Saturday, April 18, 2015

There are times when I wish she had never taken the boat

Nonetheless, take the boat she did, and after arriving in England in 1927, Mrs Ronald Tree began to create the mythic Englishness at the heart of sappy Virginian Decoration in England – a style now known on this side of the pond as "English" or a tad less mystifyingly as "English Country House."

It was, one might suppose, one of history's happier coincidences – if less earth-shattering than some might have one believe given the amount of twaddle written about them – the eventual partnership of Tree, or Nancy Lancaster as she became, and John Fowler, and given its success, inevitably, the association led to many imitators. After years of maudlin chintzes being pitchforked across battalions of bergeres, tables, sofas and windows, this so-called English style has been reduced to a wretched formula, leading to rooms that are prosaic and analgesic, where elements are constant, whoever the decorator, from magazine to blog to Pinterest to Instagram and back again. Some decorators strive to convince us it's a snappy American style and, arguably, given with whom it began, they're not wrong but my point remains, English or American, it's still the same stuff all the time.


Where's the originality, I wonder? Who has the ability to look at a space and not want to recreate what everyone has published in magazines, books, and online for the past umpteen years: be it a Fifth Avenue version of a salon from Chateau de Ferrieres; a dining room from Pavlosk; Nancy Lancaster's Brook Street yellow room; everything by no-lady Mendl; the same white room by Syrie Maugham;  badly-drawn cabbage roses, black-and-white-stripes and big baroque moulding by Dorothy Draper; nothing I can remember of demimondaine Rose Cumming's outré offerings, and far too much by Cecil Beeton. The list is longer but I'll draw the line here.

Mentioning Cecil Beeton does bring to mind an idea I occasionally have – that there might be a difference between gay and straight decorating. Not that I am suggesting that Mr Beeton was homosexual – heaven forfend! – but if he were, would it be possible to infer that there was a certain gayness in his work and his houses, theatrical as one might say they were. BUT, I digress …

Perhaps I'm wrong in hoping for originality and individuality from decorators when I suspect what clients mostly want is to conform to a perception of monied propriety. Respectability, like virtue and good manners, is a concept created in copywriters lairs, so why would a client want to stand out when conforming and being told one is unique is merely a matter of image creation by publicist, photographer, stylist and copywriter?

Consider the undoubtedly beautiful room above – and to be clear, I really do find it beautiful but, to my point, it's more of the same. I have not read about the room in Elle Decor (which I do not take) but to my eye it conforms to mainstream expectations of social background and economic status, and it projects a strong image to the world about the inhabitant's status against that background. In other words, it is a room of parade – not quite a State Room but nearly so.


By contrast, the room above, by a decorator in England, has some of the same elements but the objective is different – here I don't have to rely on deductions based on a photograph but can read a text. A quotation will be illustrative.

"To accommodate the owner's preference for contemporary art, a balance had to be struck between the majestic interior and the contents planned for it. Chester achieved this by buying a huge painting by Mimmo Paladino, which is even larger than the room's dominant central wall panel, and by placing below it a 3-metre (10-foot) banquette fronted by a massive coffee table. The style may be entirely different, but the scale and weight of these elements are so compatible with the room's architecture that the problem is resolved. The rest of the room is a mixture of contemporary art, modern furniture, tribal artefacts, and appropriately scaled antiques." [Italics mine]


I added the italics because the sentence is not about decoration but about design – note the words "the problem is resolved." So much of modern interior decoration, especially by the devotees of mid-century-anything, seems a lemming-like rush to publicity with a consequent dumbing-down of expectations by everyone concerned. I read yesterday of a designer without design education dancing her way into fame and product lines in fabric houses and wondered if her experience was not untypical. I have no idea how many of the media darlings have any design education but I wonder if it matters for with fame and fortune comes image creation by publicist, photographer, stylist and copywriter. Quite where education fits in any longer is hard to say.

This room with its George I paneling I find one of the best examples of twenty-first-century traditional interior design. I have scored through the word "traditional" because I feel this room shows exactly how a cultured and literate decorator can span the demarcations we normally think of in decoration.  Besides that highfalutin' stuff, this is a room one would enjoy walking into, sitting down with drink to hand, reading one's iPad (rediscovering Georgette Heyer in my case), listening to sublime music (Missa Papae Marcelli) – if one is not napping on the sofa – or simply waiting peacefully for dinner to be ready. What better in such a room?

First photograph from Instagram but I think originally from here.
Second and third photographs also from Instagram but originally from here.

18 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Coulda shoulda woulda, thank you! I loved the red and white striped house and it was such a perfectly understandable response – at least to me.

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  2. So very interesting how the same kind of table feels very different because scale has been respected and utilized. Wonderful post.

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    1. Daniel, thank you. I absolutely agree. Using a William Kent table as a drinks table could be considered to be mildly adventurous, I suppose, but to laden it with all the other miscellaneous items … there I go again, beginning another mini-rant. Meds wearing off, I guess.

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  3. Perhaps I am more comfortable with the first interior (Rheinstein) than a forward-thinking designer would admit, because I like decoration. I like that the ceilings were probably dropped to obscure the girders and beams, the ugly fire-rated entrance door was upholstered with nail-head trim, ill-placed doors were concealed, and that the fireplace niche was mirrored. In a NYC apartment, the idea of personalizing a space is very appealing to me.

    In the second interior (Jones), the architecture of the space was already splendid, but the designer chose to treat the wall decoration as wallpaper. The art was specifically chosen to lessen the effect of the architecture (which is better than just stripping it out, I will admit).

    I like both interiors, although the argument could be made that both were trying too hard to make a decorating statement. But as I said, I like decoration. These are two great examples of trends that I hope continue to develop.

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    1. The Devoted Classicist, thank you. I find both rooms beautiful but my point is that the first, however exquisite, is but another a variation on a long-established theme. In the second the art was not, I think, chosen to lessen the effect but to enhance or work with it. The photo I posted does not show the door case for example – in face, one of the faults of the designer's website and thus Instagram is that of vignetting. I like decoration, too, and the pity of it is, is that these two rooms appear to be at the ends of a spectrum from each other but that is an illusion.

      If ever you're here in Atlanta, do let me know. I'd love to have dinner with you – if you wouldn't mind, that is.

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    2. Blue, our meeting is long overdue. But, hopefully, that will be resolved before too long.

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  4. And here I thought, by your title, you were going to write about Viola's embarkation from "Shakespeare in Love." But then you really did, didn't you?

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  5. Laurent, not having seen the movie, I got me hastily to Wikipedia where I found I could, in truth, reply "Yes, I really did, didn't I?"

    "For she will be my heroine for all time, and her name will be...Viola."

    Thank you.

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  6. Thank you for such a brilliant post.
    Poor old Beaton, don't forgot he used almost forgotten Felix Harbord to 'do' Pelham Place, so its difficult to know exactly what Beaton did himself.
    Chester Jones's work has real 'cahones' and the Alan Davie painting and Kent table are great pieces which help massively; not sure about that Paladino, though of course they needed a big picture for such a large room.

    Best from sunny London !
    Herts

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  7. So interesting about your distinction between interior "decoration" and interior "design". These terms are often used interchangeably, but, as you point out, are not the same. At least to me, design is about shapes, compatibility, color, relationships, proportion, etc. None of those words imply a certain period or a certain style. They are more or less timeless. Great post. Thank you.

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    1. antonia dosik, thank you. Design and decoration are not the same thing, as you say, but in these days when many a person without a scrap of design education can call … oh, well, I've said all that. I'm looking forward to reading your blog. It's new to me.

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  8. But who is the nameless media darling ;-) So many names jump to my mind. I'm planning a trip this fall (finally) to Atlanta to take in an exhibit at the High, the Hapsburgs. Of course thats merely an excuse for a long overdue visit. I hope you're both around one of the evenings I am there!

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    1. ArchitectDesign, thank you. Windsor Smith – I sent you a link about it.

      We are here in the Fall – we have a flurry of activity in the summer and then are planning a European sojourn in winter but the Fall is open. Look forward to seeing you.

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  9. Dear Professor Blue,

    If you ever doubt that in your dotage your little gray cells having been popping off with great regularity, please reread this delightful rant/romp. Someone did a study on Iris Murdock's prose and thought he could tell in her writing when her dementia set in because her vocabulary became more simplified. No worries for you.

    Always a delight to read your insights, your prose, and your passion for the true world of interiors. I will close with the Decorator's Prayer (first time I saw it, it was muttered by John Saladino. Who knows its true origin) Everything I go to bed an pray that people with money get taste and people with taste get money.

    Amen.

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    1. home before dark, thank you. Dotage, hey? I'd rather call it the Age of Reason – others, the Celt included occasionally, might think it an Age of Aberration, what with the inner and outer voices (according to him) having blended. A while back, I read what purported to be an old Arabic proverb. Whether Arabic or not, or not it struck me as worth remembering in this Age of Shame and Apologize we live in.

      The mouth should have three gatekeepers:
      Is it true?
      Is it kind?
      Is it necessary?

      The Decorator's Prayer is wonderful and I'm sure said all day long and not just when they sink to their knees by their beds at night.

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  10. Obviously some typos near the end! Sorry about that. Love the Age of Aberration. However, I think the blending of the inner and outer voices is a major accomplishment. Right up there with the Age of Aquarius we were told was just about to dawn in the 60s. (BTW has it dawned yet? I must have missed it.)

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    1. home before dark, again thank you, There's a rumor that the Age of Aquarius dawns every Saturday in Little Five Points (East Atlanta) when the young OTPs drive into the city looking for a smokingly good time. We who were promised the Age of Aquarius missed it and its inheritors are our grandchildren who have to haul their parents back home on a Sunday morning.

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