Between planning family vacations and running away for novel-writing retreats, I've spent much of my adult life questing for the perfect beach escape, renting cottages all along the Florida Gulf and up and down the Atlantic Coast - as far north as Nags Head, as far south as Key West.

Slipcovers are great because they can be laundered after those all-too-frequent sippy cup and red wine incidents.

For years, I swore I couldn't work out because my own sweat gave me a rash.

The story of my holiday decorating is if Ralph Lauren was trapped in a 1950s Woolworth, this is what it would look like.

On my first trip to New York in the 1980s, the first place I wanted to visit was the Plaza Hotel, home to Kay Thompson's Eloise.