tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87852074171648294252024-03-19T02:34:30.268-04:00The Blue Remembered Hills™Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.comBlogger538125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-69436218741517114362016-01-28T10:16:00.002-05:002016-01-28T10:52:49.950-05:00"Oh, very gay, dear"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Time to write?<br />
Oh, dad, you crack me up!" </div>
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If you lived through the 1960s in the United States, you were either very worried in an existential way or, at best, oblivious to every crisis that loomed – and there were many. One area of calm persisted for, despite an occasional stab at modernization, crises simply did not figure in American Interior Decoration – the Colonial <strike>Dames</strike> Revival ruled. Oh, it might have got itself decked out in Empire and been prettily glamoured by Hollywood but, essentially, the same stuff as John D Rockefeller's Williamsburgian dreams were made of - and there's nothing wrong with that.<br />
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One aspect of American interior decoration that Hollywood featured was space – seemingly boundless space within rambling country and seaside cottages – and for a while, intramural acreage, the most luxuriously tangible condition of American democracy portrayed in movies and thereafter in magazines, made many a European head for the docks and, for that matter, many an American thankful for ambitions yet to be fulfilled.<br />
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The idea of a house for the summer or the winter, to my mind, is distinctively American – much in the same way "resort wear" is an American invention – a way of living and entertaining in eternal sunshine. The British aristocracy had the "Season" when annually its members left its estates, went up to town for the winter and socialized, presented its daughters at Court and fired them off into society and a suitable marriage.<br />
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American aristocracy also had its Season for pretty much the same reasons but the resorts were designed around particular activities such as boating, skiing, etc., and entertaining but they were not designed as tourist or vacation-package destinations as we understand "resort" today. Rather, they began as exclusive developments for compatible and rich society members, able to have more than one household and, in the manner of medieval monarchs, move seasonally from one to the other. Nowadays, society being what it is, the luster might be gone off the resorts but the lure of summering or wintering remains.<br />
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Michael Greer, once one of America's best-known decorators, is listed as the designer of this Palm beach house (by which I assume is meant that he was the architect) and the style of the white plaster structure is described as being "inspired by the Palladian villas of the Mediterranean" which must have invited incredulity even in 1966. Undeniably beautiful, even playful within the limits of symmetry, obviously Palladian the house is not. Mediterranean it might be given that is an American architectural style not known in and around the Mediterranean Sea. One detail easy to miss if the eye is too quick to pass along the front of the house is the solution to the two-car garage.<br />
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These are not the charismatic rooms of the Wrightsman residence in the same town, but as might be expected from a decorator Mr Greer's calibre this house has all the urban elegance that resort living and entertaining in Palm Beach required. Large, airy rooms, succeed each other from portico to water – entrance hall, drawing room, card room – separated by Tuscan columns rather than the Ionic of the portico. There's an emaciation about the moldings, a flatness to the walls and an inconsequence to the floors that subordinates any expectation of conviviality implied by the facade and the motor court.<br />
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In theory, backgrounds should not intrude and here the background, white and virtually shadowless, is as reticent as it can be for furniture that is known as "fine" – Louis XVI, Empire, Directoire – on carpets by Edward Fields, done up in pale greens, yellows, creams and pinks, and contributing to the mood of formality amongst the palms.<br />
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I nearly wrote how up to date it all looks, this interior from fifty years ago, but that wouldn't strictly be true – rather the contents of the house have never gone out of style. The sofas in the drawing room, admittedly, have a dated air but they are perfectly acceptable to today's retro-decorator sensibilities and, more to the point, are a mildly-modern element enlivening the traditional whole. A mid-century vibe, I suppose, one could say. Sofas flanking a fireplace, across a coffee table, accompanied by symmetrically-placed matched chairs became such a cliche of decoration … in fact, as ubiquitous as the karate-chopping of pillows in later years.<br />
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Michael Greer's <i>Inside Design</i> by Michael Greer, one of the first "decorator monographs" is still a book worth seeking and reading. My copy, bought ten years ago in Salt Lake City, is augmented with clippings glued-in by the previous owner fan, is much valued, especially for the additions which otherwise I might never have seen. Looking through it again I have the impression that Mr Greer, in his time, was the nearest American interior decoration came to equalling the decorators at Maison Jansen. Thus, you may wonder why Michael Greer is not so well-known nowadays.<br />
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Well, forty years is a long time dead and, besides that, Michael Greer was murdered during sex with a stranger in his own home. Even in the more liberal 1970s <a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20066461,00.html" target="_blank"><i>People</i> magazine</a>, not known then or now as a forum of high-mindedness published an obituary of him that is shaming to read – more for the way "friends" rushed to salivate over his corpse than for the faux-grieving tone of the text. <br />
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I wonder, once the prurient had their day, if there was a turning of the shoulder of self-protection, an immediate disassociation from the victim and all his works. Perhaps in the following lies the answer: Michael Greer was raised in Monroe, GA, and there, his ashes are buried, allegedly without a marker.<br />
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A while ago we watched a movie <i><a href="http://www.doisoundgay.com/" target="_blank">Do I Sound Gay</a></i> and whilst I found it somewhat interesting I'm not wholly convinced such a thing as a gay accent exists though there certainly is a perception that it does. However, it led me to wonder how far gender-stereotype crosses over into decoration – American decoration, that is. We blithely use "masculine" and "feminine" in decorating so I ask if one could use "gay" in the same way. "Oh, very gay, dear" perhaps, is not quite what one wants to hear, but why should it not be? </div>
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So, is there such a thing as Gay American decoration? That's for another time, if my lawyer and Barnaby Warboys agree.</div>
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My Life</div>
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"What part of "feed me" don't you understand?" </div>
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-13582532320128170562016-01-08T20:51:00.000-05:002016-01-08T20:51:30.332-05:00American Decoration, a beginning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I'm at a loss to explain how five weeks can have passed since my last post. The Holidays played a role, for sure, as did family visiting from Scotland and New York … yet, given the abiding routine of mine and Barny's days, I am, as I say, confounded. </div>
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I remarked to a neighbor that she should not find amusing what I was about to say: that since I got Barny I had learned respect for the lives of stay-at-home parents, especially those who previously had some intellectual content to their careers. Barny isn't a human child, so the comparison doesn't fully apply, however short the duration of the process, the demands of raising a beloved member of the family with as distinct a personality as those of the others, are constant and leave little room for my pursuits. </div>
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At ten months old, Barny has no idea of my need to write - he feels sad when the Celt goes to work and frequently needs to cuddle with me on the sofa until he's recovered enough to go back to bed for another hour or two. Not a morning person, my Barny Warboys, thus he fits in very well with both of his dads, yet once the carpet has been snuffled, my hand licked and fingers nibbled, suddenly its time to play – a situation announced by a peremptory "woof" and a stare that quite clearly says that this whippet's psychic universe is riding on my reaction. And play we do, after I save yet another attempt at a post. So, we walk and we walk and we walk… and I wonder where the day has gone. </div>
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I have mentioned many a time that a much-valued part of my weekly routine is lunch with my old prof. Besides the friendship, she has been useful in clarifying some of my thoughts and ideas about American design – this is the woman who, when a Graduate Assistant the University of Minnesota, was mentored by Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, the authors of <i>Art in Everyday Life</i> a book still worth reading. </div>
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Perhaps more importantly, for my present purposes, my old prof was friends with Helen E McCullough, who researched how Illinois housewives used their kitchens, noted their wants and perceptions, and published her findings and conclusions in <i>Circulars</i> from the <i>Small Homes Council of the University of Illinois</i> just after the Second World War. </div>
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The idea that American interior design in the form of logical application of standards based on scientific research began to a great degree in Illinois is a seductive one, but similar work was being done at Cornell University. The times were creative: only look at what is for sale on 1stdibs to see the variety of what was achieved (and on the other hand, what one might wish hadn't been). It is mildly shocking to think that Helen E McCullough and her colleagues at Cornell might actually have had more influence on Western society than the Eameses.</div>
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"Woof"</div>
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As I begin my look at American interior design, I need to state straight away that, in my opinion, there has never been a time when American interior decoration could be seen in isolation from that of Great Britain, France, Italy or, in modern times, of Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. Despite the vastness of this country and the multi-origins of its population, the dominant American decorative style – what is called "traditional" – is derived from the styles created in Britain and France centuries ago. That fact that traditional decorating had its <a href="http://thebluerememberedhills.blogspot.com/2015/04/there-are-times-when-i-wish-she-had.html" target="_blank">beginnings in Virginia</a> yet in this country for much of the twentieth-century was called "English," and that its major proponent went to live in Britain, should if anything, tip the wink, as it were.<br />
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In modern times "traditional" for my taste is too narrowly defined, one might say unimaginatively and lazily so. That said – and with all acknowledgments made to opinions expressed about American exceptionalism in the past and today – I maintain that there were Golden Years in American interior design and decoration, but they are not now.<br />
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The beginnings of American worldwide dominance after WWII, the rise of the so-called "American Century" is where I'd like to begin. It was a time when insularity fought with ecumenism, democracy with Communism, the body politic self-harmed but, finally and perhaps inevitably, American interior decoration let go of the WASP-manqué leading strings and took big strides out of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. <i>Architectural Digest </i>of the 1960s and 1970s is full of photographs that, at this remove, seem to embody a fear of "out there," so covered in curtains and shades are the windows and doors – symbolically blinded, as it were – but Modernism with its sanatorium-like emphasis on light, air and space began to enliven the pages, if a little tentatively.<br />
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This was a time in American interior decoration, before the apotheosis of the auctioneer, when decorators worked against a background of history; they knew the basic principles of design and learned the business from a mentor or employer. Nowadays, one wonders …<br />
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This first interior from 1969 has much of what I think is significant – this lovely combination of modernity and tradition – about American interior design from that era, and most importantly, it has stood the test of time. I wonder how eye-opening it was – shocking even – for many of the readers of <i>Architectural Digest</i>, for here is spacious Modernism, complete with white walls and ceilings, sunlight thrusting its way through large un-curtained windows onto white poured-polyurethane floors atop which sit "no-color" furnishings in chrome, glass, vinyl, plastic laminates and plexiglass. All is geared to drawing the eye to paintings by Vaserely, Frank Stella and Morris Louis, and a collection of Chinese red lacquer furniture and objects. As an aside, I wonder if this was the first time that cliche of modern decorating, a Saarinen table flanked by a set of French fauteuils, had been published.<br />
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In some ways, I come full circle with this house because though I'm on with a wider subject now, this is the time when the men whom I have written about previously, "the Forgotten Generation," were coming to the fore. They were some of the most exciting talents ever to grace the American decorating scene and many were soon gone, dead to the AIDS epidemic. To my mind, that was a loss from which decorating in this country has yet to recover.Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-29921858151952759912015-11-27T00:08:00.000-05:002015-11-27T08:49:54.223-05:00Our Own Snug FiresideIt is fitting, I think, to begin a series about American interior decorating on Thanksgiving, the most characteristic American holiday. Fitting, also, to begin in the New England of the Colonies and the Early Republic by mentioning the fact that I have coopted the tile for this post from a most excellent book – on my shelves since I read it as a graduate student and even more treasured after rereading it since meeting the author when Rory and I toured with the Decorative Arts Trust in Maine earlier this year.<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Our-Own-Snug-Fireside-1760-1860-ebook/dp/B00CGI3GLY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448557323&sr=8-1&keywords=Our+Own+Snug+Fireside%3A+Images+of+the+New+England+Home+1760+-+1860" target="_blank">Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home 1760 - 1860</a></i> by Jane C Nylander is one the best books ever about early American life. There's a lot to learn about what went into the colonial houses of this period – in fact how little actually furnished a room. The reasons choices were made certainly prefigure the choices we still make and attitudes to conspicuous consumption were more pronounced then perhaps than today. Ms Nylander is far better than I at explaining the early American attitudes and achievements in furnishing and decoration and I shall leave her to it.<br />
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There is a sofa in the High Museum, that, if anyone mistaking morality for aesthetics and believing in Adolf Loos's stricture <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime" target="_blank">"No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level ... Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength"</a> could bring a person to a developmental rubicon. The High, a museum in aesthetic crisis when, thanks to indifferent architectural grafting by Renzo Piano, it turned its back on the decorative and ceremonial entrance to Richard Meier's museum, an act, it seems to me, symbolic of turning its back on the city … but I digress … and back to the sofa which actually is one of my all-time favorites.<br />
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By John Henry Belter, this sofa, in what we know as the the Rococo Revival Style (at the time Modern French) is made of "laminated and carved rosewood, white pine, and ash with original appliqué designs on modern silk upholstery." The most astonishing aspect of this sofa is that the back, made of plywood and curved, is completely smooth. The front is three-dimensional, carved exquisitely and pierced. It is a terrific piece of work – the crests resembling nothing less than the <i>peineta </i>worn under a mantilla in Spain – and now covered in beige silk velvet.<br />
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The creator of the Rococo Revival sofa was born in Germany, and like any number of well-known American designers/makers/artists/writers/creators contributed to what we think of as American Interior Decoration and Architecture. Duncan Phyfe, Charles-Honoré Lannuier, John Henry Belter, Calvert Vaux, and up to modern times with Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra and Eero Saarinen et al – immigrants all – the point is not to belittle home-grown talent and, believe me, there is more than Frank Lloyd Wright, but, rather to introduce the universality of interior design a hundred or so years ago even if universal meant two sides of the Atlantic rather than a broad world view.<br />
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American Empire Style Card Table circa 1803</div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">Charles-Honoré Lannuier</span></div>
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The American Empire Style is a version of the Napoleonic Empire Style but made by French immigrants like Charles-Honoré Lannuier, Scotch immigrants like Duncan Phyfe, and local craftsman and furniture makers in America – the point being these people worked in that style in American cities. The Gothic Revival, Greek Revival, Renaissance Revival, Modern French, Second Empire, Queen Anne Revival, Arts and Crafts, Beaux Arts, etc. all began in Europe and Britain and it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th-century that the tide of stylistic immigration turned and Europe began to look to America to see what Mr Lloyd Wright especially was up to. In that turning of the tide Wright's ideas met the English Arts and Crafts in Germany and the ideas behind Modernism were born. When that tide turned … and so on.<br />
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Frank Lloyd Wright</div>
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Darwin D Martin House</div>
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Jack E. Boucher, Photographer - Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division </div>
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Historic American Buildings Survey</div>
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It's about this time, loosely speaking, that Elsie Mendl appeared to leave her Boston marriage and, being no better than she should have been, <i>Introduced Wicker and Treillage into the Colony Club </i>after which she took credit for everything there ever was, wore pearls with Red Cross outfits and eventually died at Versailles (which is more than Marie Antoinette was allowed to do). Everyone who should have known better took Mendl at her word and consigned Candace Wheeler, a far better designer, to the pages of dull biography almost unread except by the likes of me.<br />
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Immigration and importation have been themes throughout American interior design and architecture – even though General Washington may in a moment of madness have been offered a crown after the revolution, this country has never more had a king. Yet the forms of chairs, sofas and settees that have never been bettered for grace and beauty, and still sit at the apogee of style in the world's largest democracy, were developed under the French monarchs – imports of style that go back to before the founding of the republic.<br />
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I took these photographs of a house in Maine, closed for more than twenty years, except for the rare summer visit. They show how much hard work went into keeping house. The reception rooms were not worth photographing - not that we could, corralled as we were behind a rope. Docents .... !<br />
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Just before Thanksgiving, this country (or many in it) turned its face against immigration, denying those who've fled their fireside a chance at another. America has done so before and stylistically, also, it has done so. The Tudor Revival, for example, in many ways thought of as a characteristic East Coast architectural style that developed after the Bicentennial when - to be simplistic – immigration of Jews and Irish was at an all-time high and the WASP establishment felt threatened and, as it were, drew up the stylistic portcullis, emphasized its Anglo origins and withdrew behind its Locust Valley vowels.<br />
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At the end of the 19th-century, when the wholesale importation of paneled rooms and, indeed, complete houses from Britain and Europe for American millionaires began, so did the supply of European art and furniture by the likes of Berenson and Duveen – a supply that continues today through decorators, auction houses and galleries – it all does rather beg the question of wherein lies the Americanness of American interior design. Bu that's for another day when Barny is less tired.<br />
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-16808866696808967202015-11-09T07:21:00.002-05:002015-11-09T07:23:23.946-05:00I sent him packing <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
The famous British magazine <i>Private Eye </i>used to carry a regular feature called <i>Pseuds Corner </i>in which they pilloried purple poetical prose or, piffle as the Brits call it. I have no idea whether the Corner or the magazine are extant but they would have had a field day with the inanities contained in this book.</div>
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"<b>It's easy to get white wrong – it takes talent to get it right</b>" </div>
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This is possibly the most risible of the pieces of fustian I <i>could </i>fill this post with but I shall desist. Talent, <strike>my ass</strike> my eye – it takes lots of observation and a bit of hard work, more like! </div>
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"<b>In so much as I am living and breathing, I am a barometer of change. That's my job. Keeping current and being in fashion means<i> to be in your time.</i></b>" </div>
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This second quotation came pretty close to winning the prize but … I shall not dwell on it. </div>
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"<b>Rooms should reveal themselves gradually over time</b>." </div>
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Oh, riiiight! Oh, tautologous! </div>
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It's the hokum of these platitudes that is so absurd to me because, after all, it's only furniture, fabric and a drop of paint. It ain't art or even religion with all its attendant gobbledygook and superstition – it's decorating, not magic! I've said it before and undoubtedly I'll say it again: decorators should stick to decorating and leave philosophy to philosophers (or that bloke down the pub). </div>
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If one were to take the book and its contents at face value, one might suspect late-nineteenth-century <i>mitten-Europa, </i>with its<i> </i>middle-class Ringstrasse aesthetic and emphasis on blood-lines and family-trees, is popular in parts of the so-called upper-echelons or, rather, the monied sections, of American society. To some of us, the so-called non-worshipping classes, bullion-fringe tacked to mantlepieces – only one instance of a desperately Victorian-revival tone to the interiors, is a little too redolent of Franz-Josef and the mess he created and left behind. </div>
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It isn't often I return a gift but, frankly, <i>Jeffrey Bilhuber, American Master</i> though subtitled <i>notes on style and substance </i>contained so little of either, in my opinion, I promptly had this gasbag of a book sent whence it came. </div>
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So, I come to Sunday and a time when Barnaby Warboys allows me some time to write. The Celt is home and carries some of the <strike>burden</strike> task of being trained by a whippet pup, eight-months old, who continues to be be both delight and scourge. The wool and silk carpet for the living room came home after being cleaned, restored and guess what? Yup …you got it. As did the carpet in full force. </div>
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There Barny sat, Saturday night, as we had guests in for a nightcap, sorry for himself a little because he is ill, excited a little because we had guests and he likes company. After a while, first opening the bedroom door, he took himself off to bed then, curiosity getting the best of him, came back to say goodnight at the end of the evening. </div>
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Our continuing search for a suitable country place – two bedroom, two bathrooms, with enough land for Barny to run free – has only brought the realization that what we envisage will have to be built. We began to lean towards a cabin combined with the contemporary. The one cabin we found had, after a long time for sale, been sold only two days before. Charming as it was – and it was – old as it was – and it was (1840) – really wouldn't have been the most felicitous for Barny or me. </div>
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We both (The Celt and I, for Barny is silent on the matter) reached the conclusion that at any price-point (as the jargon goes) what is available, for our taste, is too traditional and evocative of a mountain setting. And why not? you may ask. Well, evocation of any place is not quite what we have in mind – The Celt is Scottish by birth and I am from Lancashire but neither of these facts should suggest a leaning towards tartans, antlers, cairngorm or macramed oatmeal or, in fact, anything else considered ethnic to either of our backgrounds. Heritage has no need of touristic flourishes the equivalent of monogrammed shirt cuffs. </div>
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Perhaps these two views of a sitting room from a chalet in the French Alps designed by <a href="http://mhzlondon.com/" target="_blank">Mlinaric, Henry and Zervudachi</a> visually explains my meaning. There is a lack of obvious references to place or function: no crossed snow-shoes above the fireplace; no antler furniture; no pinecone lampbases; no rawhide lampshades; in fact, none of the decorative cliches one has come to expect of decoration of a certain ilk. It is that lack of reference to locality that is particularly refreshing in comparison to the interiors we saw as we viewed houses in the mountains and online. </div>
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If our country sitting room is to reflect anything it is our family – the three of us – not the mountains, not Scotland, not Lancashire and certainly not some spurious idea of what English decoration is or even what American decoration is. </div>
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Which brings me to a subject I want to discuss in the coming post. American decorating. We read a lot about it, and how special it is. Is it just American exceptionalism and isolationism or is American decorating special? </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-63875987163716001772015-10-25T21:03:00.004-04:002015-10-25T21:03:56.696-04:00My old prof <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I have a confession to make and I might as well make it on a Sunday morning as another time: I really like plain white Corian. Unmentionable today by the salesmen of honed stones that resemble nothing more than textured Formica, and still unfashionable enough to create an eye-roll when mentioned, Corian remains my favorite kitchen surface. </div>
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You might think that if that's all I have to confess on a Sunday morning, I lead a pretty blameless or boring life. That's not for me to judge but I am at my own dining table – our "home office" having temporarily reverted to the hall closet it once was – thinking about the instability of taste and the derisory attitudes there are towards certain materials. I suppose I'm thinking about fashion and the uncritical way in which much of the interiors industry accepts what is served up. </div>
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Kate, my old prof, and l were having our usual Friday lunch at Pricci, an Italian restaurant now so 1990s in style that we both fear it is in danger of being renovated and "modernized" and fervently hope it will be left to mellow and grow old, when we got on to the books she had either given or loaned me recently, and by extension to materials and finishes no longer fashionable. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY3YGzUqOHkSVDziSNH0F7PZAfRhp1HJzGzoUT900GUxs_aE_kblTRM2xQyeNdNg0MaigMZPzgY4-o4U9w_HPNzzgixxbWWVYunvXo5mqtA0zmSMT1_X-j-zCD82EaQJeEd6NrQuXr0i8/s1600/2015-10-25-0009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY3YGzUqOHkSVDziSNH0F7PZAfRhp1HJzGzoUT900GUxs_aE_kblTRM2xQyeNdNg0MaigMZPzgY4-o4U9w_HPNzzgixxbWWVYunvXo5mqtA0zmSMT1_X-j-zCD82EaQJeEd6NrQuXr0i8/s320/2015-10-25-0009.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>
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In one, <i>The Pahlmann Book of Interior Design</i>, first published in 1955, there is a photograph of a flooring no longer fashionable – at least amongst the cognoscenti in our field – vinyl. Once new and fashionable enough to be used by the most fashionable decorators of their day (William Baldwin and Albert Hadley as wall-covering, for example), it is now still known to the contract side of the industry but appears in the residential or gift and accessory trades primarily as faux shagreen and ostrich hide, et al. If I were to choose an alternative to vinyl flooring – which would be an ironic choice, for vinyl was marketed in in the early days as a modern surrogate for this – it would be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleum" target="_blank">linoleum</a> – an interesting, biodegradable, durable and beautiful flooring – around since about the time of the American Civil War. </div>
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"You know I once sat in Dior's salon for a showing? And Jacques Fath's, too? My friend Marion and I got tickets somehow … so long ago … 1957, I think … but could have been 1954. We spent weeks touring the continent. It was not like it is today, the big productions – it was very reverential, like being in church. Fath had died by that time time, if it was '57, but his wife continued the business for a while, and Dior died in '57 also. Ah, those dresses … oh, excuse me! Those gowns! They were beautiful. </div>
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"I think that was the second time on the ship, crossing the Atlantic, when the bartender came to the table and took an order for a round of drinks. Asked everyone what they would like, but did not ask me. I recognized him from my trip the previous year and said 'Reggie, you forgot me.' He replied, 'That would be a gin and tonic, madame, if I remember correctly.' Cunard line, of course. Always had the best employees."</div>
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"Have you seen this?" She asked, handing me the brochure you see below. "I've been sorting out old files and boxes and I wondered if you might like to see this before it goes in the trash. Cute little drawings, too, of their time so when you're done keep it or trash it. Up to you." </div>
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I haven't trashed it – this useful little circular from the <i>Small Homes Council</i> of the University of Illinois, Urbana. printed in 1950 and still, I think, of more practical use to the to the modern young man or woman looking to decorate a house than any of today's how-to manuals. </div>
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Before I go on let me just say that just in case you think that residential interior design is nothing more than celebrities creating vignettes for magazine and monograph and fabric and furniture collections for fabric houses and furniture makers, you might take a look at the first quotation from this sixty-five-year-old eight-page circular: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRlruPDhbC-XpAQwmskMAT9fKpQcO_4LyR7x14xSLLRZTLpyIaVXSPPVnYkjb5WTyZLH-vUoV4gvRfUY2sAeQJiDk444OeW1rlpypJFrnESpnqei8PLGlR2elkN0ZplT_uiL-OiQXIKpk/s1600/FullSizeRender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRlruPDhbC-XpAQwmskMAT9fKpQcO_4LyR7x14xSLLRZTLpyIaVXSPPVnYkjb5WTyZLH-vUoV4gvRfUY2sAeQJiDk444OeW1rlpypJFrnESpnqei8PLGlR2elkN0ZplT_uiL-OiQXIKpk/s320/FullSizeRender.jpg" width="296" /></a></div>
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The purpose of interior design or decoration is to make the home more livable and attractive.</div>
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Interior design must (1) serve the living habits of you and your family; (2) satisfy your ideas of comfort, beauty, economy, ease of maintenance or "housekeeping"; and (3) <i>satisfy the broader standards of good design</i>. [My italics]</div>
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Interior design involves personal likes and dislikes; it involves habits and hobbies. Unless it fulfills individual needs, it can never be called successful, regardless of how well it meets the rules of good design. On the other hand, it is not successful if it violates all rules of good design even though it satisfies a fad or whim of an individual. </div>
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The lowest cost house should be as livable, and therefore, as successfully decorated as the larger home. Every budget, no matter how small, provides for certain furnishings. These influence the design of the rooms. </div>
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I wonder if <i>the broader standards of good design</i> are as well-known as they once were – so surely have they been subsumed in the fustian of the desecrators and the concept-laden verbiage of the design school curricula … but, I'm a long way from the happy lunch Kate and I shared last week. We had split a pizza between the two of us. I'd had a bourbon, she her once-weekly glass of white wine, and we'd chatted and … well, the illustration above shows the good sense that pervades the circular. </div>
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I wish I'd noticed this piece of <strike>nonsense</strike> <a href="http://www.ecobuildingpulse.com/news/pantones-top-color-picks-for-spring-2016_s" target="_blank">puffery</a> before collecting my old prof because we would have had a riotous time going over it. Quite how anyone believes this beats me, but it seems it is big business. Here are three of the ten from the link above. I leave you to judge but you may imagine my reactions to the deathless prose persuading the buyers in the garment and interiors industries to use the colors. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5uiDb00WraRech441lARvgy6qrybNISASMx8OMlodleONwOYK8jYAJ9oi5qemf1dHwJtC3dv1NMrCc0VUeDZkiz38mwGURSVxHVMVIvHNzXoBi3wpcn0ffwXk-XfsKb6NOSwpcdd9qrk/s1600/90.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5uiDb00WraRech441lARvgy6qrybNISASMx8OMlodleONwOYK8jYAJ9oi5qemf1dHwJtC3dv1NMrCc0VUeDZkiz38mwGURSVxHVMVIvHNzXoBi3wpcn0ffwXk-XfsKb6NOSwpcdd9qrk/s320/90.jpeg" width="255" /></a></div>
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<b>Rose Quartz</b></div>
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“A persuasive yet gentle tone that conveys compassion and a sense of composure.” </div>
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<b>Serenity</b></div>
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“Like the expanse of the blue sky above us, Serenity, [a transcendent blue], comforts with a calming effect, bringing a feeling of respite even in turbulent times."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKb-TETu1f1iA3iptqAFcaM9CqI0pUGvL0M4jhz-OFUTiWjdWiIyk_iMUqQ46qWRGiWrQuzHo3Io_vU151f86c8B4NZJ3qD69TUB_tfz8PJbByGVv1OgmPvBoiFwob2WFO1l6k5eQsjZ0/s1600/90-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKb-TETu1f1iA3iptqAFcaM9CqI0pUGvL0M4jhz-OFUTiWjdWiIyk_iMUqQ46qWRGiWrQuzHo3Io_vU151f86c8B4NZJ3qD69TUB_tfz8PJbByGVv1OgmPvBoiFwob2WFO1l6k5eQsjZ0/s320/90-2.jpeg" width="245" /></a></div>
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<b>Snorkel Blue</b></div>
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“Playing in the navy family, but with a happier, more energetic context, the maritime inspired, Snorkel Blue implies a relaxing vacation and encourages escape.”</div>
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Now were all told not what good design is, but what the design du jour is to which we must all subscribe. Back in the days of Mr Pahlmann and the writers of the circular from <i>The</i> <i>Small Homes Council</i> of the University of Illinois, Urbana, they simply led by example. </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-50086032068964667522015-10-24T11:50:00.001-04:002015-10-24T11:50:10.853-04:00How can it be …… with all the time in the world, I cannot write as often as I would like? – is a question I often asked myself and until a couple of days ago had few ideas about how to solve my problem. It then occurred to me to ask another question: if I can Instagram as often I do, could I write shorter posts for the blog with similar frequency as I post on Instagram. Not that the two media are comparable, really, but … why not give it a go?<br />
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As the parent of any eight-month-old whippet will attest "time for oneself" is a much-cherished delusion – a fantasy as hard to relinquish as is the idea that living rooms are anything other than canine playrooms …</div>
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… that whippets allow one time for breakfast </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9rWw8Wu49beAnTlCDGizA8jig41CjyjJZX3qTMBnsqd3JmpoBkyR8nLRQTvuVngL71FmRrRWII4CUF0WFHKNGiJosAA_588GGSTN8o0taQh1KkPBwdXhVXlOz6vmEnxL5BUsL6Bvns1c/s1600/IMG_2097.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9rWw8Wu49beAnTlCDGizA8jig41CjyjJZX3qTMBnsqd3JmpoBkyR8nLRQTvuVngL71FmRrRWII4CUF0WFHKNGiJosAA_588GGSTN8o0taQh1KkPBwdXhVXlOz6vmEnxL5BUsL6Bvns1c/s320/IMG_2097.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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…or even that privacy any longer is an option. My clever, beloved Barnaby Warboys has learned to open doors and I have photographs to prove it. Publish and be damned, he says. </div>
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Barny is the reason I have little time and there is no-one more amazed at it than I: to a great degree our life is changing in ways we hadn't thought of before he became our family. For example, neither of us want to leave him for weeks on end whilst we go to Europe so we have decided that vacations in this country are going to be more the norm and we are looking either to build or buy a second place where he can run and explore like the whippet he is and we can spend weekends as a family together and with friends.</div>
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Our taste runs more to the contemporary and something as starkly rectilinear as above and below from <a href="http://www.rocioromero.com/" target="_blank">Rocio Romero</a> in a wooded setting seems perfection to both of us, especially if more softly nestled in grasses and shrubs. </div>
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Inside, I would like to see something as comfortable and contemporary as the room below by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617691704?gwSec=1&redirect=true&ref_=s9_simh_gw_p14_d13_i1" target="_blank">Thomas Hamel</a>. There would be nothing by Eames, nothing mid-century-modern, none of the so-called "design classics" and certainly nothing from IKEA (how the hell it became so popular in blogland beats me). In other words, the formulaic way of furnishing modern architecture as boring as a trawl through a DWR showroom, is not for us. </div>
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A cabin in the woods? Possible, but without any rural references in the decor – neither of us are farmers, cowpokes, or blacksmiths and take the lead from Henrietta-Lucy Dillon de la Tour du Pin Governed who, in her <i>Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice </i>I am sure does not mention furnishing her log cabin during her exile in America with any reference to the forest or its denizens surrounding her. I know, I know, a complete non sequitur.<br />
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I want to mention again how we both feel that after all these our living room – in fact, the whole place – needs refreshing and seeing how our floors look without the carpets and rugs which are at the cleaners having whippet tracks removed, I'm leaning very strongly towards the idea of having our wooden floor stenciled. The one advantage of bare floors in warm months is that they are cool to bare feet but, if plain wood, they are visually boring. The stenciled floors in <i>The Parish-Hadley Tree of Life: An Intimate History of the Legendary Design Firm </i>have examples that awoke my interest anew. </div>
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So, my attempt at writing quickly was interrupted by nibbled toes, nibbled fingers, outraged barking when I refused to play, but as persistent as my pup is, I have my Instagram-ish post for the day. </div>
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Maybe, till tomorrow? </div>
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Photograph of Thomas Hamel's room by Matt Lowden </div>
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Photograph of Bunny Williams's room by Scott Frances</div>
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Both photographs from <i>The Parish-Hadley Tree of Life: An Intimate History of the Legendary Design Firm </i></div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-42091576883368534392015-10-11T20:56:00.001-04:002015-10-11T22:31:05.603-04:00Sunday morning, a butler's pantry, and scenes from family life<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
"We can’t all live a life that affords us the luxury of having a butler, but a luxury you CAN afford is a butler’s pantry. Historically, a butler’s pantry is where a butler made quick meals and sandwiches, cleaned silver, and sometimes even slept .... " </div>
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I'm not given to criticizing other bloggers but when I come across such a<a href="http://tobifairley.com/blog/2015/tobi-tv-the-butlers-pantry/" target="_blank"> piece of fatuity</a> as this I really do wonder … well, I didn't <i>have </i>to watch and listen but I couldn't resist, especially when I saw that the author had no idea of what a butler actually did and its so wrong on many levels – not just historically but also about the utter meaningless of the term "butler" in the modern world outside of the houses of the rich, aristocratic or TV soap opera. </div>
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Before Barny was awake I read chewable paper</div>
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What the blog author describes, of course, is an aspirational daydream and begins " … even in homes without a butler … " and explains that a butler's pantry is a transitional space between kitchen and dining room which must mean, I suppose, she's talking to people who don't have one, and would like one – look for yourselves, if you have the time. As Dorothy Draper said <i>Decorating is Fun!</i> and the complete antithesis of the book I mention below. </div>
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This morning's tablescape</div>
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Can anyone who has watched Downton Abbey imagine Carson making sandwiches and Mrs Patmore allowing him to do it? "What's a sandwich?" I can hear it now in Lady Violet's best Maggie Smith imitation. In the end, it all became clearer as I watched the video and my sense of equilibrium began to recover – shocked as I had been to discover that there are people in the provinces, still, living lives <i>without the luxury </i>of<i> </i>butlers and are wise enough to take advice – and <i>sage </i>counsel is rare – to build a cabinet and shelf or two in tiny corners of their kitchens and <i>feign </i>the presence of such a servant in their lives by characterizing those moving little works of carpentry as <i>butler's pantries</i>. Oh, plucky people! </div>
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"Are we creating a stage set? Or are we creating a home? To this day, I am creating homes for families to live in. I want dogs and children and all the family stuff in them." The second quotation of the day, I came across as I sat reading Bunny Williams's chapter in what is, so far, the best book of the year. I say "best book" in the sense that I exclude so-called decorator monographs because <i>Parish-Hadley Tree of Life: An Intimate History of the Legendary Design Firm </i>does not fit within the category of monograph. <br />
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Though, inevitably, there is some repetition where one has so many designers and decorators contributing to a book about a firm, perhaps the premier American interior design firm of the twentieth-century, where they began their careers, the text alone is a lesson in how to design rooms and houses <i>and </i>how to provide the means by which the houses can be turned into homes by the families or individuals who inhabit them – they are designed for them from the lifestyle outwards, as it were, and not just by the application of a decorative theory or fad. </div>
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The photographs are terrific, some already known from previous publications, some not, and the most striking thing to me is how important the floors were to Parish-Hadley, its designers and clients. There are some beautiful floors, stenciled, carpeted and be-rugged, throughout the book and what I see makes me wish to have my basic wood floors stenciled as the basis of the beautiful room I have in my head and, I hope, in my designer's too. Anyone with an eye to design can learn a lot from the photographs but the text alone is worth the price of the book. </div>
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Watering the trees</div>
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I think why I react so badly to counterfeit names such as that with which I begin, and why much of what I see in magazines and "monographs" is that, as Bunny Williams alludes to, it is the creation of a stage set and has nothing to do with real life. Building some extra cabinets and shelves at the end of the dining room or in the kitchen is not a romantic or easy fun project as the blogger implies. It's hard work and costly. The whole concept of a "butler's pantry" in a suburban house is so out of sync with modern times – it came along with the bonus spaces that developers attached to the MacMansions of the 1980s and 1990s and which now are as devalued as the structures and prices they helped to bloat. </div>
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Barny snuggling</div>
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If there ain't a butler there cain't be a butler's pantry – simple as that. I wonder if anyone knows what a pantry is. Oh, if I not being too dogmatic, it's not a library without at least one wall of books in the language of the people living in the house, with all book spines facing the viewer without too many vahzes or pieces of fruit stuck in between. And a neighborhood does not consist of homes; rather it consists of houses because a home is what the inhabitants make of a house by living in it. AND … oh, don't get me started!</div>
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My old prof and Rory at brunch </div>
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So … deep breath … and now, to family matters: every week we lunch at the same Italian restaurant, my old prof and I, sharing food, dire warnings about the fall of civilization, reminiscences about riding to school on a horse, history (this week, the time she and a friend had tickets to Dior and Fath), the Colosseum in a time of few tourists, the differences between American and English pronunciation (one word per Friday) – really, just the two of us rabbiting on enjoying ourselves over a glass of wine, a glass of bourbon and food we can share. In many ways an unvarying routine that is a pleasure to both of us and one that has been minimally impacted by Barny.</div>
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Barny after breakfast on the sofa </div>
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A little later</div>
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Until two days, that is, when I arrived home to find our front door wide open, debris in the foyer and living room, and Barny gone. My clever whippet, almost eight-months old, has learned how to open doors with lever handles. I was late coming home and, <i>I think</i>, grabbing his harness, which is missing, Barny went looking for me. He got to the floor below, with no access other than elevator (our elevators do, at times, have a life of their own so may've invited him in) where seemingly a neighbor found him, took him to the lobby from where, on receiving my panicked phone call, the office manager took him to her office. </div>
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Barny and Rory</div>
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I won't go into the state I was in … had I a butler and he a pantry I'm sure Barny this evening would be securely locked up behind a door with a knob handle and I would be out with my husband eating dinner instead of watching my whippet sleep the sleep of the innocent by my side on the sofa as if he hadn't a care in the world, which I hope he hasn't. </div>
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The Tale of Two Men and Their Whippet – this is family life, indeed.</div>
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By the way, I bought my copy of this book <a href="http://www.bungalowclassic.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. I make book recommendations because I like to and for no other reason. </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-7316374628640873672015-10-07T11:16:00.000-04:002015-10-07T11:16:07.253-04:00So, we went to Maine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Barny, I'm trying to write"</div>
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"I help" he said</div>
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Morse-Libby House, Portland ME</div>
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Italianate Style, 1860 </div>
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Architect Henry Austin</div>
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To have license, as an individual member of a group at a reception, to roam around an historic house without benefit of docents is a real privilege, believe me, for not to have to listen to the irrelevant and worthless tales of the lives of original and subsequent homeowners is a blessing. Some like to listen to that, I find it a waste of time – give me a caption, a QR code or the like, dump the docents and I'd be happy as a pig in muck, as it were. </div>
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The Turkish smoking room has been fully restored and like all restorations cannot avoid a feeling of inaction – it is as if it awaits a layer of nicotine (many layers of which were removed in the restoration), an echo of male laughter, a glint of polished leather on a footstool, the glow of a cigar and the blue smoke layer swirling around the gasolier. So brightly lit was the electrified gasolier that evening it seemed someone really was trying to keep a ghost or two at bay. Romance aside, I was reminded that with gas lighting, the fire of diamonds was dulled and only returned with candlelight and, eventually, with electricity. I was glad I left mine in the vault. </div>
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Museum managers need to attract visitors to places and buildings so much in need of upkeep and repair that, inevitably, a decision has been made to attract income from anyone who will pay the entrance fee (I know I'm being simplistic but for the sake of argument, etc) but for those of us who know something of the interiors, furnishings and styles, and do not wish to listen to the kind of populist crap soliciting "oohs" and "ahas" from the gum-masticating congregation with which one finds oneself, the problem is avoiding it. I do tend to wander off and risk being taken to task for stepping out of line (always infuriating to someone) rather than not visiting the places. </div>
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The small dark rectangle towards the top of the left-hand panted panel is not a shadow but a remainder of the original scheme darkened by nicotine, dirt and time</div>
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The Pompeiian bathroom (restored) with its rebuilt "thunderbox" water closet and beautiful oilcloth (?) floor</div>
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I remarked to some people that much of what I saw in the house – the smoking room and the Pompeiian bathroom especially – brought to mind an English decorator called Geoffrey Bennison and was shocked to find no-one had heard of him. Tail between my legs, I went in search of Rory, found a discussion about religion instead, downed half a glass of white whine and was out of the door, husband on my arm, texting the dog-sitter, and headed to dinner. Over a glass of bourbon I nattered on, eventually reaching the conclusion that we all have our specialties and … faced with a plate of lobster and gnocchi none of it mattered anyway. </div>
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An effect of light I find so attractive and which the camera lens always resolves more clearly than my eyes allow </div>
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On my Instagram I remark that it took two World Wars and a Modernist coup in schools of architecture to almost wipe out this type of decoration – a gross oversimplification, I know, but Instagram is not a place for essays, blogs are. </div>
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I have used Instagram for itself and as a reservoir for ideas for essays for the blog and now that my whippet Barny is settling down to a less-demanding, if still-exhausting, teenagerdom (at 7 months old) I shall write about what interests me – and it's not always interior design – if spottily. <br />
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A lovely trompe-l'œil cartouche, one of many, which I hope will be left in its faded, unrestored state<br />
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-19781658925223779662015-09-25T07:38:00.001-04:002015-09-25T07:55:32.083-04:00In Maine<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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Rory and I are in Maine for a few days with the Decorative Arts Trust</div>
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-43385319874066770192015-09-21T21:06:00.001-04:002015-09-22T13:50:15.601-04:00It had to happen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Oh, someone is being waggish, I thought, on seeing shelves of books, spines to the wall! But it seems not – shaming books has made the big time if only around here. First it was karate-chapping pillows into submission, now it's books being given time-out– we've been 'ere before, thought I. </div>
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But no, for it seems in my rush to find fault I misunderstood the purpose behind what I saw. The writer of the magazine article explains that "The massive Donald Sultan painting commands attention in the family room, where bookshelves provide an architectural and decorative frame to the impactful piece." Though the books themselves are not mentioned, it is clear their role is nothing more than filler in a larger and admittedly beautiful scheme by a good decorator. In fact, they are nothing more than accessories – frankly, white boxes would have done the job just as well. As an aside, I wish people might see the symbolism in what they create for there is a subtext to be understood, be it intentionally written or not.<br />
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What one might consider "accessories" have personal significance. The clock. bought as a souvenir of our time in Amsterdam, and the candlesticks were <i>resoluut afgeprijsd </i>in a small shop in the Kerkstraat behind where we lived. The bottle, by Janet Darnell Leach, wife of Bernard has long been treasured<br />
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It is hard to say what personal significance a Yaruba crown has for a white northern European beyond the play of light when it seems to emerge from its background. I like it and, believe me, if it were merely a filler of space, I would not have got through the door. </div>
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For me, even the term "accessories" in the context of interior decoration is laughably wrong even though we all use it – it grates in the way "disinterested" is used when "uninterested" would have been correct. Decorators talk about the final layer that <i>pulls it all together</i> or <i>the jewelry of a room, </i>decorette/bloggers take up the refrain and before we know it, there are whole industries geared to producing <i>objets </i>each<i> </i>lacking any charm beyond the glamour loaned by the designer/celebrity name attached to it. Without that borrowed glamour, resin or faux-shagreen is just plastic.<br />
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If one looks at synonyms for "accessories," perhaps the most positive is "adornments," with "embellishments" a close second with negativity already implicit. "Doodads" and "trimmings" take it downhill and at "bells and whistles" the bottom is reached. Nonetheless, "accessory" is accepted and you'd think we all know what we mean by it – but I'm not sure we do. <span style="text-align: center;">Not being one to give in to my feelings of distaste, let me just say that if the equating of decoration with fashion is not as glib as it might seem, then the advice, allegedly given by Coco Chanel “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off" applies equally well to accessorizing a room. Mind you, taking something off, in today's fashion world, might mean … well, it hardly bears thinking about. </span><br />
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The marble bowls were bought thirty years ago in de Bijenkorf, Amsterdam. The shallow, wider one meant for fruit, the other for bulbs, they have stayed the way they were packed to cross the Atlantic. They look better on the carpet which will return from the cleaner when Barny is full-grown and the room is re-done.</div>
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The Indian coverlet is, I hope, a temporary catch-all for dog, dog toys, dog hair, chewing-thingies, and anything that Barny seems to like to accessorize with - socks, shoes, coat hangers, and me.<br />
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On any given day our living room floor, now bare of its carpet, is strewn with Barny's things. I won't call them accessories (even though they are temporary) because they are necessary to his mental survival, the continued health of his new teeth and the delicacy of my toes. The latter, because he announces his desire to play by nibbling my toes and if I'm not quick enough off the sofa … you get the picture. The piece of antler apparently is kinder to teeth than rawhide yet to me it feels like stone and is often to be found in one of the Indian marble bowls we bought thirty-odd years ago in Amsterdam. The green velvet dinosaur is used (Barny marches it around in his mouth rhythmically hitting the floor with the squeaker) to announce we've spent too long at dinner and evening playtime should commence. Tennis balls, for my sanity and for the sake of the objects which are personal and, perhaps in more ways than one, valuable, are now inaccessible under cabinets – the image of a whippet flinging itself into the air to catch a ball but inches from candlesticks was not to be borne.<br />
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I see, dad, I get, I see, I want, I want, I want, </div>
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It was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris" target="_blank">William Morris</a> who said "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" – a piece of advice much quoted in Blurbville and as little honored as that quoted earlier from Coco Chanel. The concept of beauty is too diffuse to contend with, and utility is but a matter of fad and poor manufacture (or built-in obsolescence, if you will) so, really, all one is left with is Morris's weasel word "believe." I would only add "believe to have some real meaning for you."<br />
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Beautiful, probably not, but significant, certainly, to us. They stood on the cake at the party our friends gave us after we got married. </div>
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The red pot we bought impulsively. Inexpensive and perfectly placed, to my eye, lighting up an alcove – complementary color highlighted with gold, mirror and lucite, glowing most days in the full light of the rising sun. I notice, as I look at the photograph, its lines echo those of the table beneath it, whilst the legs of the table mirror the legs of the Meiji bronze crab (my zodiac is Cancer) in the foreground, which in their turn referred to in the cabriole legs of the chair – the whole summarized by the exuberant 1940s rococo framed mural. But it would be altogether too designerish to point out that completely fortuitous juxtaposition, don't you think? </div>
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This is about as near as I've come to creating a "tablescape." On the drinks table in the dining room, it was short-lived for once Barny took to investigating it all had to be put away. Lovely idea, tablescaping, if you have time, money and fatuity for it but it does rather beg the question of why you would do it. (I'm still working on that one with Macbeth's "…it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" hovering over my shoulder). The Royal Copenhagen leaping frog, "found" one day in a closet with a "Oh, I'd forgotten about this" is a delight (the Celt has always loved frogs).</div>
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The best accessories for a room are temporary, should have a scent and likely do not come from a supermarket. Grow your own, or steal from a churchyard, if you have to. </div>
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After ten years of compromise and a lot of use, the room is in need of rethinking, reupholstering, repainting, etc. It's tired and all three of us finally accept it. The significant objects will be included – the bronze Thai pilgrim will probably stand on a plinth somewhere but the framed map (a copy) in the hall is likely to go.</div>
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-69973412023049065122015-09-11T09:23:00.000-04:002015-09-12T14:57:40.931-04:00A dog's life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A surprising (to me) forty seven days ago, I wrote "back soon" at the head of the blog and here I am at the end of summer, after a four-week bout of bronchitis and an outbreak of shingles that I, at first, thought were multiple spider bites from walking Barny in the trees surrounding the duckpond. There's been a lot of time to give thought to … well, just stuff like a new bathroom, redecorating the living room, sending the carpet to be cleaned of whippet tracks, life, love and happiness, and what seems to be the senescence of blogging and the success of its peregrinating and bewitching kin, Instagram.<br />
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As I coughed my way through the awful humidity and the noise of construction seemingly as endemic and unceasing as that of insects and traffic, Barny chomped on dried duck poop (not eaten in this family, as I reminded him, for generations), and held relentlessly, if variably, to his food-in-food-out regime every couple of hours, drivers halted for ducks at crossings, some lowering their windows to remark "what a pretty pup," or "what kind of dog is that?" joggers ran, friends died or got sick, dogs and their owners said hello, and, one day, the heron, often to be seen at the pond, took magnificent flight, circled and landed high atop the trees over the crossroads.<br />
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Out of sorts and worn out during those weeks, I had plenty of time to read and it quickly became clear I was wasting my time with most interior decorating blogs – unless, that is, I was looking for the same sort of information available to me more quickly and interestingly elsewhere. Magazines advertorial does a better job than ever a blog could, whatever the aspirations the blogger may have. </div>
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Whereas the overriding tenor of interior design blogland is breathlessly sycophantic, in my opinion, the aesthetic is even worse. Who any longer has any taste other than to endorse a celebrity "design" collaboration? Frankly, if I were to judge by many of the blogs I read, I would say that fashion plays an exclusionary role and conformity rules the day. Some of us rue the day because the implications of this for design, decoration and the environment are appalling. </div>
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I'm so bored with what is happening in American interior decoration as portrayed in the magazines and decorator monographs. As I've said before, it is always the same two variations on themes – traditional and modern – with one swinging in color between allowed and not allowed and the other never budging from neutrals with a primary color and black.<br />
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We do not own any mid-century-modern furniture except a Paul Dunbar bench in the hall and, given the ridiculous prices ($65,000 to-the-trade for a high-backed winged-chair, 1939), its fashionability and copious quantity, it is unlikely we shall have any more of it. It is not just mid-century-modern's popularity that puts me off it – so contrary I'm not – but the rage for it makes me think of a bubble, given that there must have been so much of it manufactured.<br />
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<i>Haute couture</i> has its original designers but American (perhaps also European) interior decoration design has been usurped by salesmen and the auction houses. I am of the opinion that whatever the PR people might like us to believe<i> haute décoration, </i>or the knowledge of what<i> </i>residential interior <i>design </i>actually is<i>,</i> has been reduced to nothing more than the marketing of personalities and their wares. Never mind the quality, feel the width.<br />
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With all that in mind, I'm turning for a while to Europe to see what is going on there. I have a feeling, and it might be nothing more than bias, that the situation there is a little more loose, more original, less hidebound. As I say, I might be biased but, either way, I could learn a lot – I'm so over being bored.<br />
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I've already mentioned architect/interior designer <a href="http://chesterjones.com/" target="_blank">Chester Jones</a> five times and he remains my favorite of the designers working in Britain today, thus I do not intend to exclude him in future. Geoffrey Bennison, though long-dead, is also a firm favorite and his work remains utterly up-to-date and is for all to see in Gillian Newberry's excellent book <i>Geoffrey Bennison: Master Decorator</i> (in its second printing). The work of Mlinaric Henry & Zervudachi is pretty terrific as is the work of Tino Zervudachi in his own right. Jean-Louis Denoit, Alberto Pinto, Christian Liagre come to mind but they are all the subject of monographs – it may be that I'm limited to those books alone. We'll see.<br />
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You may wonder why these other photographs are here. The display of blue-and-white is composed of gifts: the tulip pot from employees, the rest from family. Placed on our drinks table, for a while the ensemble cheered the dining room until it became clear Barny (Sleeping Beauty, below), started taking notice and it had to be cleared away. The point of it really is to remind me to write about one day about accessories, memorably compared by one blogger/decorator to the finishing touches to an outfit – in her case an exhortation to buy her trinkets – but, in my opinion, accessories are simply those things which have some meaning to one's life and are not there to glamorize an empty space. But, that is for another day – maybe next time.<br />
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The photograph of Barnaby Warboys asleep against my leg as I rest my back on the sofa is about the way a four-month-old whippet pup erupted into <strike>my life</strike> our lives bringing a complete change. I've had to send the living-room carpet to be washed and stored; the floor is littered with his toys; whoever said whippets don't shed, lied, because the floor … OMG, the floor; I cover the sofa with an old quilt that matches nothing else; Barny's hand-crocheted acrylic yellow-and-white afghan lies in a sunny spot waiting for him to rearrange and snooze on it; we take off our shoes, Barny triumphantly runs with one daring us to come and get it; odd socks are usually found in his bed; my almost-as-expensive-as-my-replacement-MacBook-Air distance glasses made a lovely crunching sound when they were the only thing he found to chew when teething (oh, did I mention the watering can spout?); the maid is staying a lot longer (she'll be coming daily if I get my way. None of this matters for, in the loving, funny, nibbling, happy, bellyrub-loving dog's life that I lead, I would not have it any other way. A dog's life, indeed. <br />
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This photograph and accessories are the subject of the next post – unless the creek rises, that is.</div>
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Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-82888700740564285612015-07-20T09:24:00.001-04:002015-07-20T09:24:34.228-04:00Back soon<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAEUKFHM6g5kb_A4c5Z2y4OvQSpd2PjZNUIRd4e53xt5fCpDwyjWYxsrzu3b6awjjpUK6VF3Dcg8-OvvasLXZdA4oV5LM6-WQd6wsB4KU3MUmtscqV6gA9tGyTvnbcxj9WPco0yK8d8n8/s640/blogger-image-543517449.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAEUKFHM6g5kb_A4c5Z2y4OvQSpd2PjZNUIRd4e53xt5fCpDwyjWYxsrzu3b6awjjpUK6VF3Dcg8-OvvasLXZdA4oV5LM6-WQd6wsB4KU3MUmtscqV6gA9tGyTvnbcxj9WPco0yK8d8n8/s640/blogger-image-543517449.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">This little devil - here shown sleeping the sleep of the just - and also known as Barny, tipped a glass of almond milk over my laptop which has died and is in the repair shop. Blogging on an iPad isn't quite as easy nor, for that matter, is blogging with a whippet pup attached at the hip. Love him to death as does the Celt.</div>Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-21762297002660181312015-07-01T18:31:00.001-04:002015-07-01T18:31:36.759-04:00Should I laugh or cry? The answer. On Monday morning the Celt woke me with a kiss, a card and the news that I'd have to get out of bed pretty smartish because my birthday present was arriving at La Guardia within two hours. A little too bleary-eyed to laugh then, I've been laughing at his antics ever since I saw his serious grey eyes at Delta Cargo.<br />
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A fourteen-week-old, pedigreed, fawn-coloured whippet who I named after a favourite, beautifully drawn, yet minor character in Georgette Heyer's <i>A Quiet Gentleman</i>, Mr Barny Warboys. I have no idea what his official name is (I could read his documents, of course) but dear readers please meet the second member of my family that so far has not bored me silly. The Celt, the other, has never bored me once in almost thirty-seven years. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(I hope he can say the same.)</span><br />
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<b>Barny</b></div>
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His first walk in Central Park NYC did not last long</div>
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I carried him till we sat and he fell asleep in my lap</div>
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<b>Barny and the Celt</b></div>
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In Central Park NYC</div>
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The answer then, to the question "should I laugh or cry" is obvious I hope – I'm laughing all the way</div>
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What a glorious feelin'</div>
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I'm happy again.</div>
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I'm laughing at clouds</div>
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So dark up above</div>
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The sun's in my heart</div>
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And I'm ready for love</div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-69596639654959299462015-06-26T10:58:00.003-04:002015-06-26T10:58:49.349-04:00I wonder, should I laugh or cry?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I came to live in Atlanta twenty-two years ago whimsey, at least in the houses that knew anything of mural painting, was the rage. Also, twenty-two years ago, it was noticeable the apostrophe led a wandering and confused existence and as to the adverb … well, then as now, the least said about the adverb, the better. Whimsey is long gone from conversations, as are murals from walls, and the apostrophe has settled down to an erratic role of grammatical provocateur beloved of supermarket <strike>jokers</strike> signwriters who also wouldn't know an uppercase letter from a lowercase …<br />
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… but that's being so horribly sour and I've had enough of that the last three weeks. It seems the run-up to a big birthday can be <a href="http://www.upworthy.com/what-is-depression-let-this-animation-with-a-dog-shed-light-on-it" target="_blank">onerous and debilitating </a>even – so I ask for your indulgence as I head to New York to celebrate with the Celt's genomic sister and her scientist/rock band drummer husband, my sister and brother-in-law from Lancashire and old friends from England long settled in New Jersey. Sunday, besides the Gay Pride Parade, is our second wedding anniversary (still strange to write after nearly thirty-seven years together) for which Atlanta friends are hosting a cocktail party in their newly <a href="http://www.markwilliams-design.com/" target="_blank">redecorated</a> New York apartment, and Monday, actually my birthday, we will have dinner at my favourite restaurant. In there somewhere also is a Broadway show and lunches galore. My waistline?<br />
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The post began differently but ended where it needed to be. Seemingly I'm stymied by what the Ancients called <a href="http://www.upworthy.com/what-is-depression-let-this-animation-with-a-dog-shed-light-on-it" target="_blank">Melancholia</a>, yet such is the stigma attached to it, especially for men, it's almost comical to me to think about my birthday weekend in terms of convalescence but that is what I hope. </div>
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I wonder, should I laugh or cry? </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-80735086216199167122015-06-08T21:56:00.000-04:002015-06-09T10:38:15.518-04:00"We have a question … why are there no doorknobs anywhere? Is it a decorator thing?" "It's more likely," I said, "the doorknobs were not delivered on time or the wrong ones were sent or even that … " they had glazed so I shut up, for when one is dealing with such fabulosity as the Kips Bay Decorator Show House who wants to hear about the commonplace?<br />
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<b>East 66th Street</b></div>
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2015 Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club Decorator Show House</div>
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Photograph from Curbed NY. com</div>
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I have the book you see below on sufferance: the lady at the cash desk said paying full price was the correct thing to do, etc., my friend David added his two-cents-worth and, after much discussion about whether or not I could could bear to be seen with a purple-logo-printed plastic recyclable bag, he bought me the book.<br />
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I really should have trusted my instincts, mean as they were, and bought <i>40 Years of Fabulous </i>at Amazon so that I might return it. At first glance the book appears to be what I'd hoped it to be: an historical and photographical record of forty years of show house rooms, but there came a moment, sneaking as it were, when it seemed to me as if this book had been a last-minute attempt to get something – anything – ready for this year's show house. If that was the criterion, this book is a success, and given the lack of discernment in interior design about graphic design, the cheerful book jacket (design by Bialystock and Bloom, perhaps?) together with the <strike>curiously drab</strike> many photographs and familiar bromides from the usual suspects writ large across whole pages, should ensure an even bigger hit for its author – just not in my house.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsd_TN89CRT5dBRYtS7e94e-K1FcdenNTNkmuUuY-ocfnwPADXY5dRYoCWqME_-r07Jw_rwyPLTcsPxFi75Kv9j7RH280z8VXNBkdTo0mKzC0Kah_eg4elH41N0Z_H9TjxMBoKZD469s/s1600/IMG_3831.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsd_TN89CRT5dBRYtS7e94e-K1FcdenNTNkmuUuY-ocfnwPADXY5dRYoCWqME_-r07Jw_rwyPLTcsPxFi75Kv9j7RH280z8VXNBkdTo0mKzC0Kah_eg4elH41N0Z_H9TjxMBoKZD469s/s320/IMG_3831.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>Pavlov's Retreat</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.alantanksley.com/" target="_blank">Alan Tanksley</a></div>
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Criticizing rooms in a show house is an undemanding if not dying sport, and rightly so you may think. To critique online is to be taken to be criticizing which is not quite the same thing; the difference, it seems to me, has come down, in like manner, to that between "use" and "utilize." In the case of "use" and "utilize" to the ill-educated mind, one sounds more important and better yet, has more syllables!" Critique"sounds Frenchified – thus automatically suspect – and utterly non-egalitarian. <strike>Thus</strike> So, in my democratic way, I offer no critique of any decorator's rooms, nor shall I offer any criticism of my fellow bloggers' nuanced reportage of the Kips Bay Decorator Show House 2015 (that dead horse being already long flogged) for all is sweetness and light and I am one of Jesus' little sunbeams and have nothing to say about the red dining room that everyone else seemed to love.<br />
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<b>Pavlov's Retreat</b></div>
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This was the first room I went into and it remained for me one of the best<br />
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<b>Pavlov's Retreat</b><br />
Alan Tanksley<br />
View from desk towards murals</div>
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Let me remind you that I have no pretensions to being a photographer and I use an iPhone so old I have to crank it, and so heavy it needs hauling around in its own four-wheeled cart – all this, (whilst I'm on the subject of <i>elder abuse</i>) is because last winter after a debauch my almost-latest-model-and-lighter phone slid, unnoticed, out of my jacket pocket and the Uber driver did not return calls and … long story short, I have to use one of the Celt's <i>many </i>discarded iPhones until September when allegedly I may get a new one. I tell ya … married life ain't for sissies. Oh, yes! Well, in this case …<br />
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<b>Living Room</b></div>
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<a href="http://branca.com/" target="_blank">Branca</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLW83pGDJn-fxEq6x6Om4FWMxrmMiPn0k3AV6ZnKNxNt58DosYqh3y_5xtQW8NRPEe_w-PUZhO4VvPgRlxZvaKlqew8QtVm4kBfSZlhsEBIQsPuUXNW7LZ_8GRnan-FJfycIymvWrFoM/s1600/IMG_3857.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLW83pGDJn-fxEq6x6Om4FWMxrmMiPn0k3AV6ZnKNxNt58DosYqh3y_5xtQW8NRPEe_w-PUZhO4VvPgRlxZvaKlqew8QtVm4kBfSZlhsEBIQsPuUXNW7LZ_8GRnan-FJfycIymvWrFoM/s320/IMG_3857.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>Bedroom</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.davidphoenix.com/" target="_blank">David Phoenix</a></div>
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<b>Bedroom</b></div>
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David Phoenix</div>
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The Celt reflecting</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjals9YWKgoHC7YJg-yjho6v-gVOg-Hyr8u221MJIdGQQ1m0Q4EuBzNPATNOmTtV1e84kX0AB98es3jTeESmuOg71T56BxlgHlbrj_R6xI8uyk-SKFyDOPeVJay9yCBdxPhoy8Z6qfTP6U/s1600/IMG_3860.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjals9YWKgoHC7YJg-yjho6v-gVOg-Hyr8u221MJIdGQQ1m0Q4EuBzNPATNOmTtV1e84kX0AB98es3jTeESmuOg71T56BxlgHlbrj_R6xI8uyk-SKFyDOPeVJay9yCBdxPhoy8Z6qfTP6U/s320/IMG_3860.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>Bedroom</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
David Phoenix</div>
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Details</div>
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<b>Bedroom</b><br />
David Phoenix<br />
Wall covering and gimp </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjLu9kA14-5-kJQofVJnwEtWlieSwO7T9h3MTFuxnD8hXuhjejviGgt5Q6cBUV2_MWnvU35h7b8Ya1bl8-armXy7i_tu5SqcYcPBkjn7vZaXZ7tthAWqRYHIrbFEAO6sbmMkXlfPZra6I/s1600/IMG_3855.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjLu9kA14-5-kJQofVJnwEtWlieSwO7T9h3MTFuxnD8hXuhjejviGgt5Q6cBUV2_MWnvU35h7b8Ya1bl8-armXy7i_tu5SqcYcPBkjn7vZaXZ7tthAWqRYHIrbFEAO6sbmMkXlfPZra6I/s320/IMG_3855.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>Bedroom </b><br />
David Phoenix<br />
Carpet, as if hand-knitted by giant sailors</div>
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The spaces in show houses that get the least coverage are the ones that are the most difficult to deal with and which test a beginning decorator's mettle. In a traditional townhouse, what does a decorator do with all the little nooks, the passages, vestibules, hallways, that Beaux Arts architects dealt with so cleverly? In the case of the Arthur Sachs house, I seem to remember bar after bar – and why not? A bar being the perfect place for a beginning designer to show finish, sparkle and glamour without breaking the bank.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-SlM8VElzf8QSCZO5qGnVycLGQjfOpcU8rWNlhSlgYS_cort4nNN9xGyLWX-bgyxSdVCT-6OWGqsDzEg6Uy4SNPbdUalh0XykpBR9txlBqxwHCDnmff_dyiQ-JONOVYHTXR-RGxY5WRw/s1600/IMG_3843.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-SlM8VElzf8QSCZO5qGnVycLGQjfOpcU8rWNlhSlgYS_cort4nNN9xGyLWX-bgyxSdVCT-6OWGqsDzEg6Uy4SNPbdUalh0XykpBR9txlBqxwHCDnmff_dyiQ-JONOVYHTXR-RGxY5WRw/s320/IMG_3843.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<b>Bar</b><br />
I wish I knew by whom<br />
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A staircase, not the easiest space to decorate – especially when the walls curve and picture frames, generally speaking, do not. I must admit, I found Philip Mitchell's staircase quite beautiful with its toile paper more a texture than the soppy dominance toile can be, and the most understanding background to a delightfully eclectic accumulation of pictures that went from lower floor to attic. I loved every panting step of the way – especially the grace note of a tulip vase from a potter whose business card I've since mislaid.</div>
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Staircase</div>
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<span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://philipmitchelldesign.com/" target="_blank">Philip Mitchell</a></span></div>
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<b>Landing/Lounge Area</b></div>
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<a href="http://tiltonfenwick.com/" target="_blank">Tilton Fenwick</a></div>
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Tilton Fenwick's lounge area bodes well for their future but the decision to befringe the dado rail was a touch too much for me. I understand the space is one of contrasts: the roughish wood cabinet front encased in smooth lacquer; the Renaissance Revival chair upholstered in a smooth weave suggesting almost that the more fitting fabric, an ikat, had refused to be used and had laid sulkily on the floor; the traditional Indian scene, a modern photograph in a simple white frame, hanging on Indian-derived paper; even a plastic orchid pot seemed to fit in an oddly sophisticated way. </div>
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Then, as I headed down towards the kitchen I walked into a magical space by Bennett Leifer – an anteroom to the kitchen, a transition from the backstairs, aglow with gilded wallpaper, a rock-crystal star and rock-crystal sconces. Pure, unadulterated magic – too ethereal for the likes of my iPhone camera so I have used Mr Leifer's own photographs from his website.<br />
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<b>Anteroon</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.bennettleifer.com/" target="_blank">Bennett Leifer</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBasf2FycTU232vYY5GflvRVj-QKRn58JeyX8V8BhelaZ1jbIIoFO-fs-qdIPEWKBIma1YpM-kxe_pfpMojR-O2fN3qBNZjRYkcTvF-0tYi3xUP1fNwwpmLo_15ECbG-9rebBrWdui-fs/s1600/bennett+leifer+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBasf2FycTU232vYY5GflvRVj-QKRn58JeyX8V8BhelaZ1jbIIoFO-fs-qdIPEWKBIma1YpM-kxe_pfpMojR-O2fN3qBNZjRYkcTvF-0tYi3xUP1fNwwpmLo_15ECbG-9rebBrWdui-fs/s320/bennett+leifer+2.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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In the lobby, as we were leaving, I remarked I had not seen Jamie Drake's room to which there came a number of practically audible eye-rolls. "You're in it!" said the Celt. Indeed we were, and very lovely it was, though all too easily overlooked amidst the hustle of ticket buying and catalog grabbing.Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-1687912002747506862015-05-30T16:22:00.000-04:002015-06-02T06:16:56.101-04:00In days of old, when knights were bold and monkeys chewed tobacco Actually, a long, long time ago in a land far, far away, the world's first international trade fair took place in Hyde Park in London. It was called <i>The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations</i> or, as it is often called today, <i>The</i> <i>Crystal Palace </i>… and a marvel to behold it must have been at 1851 feet long and tall enough to hold fully-grown oaks within it. Not only a marvel to behold, the building, a prodigious green house – all plate glass and prefabricated cast-iron – was a not only technological phenomenon but also, architecturally speaking, a portent of things to come.<br />
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Yet I wonder if the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Exhibition" target="_blank">Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations</a></i> gets more than a passing glance in present-day design school curricula, so much is there to be covered with the emphasis being on contract/commercial, not residential, design. Not to notice the Great Exhibition of 1851 as part of a History of Architecture and Interiors course would be a very odd choice because one might posit that is where the modern concept of design began, as did the still-current conversation about design quality. That the concept of design took root and flourished in the ensuing debate about the aesthetic horrors created by machine production on exhibit at the Crystal Palace is history that should not be forgotten, pertinent as it is to today, one-hundred-and-sixty-years later.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>False Principles of Design and Other Legends of the Past</b><br />
Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851 is <i>The Victoria and Albert Museum,</i>"the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design" with a permanent collection of over four million objects. The Museum opened its doors at Marlborough House with its inaugural exhibition about false principles of design – an attempt by Henry Cole, the Museum's first Director, to define the principles of good and bad design.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Curtain rod holder</span></div>
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1848</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Examples of False Principles of Decoration </span><b>Exhibition</b><br />
Henry Cole's purpose in holding the exhibition and the seventy-eight objects it showcased was to deter the public from buying goods held to be unsatisfactory and to educate them in matters of taste. A quotation from an Appendix to the exhibition catalogue, illustrates the strength of Henry Cole's dissatisfaction with the industrially-produced goods of his day.<br />
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"There has arisen a new species of ornament of the most objectionable kind, which is desirable at once to deprecate on account of its complete departure from just taste and true principles. This may be called the natural or imitative style, and is seen in its worst development in some of the articles of form."<br />
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<b>Wallpaper</b></div>
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with<b> </b>perspective representation of the Crystal Palace and Serpentine</div>
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1853[?]</div>
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The exhibition, however, was not a success: a quotation from the Victoria and Albert Museum website:<br />
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"The reception accorded this exhibition quickly proved that Cole and his assistant, the artist Richard Redgrave had rather misjudged matters. <i>Every article selected for the exhibition, however unprincipled its design might be, was at least commercially very successful</i>. The public were merely amused by the selection but remained unconverted. The manufacturers whose products were criticised were mortified and immediately complained. The exhibition was closed after only two weeks."[My Italics]<br />
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<b>Gilt brass and glass gas lamp bracke</b>t </div>
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1848</div>
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In the False Principles exhibition, this bracket was stigmatized as "direct imitation of nature" and thus held to be unfit for its purpose<i>.</i> </div>
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<b>Roller-printed and glazed cotton</b></div>
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circa 1850 </div>
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The chintz above and the printed cotton below were chosen as examples of bad design because of the realistic imitation of nature, and the effect draping or folding the textile would have when used in a room. </div>
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<b>Hollyhock</b></div>
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Printed Cotton, circa 1850</div>
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The reaction to the Great Exhibition – fundamentally a discussion about good taste and bad taste, with the Aesthetes losing every skirmish on the middle-class battlegrounds then and since – is relevant to today not only because, history being what it is, the pendulum has whizzed round a few times, and we're back where we were – maybe. <br />
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The aesthetes, the purists, the minimalists, the expounders of principles such as "fitness for purpose", rightly or wrongly, lose every time the wheel of fashion turns, because the rest of us want our cosy world filled with as much novelty as possible. Any real notion of taste is long gone; "taste" is a word that makes us a little self-conscious, is even pronounced in Italics. And, to be honest, I'm glad of it. Whether or not this is a good thing for the environment is a discussion for another day.<br />
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Each of the five examples I borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum – the curtain finial, Crystal Palace wallpaper, gas lamp bracket, chintz and printed cotton – is attractive by today's standards (or, if you are a strict Modernist, probably not). Aesthetically speaking, I'm promiscuous, so I love 'em all, and possessing a fifty-year-old hand-blocked length of the Hollyhock linen I've decided to have a blazer lined with it.<br />
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The five images below are of newly printed carpets by Moooi. Printed carpet, long the unmentionable poor relation frequently seen hanging around many a roadside rug sale, has now come out of the industry closet with a photo-realistic smack between the eyes – to say nothing of a final broadside to notions of taste. <br />
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<b>Eden Queen</b></div>
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Marcel Wanders</div>
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<b>Crystal</b></div>
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Marcel Wanders</div>
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<b>Jewels Garden</b></div>
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Maison Christian Lacroix</div>
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<b>Seaweed</b></div>
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Ross Lovegrove</div>
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<b>Imitating nature, industrial revolutions and twenty-first-century photo-realism</b><br />
Whereas Henry Cole and his associates were horrified at the nullifying effect of the Industrial Revolution on the hand-made craftsman aesthetic thereto customary, we today have for so long lived with an orthodoxy of industrial processes that has made craft something of Etsy tweeness or, at the extreme, an artistic wannabe, we are inured to it all. Of course, to every such blanket statement there <a href="http://sandyjones.co.uk/" target="_blank">are exceptions</a> which are worth noting.<br />
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Henry Cole and his fellow exhibition organizers found few supporters in the general public and the manufacturers of his time, but the Arts and Crafts Movement that came after him was influenced by his ideas as were, in their turn, the early Modernists, and here we are nearly two-hundred years later in a post-industrial society, in a technological revolution watching an interior design industry in its death-throes still producing printed textiles that probably would have given Cole apoplexy, but excite the rest of us with their novelty or, perhaps more importantly, in the case of chintz, the lack of. <b style="text-align: center;">Plus ça change.</b><br />
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Photographs of Moooi Carpets from <a href="http://www.dezeen.com/2015/04/13/moooi-carpets-photo-realistic-designs-marcel-wanders-studio-job-ross-lovegrove-milan-2015/" target="_blank">Dezeen</a></div>
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Photographs of five objectionable objects from Victoria and Albert Museum</div>
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Images of Crystal Palace from Wikipedia</div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-66988277306733873132015-05-17T19:45:00.000-04:002015-05-18T07:48:58.847-04:00A book recommendation and the persistence of an idea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I'm not sure why since I came back from California I've been captivated by dining rooms, but many a time I've sat in mine in the early morning sun, black dog at my feet, leafing through books searching for rooms I like. I found many of the formal kind, fewer of the less so, and not a few that were nothing more than showing off. Stylists rule, I guess. I came across old favorites, other rooms I'd forgotten about, influences and, two days ago at an evening event at my favorite <a href="http://www.bungalowclassic.com/" target="_blank">furniture store</a>, a book about a Spanish decorator, the Marquis of Azpeztequia, who died in January this year – a fact that surprisingly made hardly a ripple in the design social media here. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVyA7zwn_Xh6N3mW72m7vCLcAwJGFS6XMLdRaXtPrveJ4A7ecYQ-hLBxfhX52I5tcM7NZwd9S4WuldiWQjIIkOxVcfhC3Fv6MHaOaa_hOlja-X6bpV-n12Y9oZrEWhTZpC9WDMUnt5pU/s1600/PARLADE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVyA7zwn_Xh6N3mW72m7vCLcAwJGFS6XMLdRaXtPrveJ4A7ecYQ-hLBxfhX52I5tcM7NZwd9S4WuldiWQjIIkOxVcfhC3Fv6MHaOaa_hOlja-X6bpV-n12Y9oZrEWhTZpC9WDMUnt5pU/s320/PARLADE.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
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I first knew of the Marquis of Azpeztequia, better known to the English-speaking world as Jaime Parladé, from the pages of <i>The World of Interiors</i> during the 1980s, with photographs of a house for a couple from Bilbao (I learn from the book it is no longer standing), which at the time made both of us fell in love with pink-lined linen sheers and cream-colored crewel upholstered furniture. Seeing those rooms again brings it all back and I would like to write about them in the future to see if I can recapture the magic – for magic it was and Señor Parladé was no trickster. These two dining rooms in Spain are by him, the first with walls of toile de jouy and the second of cordovan painted leather, and illustrate what I realize now I was searching for all those mornings and had to go out of the house to find – atmosphere. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdViVacgcsUOkaSEEZGxWvQoCdbRIPaDhmtE9PiNZf5Nu0RanV438j6JlSUUfLXsBn2lcF0dFzt9T0wY8wVUm7PIXY8V4XY5qy8HPmV2gBuHldrrlvugW3B4-HJrq2FARktqSa7DwyVkc/s1600/PARLADE2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdViVacgcsUOkaSEEZGxWvQoCdbRIPaDhmtE9PiNZf5Nu0RanV438j6JlSUUfLXsBn2lcF0dFzt9T0wY8wVUm7PIXY8V4XY5qy8HPmV2gBuHldrrlvugW3B4-HJrq2FARktqSa7DwyVkc/s320/PARLADE2.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>
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Nowadays there are many who decorate or, as my old prof would put it, desecrate – it all depends on your point of view – but few create atmosphere. It could be argued that atmosphere is a combination of stylist, lens, photographer and lighting and I tend to agree, for one has only to see realtors' photographs of once famously atmospheric rooms to recognize that the skill of a good photographer is paramount when working with rooms of any subtlety. It is the combination of the two professionals – the two artists, if you will – that create the intangible that lifts off the page. </div>
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<b>Jaime Parladé</b></div>
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Ricardo Labougle, Joaquín Corté, Derry Moore, photographers</div>
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This is the third of three books about decorators I have felt worth buying this year</div>
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<b>The Formal Dining Room</b></div>
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"More than any other room in the house, the dining room is a place for old traditions, a scene of ritual use where we can indulge in memories of the way our parents and grandparents did things in days gone by. We can put to use objects we have inherited from previous generations without their seeming like irrelevant artifacts. Many otherwise modern people when using their dining rooms actually enjoy returning to the vanished world of manners commonly thought to have been more gentle and refined than our own."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOwjQGDjPpF_fyda_0t5U80dUrq3POox5UzkJIx_3V1Ytw3hTYidrqivX1G8xb_-yhYXe67Kgc_SxZG_WNeTu9lb4-2Fkj21A9VkpKB5OyopnKxyIj_As3BTRk9LnZdbpglLv-PhdXFeU/s1600/DININGhampton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOwjQGDjPpF_fyda_0t5U80dUrq3POox5UzkJIx_3V1Ytw3hTYidrqivX1G8xb_-yhYXe67Kgc_SxZG_WNeTu9lb4-2Fkj21A9VkpKB5OyopnKxyIj_As3BTRk9LnZdbpglLv-PhdXFeU/s320/DININGhampton.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>
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<b>Mark Hampton</b></div>
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Fort Worth, Texas</div>
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Almost thirty years ago, Mark Hampton wrote about the essential nostalgia and costly exhibitionism of dining rooms. His essay, The Integrity of Dining Rooms, written at a time of resurgence of an idea first established, allegedly, during the eighteenth-century – that of a room dedicated to dining, not communally in the medieval manner, but socially for members of le beau monde. So well-written and apparently personal is it, it is easy to forget that Mr Hampton's essay, written at the height of the trickle-down economy, should be seen as precisely what it was, a piece of marketing for the magazine in which it appeared, the long-ago defunct <i>House and Garden</i>, and his own flourishing business working for those who had created that economy. </div>
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<b>Davi</b><b>d Hicks</b></div>
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Oval dining room, Britwell Salome</div>
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<b>David Mlinaric</b></div>
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The Salon Rouge, British Embassy, Paris</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7IUtlRmE6rcj5msTwU9ndR63I-H2_p-gjjHuPJbg8Wj1zifF1fbadbzLMsr8ZkDrGQDbMdTTVfNoyPXJQlzeITxbBvTZgU_z_EL_ol2Pcamz7RSZ0XXpA4MG7sqDouFZmhWL1F-YaB84/s1600/BENNISONtable.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7IUtlRmE6rcj5msTwU9ndR63I-H2_p-gjjHuPJbg8Wj1zifF1fbadbzLMsr8ZkDrGQDbMdTTVfNoyPXJQlzeITxbBvTZgU_z_EL_ol2Pcamz7RSZ0XXpA4MG7sqDouFZmhWL1F-YaB84/s320/BENNISONtable.png" width="320" /></a><br />
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<b>Geoffrey Bennison</b></div>
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Lord Weidenfeld's dining room </div>
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Exquisite but <b>unattributed</b> from Instagram</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5NhPXsPaAmNDAXcjtgduh3RBoIccSKnou94AKLDgpgwwTdmhI24c0ZRy1XJt7kPKDp2kEJEZZ8SPL-2pdymLkTbdfm6BGJf99VS-IYkdkGPrISuO2U2JJp5jo_SY6btF44cX26UsQ26Y/s1600/DINING18thcenturyfrenchdessert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5NhPXsPaAmNDAXcjtgduh3RBoIccSKnou94AKLDgpgwwTdmhI24c0ZRy1XJt7kPKDp2kEJEZZ8SPL-2pdymLkTbdfm6BGJf99VS-IYkdkGPrISuO2U2JJp5jo_SY6btF44cX26UsQ26Y/s320/DINING18thcenturyfrenchdessert.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>An eighteenth-century dessert setting</b> </div>
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A recreation of the French manner at Waddesdon</div>
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Formal dining rooms persist in this modern age – when for most people, I should think, beyond the seasonal reenactments of Rockwellesque family gatherings that are a powerful tool for selling the idea of <i>family</i> to families – the actual need for a room solely dedicated to dining, is rare. Essentially a room of ceremony and parade, the formal dining room co-exists with the "great room" – that combination of kitchen, living room and dining space so useful to the modern family – and unless the family is given to much entertaining at table, is a status symbol as vestigial as the human tail. Belonging as it does to the "public" part of a dwelling where the inhabitants are characterized by what they display in terms of possessions and behavior, an inordinate amount of money may be spent on it. And so the dining room goes on, generation after generation, lugged around as Coleridge said in another context: </div>
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<i>Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks</i></div>
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<i>Had I from old and young !</i></div>
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<i>Instead of the cross, the Albatross</i></div>
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<i>About my neck was hung</i></div>
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<b>The Happiness and Heartache</b></div>
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<b>Christmas Eve</b></div>
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Carl Larsson</div>
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<b>His First Birthday</b></div>
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Frederick Morgan</div>
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<b>The Health of the Bride</b></div>
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Stanhope Forbes</div>
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<b>Mariage de Convenance </b></div>
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Sir William Quiller Orchardson</div>
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Two night ago, beneath a beautiful Venetian chandelier, seven of us dined on gumbo, salad and bread pudding and I thought then however grand the room, atmosphere also comes from the mood of people with whom one sits, not from dimmed lighting so beloved of restaurateurs and which has begun now to sap the joy from residential dining spaces. We were a crowd international in origin – Mexican, British, Spanish, Texan and Chinese – and a jolly one, despite three of us being <i>very serious</i> architects. We ended the evening, skirting the hiphop-throbbing frat houses of Georgia Tech, with a viewing of the College of Architecture's adaptive reuse of the <a href="http://www.arch.gatech.edu/news/rehabilitation-georgia-tech-college-architectures-hinman-research-building-earns-international-" target="_blank">Hinman Research Building</a>. It's the kind of thing one does, at midnight after a good dinner with architects,<br />
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A most magnificent space, an erstwhile machine shop, likened too easily to a cathedral as are many older industrial spaces (the present-day Tate Modern, for example) and not shown to advantage by my iPhone photographs, hence <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=school+of+architecture+gatech&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=TWhXVbOcCImisAW0o4GQBg&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAg&biw=1440&bih=712#imgrc=KhXKVNtlGWIjRM%253A%3BkVeGAaS9RLH2WM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcoa.gatech.edu%252Fhg%252Fimage%252F73297%253Ff%253Dwidth400%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.arch.gatech.edu%252Fnews%252Frehabilitation-georgia-tech-college-architectures-hinman-research-building-earns-international-%3B376%3B354" target="_blank">this link </a>to official Geogia Tech images. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgukakOfxgCKrmnG8ARhprpCYFFhqq_10e2bFduL1koXqDY4O-CaZRq94BUcUWoWwZ_5I_EalVvRTvG40RrvLTdSKObmTV5rJhuz_mmwb6tpvJiBqlCsGguWBlf7gPtk1FgMIakKO_zlOE/s1600/Hinman.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgukakOfxgCKrmnG8ARhprpCYFFhqq_10e2bFduL1koXqDY4O-CaZRq94BUcUWoWwZ_5I_EalVvRTvG40RrvLTdSKObmTV5rJhuz_mmwb6tpvJiBqlCsGguWBlf7gPtk1FgMIakKO_zlOE/s320/Hinman.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhR8NtBNwuol9KIwWpeOoqjQBK82ldUF-vePamQbPNxCxmzs8P1F_6CBSxlJylYFd8YcCXPTripMP69zItVyZ5Q_WiK96zvFcF3B6i1rrgFsDwjk169xyKsYBYsvpvHNjdA234Ml05fQ/s1600/Hinman2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhR8NtBNwuol9KIwWpeOoqjQBK82ldUF-vePamQbPNxCxmzs8P1F_6CBSxlJylYFd8YcCXPTripMP69zItVyZ5Q_WiK96zvFcF3B6i1rrgFsDwjk169xyKsYBYsvpvHNjdA234Ml05fQ/s320/Hinman2.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>Personal Preferences</b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIiqFYe-Enb9RHZrp7WHcXcQyu8Wy04ObYua05u_8EBQ9ChsUx84mo4LnlQ0avoUwnKJnkwKNwmsEjqX3EzfjTNZKaXROTrSEYERQ6bvBfVV1dYy9Ux9Mr36mj3A1OA_9r7wSzRA3p3gg/s1600/white+room.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIiqFYe-Enb9RHZrp7WHcXcQyu8Wy04ObYua05u_8EBQ9ChsUx84mo4LnlQ0avoUwnKJnkwKNwmsEjqX3EzfjTNZKaXROTrSEYERQ6bvBfVV1dYy9Ux9Mr36mj3A1OA_9r7wSzRA3p3gg/s320/white+room.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Melvyn Dwork</b></div>
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New York</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSE3VNjah34y-Lrs4MToxawGhdWVdHxEvDyZrpLH_Ge3MHxM_q1IO9DXYX0LC_J1isqudbNHgwszQTRONre-ijX5zjJ8A8N1z4ink__MTim1-Fyv6U7n0XqEB5mEYmO6NjoYggD4bB3cY/s1600/braswellsown3joined.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSE3VNjah34y-Lrs4MToxawGhdWVdHxEvDyZrpLH_Ge3MHxM_q1IO9DXYX0LC_J1isqudbNHgwszQTRONre-ijX5zjJ8A8N1z4ink__MTim1-Fyv6U7n0XqEB5mEYmO6NjoYggD4bB3cY/s320/braswellsown3joined.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><b>Joseph Braswell</b></span></div>
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Manhattan</div>
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<b>William Hodgkins</b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK7l-ouZosccJTJRWIUBWfA4q1ca_d30Q8zBC0r9lR8gx_cS5MxWQmcb4FU_NBYgm4AG05tXe4t-01VJxRIwv7nSxKg738Q73pTxUFC2gH0w4d8eW2fzxkyixtIcy4pFF5_gpRez9dmE/s1600/zervudachi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK7l-ouZosccJTJRWIUBWfA4q1ca_d30Q8zBC0r9lR8gx_cS5MxWQmcb4FU_NBYgm4AG05tXe4t-01VJxRIwv7nSxKg738Q73pTxUFC2gH0w4d8eW2fzxkyixtIcy4pFF5_gpRez9dmE/s320/zervudachi.jpg" width="247" /></a></div>
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<b>Tino Zervudachi</b></div>
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Manhattan</div>
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"Atmosphere" is where I begin my search for images of rooms that could give me ideas for our sparsely furnished dining room. More alcove than room, we use it every day and at the weekends we breakfast there too. Facing full east, it's the ideal place for weekend relaxing over a second cup with iPads, especially when the the plumbago is in bloom, the hummingbirds squabble and dart about, and the clouds build.<br />
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Some of the best times have been spent at that table listening to the Jeweler, such a rare friend and a superb raconteur much given to elliptical digressions and occasional jaw-dropping transgressions that can cause tear-inducing and cathartic belly laughs. His partner, the Celt's much valued friend, is of a quieter bent – though occasionally disposed to slipping off dining chairs onto dogs – and typically looks on in wide-eyed, if speechless mellowness. The rest of us try not to simultaneously inhale and chew, and end the evening with a feeling of magnificent well-being that has nothing to do with bourbon and everything to do with companionship and laughter.<br />
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Drama we don't need – gawd knows the world provides enough of that – but good lighting is an absolute. Since my eyes have deteriorated, I cannot clearly see who is at the other side of the table but the whorls of fingerprint left by the maid on the silver is completely identifiable and as to the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, I can be precise. Candlelight is wonderful for smoothing out wrinkles; Botox better, I hear, but until the mooncalf look becomes acceptable for everyone, I'll keep the beeswax burning. Candlelit dining tables are divinely romantic but I do worry once in a while, when surrounded by acquaintances caressing their newly Botox-injected faces to see if they still have them, that these candle flames, by some mischance, a stray breeze and the clouds of fragrance with a superabundance of <i>sillage, </i>might become the final conflagration that takes down the whole universe.<br />
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Atlanta, Georgia</div>
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Early morning coffee with one of my peeps </div>
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Beyond, a view to the dining table</div>
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<i>The Health of the Bride</i>, Stanhope Forbes from <i>Paradise Lost</i>, Christopher Wood, Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1988<br />
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<i>Mariage de Convenance</i><b>, </b>Sir William Quiller Orchardson, from Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood, Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, 1999</div>
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<i>His First Birthday</i>, Frederick Morgan, from Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood, Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, 1999</div>
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<i>Christmas Eve</i>, from <i>The World of Carl Larsson</i>, The Green Tiger Press, La Jolla, 1982<br />
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Recreation of an eighteenth-century dessert setting in the French manner at Waddesdon from <i>Flora Domestica: A History of British Flower Arranging 1500-1930</i>, Mary Rose Blacker, photography by Andreas von Eisiedel, The National Trust, Harry N. Abrams Inc.<br />
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Photograph of dining banquette by Melvyn Dwork from <i>Manhattan Style</i>, John Esten with Rose Bennett Gilbert, Photographs by Chinsee, Little, Brown and Company, 1990<br />
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Photograph of kitchen dining table from Tino Zervudachi: A Portfolio, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Pointed Leaf Press, LLC, 2012<br />
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Photograph of Joseph Braswell's dining banquette by Peter Vitale from <i>Architectural Digest</i>, April 1977<br />
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Photograph of William Hodgkin dining table and chairs by Peter Vitale for <i>Architectural Digest</i>, May 1983<br />
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Photograph of Lord Weidenfeld's dining room by Geoffrey Bennison from <i>Geoffrey Bennison: Master Decorator</i> Hardcover, Gillian Newberry, Rizzoli, 2015<br />
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Photograph of the Salon Rouge from <i>Mlinaric on Decorating, </i>Mirabel Cecil, Francis Lincoln Limited, 2008<br />
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Photograph of the oval dining room, Britwell Salome from <i>David Hicks: A Life of Design</i>, Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli, 2009<br />
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Photograph of Mark Hampton's Fort Worth dining room from <i>Mark Hampton: An American Decorator</i>, Duane Hampton, Rizzoli, 2010</div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-38984371152646161282015-05-04T15:50:00.001-04:002015-05-07T20:50:52.923-04:00Ginger-ale and croutons<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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This afternoon I'm sitting on a terrace high on a bluff overlooking the ocean reading James Lees-Milne's Diaries from 1984 to 1997 and came across this entry for Thursday, 19th September 1984. </div>
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“Last night after dinner David Hicks telephoned to say Rory had died at 7.30. A[lvilde]pretended she knew already – so odd of her. She adored Rory and cherished the knowledge that she had known him years before David and other grand and rich friends. This morning, poor Gilbert telephoned from Ménèrbes, saying that he had spent the whole night with Rory on his bed, unable to believe he was dead.”</div>
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"Rory," of course, is Roderick Cameron, about whom I've written a number of times before. In some ways it's good to have an end to that story because he was much more to his friends than the creator of the so-called tablescape (according to Hicks) and talented arranger of beautiful rooms that many have aspired to emulate. But, more about Mr Cameron at another date when I return to my erstwhile theme of what a friend called my "dead decorators." </div>
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I am, perhaps, finding Mr Lees-Milne a tad depressing for such a sunny day, harping as he does on loss, death and ruined architecture. Nonetheless, his diaries are fascinating; he knew everyone and has absolutely nothing to do with anything or the fact I'm in California. </div>
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Ginger-ale and croutons based on a sentence in JL-M diaries and suggested my lunch in hotel bar. </div>
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<br />Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-79121414685917749192015-04-30T15:39:00.002-04:002015-04-30T15:40:40.116-04:00Clandon Park damaged by fire yesterday, left "essentially a shell" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Clandon Park</b></div>
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18th-century Palladian mansion West Clandon, Surrey, England</div>
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A National Trust property since 1956</div>
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"On the afternoon of 29 April 2015, a fire started in the house's basement, and quickly spread to the roof. At 16:09 Surrey Fire and Rescue Service received an emergency call, and the fire was subsequently attended by a total of 16 fire engines and more than 80 personnel. While fire fighters tackled the blaze National Trust volunteers were joined by conservators in recovering items from the house. Items were first stored on the lawns then placed in bubble wrap and sent to a local storage unit.Surrey Fire and Rescue Service remained at the property until the fire was fully extinguished and then began an investigation into the cause of the fire.</div>
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A significant number of items were salvaged, but the house was left "essentially a shell" according to Dame Helen Ghosh, director general of the National Trust with the roof, ceilings and floors having fallen into the basement, leaving only one room intact." </div>
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From Wikipedia</div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-18388412558802865422015-04-18T08:40:00.000-04:002016-01-10T08:16:02.673-05:00There 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."<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 …<br />
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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?<br />
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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 <i>Elle Decor</i> (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.<br />
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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.<br />
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"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. <i>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</i>. The rest of the room is a mixture of contemporary art, modern furniture, tribal artefacts, and appropriately scaled antiques." [Italics mine]<br />
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I added the italics because the sentence is not about decoration but about <i>design</i> – 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.<br />
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This room with its George I paneling I find one of the best examples of twenty-first-century <strike>traditional</strike> 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?<br />
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First photograph from Instagram but I think originally from <a href="http://markdsikes.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
Second and third photographs also from Instagram but originally from <a href="http://chesterjones.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-67228495993348859052015-04-09T21:58:00.000-04:002015-04-10T18:08:19.152-04:00A man rarely mentioned <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
A man rarely thought of nowadays, except perhaps by design students in thesis research, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Muthesius" target="_blank">Herman Muthesius</a>, a German architect, author and diplomat, is best known outside Germany for three volumes published in 1904 and 1905 as <i>Das englische Haus </i>(<i>The English House</i>) and for promoting the tenets of the English Arts and Crafts movement in Germany after his return home after a sojourn in England – a championing that eventually influenced the founders of Modernism such as the Bauhaus.*</div>
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That's a pretty strong statement to make about a man – "a championing that eventually influenced the founders of Modernism" – even when one has known about him for years, but especially if all one has "known" is that he was German, that he wrote a book titled <i>The English House </i>that allegedly influenced the beginnings of Modernism, and that one has never read it. Such a statement could be considered the essence of foolishness, academically speaking. </div>
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I had set off looking for inglenooks, still finding the photograph (above) from the modern house in Germany intriguing and, in my professorish way, thinking about tropes for shelter and retreat (yawn) when, in one of my books, I found a late nineteenth-century English house Muthesius had actually known and written about. Something new and much more fun than tropes, I thought. </div>
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"Built in 1898-1900 as a holiday home for the Manchester brewer Sir Edward Holt, Blackwell is a masterpiece of great subtlety and artistic imagination by the Arts and Crafts architect H. M. Baillie Scott. Herman Muthesius described it in <i>Das englische Haus </i>(1905) as 'one of the most attractive creations that the new movement in house-building has produced,' and it is regarded as a pivotal work in the architect's career. There are references to C. F. A. Voysey in some of the vernacular detail; much of the internal decoration belongs to a late flowering of the Art Nouveau style, while the clean, unadorned lines of the exterior and the play with abstract space look forward to modernism."</div>
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"Blackwell signifies an important moment in European domestic building, when architects began to reconsider the way houses were used. The flowing open plan revolves around a large, double-height hall, a place where the family could congregate at the heart of the house, with an inglenook hearth and adjoining window seat representing warmth, solidity, and comfort. This emphasis on the hearth, with the inglenook fireplace as a theme running through the house, reflects the influence of Norman Shaw, as does the 'Old English'-style half-timbering on the wall of a small room above the inglenook. There is a certain complexity about the way the hall is compartmentalised, with areas of lower ceiling representing different functions within a single space. The billiard room occupies one end, doing away with the Victorian tradition of segregating the male domain. The dining room is a separate room beyond. Everywhere light, space, colour, and texture are carefully orchestrated to create a sense of drama. The climax comes in moving from the warm, oak-wainscoted hall into the brilliantly lit White Drawing Room, one of Baillie Scott's finest interiors and an intensely feminine room. Here, capitals, frieze, ceiling, and stained glass flow with naturalistic decoration in a delicate Art Nouveau style. The room has a great feeling of modernity and exemplifies Muthesius's claim that Baillie Scott was 'the first to have realised as an autonomous work of art.' "</div>
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Odd to think, at first glance, a house such as this, even remotely, having an influence on those who founded modernism, but some, reading the quotation, will recognize similarities with Lloyd Wright's work and would also certainly know that during those years, there was for the first time a two-way exchange of ideas about architecture, art and society, across the Atlantic, as America took its place in the world. </div>
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Muthesius's books (plural) are, in fact, a survey of British nineteenth-century domestic architecture, predominantly by Arts and Crafts architects; H M Baillie Scott, C R Mackintosh, William Morris, Norman Shaw, C A Voysey, William Lethaby, and Philip Webb.** </div>
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When he left England in 1903, Herman Muthesius continued to write about architecture and design and returned to his architectural career, concentrating on houses. For many, if not all, in the English Arts and Crafts movement, industry was rejected in favor of handcraft; in America, in the Craftsman movement, not so; and in Germany there was debate about the old way and the new (I am of necessity simplifying here, hard as it is to reduce a movement to a few words) – a debate of which Muthesius was part. During a lecture in Berlin in 1907 he extolled new construction methods and materials, things so commonplace to us nowadays – steel and reinforced concrete, the very the innards of modernism – that he was vilified by the Association for the Economic Interests of the Arts and Crafts for being perfidious about German products. <i>Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose </i>you may well be thinking at this point – if you're still with me, that is. The fuss, also known as the "Muthesius Affair," led to Muthesius's supporters leaving the Association and founding the Deutscher Werkbund which led eventually to the creation of the Bauhaus and thence… but that's for another day. </div>
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Most of us work in, and many of us live in (like it or not) a Modernist world. And yet, madmen that we are, many of us prefer to romanticize it, quietly ignoring the fact that mid-century "modern" is now, at 60 years and counting, as historicist as is decorating with Art Nouveau or Craftsman.</div>
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*Based on Wikipedia's entry on Herman Muthesius. </div>
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** Wikipedia's entry on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_House" target="_blank">The English House</a> is more extensive than I could ever cover but explains the content of Muthesius's work very well.</div>
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Quotation from text of Chapter <i>Blackwell</i> of <i>The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life</i>, by Mary Miers, Rizzoli, 2009. </div>
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Photographs are from the book and are by Country Life photographers. </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-41451122549633398332015-04-04T10:33:00.001-04:002015-04-04T10:33:41.512-04:00The Book of Kells, Complexity and Ramification and the Death of a President<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Have I ever told you about the first time I saw the Book of Kells? The flight last year to Ireland … my ancient age … I shall not travel again but, I can tell you, I'm so grateful I was able to travel as much as I did when I was younger … places you daren't go anymore. Some places are no longer even there to go to! It was all different … Etruscan sites you trudged to through fields and the farmer let you in … you've been to the Villa Julia in Rome of course … that lovely reclining couple. " So began another Friday lunchtime conversation with my old prof. </div>
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"The first time I saw the <a href="http://www.tcd.ie/Library/bookofkells/" target="_blank">Book of Kells</a> it was covered with a glass box and, other than the librarian, I was the only person there and I paid nothing. It still is covered by a glass box and the place now is full of people, there are informative displays all beautifully done and it costs $18 to get in. You've seen it, of course."<br />
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"Actually not," I said, "I have never been to Ireland and I haven't ever wanted to go." As surprised as she was she listened as I began my tale.<br />
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Kate knew I had lived in London during the 1970s but had never connected that with the IRA (Irish Republican Army) beginning its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_London#Irish_republican_attacks_during_.22the_Troubles.22" target="_blank">terrorist operations</a> there. The history of those ten years is complex and not unhappy (after all, towards the end of them, I met the Celt) but I remember the fear and the uncertainty caused by the terrorists (they considered themselves military and people like me as civilians) – I remember twice turning corners in the West End and hearing and feeling bombs explode behind me; I remember sitting with friends above Bond Street and, on opening the window after realizing how quiet it was outside, being screamed at by a policeman behind a barricade to get out of the building and away from the isolated car parked but yards away down on the street; I remember too, a bomb detonated at a bus stop outside Green Park tube station, killing a twenty-three-year old <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/9/newsid_2531000/2531191.stm" target="_blank">man</a> … just standing at a bloody bus stop, for God's sake … and injuring many other people including children; and … and… etc. I remember a lot and have, thankfully, forgotten much. <br />
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Forgotten, maybe, yet this story, such as it could be over lunch, made me angry and I wanted to stop talking about it, which I found hard to do, so resentful was I about those years. I did say though I wasn't in any way comparing IRA terrorism with the Holocaust, to some extent I understood why my old friend, a Jew, would not visit Germany, and that I still couldn't hear the word Boston without remembering where much financial support for the IRA came from.<br />
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<i>Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, </i>indeed.<br />
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Every Friday we lunch, my old prof and I, and that day we ended with how she'd been in Cork when John Kennedy drove by in a big American automobile that must have been specially imported for him. One year later the President was dead and, if you are given reading the entrails, so began civilization's tumble down the rabbit hole. </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-8841288122003918662015-03-30T21:36:00.000-04:002015-04-01T13:53:00.174-04:00A retreat to spaces and places where the past is loved and knowledge was a quest ... <div>
"As for the condition of the world which is devolving in front of our eyes faster than the speed of light, one simply has to sigh, retreat to spaces and places where the past is loved and knowledge was a quest rather than a google"</div>
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So wrote "home before dark" a sometimes and always pithy commenter on this blog, in response to the first post about Geoffrey Bennison. As usual, her comments gave me much to think about and coincided with my finding the photographs you see here and having the idea I express below. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtf6wYfzoTIc9IzAFQu9EpzNfTvyldn8E4LtjT65PSOqWr01yTME8LPq8y03Tj5coPFmgELfO2fl7Pv_BH_IzRaYOzv-o0oONJt8N-2qVAl6X_j8W_hyphenhyphengmZ-YPEFbx2erp3wUTFB8Emt8/s1600/German-barn-conversion_Thomas-Kroger_dezeen_468_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtf6wYfzoTIc9IzAFQu9EpzNfTvyldn8E4LtjT65PSOqWr01yTME8LPq8y03Tj5coPFmgELfO2fl7Pv_BH_IzRaYOzv-o0oONJt8N-2qVAl6X_j8W_hyphenhyphengmZ-YPEFbx2erp3wUTFB8Emt8/s1600/German-barn-conversion_Thomas-Kroger_dezeen_468_10.jpg" height="320" width="255" /></a></div>
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The idea of retreat is so commonplace nowadays especially in bedroom and bathroom design – so mainstream, in fact, I wonder whether using the term is more reflex than conscious choice. <i>Serenity</i> and <i>retreat </i>are words that so often go together in copywriter's puffs that the eye glazes over. I feel rather they should be banned from any blogger's writings in the same way no-one ever should write or say "to the next level." But, Regina Grammatica-mode, notwithstanding, I shall shut up about it now and come back to that at a later date.<br />
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So, let me say again, I'm not overly-impressed with the state of interior decorating and, rather than continue to bleet, I want to investigate within the limits of my own aesthetic education and social values what and I think is of real significance. In other words, I want to clear away the dross and get down to architecture, the Maslowian instinct to decorate, the balance between commercial and aesthetic pressures and, maybe, just enjoy myself. If I occasionally lapse into professor mode, I hope you will forgive me.<br />
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The two photographs are by Thomas Heimman and are from Dezeen <a href="http://www.dezeen.com/2015/03/27/thomas-kroeger-architekt-landhaus-cowshed-conversion-holiday-home-germany/" target="_blank">here</a> – one of the most interesting and occasionally irritating blogs about design.Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-8794314093924117982015-03-24T17:13:00.001-04:002015-03-25T16:37:41.112-04:00A last chapter, a fresh take on artful, modern classics and Tumblr, OMG, Ah'm Luvn' This<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilWcb3ome9Eah0OjlWRda2Y4D_UYlOLBpFU4_F_-eJfPIT30fcjmeKZpNt-9LPtGJrr02iLmdHD-tSqF4O3NG3EfjorM-6VP1kyXZW3tYQszJKrJEBsC_1xoFC8iKM2qIO6N4iYxGsZFM/s1600/room1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilWcb3ome9Eah0OjlWRda2Y4D_UYlOLBpFU4_F_-eJfPIT30fcjmeKZpNt-9LPtGJrr02iLmdHD-tSqF4O3NG3EfjorM-6VP1kyXZW3tYQszJKrJEBsC_1xoFC8iKM2qIO6N4iYxGsZFM/s1600/room1.png" height="293" width="320" /></a></div>
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Fittingly, Gillian Newberry's excellent book about Geoffrey Bennison closes with a chapter touching on the interiors he began for Isobel Goldsmith. Bennison was halfway through this work when he died of a stroke, leaving his team of craftsmen to create what they, from long experience, knew he wanted to achieve. And, judging by these photographs of the library, they succeeded superbly.<br />
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Occasionally, I mention misgivings I have, (beliefs or prejudices, depending on your point of view) about the ability for the modern generation to deal with complexity in design, beyond what, risibly, is called <i>layering</i>. Buying specially-made trinkets usually dignified with the name <i>Home Decor </i>by famous personages whose seasonal "new arrivals" purportedly are "fresh takes of artful, modern classics" and scattering them – oh, excuse me! <i>punctuating</i> an interior with them – ain't layering a room any more than draping codswallop across a chandelier would be. But, let me not get carried away, for I have my prejudices.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYM-m1W7rBlcARoe8CP4BB8UUQE1AGAajBgWlysSNJIdOPJso9IwqWEZmVNVbwV8M0uzkl3SJICWzVEi9hcVtUxrs82hi0lYQptwkTHtVuGCVEUKDuik2-M4d0KOS3DOgaV2h991woRcQ/s1600/bennisonartnouveauquilted.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYM-m1W7rBlcARoe8CP4BB8UUQE1AGAajBgWlysSNJIdOPJso9IwqWEZmVNVbwV8M0uzkl3SJICWzVEi9hcVtUxrs82hi0lYQptwkTHtVuGCVEUKDuik2-M4d0KOS3DOgaV2h991woRcQ/s1600/bennisonartnouveauquilted.jpg" height="306" width="320" /></a></div>
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Complexity in the way that Geoffrey Bennison dealt with it, for me, and I hesitate to use this analogy, is like the complexity of a well-made fruitcake. For those of you who only know the commercial variety, or only know of it, and merely subscribe to the perennial joke about fruitcake, the real thing made from the best ingredients, following a recipe from the early twentieth-century, well-matured, offering multiple yet unified layers of texture, color, and flavor, should come as a very pleasant surprise – much, in fact, as Bennison's rooms should after the celebrity-ridden, undiscerning mid-century-fetishism, and disagreeable flash of the last few years.<br />
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I am by no means advocating a return to late-ninetheenth century eclecticism, even if Bennison's style were such – there's enough last-century historicism being peddled right now, with more to come, without that – but what I will say is that I question whether anyone knows anything any longer or, worse, cares to. Where are the people who will write the next generation of scholarship? Where are the Israel Sacks of this generation? The Margaret Jourdains; the Geoffrey Beards; the John Cornforths or the Peter Thorntons? Where, as important, are those that will read the books yet to be published? These aren't rhetorical questions, at least not to me, because I have a distinct and sinking feeling that no longer is it true, culturally speaking, that no man is an island.<br />
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A strange idea, that residential design teaching is at a low point, given the number of so-called design schools there are in this country but, based on my experience as Chair of a CIDA-accredited interior design department at the time undergoing an, ultimately successful, reaccreditation process, and what I have subsequently heard about local schools, I am sure that residential design teaching is at its lowest standing ever. Surprising, or not, given what one sees in the magazines and most of the so-called designer monographs. I'll return to this.<br />
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The more Tumblr takes over from the <i>OMG,</i> <i>Ah'm</i> <i>Luvn' This </i>blogs<i> </i>(the literary kind)<i> </i>the more saturated and bored one becomes for, seemingly, everybody is "reblogging" from each other. It is as if posting a reblogged image alone is sufficient and obviates the need for further commentary. The really good thing is that one can see how bad the state of the industry is and how good of the really bad stuff is thought to be.<br />
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Did I just write "The really good thing is … "? OMG*<br />
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*OMG According to Scott, no-one over fifty should be using OMG when texting. Emojis are still allowed. Phew!<br />
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Photos are from the book which I stress is really worth having in your library, on your coffee table and in your hands to read.Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8785207417164829425.post-56162706043230341152015-03-17T21:49:00.003-04:002015-03-18T11:28:16.353-04:00The magic that was Geoffrey Bennison <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm very glad to finally have this book but what struck me is how slim it is compared to many a designer monograph about people still living and who are much younger now than Geoffrey Bennison was when he died thirty-one years ago. The book's slimness does rather belie the excellent quality of its contents. The problem, of course, is that Geoffrey Bennison died relatively young (sixty-three years old) and his oeuvre is small – yet Gillian Newberry did not subtitle her book about Bennison <i>Master Decorator</i> for nothing, so full of treasures is it.<br />
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I have written a number of times about Bennison (see sidebar <i>Labels</i>) including him as a member of the Lost Generation though his name was not forgotten, as are the names of many. The author of this book, with others, kept the Bennison name in front of the public through his fabric designs and now, splendidly, with this book. </div>
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In the introduction, John Richardson, calls his friend Geoffrey Bennison "England's best decorator" and this book goes a long way to proving his point. Bennison, however camp he might have been in his humor and way of commenting at life, was no satin britches, powder and patch kind of decorator.<br />
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I'll keep my opinion to myself as to whether or not he was the best but see how many times I have written about him. I sought photographs of the Lord Weidenfeld rooms above for a long time, having glimpsed them once but never found them, and here they are in all their literary splendor. Some of my favorite Bennison rooms.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtk83KOHK5RTvSDgpAJAMIFRTD-Z9RnH1Pzm9WsSAc3i_DoCqSZoyl1UzZpuSRGB7CmkIzDAxXU2Kgoc4KNizIqizdJ-6GwnbR5BjeJhrWMcTnYxz6U0MRXFc1wNJp3XxVfJNKl1-5AJY/s1600/bennisonpasha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtk83KOHK5RTvSDgpAJAMIFRTD-Z9RnH1Pzm9WsSAc3i_DoCqSZoyl1UzZpuSRGB7CmkIzDAxXU2Kgoc4KNizIqizdJ-6GwnbR5BjeJhrWMcTnYxz6U0MRXFc1wNJp3XxVfJNKl1-5AJY/s1600/bennisonpasha.jpg" height="320" width="317" /></a></div>
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A 19th-century automaton of a seated pasha </div>
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which smokes a hookah and raises a coffee cup to its lips</div>
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In Bennison's living room</div>
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This is a book entirely worth having. Believe me, you will pore over it and go back to it time after time. It is a treasure. </div>
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I'm making this recommendation purely for the pleasure of doing so – my only recompense. Oh, and I bought my copy <a href="http://bungalowclassic.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
Bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07652670896513329236noreply@blogger.com14