Salon style as a cottage industryAfter five...

Salon style as a cottage industry

After five years of doing business in New York, French General has gone Hollywood. The home decor store recently relocated to a bungalow on the old Lasky Studios lot -- Clark Gable’s bungalow, as it happens -- off Hollywood and Vine.

Owner Kaari Zabala was drawn back to her home state because she saw that “Hollywood was coming back to being glamorous, appreciating its past life.”

She and husband Juan Carlos Zabala decided to restore the 1920s look of the cottage cum shop, using a palette of paints based on colors of the era -- plume blue, peony, pearl de mer -- 10 of which they now market under the French General brand. “It’s got a feeling of an old ‘20s salon,” says Kaari Zabala, “pale but rich.”

The Zabalas sell early 20th century French textiles -- hemp, nettle, linen, florals -- that are no longer woven or produced today. They offer them as either finished products (linen curtains with ticking, floral pillows, tote bags, from $125 to $600) or unfinished (sheets, harvest table throws, tea towels, from $100 to $350). The textiles are made of fibrous plants, and “they regulate your body temperature, which allows you to sleep deeper,” Kaari Zabala says. “They wick the moisture from your body, great for night sweats or hot flashes.”

She has also created a line of lavender products, including laundry detergent and lavender-infused soy candles, and sells millinery and a range of notions from apothecary jars filled with vintage glass beads, buttons and cabochons.

The store is at 1621 Vista Del Mar Ave. and can be reached at (323) 462-0818 or www.frenchgeneral.com.

For those brewskis

Hey, mancave dwellers, it’s no longer enough just to hunker in front of a mammoth TV to watch the primal fight over pigskin. You’d better be well-armed. And the latest tool you didn’t know you needed is a personal vending machine that dispenses beverages.

Maytag’s SkyBox holds 2 1/2 cases of 12-ounce cans or bottles. Special locks keep your brews safe from preying moochers, and a warning light flashes when your stock runs frightfully low. It comes in colors perfect for that coal-mine decor you prefer: pitch black and gridiron platinum. If you want to jump on the spirit wagon, you can order polystyrene panels with team logos, photographs or art.

At only 2 feet by 3 feet, it leaves plenty of room for your recliner. It can rest on a pile of Sports Illustrateds or on its matching stand, which comes with shelves to stash remotes. Well, most of them.

The SkyBox -- available at the Maytag Store in Costa Mesa ([949] 548-9573), Amazon.com and, in March, the Home Depot -- costs about $600 with the stand.

-- Janet Eastman

A hearty wrap

The founders of the online children’s clothing retailer Oliebollen.com say they want to “blanket the world with love” this Valentine’s Day. Margaret Schankler and Deb Pilutti, two Michigan mothers who started the stylish Internet store in 1998, have created a special baby blanket to raise awareness and financial support for children hurt by recent wars.

Profits from the colorful cotton flannel blankets, which sell for $25 each through www.oliebollen.com, will go to Sitara, a home for Afghan war orphans in Peshawar, Pakistan.

The central illustration of the blanket features the company’s pacifier-chewing “Olie Girl” character cradling a heart-shaped world. The blankets come in red/orange or blue/green.

-- Tina Daunt

Love those robots

There’s something about the Roomba robotic vacuum disc that keeps the media spinning tales about it, even though it’s been around in one form or another since September 2002. Maybe it’s the idea of having a machine do one of the dullest household drudgeries. Or maybe it’s just because it looks cute.

But the latest entry, from this month’s Consumer Reports, isn’t exactly ebullient: The magazine found the newest model, the Roomba Pro Elite ($250 at major retailers), to be time-consuming and less than stellar for heavy-duty cleaning.

What testers didn’t rate was the near-obsession of some owners. At Roombacommunity.com, people don’t merely sing its praises, they also post Roomba’s-eye-view videos of their devices in action and discuss how to modify the machines to run through mazes and play tag.

-- Abra Deering Norton