Like the rest of the world I have been in the dream state that is holiday/family mode. Mine was par­tic­u­larly lovely and par­tic­u­larly long, but I am back and ready to party.

Truth­fully, the par­ty­ing is a lit­tle sub­dued since I’ve come down with a very annoy­ing cold, but I’ve used it as an excuse to catch up on my mag­a­zines. Did any­one read the pro­file of Bot­tega Veneta designer Tomas Maier in the New Yorker (Jan­u­ary 3 issue)? Here’s the thing: if I were crazy flush, I would very hap­pily carry a BV bag. Like Reese:

But the real rea­son I bring this up is because Tomas Maier, obsessed with the tini­est details (the arti­cle men­tions how a cof­fee saucer that doesn’t sup­port a spoon dri­ves him insane), a man who says, “The It Bag is a totally mar­keted bull­shit crap” (despite it, um, sort of pay­ing his bills) lives in—are you ready for this?—Delray Beach.

Say what?

It should be men­tioned that there is no Duomo in Delray.

Del­ray is, as I have men­tioned before, not my favorite place on earth. If you are a con­trol freak (sorry, Maier, it’s a com­pli­ment) who will not live in Milan due to its “design flaws,” you can do bet­ter than Del­ray. Dur­ing our time in Florida, Ryan and I exten­sively dis­cussed how we could make it bet­ter. Our con­clu­sion, for us, any­way, was that if you led a cer­tain lifestyle—one in which you could afford a house on water, a boat, etc.—South Florida could be, let’s say, not so bad.

Maybe Milan totally sucks? I don’t know. I have spent all of three hours there, and I was 16, so I’ll remove myself from weigh­ing on it. If I cre­ated beau­ti­ful things for a liv­ing, I assume I’d want to be inspired (even a lit­tle bit) by my sur­round­ings. I’d go in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion than a retire­ment com­mu­nity sur­rounded by strip malls and I-95.

(Reese photo here, Duomo here.)