Our Story

They call me El but its spelled Elle: El from Eleonora and Le from Lewis. It was my mothers way of being clever, including naming me after a beautiful woman she had met just one time, in a hallway, while on a trip to Rome, Italy. I’d heard this story so many times growing up: My adventurous mother staying at a Bed and Breakfast, the owner pops in to check the room next to hers just as she was leaving to explore the city, and then just behind him was one of the most stunning women my mom had ever seen, The owner introduced her as “my girlfriend, Eleonora.” But if you’ve ever heard an Italian man speak a women’s name, you know it sounded much more like he was making love to her simply by saying her name. It was a perplexing combination of red hot passion, and slow, deliberate, grace. Quite simply,  it was like sex oozing out of his beautiful mouth as his palpable lust and husky voice betrayed him. My mom was kind enough to add the “adult” words after I was old enough but I grew up knowing that my mother had hoped by naming me Eleonora, I would be just as beautiful as the Italian woman in the hallway in Rome.