Goodness knows I am a sucker for modern design, but I totally get how it can seem a little ... sterile at times. When I spotted this nursery done for baby Alice, my heart skipped a beat because it seems to have a magically wonderful mix of warm and welcoming modern style with a vintage flair, things not often found existing together in the same room!

Click through below to see more of what I mean! 

Go ahead and fess up -- how many times have you watched Christmas Vacation already since Thanksgiving? It's only, like, the funniest movie EVER -- and one of the best parts of the whole thing is when Clark Griswold finally gets the "250 strands of lights" on his house lit and the power plant in town goes berserk. (Love it.)

But while having so many lights on display is hilarious in the movies, it can be a little bit annoying if the house next door is the one trying to re-create Clark's holiday display.

One of my favorite ways to take advantage of the beautiful summer weather is to host (or attend) a little evening get-together. Parties like these don't have to involve a lot of planning and can usually be thrown together quite easily with a few simple touches. Globe lanterns like the ones pictured above can be found at IKEA and I'm willing to bet you've got some votive candles stuck in a drawer somewhere. Throw a long tablecloth over your picnic table and suddenly you've created something magical! 

Click through for 5 more outdoor evening entertaining inspirations below:

Spring may be synonymous with doing a big cleaning of the house, but it seems like fall is always time for fixing up the place. Maybe it's just because the busy, busy, busy of summer keeps us from noticing all that's going wrong around the house? Or maybe it's because the temperature's dipping and suddenly I'm looking for ways to hold on to that warm, sunny atmosphere that flooded in naturally straight through August.

The good thing is keeping the house bright and cozy doesn't really take a lot of bank. I mean, everybody's on a budget these days, right? And even those of us who don't have a DIY bone in our bodies could use a little sunshine on a cloudy day. So let's take a look at some of the fast fixes for fall:

It's easy to love a house with lots of natural light, so I find myself drawn to rooms with large scale windows. Here in France, we're renting a gorgeous farmhouse in the countryside, and the room we spend the most time in is the room with the biggest windows. Of course!

This roundup of beautifully designed sun rooms will make you want to knock down a few walls and make a cozy, sunny spot of your very own.

Let’s be very clear about one thing: I’m not a huge fan of energy-saving light bulbs. In fact, when we moved into our current apartment, the bathroom light was filled with the ugliest version of these things, and they’re still there because who has the cash to get the prettier ones? I hate composting, too, but I freakin’ do it because I don’t want the earth to be taken over by giant landfills any sooner than it has to. No-brainer, right?Except some knucklehead politicians actually put their time and energy into overturning a law creating new energy standards for light bulbs. Instead of, I dunno, creating jobs or figuring out healthcare. Light bulbs. They were fighting about light bulbs. And they finally have lost their fight, thank goodness. Open letter to Washington: I want safe, efficient stuff in my home, and I want it to be as cheap and easy to find as possible. So stop fighting for energy-wasting home accessories.

There are a lot of stereotypically feminine gifts I will toss back if I fish ‘em up. Box of chocolates? My tush is big enough, thanks. Bath products? At this point, I only take baths when one of the kids says “I don’t want to! Will you come with me?” (Which is lovely, but not conducive to relaxation.) A spa day? I would seriously sooner have a root canal. And scented candles? The bane of my existence. A fire hazard that stinks like a flower threw up? No, thanks. And now I've been given the best argument against scented candles ever: They’re as bad as cigarettes. So if you’re the type to flap your hand across your face when you exit a building past a crowd of smokers, well, get flapping in the Yankee Candle store, too. And prepare yourself, scented-candle-burners: I'm bringing a jumbo-sized hand-fan to your sickly-sweet-smelling home.So what’s so bad about scented candles?

A friend of mine got a Roomba just for the hell of it, and found it made a perfect toddler babysitter: his 3-year-old would follow the damn thing around the house, chirping, “Woomba! Woomba!” as if it were his beloved pet. Myself, I never found the things to be all that useful as a cleaning device -- by the time I finish de-cluttering the floor, I may as well vacuum the place myself. But a group of German industrial-design students saw an amazing potential in the Roomba: they attached lights to the automatically-piloted vacuum cleaners, and took long-exposure photographs of their journeys. The results? Gorgeous, Spirograph-like images of light sculptures. Here’s how they did it. Don’t you wish your housecleaning left such a cool image?