Remember wallpaper?

It was that tacky stuff you had to strip off the walls of that 1927 Arts & Crafts style house you just bought from an 82-year-old woman who hadn’t updated the home since the Eisenhower administration. The faded wallpaper was pink flowers, blue bows, or — saints preserve us — both, and it was a messy job to remove it. But as soon as you got it down and slapped a new coat of paint on the walls, you had increased the value of your home by about 7 percent.

Well, a funny thing has happened while you’ve been busy poring over 13,567 paint chips for your living room makeover — wallpaper has had a renaissance. In fact, it’s even outgrown its name. At the higher end stores, they call it “wall cover” now, to better reflect the remarkable range of prints, colors and textures that are available. They can be handmade, custom-fit, and, believe it or not, downright hip.

Looking up at the gleaming skyscrapers of today’s Beijing, I began to wonder where the history was in this imperial city turned modern metropolis.

On highways packed with highly prized new Audis and other cars in the city center, you may glimpse the peak of an old temple, but you have to look hard.

Beijing hides its history behind a bustling concrete jungle.

Consequently, most visitors to the China capital these days have the same reaction: “It’s not what I expected.” As it prepares to host the world at the Beijing Olympics in August, the city feels as much like a clean version of New York as a place with a 5,000-year-old legacy. You start to wonder how a foreign place can look so not.

The mailman must get miffed at Peggy Greenough.

The 53-year-old Concord homemaker and her brood subscribe to “Better Homes and Gardens,” “Architectural Digest,” “Cooking Light,” “Newsweek,” “Time,” “Popular Science” and — the mother lode of thick, slick glossies — “Vanity Fair.” Add in this family of five’s subscriptions to “The Boston Globe,” “Wall Street Journal,” “New York Times” weekend edition and “The Concord Journal,” as well as the 20-odd cookware and clothing catalogs that arrive monthly, and the weight would make even a pack mule groan.

And yet, a lone trash barrel stands sentinel each week outside their Main Street home. It’s enough of an anomaly that Greenough’s neighbors have begun to talk.

‘Potter’ pack

       Somewhere along the line, the “Harry Potter” series evolved from a phenomenon into a classic. And now that J.K. Rowling has completed the series (she thinks), it’s a great time to pick up the Harry Potter Hardcover Box Set. After all, if your kids are any judge, this series will be entertaining many more generations of young ones. $136.50 at www.scholasticstore.com.

One of the nice things about the holidays is that friends and family drop by for visits, so it’s great to have some sweets on hand to serve your guests. The following cake recipes are all delicious, but the added bonus is that they’re also wonderfully aromatic — while they bake and cool, they’ll fill your kitchen with the aromas of sweet spices that we tend to associate with the holidays. 

These cake recipes also included nuts and fruits that are great for winter-time baking, and they all can be served warm or at room temperature and with some whipped cream or a scoop of your favorite ice cream. My personal favorite in this list is the walnut cake, a recipe I developed based on my visits to France over the years. I really like it for dessert with vanilla ice cream and dark caramel sauce, but it’s also very good the next day with your mid-morning cup of coffee.

Editor’s Note: If you’re like us, you’re convinced that the good life includes travel. So we’re adding stories about destinations near and far into the mix at “GoodLife.” We start in rural France, where a community has made one of life’s pleasures its life’s work. We’re talking about Cognac and cognac. Check out this beautiful city if you get a chance, but even if you can’t visit the town, the good news is that you can still get a taste of what they’re up to.

They don’t just drink cognac in the Charente river valley of Southwest France. They live it.

Driving through the pretty countryside, where small hills and valleys are dotted with perfectly spaced grapevines, you’d never know the wine produced here in this region above Bordeaux is used to make “the Noble spirit.”

But enter the city of Cognac and you know where you are. The big guys — Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Martell — are all based here along with smaller houses, and occupy historic buildings on much of the riverfront. Right across the Charente in Jarnac is powerhouse Courvoisier. Nearly everyone in the city of 20,000 and surrounding countryside seems connected with the famous French brandy. Cognac is big business in Cognac.