My apologies to those who received a post with no content.  I was trying to re-blog a post on “How to Travel in Winter” from one of my favorite travel blogs, “Picnic at the Cathedral.”  I’ll try again!

I’m just getting around to sorting my many photos of my first trip to Hungary, this past December. One of my favorite stops was the House of Art Nouveau in Budapest.  As I explained in a recent post, it’s not so much a museum as a collection of stuff that ordinary people owned, used and loved. Hungary enjoyed one of its few periods of peace and relative prosperity between about 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War.

Furniture styles at the beginning of the period were staunchly conservative, even a little stuffy.  I’m not an expert, but I might call the bedroom set above a version of the “Biedermeier” style popular with the new middle classes of central Europe between about 1815 and 1850.

The cozy dining nook above sits next to an Art Nouveau stained glass window original to the house. It looks ready for a cozy chat and a nice cup of coffee.

Later in the period, the height of fashion was for furniture with fanciful flowing lines, like this dressing table.

I’ve seen much finer examples of Art Nouveau in the design museums of Paris and Vienna, but I love the common touch of the everyday pieces haphazardly crammed into Budapest’s House of Art Nouveau.

And there’s a cafe, perfect for a quick meal while dreaming of the past.  The smiling waitress asked with great interest where we were from.  She thanked us profusely for coming to her country!  This friendliness is just one of the reasons why I love Hungary.