Road Trip to Stephanie Chance’s Decorate Ornate!

Dear Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Book Club Members, book lovers everywhere,

There are some people that you meet in your life that you have this instant connection. One so profound that you want to be with this person all the time, THAT for me is Stephanie Chance! Stephanie owns a store called Decorate Ornate that you have to see it, to believe it.

Her shop, if only it could truly be my house as it is filled with all the treasures she finds on her trips to Europe and beyond, it’s a visual feast. In fact, many things from her store and from the trips I have taken with her are in my little house in the woods that I call, “Murphy’s Law”!

I happen to feel like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole and discovered the Wonderful World of Wonderland.

She has one building just devoted to all the architectural finds, doors, gates, balconies that she ships in containers back to the states. Many a home owner in Texas has discovered this amazing portal to taking home a unique find to make their own. I happen to feel like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole and discovered the Wonderful World of Wonderland of Decorate Ornate.

But I have taken you a step further on this journey, Stephanie has been following my art work on campus and invited me to showcase my works in a gallery setting in her store. To be amongst such treasures was not only a thrill, but the kindness and generosity of her offer have humbled me. Stephanie has embraced my art and I have been invited many times to be featured at the ArtStroll in Gladewater, Texas at her stroll. I marvel at my luck, such a loving and giving friend you will ever find.

If you have never been on one of her Decorate Ornate trips, you have missed what she calls “Fairy Tale” trips and she is not kidding. I went to castles like the storybooks of my childhood in “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella”. I dined with a real count! I brunched banquet style in an Italian estate courtyard for a feast that has a room that the POPE stays in on a visits. We go off the beaten path and enter homes of Stephanie’s friends, we drove the Amalfi coast and even danced disco in a nightclub built into the side of the cliffs that have enjoyed the like of Michael Jackson and Beyonce’. We have cruised the Mediterraean, me a small town girl born and raised in Kansas. All the things I dreamed of lived outside in nature with my nose stuck in my books up in my treehouse. I have got to live in the worlds of the imagination of my childhood reads. I have been very fortunate to meet Stephanie Chance and never will I forget the world she has opened up to me.

So as we fall back into reading, let your armchair travels and dreams become reality. Road trip to Stephanie Chance’s Decorate Ornate, go on one of her incredible trips. I have never heard anyone ever say as they lay dying, I should not have gone on that trip. You can see I have a weird sense of humor but it’s true! We save and work all our whole lives for what! All I know is the rest of my life I am becoming the adventurer. It is time to go to all those places I dreamed about as I read in books, over and over again and I can assure you, there is no better trip than with as they call her in Italy, Stephani!

I love you Stephanie and cannot wait to go back to Italy with you, Tony, and Nino! Now check out all the photos for your own visual feast and Go! Go! GO!

Truly, Tiara Wearing and Stephanie Chance Book Sharing!

Kathy L. Murphy

The Pulpwood Queen

P.S. Stephanie Chance is also an author and has two books on her travels and Decorate Ornate style. Her latest “Beautiful Seductions” is a coffee table book and gorgeous decorating through all the seasons and she is currently working on her third book now. Armchair and Decorate Ornate travel here we go all together now, you hear!