunted swimming pool.

Michael Curry, during the restoration of the house, decided he'd take a dip one night when he was alone at the house.  And promptly found himself looking at a scene from the past, something that might have been either a time slip or a residual type of haunting.  Seeing a ghostly replay of Stella Mayfair's Roaring Twenties party could certainly be called residual.

But the ghost of Arthur Langtry of the Talamasca, who also died in 1929, standing at one end of the pool and urging Michael to "Come away from there, man!" certainly isn't residual.

Haunted or not, a swimming pool like this in the middle of a garden full of lush, flowering plants would certainly be an enchanting, magical sight to behold.  Hopefully, I can achieve this effect, or come very close.

Speaking of the ghostly replay and the ghost of Arthur Langtry, here is a tidbit from Season 1 of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches that jumped out at me.  I don't believe I've gone into this much, but why not?

When Rowan was trapped in the Mayfair house after Deirdre's funeral and Carlotta's attempt to burn the house down, she had quite an odyssey.  She and Ciprien Grieve.  Ciprien Grieve found himself making the acquaintance of a man named Stuart Townsend.  And Stuart Townsend had some advice for Ciprien Grieve.

Don't die in the house.

Those who have read The Witching Hour will probably know who Stuart Townsend is.  He was indeed in the novels.  For those who don't know or might not remember, Stuart Townsend also belonged to the Talamasca.  Stella Mayfair was aware of the order, and even had a little fun with them when signing a photograph of herself for them.

By 1929, the sibling rivalry between Stella, the Designee, and Carlotta, the older sister who was originally the Designee until their mother, Mary Beth Mayfair, decided it would be Stella, instead.  Mary Beth Mayfair had died of cancer in 1925, and the relations between the siblings deteriorated alarmingly.

Stella had wanted to get away from her family, and apparently had hoped Stuart Townsend, who had fallen in love with Stella, would help her.  Well, Carlotta did not like that, and the brother, Lionel, was jealous as well.  What happened?  Carlotta tricked Lasher and provoked Lionel into shooting Stella in the double parlor from the main staircase.

Unfortunately, Stella's 8-year-old daughter Antha saw her mother shot to death.

Arthur Langtry was also in the Mayfair house when Stella was killed.  Actually, A LOT of people were in the Mayfair house when Stella was killed.  Because it happened during what would turn out to be her last wild, Roaring Twenties party.  

Langtry was able to leave the Mayfair house to head home, but died on the ship he was traveling on.  Stuart Townsend?

Well, he went "missing".

Kinda.

See, he never left the Mayfair house after Stella was killed.  And he wouldn't leave it for another sixty years.  That was when Stella's great-granddaughter Rowan realized there was a reason that rolled up carpet on the third floor looked funny.

Some of this might sound familiar to those who recall Season 1--except it was Deirdre who was the murder victim rather than Stella (so far).  In the book, Lionel, the actual shooter, was taken to a psychiatric hospital and died soon after, thanks to Lasher tormenting him.  

All of this activity appears to have also caused the haunting to include the swimming pool.  Those familiar with the novels will no doubt recall that when Michael came home and found Lasher "in the flesh", the two of them fought, and Michael ended up drowning and being brought back--again--in the swimming pool.  

No matter how trivial a detail might seem on the face, Anne Rice had a way of integrating it into the stories in the novels she wrote.  Every single thing described about the Mayfair house and all of the items in it has a purpose to the rest of the tale.  While a haunting, blue-green ambience and the sight of moss dripping from branches, descriptions of the china, silver, and crystal found in the butler's pantry and other things might seem pointless on the face, they're not.  Even those things are telling the story. 

It might be more accurate to say it was Lasher, rather than Carlotta, who stopped time at the Mayfair house since 1929.

I'm pretty anxious to finally be at the point where I'm ready to start adding the flowers to the garden...

Aunt Queen's Cameos: Hidden Gems in Blackwood Farm

When I first read Blackwood Farm, there were many things (other than the timeline) that really caught my attention.  It was no surprise that Rowan Mayfair and Michael Curry were familiar with films like 'Immortal Beloved' and 'Gladiator'.  The book blended aspects of popular culture and the working class (at the time) in with mysterious tales of not-so-imaginary friends and mistresses from Hell, which I enjoyed.  There was another detail in the book that really intrigued me, though.

A Little Mayfair Witches Ambience ASMR-style

The Parlor is trying something new.  It might have been mentioned before, but this new experiment is...ambience.  ASMR-style.

The Parlor Extends Deepest Sympathies to former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Her Family

 

The Mayfair House--A 3D Update

I thought it was time I provided an update on my project, a 3D model of the Mayfair house on First Street.  There are some details I've added, some obvious, some not so obvious.  This update shows only part of the first floor, and there are certainly details I've not gotten to yet.  One is that there appears to be a door or window on the end of the butler's pantry that faces the pool and patio area of the garden.

Stella Mayfair In 3D

I've been doing a little revising and improving upon the next Mayfair Witch in 3D, Stella Mayfair.   I'm still learning how to make 3D people in the way that I want them made, and that particular pose, I thought, was perfect for a ghost one sees in a mirror.

For More on The Pink Room...

For a little more background on the model of the master bedroom and a few tidbits on the role it plays as a setting in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series, I've included a little bit in a new addition to this page of the Parlor: Come Into My Parlor In 3D.

The Pink Room: The Master Bedroom

This is REALLY pink everywhere!  Hopefully, I will soon be able to reduce the amount of pink in the master bedroom.  In the meantime, this is the first room on the second floor I've worked on.  Quite a lot of progress on the room has been made already...

For Your Viewing Pleasure...

 Throughout the Parlor, there are videos embedded on pages according to topic.  These videos are on YouTube, as well.  There are also some playlists and videos from other platforms like Vimeo and Behance.  It's pretty amazing how hard it can be to tell what the video's screen resolution, bit rate and stuff is, but many of the Parlor's videos are much larger than what you'd see on YouTube's player.

Rowan Mayfair By the Book

 Sometimes when a TV show or movie makes changes to some of the basic features of a character's physical appearance, it isn't always a bad thing.  One example is Rowan going from blond to brunette from page to screen.  It isn't one of the changes that bothered me too much when it came to Rowan's appearance.  I still wanted to show Rowan as Rowan Mayfair in the novels.  The model I found really did not need much in the way of changes, and even the sunglasses work.  Rowan had purchased some sunglasses on her trip to New Orleans to attend Deirdre's funeral, and they really do make her look glamorous, I think!

The Mayfair Witches in 3D

 

Now that I've been able to build (for the most part) a 3D model of the Mayfair house with interiors that can be shown even while the entire house is incomplete, I'm turning more attention to...the Mayfair Witches themselves! 

I've included this image and some details about its creation on both Come Into My Parlor In 3D and The Face of Come Into My Parlor's Mayfair Witches.  I am working on some other models of the Mayfair Witches alongside the ongoing 1239 First Street in 3D project.  From what I can tell, it looks like the Witches themselves are what people really want to see.  I can't disagree with that!

That is my ultimate goal--to create the Mayfair Witches as Anne Rice described them.  As we begin to look toward a possible Season 2 of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches on AMC (actual status unknown), I am reminded that reactions to Season 1 were most definitely mixed.  People either really loved it or really hated it.  Some of the most important main characters were missing completely, there were jumps from one plot line to another that made no sense, among other things.  Most of all, there was a diversion from the source material (the novels themselves) that was too much of a diversion and made people ask a number of times, "Did the writers even READ the books?!"

To be fair, The Witching Hour is a long book.  It's challenging to bring a book so long with four different parts to it to the screen, even as a television series.  There is so much material there that I would imagine it's hard to determine what to somehow translate to the screen and what not to.  I don't know; I am not a filmmaker.  

One thing I keep meaning to do is to expand more on the differences between the books and the series so far.  There are some things from the series that I actually loved seeing, because they did give me a new feel for the atmosphere of the settings of the story.  Another was that Suzanne, the village midwife of Donnelaith, Scotland and the first Mayfair Witch, was brought to the screen.  Then, though I was confused about a few details at first, there was the inclusion of the Mayfair Emerald as a literal key.  Which, symbolically speaking, is what the Mayfair Emerald was.

I decided to limit what I included from the series in the model itself.  One thing I did decide to do, since recreating the mural on the walls of the dining room would be a challenge, was to find a suitable panoramic image for the mural.  Also, I would include framed portraits of each of the Mayfair Witches on the walls of the dining room, which is what was done in the AMC series.  

One of the photographs Rowan finds in Ciprien Grieve's cellphone is an old one that appears to have been taken in the 1920's.  Guess who that has to be?  Yes.  Stella.  The novels refer to photos taken of Stella's Roaring Twenties parties in the Mayfair house, including the last party she threw before her murder in the parlor of the house in 1929.  Photos are mentioned again in connection with some pearls and a Victrola once owned by Julien Mayfair.  The photos were also of Stella and others, like Ancient Evelyn as a young woman.

That photo is one you'll no doubt see tucked in somewhere.  The other photos and portraits, such as the ones seen in the opening credits mounted on crumbling walls with twisted branches of the family tree, I think are one of the ways the Mayfair Witches' tale has spanned generations of this family.  Indeed, there is a lot of interest in the Mayfair family tree. 

But let's get back to The Witching Hour.  As stated, it is a long book.  I understand cast members themselves read the books and are longtime fans of Anne Rice.  At the same time, reading a book that long, with so much in it, seems to be something some readers struggle with.  That's not a criticism of them as readers, however.  The book has so much in it that it can be hard to keep the flow of the story in mind while reading.

This might be a bit overdue, but perhaps it's time the Parlor devoted extra space and time to a more detailed discussion of The Witching Hour?  

In fact, I was just reading through parts of it last night when I came across a section I had been meaning to review anyway.  The reason being that I have been working on other parts of the Mayfair house and needed to review details on a few things in it so they will be accurate in the model.  As to what that might be, I'll give you a hint.

It's something that has me doing yet another search to see if I can find architectural details of the second floor of the Mayfair house.  I want to make sure the master bedroom door is in the correct location...