Soignée

"I often think designers should keep their thoughts to themselves, and just let the results show their point of view. But in this particular case, I am anxious to talk about my work, because I think that what is most eloquent in this house is what doesn't meet the eye. I'm referring to absence - or abstinence, if you will. The most important thing about the house is what didn't go into it."

So said David Whitcomb over thirty years ago during a conversation about a 1950s modernist glass box he'd decorated in the Appalachian hills of Tennessee. What he said about absence in an interior struck a chord with me, for I like a certain simplicity, emptiness and a lack of visual clutter - qualities common to many of the interiors I've written about. All my favorite decorators of the last forty years share the same eye for proportion, simplicity, and appropriateness - an analogy with tailoring (bespoke is implicit) comes to mind - how a garment is constructed of fine stuff by hand after years of training of both hand and eye. In interior design there has to be training and knowledge, not just of historical styles (in which I include early and mid-century modernism) but of how the forms of furniture, the drape of textiles and the texture of color inhabit both a volume and the lives of the clients.

I'm not sure if it's a phenomenon of aging but I have come to feel the oppressive weight of possessions. I've never been a collector per se, and I don't think that nine framed drawings, two etchings, one large abstract painting, two watercolors, three photographs, a framed Hermes scarf, a small bronze, a tiny terracotta Grand Tour souvenir, 125 square feet of books, and twenty-eight-years-worth of The World of Interiors actually count as a collection - more, perhaps, the evidence of a life well-loved and a hell of a lot of dusting required.

I was reminded recently - it happens every time I see a piece of majolica - of a house early in the 1980s that in my memory was awash in chintz and majolica. No surface nor shelf was free of the stuff. The lady of the house had been persuaded by her decorator to collect majolica, as if by building this collection she was in some way validating her existence - I collect, therefore I am, as it were.

As frequently happens, when in search of something else, my eye was caught by something I was not looking for - this time, a mildly repellent passage in Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's autobiography and, suddenly, there it was - the word I didn't know I'd been looking for, which sums up my thoughts about much of today's interior decorating.

Soignée is a word not much used nowadays, and it's surprising, really, given that its meaning is quite simple. It just means well-groomed, carefully and elegantly put together. Before I develop my thought, let me quote the passage in which O'Neill refers to a famous, now dead (thus arguably fabulous) personage:

".... He had another hang-up, which was horrid. He liked all his women to smell au naturel and remain unshaven. I used to watch in horror all those beauties becoming unsoignée, going without makeup and gradually losing all their glamour. Having reduced them to the mundane, he would move onto the next one and repeat the process."

Unsoignée is precisely the quality that has become so much a part of modern interior design in America. It's not just the plethora of mise en scene props and accessories that overlay most horizontal and vertical surfaces, but also the unconsidered, and some might say benighted, groupings of mismatched pictures in small frames, and in the (to my mind) uneducated juxtaposition of furniture from various periods and styles. I'm not going to argue that the juxtaposition of, say, an Eames plywood chair with French a canapé or Verner Panton plastic with a farmhouse table is wrong, per se, but what I am going to say is that if brand, logo, name or provenance is the deciding factor, that leaves no room for proportion, scale or suitability. One imagines the intent is to be "eclectic," perhaps even worldly - but the result is all too often mere randomness, evoking an upscale flea market.

There was a time, starting in the 1960s, I think, when young designers began to take a piece of what nowadays is called important furniture and display it in isolation, spotlit, against a white wall and with lots of space around it. White wall apart, the point is, placement in relation to immediate surroundings and effect on the viewer, were considered. The unsoignée character of and the apparent lack of consideration in much of modern decorating is a clear example of how innovation - the mix of styles - becomes established practice and eventually descends into retrograde performance art.

How, you might ask, did we go from well-groomed and considered elegance to the accessory- and collection-riddled interiors of today? The answer to that lies, I believe, in the nineteenth century and is for another post. 

Photographs by Daniel Eifert to accompany text, from which the quotation comes, written by Peter Carlsen for Architectural Digest, March 1979. The quotation of Patricia Cavendish O'Neill is from A Lion in the Bedroom, Park Street Press, 2004.