Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Perfect

Early this morning, before class started, I began a conversation with two students about reading, assuming that they'd enjoyed researching, reading and completing the writing tasks that were due today. I shouldn't have been surprised to hear that neither of them read for pleasure: reading to them means cramming the evening before a test. I admit that two students may not be representative of a generation (both students are in their early twenties) but I wonder if typical they may be. The recent statistics about the drastic drop in hard-cover and paperback book sales make me wonder who is reading. Is it just old fogies like me? When I and my like die, shall we, anachronistically, have represented an era - one, it occurs to me, that is already long-gone. If you'll forgive an Ecclesiastes reference, I wonder if the time for planting became the time for uprooting without our realizing, for beyond what we read bookstore and library closures and the loss of jobs, there is the closing of the collective mind.


Not quite what I set out to write after a fortnight's blogging silence, that first paragraph, but I must say recently I have found it increasingly difficult to stay on track. I've been occupied with things other than interior design - newly married friends gave a dinner party, the Celt's family from France, Scotland and New York were in town - averting my gaze, as it were, from the fact that that I find little of interest in modern decorating.

"He who dies with the most toys wins" - a phrase current in the 1980s and one not easily forgotten if, like me, you are a lover of simple, uncluttered interiors - though my use of the word "simple" is perhaps a little disingenuous for it is not simplicity per se, but a distaste for the self-consciously artless, the ironically unpolished, the carpingly self-effacing or the profligately vacuous.

I realize there are limits to looking back to 1980s and 1990s interior decorators - those men, generally speaking, whom I call the Lost Generation - and a time must come when that particular seam is mined out and a new direction must be found. That said, yesterday I found another Arthur E Smith interior (his own, a carriage-house and second home, in Charleston, SC) in a batch of old magazine clippings - an article saved because of the house and its interiors, not because of the decorator, for those days, I think, I had little idea of Smith's role in my recurring theme of connections within connections.


I wish sometimes it were not possible to think in terms of class and I'm very aware that we Americans find it a difficult subject to discuss - almost as difficult as the existence of bidets - but this interior of Arthur E Smith's is entirely driven by class, and one based on education of both the mind and the eye.

It could be argued that there's a correlation between the number of mass-produced and faddish accessories, the owner's aspirations and the suspension of disbelief with regard to marketing. Fads make fools of us: witness the dominance of the so-called Belgian style - the greyest of styles deriving from the antique shops of Axel Vervoordt and other Brabantse antiquairs and decorators and now devolved via trend-driven decorating magazines to mall and catalogue. The style could be Belgian, French Provincial, Gustavian, English country house - the name doesn't matter. What matters is that we keep on buying the furniture store vignette (remember that annoying tune "buy the room, get the ....") much as we might buy an outfit put together by a clothing store clerk. That's what matters.



Photographs by Peter Vitale to accompany text written by him for, I think, Architectural Digest. I clipped and did not note magazine, issue or date. If anyone can tell me so I can correct this, I would be grateful. Also, if anyone can identify the print on Smith's wicker chairs I would very much appreciate it. I know it was from Brunschwig et Fils. 




21 comments:

  1. Always the sculptures and the sculptural even the andirons and a sphinx to boot this time. Thanks.

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  2. I love reading your blog, as you have such a facility with language. Every piece has an arc to it of elegance and grace, and the words chosen are sublime. Thank you for sharing your erudition with us your fortunate readers. Reggie

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  3. I love this room, the height of the ceilings and - especially - the bookcases with pots. Glorious. A real retreat in which to read.

    I'm still reading myself, though I must admit that a good deal of this is research on google books. A great deal of what I used to find in library stacks is now there. Funny that: the more available material is the less the young are reading? That would be a great irony.

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  4. I dislike fads in anything, including of course interior design, and any interior designer who decorates in the style of "latest trends" is a non starter for me. Decorators and designers should have their own sense of style, and if it includes anything thematic, it is abhorrent to me.

    I find the lit recess in the third last picture to be perfectly charming. Whether it was there or created matters not really.

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  5. What a wonderful posting. And I'm in total agreement. You were especially spot on in your comments about current trends! I've never seen this particular interior of Smith's and it has that timeless, book-filled, collected look I love. After looking through October's Elle Decor last night, I think it's very clear that having a room full of pricey "named" pieces purchased by your decorator isn't the same as developing your own eye through years of looking and studying. Where has true connoisseurship gone in this internet age?

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  6. Yet another example of timeless interior design. The Billy Baldwin influence is strong, with the iconic B.B. slipper chairs figuring prominently. But what I also love are the carved wood torcheres in the form of a palm tree, similar to those used in the Wolcott Blair's Palm Beach house by Ruby Ross Wood with B.B. And those Mogul finials appear to be the ones from Mary and Harding Lawrence's Manhattan triplex apartment, designed by B.B. with Smith.

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  7. My favorite sort of room, bar none, and one that people seem almost to have forgotten how to do...

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  8. I'm rather under the weather with a cold . I meant to add (though my esteemed fellow commenters have beaten me to most points I'd make), that I am quite distressed by how increasingly uninformed by history design has become---the willful stupidity shown is analogous to the current political situation, no?

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  9. Terry, thank you. Those sphinxes are beautiful. We have something similar on our terrace - not sphinxes but recumbent lions.

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  10. Reggie Darling, thank you. I really am very grateful for what you write. The feeling is pretty well mutual - I look forward to every one of your posts and having met you I can hear your voice in each. Again, thank you.

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  11. Daniel James Shigo, thank you. I have written about many favorites over the past two and a half years but this, I think, is the one I love the most.

    We are at the tipping point or perhaps beyond it as regards books and online reading. I spend a lot of time, like you, researching online - to a degree caused this year by the fact the university library has been remodeling and books and periodicals have not easily been available.

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  12. Columnist, thank you. I agree, fads are abhorrent and to very few it seems. One day I'd like to research the psychology of fads though I'm sure that research is already done. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration.

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  13. Michelle from Boston, thank you. True connoisseurship is clearly is in the hands of very few able to supply it, or at least the appearance of it, to those, equally very few, who can afford to pay for it. A room full of pricey "named" pieces bought by one's decorator isn't the same as developing one's own eye but it's a hell of a status symbol - rightly or wrongly. It is a subject for more discussion.

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  14. The Devoted Classicist, thank you. The text of the article states that the room has a number of favorite pieces that Smith bought back from clients and the Moghul spires are amongst them. I looked this morning in Billy Baldwin Remembers and there they are, in the Lawrence's drawing room. Beautiful things!

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  15. The Down East Dilettante, thank you. Oh boy, do you raise a wonderful subject for discussion when you write "I am quite distressed by how increasingly uninformed by history design has become---the willful stupidity shown is analogous to the current political situation, no?" This could run and run - and it shall!

    I hope you feel better soon. A Manhattan is a well-known if uncommon cure for the common cold!

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  16. I lend books to undergraduates habitually and in 12 years have found 1 who reads what he says he wants to read. To a man, what they really want to know is what my club was at college. Does that help? I'm sorry if it does.

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  17. Laurent, thank you. Oh, that helps!

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  18. Blue -

    It's good to see you back in business.

    As I am so much less sophisticated than everyone else who posts here, I hope I will be forgiven for saying that a few of those pictures set loose a nightmarish version of "The Little Brown Jug" which has impeded several nights sleep!

    (Joking aside, I once again plead for a RC summary. No one else seems able to do it.)

    Best, etc.

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  19. The Ancient, thank you. I looked up the words to "The Little Brown Jug" and Lord help me it stuck - I hear it still. I first heard it when I was five in a singing class in primary school and I hated it. Still do, in fact.

    RC will return - I wrote but haven't finished two posts about him but you set me thinking about how I might complete them satisfactorily.

    Good to hear from you, and thank you.

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