The Blue Remembered Hills™

The light from the sea

2012-01-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

The entrance hall, with its encaustic mural representing peace

The bathroom next to the entrance hall

The grand salon

The library

The dining room

Just for a few seconds, before my eye roamed again, I was entranced by the way light, as only it can when reflected off moving water, trembled on the walls and the ceiling of Théodore Reinach's bedroom. We had walked slowly through each room and upstairs, iPhones in hand ready to capture everything we could, not quite overwhelmed but certainly slightly addled by the riches to be seen in this astonishingly beautiful house. And astonishing it is: not just because of the Romantic recreation of ancient Greece and to some extent of ancient Rome, or its Greek and Roman-inspired furniture (Mr Reinach's bed, actually a reproduction of a Roman bed found in Pompeii and displayed at the Archaeological Museum in Naples), but also because of its marble walls and encaustic murals, its thyrôreion, balaneion, gynaeceum, andron and triklinos, delectable columns, mosaic floors, stucco friezes, painted ceilings, polished bronze tabletop serving, as it would have in the ancient world, as a mirror, Roman-style "rain" shower, embroidered linen curtains, rotting and frayed though they are, chandeliers inspired by those in Hagia Sophia, electric lamps modeled after ancient oil lamps, Christophle silver vase based on the krater found with the Hildesheim Treasure and, finally - because this list could go on and on - a carrara marble altar bearing the inscription To an Unknown God.

It occurs to me, as I sort through the hundreds of photographs we took, how little one experiences from behind the lens - involvement at a remove, as it were - and how intrusive and misleading the desire to photograph everything can be. An end in itself, perhaps, using the world's wonders as background for our lives: as one sees with tourists everywhere, for there they are, grinning away in front of every monument, fountain, ruin, painting and statue, even posturing for the camera, as I saw last year in Florence, to appear to be holding David's dick.

All photographs by us except for the second - the bathroom next to the entrance hall - which is by M. Listri, from The Kérylos Villa, Beaux Arts magazine/TMM Editions, Paris.

X A I P E

2012-01-13T20:45:00.000-05:00

It was on a whim that we decided that this winter the Villa Kérylos should be part of our itinerary - an itinerary that eventually involved seven flights, three train journeys and numerous taxi rides. Rome was a given but, instead of going north via Lucca to the Veneto as we had originally discussed, we decided that Naples with its proximity to Pompeii and Herculaneum, its Archaeological Museum and warmer weather might be just the thing at the end of what had been a very long year. Nice, an aside as it were, became, because of our visit to the Villa Kérylos, one of the many highlights of the whole vacation - its mild weather and sparkling sea a blessing after those short, sombre, sodden, solstice days we'd left behind in London. As the plane circled over the water towards the airport, it occurred to me that this was my first view ever of the Mediterranean and that, in two countries, I was to spend a number of days on its shores.

The rental car with automatic transmission, reserved long before and despite emailed confirmation, was nowhere to be found, and enquiries produced wreaths of bemused smiles, tossings of the head and shrugs of the shoulders indicating quite clearly that in France one does not drive an automatic, one simply knows how to drive properly. We lurched a few times around the parking lot - the Celt remembering how to drive a stick-shift (I'm purely automatic) - flung ourselves into early morning rush-hour traffic and headed for the Promenade des Anglais where our hotel, cunningly disguised behind a large sign for the Casino, awaited.

The first view we had of Villa Kerylos was above the Baie des Fournis on the ever-climbing and narrow road from Nice. I had read about the villa years ago in an issue of The World of Interiors and it had remained at the back of my mind as nothing more than a curiosity. It was our friend Will's recent visit there and his account of what he saw that made Kérylos interesting enough for us to decide it should be part of our vacation.

The most surprising thing for me about houses such as Villa Kérylos, Villa Ephrussi, La Leopolda, even Villa Fiorentina, was that they are all either on or at the end of narrow, frequently car-choked, paved tracks winding up and around the terrain. Surrounded as they may be by large grounds and as magnificent as they are, these houses are as closely packed together as any subdivision in America. Why I should have been expecting otherwise I cannot say.

Villa Kerylos is probably one of the most exciting houses I've seen. It was difficult to concentrate on it when we first arrived, so much was there to take in: the air; the light; the sea; the curve of the bay;the plantings; the sky; the flanking hills; the boats in the dock; and the house itself - in all its crisp, white splendour speaking of a time long gone, if only from the imagination of the modern world. Hard to concentrate indeed, difficult not to photograph everything in sight and consequently easy, in my excitement, to feel I missed a lot.

There were but two other visitors when we arrived at the front door and they quickly departed, leaving the house to the two of us so we could wander at will - or, at least, where the self-guided tour recording suggested. The Villa Kérylos is a marvelous place, an entirely convincing (save for the chrome and lucite folding visitor's chairs discretely placed here and there) recreation of what could have been an ancient Greek house. This house does not make one shuffle self-consciously through its rooms, across its mosaic floors, by its murals and friezes, under its lamps and ceilings, through its peristyle and by its superbly crafted and beautiful inlaid furniture, as did the Getty Villa when I first visited it fifteen years ago. Perhaps the culture has changed, but there was a time when such a recreation, or better, evocation, would have been dismissed as mere rich-man's revivalism, kitsch even. Not so, I felt, with the Kérylos, for clearly it is the product of an education, depth of scholarship, culture and refinement, the likes of which today, if it exists, is subsumed in a celebrity-ridden culture that has not one jot of value for it. Judgmental, you think? Perhaps.

The experience of visiting the Villa Kerylos is so astonishing - almost overwhelming - that I shall leave for a second post more details of the interiors, decoration and furnishings.

The vestibule or thyroreion has a beautiful mosaic floor (as do most of the rooms) with a delightful inset panel of hens and chicks and an inscription that translates as both "hail" and "rejoice" - a wonderful welcome, as well as an instruction to the visitor.

Unlike a museum, where one is herded through roped-off corners of rooms and allowed to peer at things from a "safe" distance, at the Kerylos, the rooms are completely open and one may walk where one pleases. One could almost sit on the furniture if one dared (we didn't of course). This freedom, and the fact that we were entirely alone, created the impression we were truly visiting a house, rather than a museum - a 3,000-year-old house, but a living house. The sensation was vivid and enveloping and quite, quite magical.

Above, the statue of Sophocles that faces the visitor on entering the vestibule; then, views of the peristyle, or atrium, that formed the center of a classical Greek house, with its colonnade of devastatingly simple white marble Doric columns surrounding a slender basin, and sepia-colored frescoes of gods, legends and sea creatures on all the walls.

All photographs, except the second which is from Wikipedia Commons, are by the Celt and me.

Smooth sailing

2011-12-31T19:00:00.003-05:00

Wishing us all a calm sea, a prosperous voyage and an absence of unexpected eruptions for the coming year. Happy New Year!

In Rome

2011-12-25T00:05:00.002-05:00

Chestnuts roasting by an open fire ..... Happy Christmas

Going on holiday

2011-12-16T18:44:00.001-05:00

The semester is over, the last interior design students are graduating, our Italian classes are finished - as are all our holiday celebrations, except for, that is, friends coming in for drinks tonight; lunch at Bergdorf's on Saturday and dinner with old friends in New Jersey later that evening; afternoon tea next Monday with a neighbor and her children at A Grand Hotel in London and dinner the same day with an old friend at A Trendy Restaurant; dinner in Rome on the 25th with neighbors from down the street and, on our return from Naples, a visit with the Celt's family in London. My goddaughter, the Celt's ten-year-old niece, has decided that the best possible treat for her uncles is for her to take them to the Victoria and Albert Museum, go ice-skating, view the city from the London Eye and eat Italian food in Soho.

You'd think, reading the first paragraph, that the Celt and I plan nothing that doesn't involve eating - and to a degree you'd be right. Food outside and frequently in the house often means friends are involved and seemingly being on vacation (going on holiday as we used to say it) isn't any different. Everything is planned and booked - flights, a train journey, hotels, restaurants, tickets to Villas Kerylos and Ephrussi-Rothschild, even a car to pick us up from the airport. I don't mind driving around Nice, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat or Monaco but I refuse to deal with Rome's traffic from behind the wheel of my own automobile.

Finally, we are going away - to places we love and to places we have never been.

I. Nearly. Died.

2011-12-05T21:42:00.000-05:00

"You're staring again," said the Celt. "I am," I said, "but it's all right - I'm too old to be visible." If I was staring it was inadvertent because actually I was listening to a young man, sitting at the counter of a New York coffee shop where coffee beans flew through tubes across the ceiling down to machines and baristas supplying inexplicably baroque concoctions of coffee, who was talking, futilely, it seemed to me, to his companion who was busy watching another man at the other end of the counter who, in his turn was watching .... well, you get the idea. But what had caught my ear was the phrase "the rise of the novel" - not a phrase one expects to hear early on a Saturday morning anywhere.

Used as I am to being met with dismay and bewilderment when I suggest to students that they might pick up a book and read, I settled in, cup in hand, eyes safely averted in the direction of the famous-but-whose-name-escapes-me person walking his dog, for what I hoped was going to be an interesting few minutes. Well, it wasn't, but the speaker's voice having that rising inflection that makes all sentences sound like a question, kept me eavesdropping a few minutes longer until he really grabbed my attention by stating very dramatically "I. Nearly. Died."At which point the Celt, fixing me with a don't-dare-argue stare, said "We. Need. To leave."

We meandered on through streets virtually empty - so unexpected for Manhattan - until we climbed the steps to the High Line and realized it was no wonder the streets were empty, everyone was here and they were walking in clots very, very slowly along the pathway taking in all the wonders than a camera phone can bring.

Later, we sat for a while, that weekend after Thanksgiving, in the sunshine on a stone bench in Washington Square, talking about our plans for our winter vacation and how near our departure was; about how neither of us wanted to shop in the city, except perhaps, for curiosity's sake, a visit to the new Uniqlo on Fifth Avenue (for me, because of its crowds and noise, hell on earth); about where we would eat lunch; about how we hadn't any real interest in visiting museums ... just talking.

I mentioned an article I'd read in the Design and Decorating section of the Wall Street Journal, entitled 10 Odd, Yet Essential Elements of Style and it seemed to me nothing more than trite advice about a formula for decorating a house. Which of course it is, but after I'd gone through the list, the Celt asked me if I'd checked around our place recently to see how many of these odd yet essential elements we actually owned. "Nonsense", I said, poo-pooing the very idea. "When we're home again take a look," he said.

And here, dear reader, is what I observed. Ms Needleman's first essential is A little animal ... people like cute things and animals are cute - it is so nice to have a small creature in figurine form in your house. A funny stuffed animal on a nicely made bed, a white porcelain monkey ... Well, I'm not sure if a Meiji bronze crab counts, but if it does, then I guess check! But, I must say, neither of us likes cute (unless, that is, it sports six-pack abs).

Next up: Jollifiers ... sentimental things that spread a little joy every time you cast your eye upon them. Goodness, we have not just one, but one each. For the Celt, a framed Hermès scarf and for me a Delft tulpenpot, a souvenir of times in Amsterdam.

Third on Ms Needleman's list are Mollifiers, which she defines as ... the stuff that you allow into your home because awful as it may be, it makes someone else happy. We appear to have none of these. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that almost all our relatives live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean so there's little need to appease or to be prepared for the unexpected visit.

While an odd chair is useful, it is not used primarily for sitting. It is desirable primarily for its amusing demeanor, making it more like a piece of sculpture in the shape of a chair... We certainly have one of these, in the form of a flea-market 19th century French Modern chair we had recovered in a Timney Fowler silk we bought thirty years ago. We had never found a use for the fabric, with its sketchy drawings of the Three Graces, but eventually it revealed itself as the perfect complement for this dumpy little chair. And the fact that we bought this fabric on a whim without knowing quite how we were going to use it brings to mind another of Ms Needleman's pieces of advice: when love strikes, buy it. You can figure out what to do with it later.

An inordinate number of geometrically-cut Murano and sommerso glass bowls that send off all sorts of scintillations probably come under the heading of shiny object, and are certainly, as Ms Needleman describes .... completely useless items whose only purpose is to sit around looking attractive....

Ethnic textiles are pretty scarce chez Blue, with the notable exception of a pair of pillows made from vintage Japanese kimono silk. Bought on Etsy on one of the numerous whims to which the Celt is subject. Thank the lord for return policies!

Not too much brown furniture ... too many brown pieces in a room is the surest way to suck the life of it. Ever seen a room and wondered why it looked like a hotel lobby? Brown! Not too much, just a smidgen, in each of our rooms - a dining table, a side table in the living room and bedside tables in the bedroom.

Decorative mirrors ... a big mirror over a fireplace or in a dining room can toss daylight around the room and multiply the light of a chandelier or the glimmer of candles set in its path. That, and it is a big beautiful object that can create the kind of drama that grounds a room. A highly functional decorative object if ever there was one. Yup, got two of those! One a large Venetian that indeed tosses light dramatically around the guest bathroom; the other a gilded, apparently Gustavian treasure that, amazingly, is in fact a gem from IKEA's all-too-short-lived series of reproductions of Swedish classics. We often ask first-time guests who admire it to guess its true provenance. No-one ever does.

Lacking a fireplace, as we do, might be considered a disadvantage for tenet number nine: log baskets. But as Ms Needleman points out, even if you have no use for split wood, you might still like the rugged texture of a big woven basket in your living room or front hall. It gives you something a little rough and adds a sense of depth to both sleek-modern and refined, antique-filled interiors. And in fact, a rather large log basket does duty in our household as a laundry basket.

The last essential is, apparently, some patina, of which our home has plenty. Indeed, the occupants alone provide a fair measure!

I started skeptically believing my own exquisite taste to be immune to the newspaper article's ten decorating clichés du jour. So imagine my surprise to discover we've ~~committed~~ completed nine out of the ten! Well, my dear, I. Nearly. Died.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T04:33:00.001-05:00

Click here for a celebration of family and, perhaps, give thanks.

Photograph of a kitchen table in a shepherd's cottage "... an early 19th-century cottage, one room thick, built of rough flints. Oil-lamps are still used here and cooking is done either on the open fire or on an oil-stove. The fireplace is built up with bricks and has a wrought-iron front of two bars. The fire-bar which once when across the chimney and from which pots and kettles might hang, has disappeared" from English Cottages and Farmhouses, text by Olive Cook, photographs by Edwin Smith, Thames and Hudson, London 1954.

Figure in a landscape

2011-11-21T21:45:00.000-05:00

I have written* and quoted much about Roderick Cameron over the last year or so and, though this is likely to be the last post about him for a while, I'm not done yet - to quote David Hicks, "I could write a book about Roderick Cameron."

Spurred on as I was, in the beginning, by my distaste at two comments in print about Cameron: waspish and grab-arse pansy, long dead of Aids** eventually I came to realize how central he had been, not only to the lives of his friends but central also, if not to my life, then to much of my thinking. Given that I've concentrated on the positive aspects of his character as related by his friends and, in two gratifying instances, by people who had worked for him, what I have written borders, perhaps, on hagiography but, to be honest, I've never been interested in writing an exposé.

"For almost all of us here this morning in the Grosvenor Chapel - a building he must have particularly admired - the death of Roderick Cameron marks the end of a very long friendship, which made a great addition to our lives. My own friendship with him began just after the end of World War I, and lasted nearly forty years. When I first met him, he was living with his mother in London at nearby Lees Place; and he and Lady Kenmare used sometimes to attend the delightful dinner parties given by the famous Anglo-American hostess Lady Cunard (who for some reason hated to be called a hostess) on the seventh floor of the Dorchester Hotel. I remember him in those days as a tall, elegant, but rather quiet young man, somewhat overshadowed by his resplendent mother, a celebrated beauty of the pre-war world. And it was only a little later, when I stayed with them at their house in the south of France, that he seemed quite to have emerged from the chrysalis of youth and to have become a completely individual character."

Among his earliest achievements, I suppose, was to redesign his mother's house, La Fiorentina, near St. Jean, Cap Ferrat. Before the war it had been a large Edwardian villa; but during the German occupation it was half-destroyed, and Rory completely transformed it on the classical lines of one of the splendid villas Palladio built near Venice. This was an important feat, since in later years, La Fiorentina was the harmonious background against which he exercised his gift for friendship. Rory Cameron was a man with many friends - that is a point I should like to emphasize; and, besides being himself a Man of Taste, he always loved to share his taste. It was not only for himself but for his friends' benefit that he both collected pictures and smaller objects of art, and at the same time laid out a glorious garden overlooking the Gulf of Beaulieu - it once included, I recollect, a pool covered with bright blue water lilies he had brought back from Australia, which, alas, a greedy fellow-gardner eventually stole.

"Rory's generosity was a keynote of his character. So was his hospitality; and among his guests were many writers. I remember Cyril Connolly (for whom La Fiorentina was an anticipation of Heaven) sunning himself upon the terraces. Rory's neighbours were William Somerset Maugham and Jean Cocteau. He was deeply interested in literature; and though he was conscious of having had a somewhat neglected education, he felt, himself, a keen desire to write. His subject was often his own travels; and his first book, 'My Travel's History,' which dealt largely with a visit to Egypt, was spotted by a clever publisher's reader, and accepted and published by Hamish Hamilton. He gave us - and I personally much enjoyed - no less that eight other books, mostly dealing with his impressions of foreign lands, from India to Australia, the continent where his mother had been born and brought up. And in each of his books I noticed the same quality. He had what I can only call a painter's eye. He could bring an exotic landscape or building to life by his evocative observations of line and colour, and his discerning sense of beauty.

"I have said enough, I hope, to suggest that he was no mere leisured dilettante, but had a true creative impulse. He worked hard, was always ready to accept criticism, and aimed at perfection in everything he did, whether he was writing a book, rebuilding a house, planting a garden, or placing a picture he had discovered and acquired exactly where it should be hung. His tastes were catholic, and he exercised them generously. In his personal life, as I have already said, he had an extraordinary gift for friendship. It is both as a friend we valued and as a creative spirit we respected that we are bidding him goodbye today."

Peter Quennell's "eulogy at Rory's memorial service, November 1985."

I first came across Roderick Cameron, merely a figure in a landscape - territory fascinating and as yet unexplored by me - in an article published in The World of Interiors twenty-seven years ago. I had no idea who he was - all I knew was that his house, Les Quatre Sources, at Ménerbes, impressed me no-end. The photographs and his description of what was his last house house stayed with me for years - his phrase the silver-green of the back of an olive leaf has assuredly been a touchstone for my own aesthetic. I look around our flat, sparely but not sparsely furnished, and can see colors, muted but not diminished, responding well to the early light from the east and to the golden light of the westering sun.

As the Celt and I head to Manhattan for Thanksgiving, let me offer my thanks to all of you who have over the past two years, contributed to and commented on my journey of discovery of Roderick Cameron and his circle. It has been, and continues to be, a delightful odyssey. Thank you all for coming along for the voyage.

*Click on Roderick Cameron's name in sidebar "Topics"
** The link for this quote seemingly is inactive.

Photographs of the Grosvenor Chapel where Roderick Cameron's memorial service took place from Wikipedia Commons.

Two portraits

2011-11-04T22:35:00.001-04:00

"I could write a book about Roderick Cameron but this is a small and humble tribute to the nicest man I ever knew.

"In 1954, when I was twenty-three, I was invited to lunch at Fiorentina by Elizabeth Chavchavadze who was staying there with Rory Cameron. Arriving on my rented scooter, I had little idea of the impact on my senses that that first glimpse into Rory's world would have, or what a tremendous influence he would be on my taste, or what a friend he would become. I was bowled over by everything, from the white-washed trunks of the straight rows of orange trees in front of the Palladian portico to the vast arrangement of sunflowers on the Louis XV table, next to the Sung horse and the huge books of engravings, to the fez on Rejabo's head, the Moorish water garden, the Battersby trompe-l'oeil inner hall, and the vista between the sphinxes leading down to the pool, which seemed to be part of the sea below.

"At the pool an elegant whippet welcomed me, followed by George III, but strangely tanned and tall, who greeted Shirley Worthington and me with diffident charm and introduced us to Pat Cavendish, Peter Quennell, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, Jimmy Douglas, Lady Waterpark, Anthony Hail, and Hamish Erskine. Princess Chavchavadze looked after me at lunch, which was absolutely delicious, and when we had almost finished Rory's mama arrived with a Hirax on her shoulder, murmuring to the assembled company, seated on the Italianate loggia above the box and lavender, 'Rather late - painting, you know." She had to be Rory's mama - anyone less elegant, exotic, and simply beautiful would not have been appropriate. His sapphire eyes were from her.

"Quite overwhelmed, we left for our pension in Antibes, but I was determined to re-enter the magic world created by Rory that I had seen and, before leaving, I had pressed my London telephone number into his hand.

"That autumn he telephoned and I got to know him. Out of his kingdom he was a frank, sometimes shy, always invigorating personality. His knowledge of enthusiasms - for the pre-Raphaelites, Mies Van der Rohe, flowers, photographers, designers, writers, eighteenth-century follies, clothes, restaurants, exhibitions, travel, antiques, house and 'interesting' people - were so sympathetic. I was able to take him to the legendary Winnie Portalington and my Essex folly, The Temple, and other architectural delights he didn't know. Subsequent, almost successive, summers from 1955 to 1983 I stayed with him at Fiorentina, Le Petit Clos, Le Clos, in Co. Donegal, and finally at Les Quatre Sources. He came often to Britwell and came over to see us when we had Place de l'Horloge in Roquebrune-sur-Argens near St. Raphael and at Classiebawn Castle in Co. Sligo. His visits were always enormously enlivening.

"He would go through the rooms, feeling the objects, opening those that had lids. Once, at Roquebrune, he opened a large orange Scandinavian tub and was delighted to find that it turned out to contain ice. He had one of the best senses of juxtaposing objects, a wonderful appreciation of opulence combined with understatement, and he used beiges in a masterly way. If he was not a professional interior decorator he certainly had an immensely sure touch when doing his own houses and gardens.

"And he was the perfect host - the food, the comfort, the guests. Also a wonderfully appreciative guest himself, and a great traveler. Pamela and I did two expeditions with him - one to Aixe-en-Provence, the other around a game reserve in Kenya, and he edited out the boredom of, respectively, too many fountains and too man girrafes. 'Come on,' he said quietly, after banging on the landrover roof, 'we've seen the giraffes, let's go on to zebra.'

"He always called me 'Master David,' and the most wonderful thing for me - after all, I learned so much from HIM - was when in the spring of the year he died to told my Persian friend Nahid Ghani, for whom I was building a house in Portugal and whom he hadn't met before, "My dear, you are in the best possible hands.' It will be, forever, one of my greatest accolades.

"Whenever I've solved an architectural problem or wondered about a planting solution or when I hang pictures in Portugal and group objects, I long, long, long to see his reaction, to have his approbation OR gentle criticisms as in the pool garden at Britwell in 1964 - 'Do you think the garden is a little big for the pool?'

"The Prince of Provence is no longer with us but we have so many happy stories and events to remind us of what a tremendous, hugely warm, erudite, generous and cosy friend Rory has been in all our lives."

Two portraits, then: one, an affectionate eulogy by David Hicks of his friend whom he called the Prince of Provence; the second, a portrait thought to be of Samuel Johnson's much-cherished servant, Frank Barber, versions of which hang in the Tate Gallery and the Menil Collection - Joshua Reynolds' A Young Black, whether copy or original I have no idea, hung above the chimneypiece in that same Prince of Provence's drawing room in Paris.

Image of Francis Barber (or, as it has been suggested, of Sir Joshua Reynold's own servant) from the Tate Gallery.

Roderick Cameron's living room photographed by Jacques Boucher for Les réussites de la décoration francaise, 1950 - 1960. Collection Maison et Jardin, Condé Nast S.A. Editions de Pont, 1960

Three books

2011-10-31T21:31:00.000-04:00

"Well, at least nowadays I don't buy too many," I said. The Celt, born tactful, forbore from commenting or even glancing at the growing pile of books by my chair - my old professor is retired and culling her library - as I unwrapped two parcels I'd just collected from the mailroom. I really don't buy too many books, though I suppose that depends on what the definition is of too many books.

Of late, I have found it difficult to buy interior design books - I'm willing and have the means, yet despite the flurry of publishing in the last month or so, I find so little of interest on the bookshelves. I know that, as I've aged, I have become very critical about the content of a book and consequently am loath, as I once was not, to buy examples of vanity publishing or compendia of this, that and the other, whether allegedly curated or not. I wish I could dismiss the impression of an ever-and-increasingly-revolving cycle of nonentity, but seemingly cannot. Maybe, as you might well infer, I feel I really have seen it all.

One book I have wanted for a while now, and the first to be unwrapped, is The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life. It is a big and heavy book, filled with the most beautiful houses photographed, with nary a vignette (but plenty of close-ups of details, certainly), all sixty-two of them, since Country Life began in the 1980s to publish photographs in color. These photographs have the rare quality of being as attractive and as texturally rich as were the black-and-white photographs of the previous decades. There are plenty of full, explanatory captions and, tipped-in, six essays by the likes of Marcus Binney, Tim Knox, John Martin Robinson, Geoffrey Tyack and Jeremy Tyack. Too heavy, without benefit of a lectern, to read in bed, but a joy to leaf through early in the morning, coffee in hand and brain on resurrect, this book is example from Rizzoli on how to produce, publish and persuade.

Had I not already owned Manhattan Style; Sister: The Life of Legendary American Interior Decorator Mrs Henry Parish III; Parish Hadley: Sixty Years of American Design; Albert Hadley: The Story of America's Preeminent Interior Designer; Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration; The Inspiration of the Past: Country House Taste in the Twentieth Century or Colefax and Fowler: The Best in English Interior Decoration, I might have found Sister Parish: American Style more interesting than I did. Please don't misunderstand: I am definitely glad I bought the book which is well-produced and designed by someone who knows, perhaps too well, the discipline of the grid. A few times I wished some photographs had been larger, and I really felt I had learned nothing new - a negative comment made by Mrs Parish about Mrs Onassis, notwithstanding.

Have I really seen it all? I wonder.

My magazine subscriptions have dwindled to two: The World of Interiors and the New Yorker; one taken since 1983 and the second given to us as a Christmas gift when we came here eighteen years ago. We read them both, still, after all these years. It is not that I let the other subscriptions lapse - one, as I mentioned a while back, I cancelled because I found I had unwittingly or, rather, unwillingly, agreed to a constant renewal service, and the second I cancelled for the same reasons. In the second case I learned during a phone conversation in the entanglement the 1-800 menu that my subscription had just been renewed until 2014. With neither magazine is a constant renewal service, and I use that word "service" advisedly, worth my while. I look into both, and others, in the bookstore but having learned to resist such blandishments as go for classic with easy, unfussy details or go for graphic from window to walls or, my favorite so far, go for big gestures and make it fun I put them back on the shelf.

I was curious about the third book, but waited to order it until I'd had a chance to leaf through it in the bookstore. I have an older book about Oliver Messel which is interesting enough but left a lot to be desired. I was curious - and was pleasantly surprised to find that Oliver Messel in the Theatre of Design could be a good addition to our library. I confess that in the past I have found Messel's style more than a tad twee, too redolent of the high-pitched precious accents of the British elocution schools. I must say his much-lauded tropical architecture baffles me - at least, the lauding baffles me. However, not wishing to appear negative about a book I'm actually glad to own and look forward to reading more of, I shall explain where my irritation lies.

One of the pleasing things about book design to me, indeed one of the most desirable, is where the layout does not detract from the contents. Such, alas, is not the case with the Messel book. It is with the layout, the graphic design, that my irritation lies - by the time I got to the Contents double-page spread and the Foreword page I was grousing about the page layout and the typography, muttering to the Celt, "look at this, look at this!"

How, you might be asking, did I not spot this at the bookstore. Actually I did spot it but, in my desire to have the book, I suspended my disbelief. I am not returning the book, because the contents are good enough to transcend the irritations of the layout, and give me a better understanding of who Messel was, and what his achievement was.

The image of Sister Parish: American Style from here though the book was bought at Amazon.com.
The image of The English Country House: From the Archives of Country Life from Amazon.com whence the book.
The image of Oliver Messel: In the Theatre of Design from here. My copy came from Amazon.com.

Crossing the Rubicon

2011-10-23T23:02:00.001-04:00

The other morning at the only surviving bookstore in this part of town, ready to be persuaded despite the histrionic title that I really needed to have the latest book by a well-known decorator, an erstwhile favorite of mine, and someone, I'm sure, nominated tastemaker and trend-setter many times over. I wasn't going to buy the book then and there because, being willing to defer gratification by a few days, I intended to order it online. In the end, though, after going through the book twice, I decided not to buy it at all. When a book, to my eye, is nothing more than a series of vignette after déshabille vignette, I find, much to my and undoubtedly the Celt's relief, that I no longer can be persuaded that I really need a book for its potential historical value, especially when, disconcertingly, I hear myself saying I might not live long enough for it to become history.

However, this isn't going to be a criticism of that particular decorator's work or even about the fatuous language used when writing about celebrity interior designers (tastemaker and trendsetter) or those that wish to be so - rather more a plea for fewer vignettes and less styling thereof. Perhaps I'm being lazy, but sometimes it's hard to understand how a room as a whole works. I'm sure I don't need to elucidate because you've all seen the petal and leaf bestrewn table tops, the asymmetrically arranged mini-gallery of mini-art, assortments of trinkets disposed on bookshelves and on and under tables, darling little lamps on kitchen countertops ........ well, you've seen 'em all and possibly loved 'em all as well!

Dear reader, it is what it is.

One of the more restrained and interesting riffs on the Post-Modernism of the 1980s, a mix of allusion and illusion, modern with the seeming old, David Whitcomb's four pavilions connected to a long hall, an eighty-five-foot-long spine, set high on a ridge overlooking the Hudson River was, I thought at the time, one of the most exciting houses published in the 1980s. I still find it interesting but, to be honest, not quite as exciting as it once was.

Perhaps my eye is a lot more critical than it was twenty or thirty years ago and Whitcomb's house is very definitely of its time. Not that I wish to imply that for a house to date is a bad thing but there are some decades, being afflicted by extremes as were the 1980s, that have a very strong flavor and cannot but date.

I struggled with what I wrote above (a train of thought I still cannot complete) about as much as I struggled with the feeling that sometime during the the late spring and early summer I crossed a personal Rubicon, and over the last month I came to realize my own "summer stream"(to misquote H V Morton)* had dried up. Many a time I've opened this post to continue writing and each time I went away frustrated with myself. It is clear to me, much as did the Rubicon of old, I must set a new course.

*H V Morton, a fellow Lancastrian, prolific travel writer and, for me, a newly-discovered pleasure and one of the positive aspects of what I suppose has been a kind of writer's block. In the hopes of finding a remedy, I haunted the university library and found many a book to occupy me and dampen my frustration - Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, E M Forster's short stories The Life to Come, Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham, Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, Wilde's Devoted Friend by Maureen Borland, and Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.

A Traveller in Italy by H V Morton, not actually found in the library but given to me recently by my old college professor - a happy coincidence given that we are planning our own travels in Italy - is a such a pleasure to read. I cannot say travel writing is a genre that has heretofore particularly interested me but I can see me reaching for more of Morton's books, especially those about Rome. The Fountains of Rome was a darn good read if a little too heavy (physically) for bedtime reading.

"A few miles north of Rimini, on the coast road to Ravenna, I came to a trickle of summer water that was flowing under a bridge. Its name was the Rubicon. It was once the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Rome, and any general who crossed it with his army, without the permission of the Senate, was committing rebellion. Caesar crossed it because his spies had told him that his enemies in the capital were plotting his downfall, and he knew he had to march on Rome or perish.........

"It is curious how often famous rivers fail to live up to their associations: the Tiber is not much to look at, and the Jordan is hardly wider than the Rubicon. In winter, of course, the Rubicon, like all torrents, would be formidable, and Caesar forded it on January 10, in the year 48 B.C., which, as the unreformed calendar was about seven weeks ahead of the sun, would really have been during the November floods. As I stood looking at this stream, to me one of the most thought-provoking sights in Italy, cars, motor-cycles, scooters, coaches, and caravans continued to rush past; and during the few moments I was there several hundred people must have crossed the Rubicon without being aware of it."

Photographs by Langdon Clay to accompany text written by Gini Alhadeff for Architectural Digest. Architecture by WM. Richard McGilvray and interior design by David Whitcomb. I cannot cite the date of publication yet.

A tonic

2011-09-23T19:20:00.000-04:00

Years ago, before the onslaught of truth-in-advertising-standards, Britain's elderly, when in need of a tonic, were tempted by advertising for a very popular fortified wine that promised, or at least implied, that a tipple of the sweet sherry-like substance drunk on a daily basis, would be fortifying for the nerves.

In that sentence I purposely used a phrase that in weaker moments can drive me to needing a tonic - in my case a Manhattan. "On a daily basis," is a construction, like "on a regular basis" that makes me grind my teeth. WTF is wrong with good old-fashioned "daily" or "regularly?" Why use four words when one suffices? "Double-check" is another, though, having once worked for someone whose default was "doublecheck," there may be more than a little prejudice about that particular phrase. "My fine china and crystal" - to my ear elided as "myfinechinaandcrystal" is enough to make me reach for my hip flask if not my revolver.

Having recently spent a few days with my fellow-original-countrymen, I know, believe me, how heinously intrusive stock phrases can be. Brits use "pop" all the time - as in "I'll just pop down to the slaughter-house" or "be a lamb, and just pop this in the oven" - pop, pop, pop, all over the damned place! On the subject of "pop", could we just stop using the phrase "pop of color?" Please?

I caught myself using what, around here, is a typical response when asked how one is. "I'm good," said I to my mother-in-law when asked how I had been. Of course, what I meant was that I had been well - the moral aspects of my character having nothing to do with it at all, at least to me.

Our fine china and crystal? Wedgwood and Yeoward, of course. Which reminds me, I need to pop the dinner in the oven, and before the neighbours pop in for a drink, the Celt has his orders to pop into the supermarket for things we need on a daily basis, and I'll need to pop into the bathroom to freshen up, but first, let me just double-check the spelling and I'll click "post" and pop this into blogosphere.

I found these pictures of a dining room by William Hodgins in the same batch of clippings the photographs of Arthur Smith's house came from. I'd had these photographs since 1983 and the room with its delicious combination of dark wooden table surrounded by white-painted chairs and flanked by bookshelves seems as fresh and inviting today as it did nearly thirty years ago. A tonic indeed.

Photographs by Peter Vitale accompanying text written by Francis Levy for Architectural Digest, May 1983.

Perfect

2011-09-20T21:18:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A country house

2011-09-07T20:02:00.001-04:00

During the last few weeks as my life creaked its way to back to normality, I did much planning of the country house that looms large in my imagination and which, despite all my attempts at getting us to reconnoitre lake and mountaintop, we have yet to buy.

It's the English half of me, I think, that longs for a house in the country - I read somewhere an acerbic comment that when Brits make a pile of money they all head for the country, heads filled with notions of joining the gentry, to refurbish every bothy, parsonage and manse in sight - whereas the American half rather would like a snappy little cottage, fit only for ourselves and a couple of friends, atop a gusty dune by the ocean. The Celt, raised as he was by parents who for various reasons lived in the Scottish hinterland, considers the countryside nothing more than psychical and cultural wilderness, brimming with rain, flies and shit. Undeniably, the countryside does have a lot of each, but my relationship with a romantic idea remains strong despite me knowing that, were I there, I'd probably spend a lot of time sloshing, swatting, dodging and squelching. The Celt, as I say, does not think as I do.

I can accept that one might, romantically, wish to connect the interior of a country house to its surroundings - give a nod to the spirit of place, as it were. I accept, also, that in the language of design there is a degree of cant - conventions and pieties that seem to express an esoteric level of connection. For example, the once de rigeur phrase bringing the outside in has been supplanted by a more mystical honoring of the landscape beyond the windows - a paying of tribute, nymph-like, to the trees, the streams, the flora and fauna. What it means, of course, is that wicker, grass, rust, distressed paint, driftwood, flour-sack pillows, litters of herbal, avian and floral motifs, even a jelly-jar or two, aflitter with lightening bugs, cosy up together with hand-adzed beams, reclaimed barnwood walls and floors, faded oriental carpets, crusty antiques from ~~last week~~ yesteryear in a tasteful tizzy of rustic whimsical cliches. None of it actually risible, if that is what you like or, at least, lust after, but to me it is about as real as the stylist's set pieces in magazines where one sees tea tables set out on a lawn or under trees - as if there wasn't a fly, mosquito, a chigger, flea, tick or snake within a million miles.

Our friend Will emailed to tell me about photographs of David Whitcomb's country house that he'd found and another friend kindly lent me the book. I recognized it immediately, of course - somewhere here there's a box of clippings amongst which is the original article about the house - I was so impressed thirty-odd years ago, when I saw the photographs for the first time. In fact I still am, and it's quite clear that Mr Whitcomb had no truck with a gimcrack pantomime of country life. His house, a converted mill, which he enlarged with a stainless-steel structure as simple as a child's building block, became his year-round residence after he gave up his city apartment.

I could bang on about Mr Whitcomb's sense of place, his appreciation of the structure of the old mill, his taste in furnishing it, and how the more contemporary room, the steel studio, has stood the test of time, but I don't need to - its clear from these photographs.

And it's clear to me that this is precisely the kind of house I would like for us to inhabit. Oh, I don't necessarily mean a mill-house, though that would have its charms; rather, a house comfortably and amply furnished, cognizant of infirmity and youth, and with those most valuable of commodities: space, peace and quiet.

Photographs of David Whitcomb's country house from Architectural Digest: Country Homes by Daniel Eifert to accompany "original text adapted by Cameron Curtis McKinley." The Knapp Press, Los Angeles, 1982.

Wet days, a mountain view, and the progress of love

2011-08-22T20:58:00.003-04:00

Hard to imagine, perhaps, but one of the most beautiful aspects, to me, of the Frick Collection, is the muted murmur, the continuous crackle and creak underfoot, of the wooden floors. On a rainy day, as it was a couple of Sundays ago, that softest of sounds had but one counterpart in the soft splash and plop of rain on leaf and pond - the sound of introversion and contemplation - in Russell Page's beautiful courtyard garden, itself a reflection of the court at the centre of the museum which, in its turn, is nothing more than the atrium with its peristyle and impluvium of Ancient Rome.

The night before we'd talked at dinner, the four of us, about second homes - for me enticing but for the Celt, a not-so-captivating idea. For our friends, two men from London, a second home was nothing more than an extra expense, extra responsibility, etc., a dismissal so heartfelt and final I was glad I was old or wise enough not to argue. I understand all the arguments against such an establishment but, much in the way the Frick's courtyard garden attracted me because of its sense of enclosure and separation from the noise of the city, so does a small place - a recourse rather than ivory tower - surrounded by woodland, within the sound, if not the sight, of falling water, blind to the road but open to a courtyard that captures, each in its season, the fall of sun, moon, rain, snow and leaf.

Another drenching storm had passed when, last weekend, we drove up the steep and winding road to the great white house atop a mountain in North Carolina. A weekend house filled with elegantly dressed people invited to meet two of the the Million Dollar Decorators, and from which the mist-softened panorama of the wooded slopes of the Appalachians came as such a beautiful surprise. To stand, even for a few minutes, under a sky no longer ominous but still flickering with lightening, deaf to all around and looking at a view so rare, was the most invigorating of moments.

It is hard to say how many times over the years I have visited the Frick but it has never palled. The Fragonard Room, in which his The Progress of Love is arrayed, is the perfect room in which to while away a book-riddled hour or two on a dim, wet and fire-lit day. These paintings, at the end of the 18th century, having been rejected by Madame du Barry, came to hang in Fragonard's cousin's house in Grasse. This reminds me, as an aside, that Roderick Cameron described Charles de Noailles, who had a villa and garden in Grasse, as one of the world's great gardeners - a compliment indeed from such a talented man as Cameron.

Our two friends from London, and this is their progress of love, asked us to go with them the following Monday to the Office of the City Clerk in Manhattan and witness their wedding - which we did, in the lavender-decorated ceremony room. I'm pleased to say that neither the color scheme nor the continuing rain dampened their ardor.

Photograph (cropped) of Finnish cabin from 1609 by Paul Wistman, accompanying text by Klaus Eriksen, for The World of Interiors, January 1986.

Image of Fragonard's The Lover Crowned from Wikipedia Commons.

I need what?

2011-08-10T08:37:00.000-04:00

"Oh, you need a three-hundred-pound seat" the brisk female voice on the other end of the phone said after I had explained, as delicately as I could, and without embarrassing either of us, that ... well, let me put it this way, and without being overly euphemistic, both bodily functions could not take place at the same time within the aperture of the seat of the "beside commode" I'd been given when I left hospital. The aesthetic desecration of our Philippe Starck-designed toilet pot caused by this baldly utilitarian object, with its white tubular construction, grey plastic lid and splash guard, was of little consequence compared to the ease promised by its 21-inch-high seat - six inches higher than the one above which it hovered - a promise short-lived in the event, for the reason given above. If I understood that person correctly, this method of assessing the required dimensions of a toilet seat – by the weight of the user - was new to me and, it has got me wondering about what I know.

It is only at times like these, in my case a temporary disability, that it comes upon one that the beautiful rooms one has gone to great lengths to create come up short in one vital aspect - accessibility. I found that much of our furniture, except the bed, no longer worked for me – or rather, with me. Until this week, the fourth since surgery, there has been but one chair – one of a set of four Provençal dining chairs with arms we bought 25 years ago in France – that has been in any way hospitable to my condition. The chairs and sofa in the living room, the library and the bedroom, all by well-known designers and from reputable manufacturers were, variously, too deep, too low, too springy, or too soft - qualities which in normal times may be much appreciated. We got the decoration right, but what we forgot was to make the rooms usable in all sorts of conditions. So, for a month, I have perched like a petulant parson on a dining chair, surrounded by furniture I could not use, immensely thankful for the arms (in more ways than one) that surround and support me.

I sit now at my writing table, in another of those Provençal chairs, propped by a pillow at my back, and though this morning I heard from the surgeon that everything has gone brilliantly and I may drive and fly again, I'm still too wary of the other furniture to try and sit in it. Sit in all I shall, eventually, but the lesson has been learned - function is prime. It is the ergonomics, the universal user-friendliness informing the design of furniture that counts.

This morning I looked around at the surgeon's waiting room and thought again what a difference there is, generally speaking, between the residential side of the interior design profession and the contract side - not necessarily a difference that is universal but one that comes down fundamentally to the training either side receives. There was so much space, though none wasted, for allowing free movement of wheelchairs, walking frames, and couples side-by-side supporting each other.

At home, when we remodeled, we got our openings – the doorways – right, in that I was able to get the wheelchair and, later, the walking-frame comfortably through them – not something that could be said of many houses around this nation. But where there is a registered architect, a licensed interior designer or an experienced interior decorator involved, there should be no problem with clearances or accessibility in residences, and there will be a universality of design - the rooms will not be hostile environments to those who are in any way, and however temporarily, physically challenged.

Drawings of chairs by Emilio Terry from an article written by Marie-France Boyer for The World of Interiors, November 1987.

Whoa!

2011-07-27T20:02:00.001-04:00

We had planned so much to do in London and Manchester - not the least of which was to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum's The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 and, nostalgically for me, in Manchester look at one the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings anywhere, paintings I'd not seen, outside of books, for many a long year. So much planned and commensurately such a disappointment in having to cancel - not on a whim, but out of necessity. A disappointment heralded by the PA's reaction on his first look at my MRI films. "Whoa!" he said, with awe in his voice, "I've never seen anything like this." It confirmed, I suppose, what we already knew, but had gone unspoken, about having to cancel the vacation - this after an epidural, the onset of "dropped foot" in both legs, and a return, despite the epidural, of the worst sciatic pain I'd ever had, followed by a fall flat on my back in the shower, and the fact that I was in a wheelchair. I thought "whoa!" was a fair reaction to what he saw.

So, an unplanned break from blogging having ensued, as has surgery and physical therapy (ongoing) I'm now able to totter, with the use of a cane, to my desk and sit for a while, fogged a little from the medication, and wonder what I'm going to write about. I have read so much the last four weeks but somehow don't want to turn this post into a "what I read this summer" grade school essay but, nonetheless, when you're flat on your back for a couple of weeks there's not much else to do but read.

I mentioned a few weeks ago how I'd finally come round to e-books and was quite enthusiastic about them. I still am enthusiastic but, much as with p-books, e-books are a mixed bag in terms of design, typography and proof-reading or the lack thereof. Many e-books are poorly typeset, with total disregard for basic typographic principles – more "widows" and "orphans" than a Dickens' novel, captions cut adrift from the illustrations they describe, letter-spacing choppy at best. This might be excusable in the free e-books, on the basis that one is getting what one has paid for, but the same problems regularly arise in commercial e-books, too.

Paradoxically, at the same time as they appear to flout the basic good manners of typography, many e-books also seem locked into a "print" mindset, and fail to take advantage of the potential of the new online medium. Like the online shelter magazines I discussed here, they seem to designed by people whose training is in print, and not in web design. Both e-books and e-magazines are designed - though "design" in this context implies intent - to resemble their print counterparts. And that, to me, is the intrinsic flaw. Why, given the capabilities of digital linkages, am I still having to turn the digital page, and in the case of e-books why are the illustrations bundled together in sections as one would find with a print book? As I say, e-books and e-magazines, as I experience them, are designed by people who were trained in the limitations of print - limitations that do not, or should not, exist in e-design. The nearest I have come in my search for what I think an e-magazine should or could be is Flipboard.

So, what did I read this summer?

A terrific read, the top of my list, despite the fact that because of medication I found it hard to concentrate for long, is Rome by Robert Hughes - a book not yet published in the United States - a highly personal account of the city of Rome from its founding to its present-day cultural destitution. A quotation from the last chapter gives a good sampling of what you might expect from this book - a quotation, I think, that pretty well sums up the cultural meagerness of the present day, and not just in Italy.

"..... It has got worse since the sixties with the colossal, steamrollering, mind-obliterating power of TV - whose Italian forms are amongst the worst in the world. The cultural IQ of the Italian nation, if one can speak of such a thing, has dropped considerably and the culprit seems to be television, as it is in other countries. What is the point of fostering elites that few care about? It bestows no political advantage. In the wholly upfront culture of football, 'reality' shows and celebrity games, a culture of pure distraction, it is no longer embarrassing to admit that Donatello, like the temperature of the polar ice-cap or the insect population of the Amazon, is one of those things about which you, as a good molto tipico Italian and nice enough guy, do not personally give a rat's ass."

William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography, my first e-book, led me to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at Clarence House, by John Cornforth, a book about the history of the house itself and the role of the Queen Mother as art collector; thence to Christopher Hussey's Clarence House published in 1949 to commemorate the then-newly-married Princess Elizabeth and Duke of Edinburgh setting up home together at Clarence House in rooms formal and sparsely, if comfortably, furnished, with:

"Many gifts made to Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip at their wedding consisted in furniture of the second half of the eighteenth century. This was fortunate, for English cabinet-making and design reached their zenith during the reign of George the Third, in the hands of Robert Adam, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and the consummate craftsmen who executed their designs. These designs, moreover, were inter-related by a continuous though changing trend of development. Consequently a definite stylistic unity is given by the furniture to the rooms of Clarence House. These, though built during the Regency, are essentially late Georgian in character, with the spacious simplicity that suits furniture produced during that epoch."

Christopher Hussey, the erstwhile editor of Country Life, wrote a beautiful and poetic description (some might call it purple prose) of the Sitting Room and it's worth quoting it full.

"The most attractive room in the house is undoubtedly Princess Elizabeth's Sitting Room..... There are two lofty windows in the long wall and a wider one in the end opposite the entrance, the strong light from which is diffused my white muslin curtains. For the walls Her Royal Highness specified aquamarine, a delicate pale blue with a hint of green in it. This is carried up into the ceiling cove, which should, in general, be the same colour as the walls, and thereby emphasizes their height. The mouldings dividing the walls into compartments appear to be early twentieth century, but those of the chair-rail and skirting give evidence of being original. The original chimney-piece of white marble and ormulu has been moved to provide a second fireplace in the Drawing Room, the original chimney-piece it closely matches. Its place has been taken by one of carved pine, re-assembled from members found in store at Kensington Palace. Its entablature, crisply carved in high relief with festoons of flowers in the rococo taste, sets its date fairly easily in the time of George II who occupied Kensington for most of his reign (1727-1760). The window curtains, of patterned damask, match the walls. The magnificent modern Chinese carpet of self-coloured wool, textured with an over-all pattern of conventional flowers in relief, is considerably lighter in tone and contributes to the effect of diffused lightness which is perhaps the outstanding impression given by the room.

"The impression might be imaginatively described as catching the sensation of an early morning in September, when the sky is of a pale cloudless blue, but when the sun is still veiled by a thin haze and the lawn is silvered with dew. At that hour, in the freshness of the dawn, when the cool light vibrates in refraction from an infinity of tiny prisms on gossamers and flower-petals, the scene sings with soft, clear, colour. But in the margins, among the stems of trees that still cast long shadows over the lawn, the light is stained to deeper tones by the green canopies above, except where through a chink some ray falls on a still pool, a dew-dropped twig, or golden cache of fallen leaves.

"The components of this fanciful picture have close analogies in the colours assembled in the Princess's room. The phloxes and hollyhocks of a late summer garden are always reminiscent of chintz, a covering material of which it is said she is fond. The pattern chosen here for sofa and easy chairs incorporates pink and white hollyhocks against the same misty blue as the walls. The cut-glass chandelier, of late eighteenth-century design, has a skeleton of old gilded bronze from which hang the festoons and cascades of drops catching and concentrating the sunlight. The oval Chippendale mirror above the fireplace, with rococo carved and gilt wood frame, is the craftsman's version of the sylvan pool, while in each wall-light of gilded and carved wood he has actually portrayed a pair of doves, whose song we might add to the scenic analogy."

At the bottom of my list, an e-book, The Age of Comfort by Joan DeJean - and this is not a criticism of the author's writing style or the content of the book - was maddening in its lack of proof-reading, its seemingly random underlining of certain sentences and paragraphs, and its occasional instruction to "see color illustration" of which I could fine none. I had the distinct impression that there had been a rush to e-publish, the detriment of quality being beside the point. It is this book that has caused my wariness of buying e-books. Nonetheless, the book is a good and interesting read - the author's premise being that there was a particular moment in 18th century Paris when comfort, rather than grandeur, became the priority and thereby transformed architecture and interiors up to the present day - but what began to dominate the author's account of that transformation was my reaction to the careless typesetting mentioned above.

Somewhere between the two extremes, and in no particular order, are: State of Wonder, by Anne Patchett - a beautifully written story of a "research scientist with a Minnesota-based pharmaceutical company, sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor ..." not, in my opinion, the spellbinder the book cover promised and I labored at it for quite a while. I think I should read it again for I admit I did not give it my best, falling asleep as frequently as I did when reading it; Doctored Evidence, the first of a number of Donna Leon's books I've enjoyed over the past weeks - marvelous evocations of Venice and the Italian political scene as experienced by her humane Commissario Guido Brunetti; The Man from St. Petersburg, by Ken Follett - I knew by the end of the first chapter this book was not for me but because it was a gift I persevered, again between bouts of nodding off, but neither the tale nor its characters enthralled me; Edward VII, Christopher Hibbert's biography (e-book) of Queen Victoria's eldest son, who despite his appalling childhood and lack of training in the job of monarchy, became a well-respected king, a loving father and grandfather; The Aspern Papers by Henry James, which I have yet to finish (and to be honest, doubt if I ever shall); Jane Austen's Persuasion (free from iBooks) which I assume needs no further description, and, finally, the newly-published and excellent Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, by John Julius Norwich - a very good read and an acute history of a line of rulers, spiritual and temporal, that began with St Peter and ends, thus far, with Benedict XVI. Actually an e-book which has got me through many a long dark hour when I awoke in the middle of the night and didn't want to wake the Celt by switching on the bedside light. I'm enjoying John Julius Norwich's book so much, obtusely perhaps, am going to buy the print version. And, I'll read it again from beginning to end.

So... what are you reading?

Photographs of Princess Elizabeth's Sitting Room and her Drawing Room from Clarence House, Christopher Hussey, Country Life Limited, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1949. No photographer's name given in the book.

Photographs of the Queen Mother's Sitting Room and her Drawing Room by Mark Fiennes, from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at Clarence House, John Cornforth, Michael Joseph London in association with The Royal Collection, London 1996.

Tell me, my dear: is it good?

2011-06-24T08:34:00.001-04:00

For one reason or another I'm still lying around reading and to stave off boredom I've been trawling my library, finding treasures I hardly remembered I had and, besides, buying a couple of eBooks.

I downloaded the Kindle app and found books on Amazon I'd not found on iBooks - not that really is of any significance. Interestingly, from both Kindle and iBooks I found I been given free books for signing up - Winnie the Pooh on one, and Aesop's Fables, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island on the other. I cannot grasp quite what the marketing decision was behind those choices, but in the case of that insufferable bear and his ~~dumbass~~ cute friends I find I cannot delete the book from my digital library as I'd very much like to. Pride and Prejudice is a book I reread at least once a year so to have it on my iPad is a marvel, but it isn't likely I'll ever read Aesop's Fables again and as for Treasure Island ... well, I just wonder who makes these choices!

I thoroughly enjoyed William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth, though it borders on hagiography and omits any real historical analysis - but, nonetheless, I found it heartwarming and humane and precisely what a very creaky grump needed whilst awaiting his niceness medication to put latent anti-monarchical tendencies in abeyance. It's not the book's most salient point, but who can't admire a woman who was £4,000,000 in the red at the bank and yet bought a castle - and come to think of it who couldn't admire the bank that could allow it? Needless to say, it is not my bank.

The next book at bedtime is about Queen Elizabeth's father-in-law's father, Edward VII, eldest son of Queen Victoria and a friend of the man who was David Hicks' wife's grandfather, and whose desk and leather cushion from his automobile Hicks had in his library. I'm tempted, a little, by Deborah Devonshire's Wait For Me because she writes about her favorite sister, Diana, about whose house, the Temple de la Gloire, I wrote a yet-to-be published post, but In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor could be the better book for me. Dip in, dip out, as it were.

I reread both of Mark Hampton's books and relished again the civility and erudition of the man who, according to his daughter, called chartreuse "cat piss green." There are not many of the good and the great I would like to meet, but Mr Hampton was one of them. Not so with his erstwhile employer, David Hicks, yet his book David Hicks Living with Design which the Celt bought for me has provided many a moment of pleasure and an occasional raised eyebrow.

In one of his books, Mark Hampton mentions a room done by George Geffroy that led me to seek but not find it in Les réussites de la décoration française, 1950 - 1960, thence to Jansen, and eventually and circuitously to Edith Wharton, whose books - totally not to the point - are downloadable for free. Shamefacedly, I admit the only book of hers I've read is The Decoration of Houses. However, she's now on my list despite my aeons-long prejudice that Wharton was the American equivalent of Thomas Hardy, whose doom and gloomth scarred me deeply when in high school. If there's one literary device I don't like it's a sustained, slow seepage into ignominy and loneliness. Gives me the willies, this traipsing through a barren inner landscape, and being the armchair-socialist-with-centrist-leanings that I am, I prefer the slap and tickle of detective stories - an engrossing beginning, a rip-roaring middle and a proper ending with all loose ends tied up and justice done. Now, that's how to spend a few hours! However, discursive as I seem to be ... back to Edith Wharton and the reason why I'll now give myself another chance with her books.

The passage below I found quoted in part in Therese Craig's excellent book about Wharton, and it was reading that passage that sent me seeking the book, A Backward Glance, which I eventually found on Project Gutenberg Australia. Oh, and what riches I found!

"When I first knew it, the salon in question looked out on the mossy turf and trees of an eighteenth-century hôtel standing between court and garden in the Rue de Grenelle. A few years later it was transferred to a modern building in the Place des Invalides to which Madame de Fitz-James had moved her fine collection of eighteenth-century furniture and pictures at the suggestion of her old friends, the Comte and Comtesse d"Haussonville, who lived on the floor above. The Rue de Grenelle apartment, which had much character, faced north, and her Anglo-Saxon friends thought she had left in search of sunlight, and congratulated her on the change. But she looked suprised, and said: "Oh, no; I hate the sun; it's such a bore always having to keep the blinds down." To regard the sun as the housewife's enemy, fader of hangings and devourer of olds stuffs, is common on the continent, and Madame de Fitz-James cream-coloured silk blinds were lowered, even in winter, whenever the sun became intrusive. The three drawing rooms, which opened into one another, were as commonplace as rooms can be in which every piece of furniture, every picture and every ornament is in itself a beautiful thing, yet the whole reveals no trace of the owner's personality. In the first drawing room, a small room hung with red damask, Madame de Fitz-James, seated by the fire, her lame leg supported on a foot-rest, received her intimates. Beyond was the big drawing-room, with pictures by Ingres and David on the pale walls, and tapestry sofas and armchairs; it was there that the dinner guests assembled. Opening out of it was another small room, lined with ornate Louis XV bookcases in which rows of rare books in precious bindings stood in undisturbed order - for Madame de Fitz-James was a book collector not a reader. She made no secret of this - or indeed of any of her idiosyncrasies - for she was one of the most honest women I have ever known, and genuinely and unaffectedly modest. Her books were an ornament and an investment; she never pretended that they were anything else. If one of her guests was raised to Academic honours she bought his last work and tried to read it - usually with negative results; and her intimates were all familiar with the confidential question: "I've just read So-and-So's new book. TELL ME MY DEAR: IS IT GOOD?"

I mentioned above that I'd found treasures in Edith Wharton's memoir and certainly some that connect with what I had intended to write about today - Emilio Terry's silver melon - but that will be for another occasion.

The photograph of our library, my reading room, taken with the iPad, and the black-and-white images of Edith Wharton's library and reading room at Ste. Claire, credited to the Lilly Library, Indiana University, are from Edith Wharton, A House Full of Rooms: Architecture, Interiors, and Gardens, Theresa Graig, The Monacelli Press, Inc., New York 1996.

Did I really chose?

2011-06-15T10:57:00.004-04:00

I'd like to say I'd spent a lot of time in my library over the last week but, given the fact that lying on the bed was, in the beginning, the required means of conducting my life, my library – thanks to the Celt, and much in the manner of his ancestors with the Forest of Dunsinane – came to me.

A supply of books on the bed, and an iPad to hand - what more could be wished for? Probably not much, and certainly not to quite the level of heaven that Sydney Smith enjoyed, though I do enjoy foie gras, but I'm afraid I slept through most of it. During my more ~~lucid~~ awake moments, having spent some time looking at interior design blogs and magazines, I have mixed feelings about what I saw.

A couple of weeks ago in my post Rapture and End-Times, I discussed what I see as the likely online present and future of magazines and books. In my last post I wrote that I would, because of its timely connection with what I had written, like to discuss this New York Times article about four online interior design magazines' thriving present.

The four are Lonny, Rue, High Gloss and Matchbook. That they are thriving is good news, and that they are positioned solely towards twenty-something females with little disposable income is, to my mind, undeniable. I question whether this positioning is entirely a good thing for only too soon will that group find itself the forty- or fifty-somethings and I wonder if the format, heavily reliant on advertorial and the worshipful prose of celebzines, is viable enough to grow or change with its targeted demographic? Or will there perhaps be new cohorts of twenty-somethings following behind to take their place? But perhaps that is not the point, for it occurs to me that such narrowly-targeted magazines may not be designed for the long-term - and are ephemeral, perhaps, as anything in the world of fashion.

That these magazines do not include me by gender, age, income, interest or scope is not a matter of particular concern. Their value to me, whether here today or gone tomorrow, is that I do not pay for them and I can dip in occasionally – very occasionally – without any thought of disposing of yet another pile of coated, printed, polluting paper.

On the subject of physical magazines: a couple of days ago I received a communication in which I was thanked for choosing to be part of a magazine's Continuous Service Renewal and as I'd recently been notified, my renewal has been processed and payment was now due.

I'm not really sure I chose to be part of the Continuous Service Program and I'm pretty sure I did not receive any such renewal processing notification and, now I look for it, neither can I find a telephone number to call to ask a customer service representative precisely when my subscription actually ends. Over the last few months I've found this magazine increasingly uninteresting - pretty much the same reaction I have to the four online magazines mentioned above and generally speaking for the same reasons - and had decided not to renew and to find I've chosen, unbeknownst to me, to renew my subscription really does make me even more determined not to enclose my check and return it with the invoice in the pre-addressed envelope.

So, back to where I began, in a library with the past and looking towards the future. A few days ago, I bought my first iBook, William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography – and I am totally sold on e-publication. I fully expect my e-library to grow rapidly if there are enough e-books to satisfy my predilection for history and biography. Biography, by the way, is a genre I have come to appreciate only in recent years – and I'm still surprised that I do, given that I'm not overly interested in the inner lives of anyone, however salacious or celebrated. As I wrote that I glanced at my bookshelves and to my astonishment found many a biography - Billy Baldwin; Catherine of Aragon; Edmund White; John Adams; Elizabeth I; Louis XIV; Mrs Henry Parish; Brooke Astor; Alan Bennett; George, Nicholas and Wilhelm; David Hockney; Nigel Slater; Elizabeth David - to name but fifteen and to say nothing of the monographs about artists, architects and interior designers inhabiting the shelves. Ah well, such is self-delusion!

Real estate, or square footage, is not something one has to consider with e-publishing. Our household is long beyond the point at which we should have stopped buying books and I have considered buying an additional bookcase – a long, low one for the living room – but have yet to find anything that would, aesthetically speaking, fit. Not being one for stacks of books by chairs, under plant pots or vases, or even stacked as decoration on tables, I have decided to edit - take out and dispose of those books neither of us actually has any more interest in. I have begun with the vanity-publishing - decorator monographs of interchangeable interiors and egotism. Some of these are now for sale on Amazon Marketplace. We'll see how they fare.

The room above is Emilio Terry's library of books and musical scores for Jean de Polignac, photographed by Robert Doisneau for Les réussites de la décoration française, 1950 - 1960, Collection Maison et Jardin, Condé Nast S.A. Editions de Pont Royal, 1960

P.S. One of the more interesting aspects of looking at interiors is the art to be found in them - for example, the Edouard Vuillard portrait of Jean de Polignac - a subject for future posts, I'm certain.

Two finds and three discs

2011-06-03T16:45:00.003-04:00

A very short post this week, more a placeholder, than an essay. I just want to show you two discoveries I made last week: one a Frank Brangwyn etching and the other a Tibetan, hand-carved, not-quite-one-and-a-half-inches-long, bewitchingly tactile and worryingly inconspicuous, luminous, rock-crystal dorje.

I would like to discuss this because it connects with this, but because there are three herniated discs demanding I get out of this chair, I shall wait until next week.

Have a good weekend.

At the sign of the dancing man

2011-05-27T12:07:00.001-04:00

One of the pleasures of trapped sciatic nerves is that there is so little that one can actually do, beyond snarling at everyone in sight, lying on the floor and reading. If you cannot walk, drive, stand, sit, sleep, blog, empty the dishwasher, pick up a heavy book, retrieve soap in the shower, lace up shoes, even twist the cap off your favourite cologne (Imperial by Guerlain) without sending lightening bolts to your ankles, there's not much left to occupy one's time but haunt the chiropractor's office, snarl and read - and I've done a lot of all three this week.

It's driving me nuts, this enforced inactivity, but at least the view of the living room from the rug (Kravet, wool and silk) is novel. I wish I could be a good patient (or even just be patient) but I'm a man. Oh, by the way, if ever you're in this state do avoid sneezing.

Rapture and End-Times?

2011-05-20T18:33:00.002-04:00

The debate as to whether or not blogs can affect magazines is over, I guess, though I wonder now if we were just looking in the wrong direction when that discussion began, because it is undeniable that the design industry and its magazines take an interest, to say the least, in blogs. Before I go on, let me say that today's post will be a bit discursive, but there is a point, if not three intertwined - one being that yesterday I had a not-entirely-rapturous experience and am frustrated enough to write about it critically - something I rarely do. However, I will get to the rapture or lack of it shortly.

Generally speaking, I have been skeptical about the interest taken by the design industry in blogs and bloggers - to wit the number of fests and conferences organized for our benefit and for which we are asked to pay attendance fees and all our own expenses - travel, lodging and food. I wonder, more than a little cynically, what's in it for me? I pay, I travel, I meet, I listen, I view, I discuss, and then I go home and do what? Well, it's implicit, of course, that I go home and I blog and tweet about my hosts and my happiness at being included, thereby creating free publicity for the organizers the event, whether magazines or design firms, getting them higher in Google search rankings. I am, thus, quite clear about what is not in it for me.

A Los Angeles Times' headline that "Amazon.com says it's selling 80% more downloaded books than hardcovers" has enormous implications for the magazine industry - implications that are certainly not lost on the editors or publishers. I glanced at this issue of e-publication, if issue it is, in my post Poof! when I wrote of how easy it will be when I travel to take a number of books and magazines downloaded to my iPad rather than to schlepp physical copies.

Even from what little I know, it's clear that producing a magazine is an enormously complex, labor-intensive, physical and costly process - a process that begins with editorial decisions: commissioning writers and photographers; organizing photo shoots; reviewing results and making selections; designing the layout of pages allowing for the of number of pages and number of advertisements; fact-checking and proof-reading - this all before anything goes to print and all taking place in various offices.

At the printer, proofs are reviewed; printer does imposition (how multiple pages fit on larger sheet of paper on the printing press); printing; trimming; binding; bundling and then distribution to newsstands, bookstores and subscribers (of whom a database of street addresses must be maintained) and part of the distribution process is also dealing with the returns, transporting and disposal of unsold magazines.

All in all, a very resource-intensive process, the production of a magazine, and I have not even mentioned one other side of the business - advertising sales - an enormous department of itself with its own overheads and processes, that generates the revenues that finance almost all of the preceding.

It seems to me, and this is happening I think, that if magazines are to survive in any economic form they must go digital. Imagine how much of the process outlined above can be eliminated if a digital format becomes the norm. The editorial staff can do without, and possibly already are so doing, expensive real estate. The printing side of the business can be eliminated as can distribution. I realize that what I am also saying is that many a job will also be eliminated - a situation we saw in the 1980s with the invention of software that enabled graphic designers to go from computer to printer without the need for separations houses and other ancillary trades. Think also of the parallels with the present precarious situation of selling books. End times, indeed.

For those of us who like books, compilations of magazine articles could regularly be published, much in the way (see above) Architectural Digest published its compilations in a series called The Worlds of Architectural Digest, though that perhaps is wishful thinking rather than likelihood, for if, as the LA Times headline suggests then the publishing world in general is already beyond crisis point. You might think that there will always be a need for magazines and books - and you might well be right - but it is not to be expected that either will continue to take the form we have come know, love and collect. What might it all mean for blogs is for a later post.

Now, the rapture, or as I write above, the lack of it. This week I have attended a number of presentations by well-known decorators - events I was looking forward to, not rapturously, but certainly with great pleasure. All with the exception of one were worth the trouble and rewardingly so. One, with whom I spent a while conversing, is one of the most attractively intelligent and witty women I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Putting cynicism to one side, I know as must we all, that the reward of listening to the greats and looking at slide shows of photographs from their latest book, is that we get to buy a signed copy of the book and we can feel, however distantly, we've rubbed noses with celebrity. We might even be entertained and learn something.

If I were to be quite plain-spoken about the one I had very much looked forward to listening to and was so disappointed in, I could say I have not listened to such a simperingly self-satisfied, blasé and disheveled, but mercifully short, load of twaddle in a very long time. As I say, if I were to be plain-spoken ...

Book cover photograph by Jaime Ardiles-Arce published by Architectural Digest in the series, The Worlds of Architectural Digest, 1979.

The Twang's the Thang Redux

2011-05-19T22:41:00.002-04:00

"So I concentrate on what I have and where I am. I take pleasure, for instance, in the way the house is aging - the shingles in particular, which have moved so gracefully past tan and tarnished silver to a rich dark brown. Some of this is just dirt, of course, left there by the vagrant fog, but the effect is enchanting. The shingles have grown as rough and mossy as bark, so the house seems more organic, like something rooted in the earth that will have to return there, sooner or later. To my overly romanticizing eyes, shingles are most beautiful when they're closest to collapse.

"On my better days, I try to see my own weathering this way. I rarely succeed. I'm not ready to discolor and rot, no matter how charming the process might seem to others. I'll leave the planet in a state of panic and self-loathing. I'd rather there be peace and a sense of completion. And I'd like Ben there, of course, cuddling me into the void with the usual sweet assurances. I know that's not original as fantasies go - and impossible to ordain - but a boy can dream.

"In the meantime, I tinker with our home in a way that Ben finds comical, if not a little pathetic. I arrange objects like talismans in a tomb, carefully balancing according to how the rivets on the bowl on the coffee table are repeated in the frame of the dining room mirror and the base of an Arts and Crafts candlestick. I know where every spot of Chinese red can be found in the living room. I never add anything to the decor without considering the metal-to-wood ratio and the need for the sheen and color of ceramics. 'Have nothing in your houses,' William Morris decreed, 'that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,' and I can show you a wastebasket that fills that bill to a tee. I bought if off eBay for $385. This house will be perfect by the time I'm committed.

"A case in point: one night Ben and I were watching Six Feet Under when I sprang from the sofa and began rearranging the art pottery on the shelf above the TV tansu. Be indulged me sweetly as I swapped the purple Fulper ginger jar for the light-green one and offset them both with the large bronze Heintz vase.

" 'That's been bothering you, has it?'
" 'I couldn't put my finger on it,' I told him, 'but it's better, don't you think?'
" 'Oh, absolutely.'
" 'Don't look at me like I'm Rain Man,' I said.
" 'Come back,' he said, 'Keith is about to get naked.'

"As we settled in again for the show, Ben's head warming my chest, my gaze began to creep away from the television screen and back to the shelf of now perfectly composed pottery. And Ben somehow sensed this without looking up.

" 'Stop that,' he said, slapping my belly. 'Watch the damn show.' "

Yesterday, apropos a couple of YouTube videos we had watched - a "damned show" if ever there was one - a friend and I in discussing them raised the subject of accents, and how, though I actually have yet to hear an accent I don't like, especially the seemingly myriad Southern, some tones of voice can grate.

The word 'twang" was used and immediately I had one of those moments, increasingly more frequent it seems to me, when I plunged into the past and dredged up the phrase The Twang's the Thang - something I'd not thought of in forty years - the name, I think, of the first 45 rpm single I ever bought. Duane Eddy was the guitarist. Another name that dredged up was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs but I'm not going to touch that one, the great Woolly Bully notwithstanding. Worrying, how much crap gets stored away!

This conversation got me thinking about accents in design - not the ubiquitous accessories one sees - but more what makes American design different from, say, English design. In traditional decorating - and here you see rooms decorated twenty years ago by Arthur E Smith - the constituents, generally speaking, are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. In the way that it is easy to spot an Englishman abroad, so it is with an American (it's always the clothing) and this before they open their mouths to speak - it is equally easy to know when an interior is American and when it is English.

With clothing the differences are easy to spot - it's a matter of fit and to some extent color. British clothing tends to be trimmer and somehow grayer, whereas American clothing leans towards the generously-cut and the colorful (I'm sure there are a million and one examples of how I'm wrong, but bear with me). The analogy does not fully work out with decorating but it fits pretty well. Scale, or fit, is smaller in England but interiors, and I think this is because of the differences in light, are more colorful - here rooms are larger, as is the furniture commensurately, and in the main neutral. It must be said that on one side of the Pond color is creeping back and on the other it might be beginning to drain away.

So, the differences between American and English decorating, as with the language, is a simple matter of emphasis, or accent, if you will. Now, you might wonder why, in a world where design is increasingly homogenized, I even care about differences in accents. I do, in the way I care about language and how we use it, for good or for bad. I care about accents because, wherever they are from, I love them. I love the cadences, the emphases, the rhythms, the limitations, the color of language - and these are all attributes that can be applied to the language of design. I love how, for example, Michael Tolliver, a survivor of the plague though not untouched by it, describes his relationship with his house, the home he has made of it and the lover who shares it with him, despite knowing, as we all do, it is but a temporary stopping place and one filled with love.

Quotation from Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin, Harper Collins, New York 2007. One of the Tales of the City books - a series of novels, but actually one of the most acutely observed, humane, humorous and heartbreaking social documents written during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Update: it was the blogger le style et la matière who kindly wrote and told me to look in Google Reader for my lost post. She, thus, has my gratitude and my friendship.

Photographs by Peter Vitale, accompanying text by Michael Frank written for Architectural Digest, October 1991.

Title of post quoted from an album of guitar music by Mr Duane Eddy

Poof!

2011-05-17T19:57:00.001-04:00

Losing a post and comments as I did last week rather took me aback. The Twang's the Thang sorta went poof and retreated into the cloud whence I've daily been expecting it to reappear. I understood the Blogger team would restore data that was removed but precisely a week later it has not so I guess it's time to stop pouting and move on.

When the Celt suggested that we take our iPads on vacation rather than schlepp books as we would normally do, to my surprise I agreed with barely a demur - which means I refused point blank and then thought about it and admitted he was right. I'd like to say that is a syndrome I've grown out of over the years but, at best, I've just got quicker at admitting he's right.

Yet I didn't like the idea, however practical, because an e-book is not a book as I have known a book to be, and I like books. By which I mean, of course, I have a fetish about owning books - a fetish I find hard to admit despite the fact that, as I said in my post Soignée a couple of weeks ago, I sit surrounded by about 125 square feet of them in the room, once the second bedroom, we call the library.

It's a rather 19th-century name for a room of books, library, and one that smacks of municipal and philanthropic do-gooding. Book-room is even more archaic - on a par with looking-glass, though that fact has not stopped me using either on occasion. Whatever I call the room, if I were to lose its contents, my life would be bereft for I have great pride in ownership, great confidence in the emblematic and talismanic roles books play, and I take enormous pleasure in being able to take a book from our shelves, browse, read or research - precisely as I use the internet, it occurs to me.

My morning read is no longer a newspaper and neither is it, generally speaking, a book. I begin my day with a smile, a cup of coffee and The Daily Beast. Ten years ago, I read a book. Today I am more likely to be looking online and am constantly amazed at how much is available at the tip of a cursor and how much I rely on it - much as I relied on Blogger always being there.

I'm told everything is moving to the cloud, wherever that may be. I look out of the window and no evidence of the internet do I see but I'll take on trust that The Blue Remembered Hills are out there somewhere, floating. How aptly named this insubstantial vehicle. Losing a post is but the most minor of happenings in the technological scheme of things, but if that cloud ever goes poof .....

The room above is Emilio Terry's library at Chateau Rochecotte, photographed by Anthony Denney for Les réussites de la décoration française, 1950 - 1960, Collection Maison & Jardin, Condé Nast S.A. Editions de Pont Royal, 1960

Really?

2011-05-06T14:30:00.000-04:00

"Really?" I thought, when I saw the malachite-painted chair in a photograph of a room at Kips Bay Decorator Show House. Forgive my skepticism, but there's a degree of absurdity in pretending that a slight, spoon-backed chair could be made of malachite and could have supported itself, let alone an object heavier than a handkerchief, and it is that very fatuity set me thinking, again, about show houses and why I still go to them.

From my perspective, show houses offer an annual opportunity to see the work of upcoming and well-established decorators under one roof. A good thing, undoubtedly, but at the same time a show house presents one with a visual avalanche that can be overwhelming and, consequently, it is the rare room that stands out even a few days later. Nonetheless, some rooms are memorable even after a long time, as are some objects or juxtapositions. For example, the quilt of living moss that covered a bed a few years ago remains in my memory - but whether as a thing of ridicule or romance, I cannot decide. I remember it, but not the rest of the room or, perhaps more importantly, the designer - and it seems to me therein lies the problem. If my encounter is with an object rather than the room then it means that either I'm remembering for the wrong reasons, or put another way, forgetting for the right reasons.

Recently, after a recent visit to a local decorator show house, what remains in my memory is a kaleidoscope of neutrals and the impression of a sedimentary layering of accessories and props. That is not to say that there weren't moments of pleasure - beautifully made, handprinted linen paisley curtains that were the raison d'etre for a whole living room in which three tiny hand-carved wooden birds had landed on a marquetry commode; an iron tripod table partnered with a crustily gilded and damasked Louis XV chair in a cream and crystal dining room bounded above the dado with mercury-silvered mirror; a dusty-gray Spanish table doing duty as a desk in a man's study; a coolly brown understated guest suite; Hogarth prints matted in glass against tailored gray flannel walls; a purple-lacquered sideboard affectionately known as Barney; along with some very fine bathrooms. But beyond these moments - the equivalents of the malachite-painted chair - there was little that has stayed with me these two weeks later. Mind you, it could also be these old gray cells are just wearing out!

Please don't think I underestimate the effort and expense that goes into dreaming up and creating these ephemeral interiors. They are works of art and in many case truly labors of love. Indeed, from the designer's point of view I wonder what the return on the investment actually has been over the last few years. If, as I read here, what growth there was in the luxury market has slowed down, it makes me wonder how long these costly affairs can survive.

Which brings me to today's decorator - someone I've written about before and whose work as illustrated in these photographs is an example of the staying power I'm talking about.

Arthur Smith's own rooms, created over thirty years ago, are I think a superb example of an interior that has not dated, a rare quality of interiors from that decade of plutocratic absurdities, the 1980s. I had intended to analyze precisely what it is about this interior I like - other than the Art Déco bronze console by Richard Desvallières for Süe et Mare, the Egyptian falcon, 1st-century Roman torso, Japanese box, 19th-century faïence dog, the Richard Serra Black Triangle drawing on paper, 18th-century Japanese screen, bronze panther, 18th-century Venetian figures, the statuette of Aphrodite standing before a miniature trellised pavilion, the carved, painted and gilded dining table, the amazing collage of watch parts, 1st-century Romano-Egyptian lion, 1st-century Roman head in the shower, Diego Giacometti stool, Amish quilt, Franz Kline drawings and Thomas Hinckley painting of a dog - but a commenter on my post Soignee summed up my thoughts about David Whitcomb, by extension this interior by Arthur E Smith, and indeed much of what I am always looking for in decorator show houses.

"I think what you like is the deliberateness with which things are arranged - considered, thoughtful choices - which convey a sense that the objects on display have meaning, or significance, to the owners. And well-made things are given breathing room, as if to say: "have a look ... enjoy me ... I'm worth it." We create a narrative when we arrange our rooms - and the story being told here is sophisticated, assured and inviting. This house makes me want to know it's occupants - what do they think; what do they read; where do they go in their spare time - that's an alluring notion ... and an accomplishment."

Precisely, Anonymous, precisely! Thank you.

Photographs taken by Peter Vitale to accompany text by Patricia Warner - from whom also list of contents in Smith's loft - written for Architectural Digest, November 1987.

Wedding gifts

2011-04-29T08:20:00.000-04:00

Gifts from a friend visiting from England, to be used at the Celts's office with the celebratory champagne.

An enormous compliment!

2011-04-23T20:20:00.000-04:00

Blue Remembered

2011

Acrylic on wood panel

120 cm x 80 cm

From Paul Gervais de Bédée and for which I am truly honoured. As I wrote to Paul, it was a "marvelous surprise. I am flattered - no, I am touched - by this delightful painting and that you would choose to name it after my blog." Truly.

Soignée

2011-04-22T20:01:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three portraits, three rooms

2011-04-19T05:52:00.005-04:00

"I was appointed an honorary attaché to the British Embassy in Paris in 1948, and shortly after my arrival there I was invited to visit Lady Kenmare and her son Roderick Cameron at La Fiorentina. It was Easter and it was to the be first of many wonderful moments spent with them both in the years that followed, and particularly with Rory as Enid seemed to travel so much or would be visiting her daughter Pat Cavendish.

"To use Rory's own words, life and people were 'enchanting' and 'delicious' during those after-war years, and I think back to those Fiorentina days filled with speculation and excitement of who would be coming to lunch or dinner, or to spend a few days. There were of course many such visits and my early recollections of friends or Rory's - and some became mine - included Elizabeth Chavchavadze and her husband George, a great pianist, who composed a ballet for George de Cuevas aided by Marthe Bibesco. They became constant companions of Rory, particularly Elizabeth, who it was said wrote him a letter a day. She lived in Paris and also had a charming house in a garden full of lavender and English flowers, at Dampierre, close to Paris. She had a tremendous influence upon Rory's taste and he probably on hers. They did spend a great deal of time together till her tragic death - she and George were killed on the way to their house at Chatel Censoir.

"Somehow Rory developed from that moment on - but he kept on seeing his early friends either at La Fiorentina or in Paris, where he also lived. Rory later on said he never truly liked Paris, and seldom came. His dinners, his objects, either recent purchases or otherwise, and the ambience be managed to create, were exceptional. I can remember during this early period evenings or days with Jacque Février, Nora and Georges Auric, Odette Massigli, Bill Baldwin, Marthe Bibesco, Grahame Sutherland, Charlie Chaplin and his wife, the Quennells, the Lees-Milnes, Princess Grace, Van Day Truex, Hubert de Givenchy, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Bunny Mellon, Duff and Diana Cooper, Philippe Venet, Serge Lifar, and Marguerite and Mark Littman.

"There were many, many people in the life of Rory, and La Fiorentina was his true background - not the Vaucluse.

"Rory loved to travel, and recorded and photographed every face, place, nook, and cranny. His two favourite countries, he declared strongly, were India and Mexico. He knew them both well, of course, and it was Rory who led me by the hand on my first visit to India. For me the trip was enhanced by his knowledge and understanding of that wonderful country. When I return there I will think of him with much affection and nostalgia.

"Rory fancied himself a cook and there were times when one thought he had had a Cordon Bleu course, He loved concocting dishes for Sunday evening supper. There was quite often an Indian flavour to it all. I copied several of his recipes and I like to think my Paris dinner parties improved as a result.

"There were many faces of Rory that I could dwell upon. I could say he loved eating, putting on weight, and then going to Montecatini each July to lose it all. He loved dogs; he rhapsodized over butterflies; his favourite colour was probably brown; he spent hours with books and objects. Perhaps his greatest interest was his garden in the house where he died. As for the gardens at La Fiorentina and Le Clos Fiorentina, they are universally known.

"Rory enthused over flowers and it gave him great pleasure to arrange massive bowls of garden carnations in white and pink, or tubs of bursting-out peonies - always cut short near their heads. He knew the names of all the flowers and plants and quite often he and Charles de Noailles spent hours together comparing notes!

"I must stop! But you must agree Rory was truly an enchanting, delicious gentleman."

I must mention again how kind people have been to send me images, recollections, suggestions and texts in connection with my themes. The quotation above, one such gift - a tribute by Walter Lees to his deceased friend Roderick Cameron - is yet another instance of how fortunate I've been in my correspondents. The tribute, one of three sent to me together with Lees' portrait, is from a privately printed book that ... well, I'll let Anne Cox Chambers, explain:

"Shortly after attending Rory's memorial service in London, I thought how fitting - how right - it would be to help bring into existence a small volume not mourning his death but celebrating his life, so that we could all share with one another the happiness of having known Rory.

"To that end I took the liberty of writing many of the friends he had "collected," inviting them to set down their recollections of that rare and roving spirit.

"We remember him with pride and love, and in the hope that we were "worthy" - to use one of his favorite words - of being his friend."

Walter Lees was unknown to me before I wrote about Le Clos Fiorentina, Hubert de Givenchy's house on Pointe Saint-Hospice, the same house decorated previously by David Hicks for Sao Schlumberger who'd bought it from Roderick Cameron. I say he was unknown to me - but actually I'd read about him in Van Day Truex's biography and had forgotten. Lees, who died last year at the age of 100, was the son of a joiner, British Embassy attaché, an intimate of the Windsors on both sides of the divide, of the Mosleys, a diplomat in more senses than one, personal assistant to Stavros Niarchos and afterwards Pierre Schlumberger, model for a character in Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred, close friend of Hubert de Givenchy, and mentor and friend to Van Day Truex - a surprising, perhaps only to me, connection in my ongoing theme - a seemingly modest man who knew everyone.

The china on Walter Lees' dining table above (a vignette, I'm sure, created especially for the book) is the same pattern, Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', that led Roderick Cameron in his The Golden Riviera to sketch an affectionate portrait of his old, much-loved and much-respected cook.

"How attached one becomes to one's routine, always the same china; Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', a stylised pattern dating from the last century and one that is to be found in countless English houses. Mohammed, a Moroccan who has been with me for years, greets one with a flashing smile, produces the papers and pours the tea. Next to appear on the scene is Catherine. Catherine, of Italian extraction, was brought up in our village. She must have been very good-looking, and even at eighty-four is still handsome. Her face, lively and wrinkled, has changed very little in the thirty-odd years she has been working for us. Living in the village, she rides up every morning to the house on her mobilette, long flûtes of bread sticking out of the basket attached to the back of her bicycle. Unbeknown to her I was driving behind her one day as she mounted the hill from the village, and her progress was almost royal: 'Bonjour Madame Catherine.' 'Bonjour,' she intoned with a dignified bow of the head, sitting very straight, averaging a pretty fast clip, too fast for me to overtake her. She is a remarkably good cook and loves being taught new dishes, working by instinct rather than measure. When we meet she stands, hands joined in front of her clean white pinafore, while we discuss the menu, a procedure we have reduced to a form of telepathy. I remember her, also, in the days when one used to attend the galas in Monte-Carlo. She would stand next to the great olive growing at the bottom of the entrance steps, waiting to see my mother, and this, also, would be discussed with next morning's menu. She was crying, I noticed, the day we all drove off to Princess Grace's wedding."

If you look closely you will find the portrait of Lees in his London living room at the right-hand top corner of the photograph of his Paris living room with its mirrored walls, white-covered sofa, rococo chairs, Giacometti tables, old-master drawings, Russian silver, David Hicks carpet and a view of the dome of Les Invalides.

There is one more stop to make in Paris - the house of another of Lees' acquaintance - and then it's back across the Atlantic to stay, I think. It seems that in trying to broaden my scope, I've merely completed a circle.

The first photograph, according to the correspondent who sent it to me, is of Roderick Cameron's Paris living room. I do not know who the photographer was, or where the image was originally published.

Update to the above: thanks to Mr Toby Worthington, I now know that the photograph of Roderick Cameron's Paris living room is from Les Réussites de la Décoration Francaise, Les Éditions Condé Nast, 1960. The photograph is by Jacques Boucher.

Photographs by Jean-Bernard Naudin, from The Finest Houses of Paris, Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery and Jean-Bernard Naudin, The Vendome Press, New York, 2000.

Reminiscences of a boy in blue

2011-04-13T21:20:00.007-04:00

As I wrote last week, one of the more gratifying aspects of blogging - and, believe me, there are many - is the way that people over the last two years have been generous with sources, suggestions, reminiscences and even images of my subjects. And so it was with with this photograph of Marguerite Littman, but what excited me, and here I don't wish to be ungentlemanly, was what was on the wall behind Mrs Littman - a double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Seeing that painting again was one of those moments when, wordless and blind, I traipsed through memories long buried.

I need to tell you, and this will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me well, is that I did not enjoy Cabaret. Piteous, I know, and it's an admission deplorable enough to require my gay card to be rescinded or, at least, be withheld until I've been re-gayed. Whilst I'm being a confessin' queen I might as well just get it all out and admit I couldn't stand listening to Judy Garland or her daughter. I know, I know!

What you might think, has that got to do with Marguerite Littman? Well, actually, not a lot. But what is germane is that Christopher Isherwood wrote I Am a Camera, the book on which Cabaret was based - a book that, together Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin's Another Country, John Rechy's City of Night, and the nude drawings and blue swimming pools of David Hockney, was a seminal influence in my youth. You could say, if you'll pardon the pun, they all made a bigger splash, and were emblematic of youth yearning to be misspent.

I say above the connection with Marguerite Littman is tenous - a background to a photograph and nothing more - but if truth be told, she was one of the first people to organize a response to the spread of AIDS, and continues to be involved, a fact that should be again noted here. The connection, then, is with the younger me and my admiration of David Hockney. In his autobiography he talks about meeting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, how they took him up and introduced him to his new life - much as happened to me in a different circle all those years ago.

"By this time I had met Christopher Isherwood and we instantly got on. He was the first author I'd met that I really admired. I got to know him and Don Bachardy, whom he lives with, very well; they woud invite me out, take me around to dinner; we had marvellous evenings together. Christopher was always interesting to talk to about anything and I loved it, really loved it. I don't know how it was that we hit it off, but we did. It wasn't only that we were English, but we were both from Northern England. I remember Christopher later said Oh David, we've so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we're from the north of England. Of course, Christopher's from the opposite side of the north of England: his family was quite rich, mine is working class."

A scant five years before I first read of a new and rapidly aging, aggressively wasting, ultimately fatal disease affecting gay men, I'd bought Hockney's autobiography - a book I still own and in which the light of California still glances off the glittering pools, the hissing lawns and the bronzed bodies. It had been an all too brief time of recognition, liberaton and great fun - certainly not a time of innocence as the past tends to be - and without, as is always the way, any hint of the catastrophe to come.

I'll let David Hockney himself finish this post with a paragraph that has such savour of those years:

"I went to visit the place where Physique Pictorial was published in a very seedy area of downtown Los Angeles. It's run by a wonderful complete madman and he has this tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plaster statues. It was marvellous! To me it had the air of Cafavy in the tackiness of things. Even Los Angeles reminded me of Cafavy; the hot climate's near enough to Alexandria, sensual; and this downtown area was sleazy, a bitt dusty, very masculine - men always; women are just not part of that kind of life. I love downtown Los Angeles - marvellous gay bars full of mad Mexican queens, all tacky and everything. The Physical Pictorial people get men, boys, when they've just come out of the city gaol: Do you want to earn ten dollars? Take your clothes off, jump in the pool, that sort of thing. They're all a bit rough-looking, but the bodies are quite good. The faces are terrible, not pretty boys, really. I must admit, I have a weakness for pretty boys: I prefer them to the big butch scabby ones. I was quite thrilled by the place, and I told the guy. I bought a lot of still photographs from him, which I still have."

Whilst I'm, or Hockney is, on the subject of Physique Pictorial: if you've ever seen the painting When Did You Last See Your Father you know exactly how I felt when my grandmother demanded of me, then aged fourteen or so, an explanation of why I had a stash of the magazines in my nightstand! Like the young man in the painting, it took me a long time to find my voice in these matters.

Odd how pictures can have so many consequences and memories.

Image of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968, from David Hockney by David Hockney, edited by Nick Stangos, Thames and Hudson, London 1976.

A sneak peek

2011-04-05T21:56:00.003-04:00

I’ve mentioned before that people write to me about connections they have made or feel I should make, and these past few weeks have been no different in that. Last week I read about the irritation one correspondent feels when he reads or hears the phrase “pop of color” and I knew exactly what he meant.

My particular bête noir is “sneak peek.” I’d like to say it’s the only piece of decorator-speak that irritates me but “wow factor” comes pretty close, as does “a fresh take on …” and “... with a twist” as in “timeless yet modern twist on traditional style" - whatever that might mean! I fully appreciate we all have set phrases, patterns of speech, jargon – lord knows, I recognize mine each time I put fingers to keyboard - but there are times when the sloppiness and vacousness of it all ~~gets up my nose~~ exasperates me. It seems to me that the more inconsequential interiors have become in recent years, the more consequential, referential and reverential the descriptions have needed to be.

Last Thursday I said I intended to move away from Roderick Cameron and his friends for a while and look in other directions - my own fresh take, or a twist on tradition, if you will - and in this post I am doing so, but not moving too far. To be honest, I cannot say I had made the connection between Marguerite Littman and the men I've been writing about, but now it has been pointed out to me, I realize it's a connection I could have made for in the 1960s Littman and her husband were clients of David Hicks. Marguerite Littman, though not a decorator, fits into my theme of circles within circles because she is connected to a number of the men I have written about.

Mentioned by Edmund White in the latest chapter of his autobiography and, indeed, written about by him for Vanity Fair, friend to Princess Diana, Rock Hudson, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams and - well, the list is endless. In the main, I've stayed clear of the characters of those I've written about, preferring in my own way to stress positive rather than the opposite - not in any way striving towards hagiography but simply being clear that it is the work rather than the character that counts. Not that I want to sound naive - I'm very aware of the utter vacuousness and frequent viciousness that characterized the lives of the many style icons. It has never been my intention to be an apologist for the likes of ... but that is for another post and I want to stress just in case I have not expressed myself clearly, none of the above applies in my mind to Marguerite Littman.

For, if by their deeds ye shall know them is the standard by which we can judge then Mrs Littman comes, amongst these Blue Remembered Hills, pretty close to sainthood. In the mid-1980s when conservative and fundamentalist politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were ignoring or, on occasion, celebrating the growth of an epidemic she founded the AIDS Crisis Trust in the United Kingdom. If you are a gay man, or just a human being, of a certain age, you will remember how while a thin red line was being drawn through history anorexic socialites and their walkers danced till dawn with the unheeding leaders of Western society in the White House and other bastions of the establishment.

It is that thin red line, the Maginot Line of our times, that the likes of Mrs Littman, a woman to whom I shall return, recognized and walked across. It is the consequences of that red line drawn through late 20th-century history that underlies my fascination with the circles within circles and those who orbited within them.

Photographs of Mr and Mrs Mark Littman's house from David Hicks: A Life of Design, Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli 2009

The hands of the Madonna

2011-03-31T08:45:00.139-04:00

"The other afternoon, when at the top of the house in what is known as the Anglo-Indian room - the study in which I work - Emilienne came through on the house phone: the admirable Emilienne who hs been running things for us for the last thirty-five years. I must come down, there was an old lady of ninety-one who wanted to see the garden. Emilienne has an infallible judgement about people, and wouldn't have called had the visitor not passed muster. So I went down, and there at the door stood Madame Delor accompanied by three friends. Impulsively she held out both hands - 'I was born here, grew up in this house, and it is only now I have dared to come back'. She apologised for intruding, and her eyes were misted with tears. Equally moved, I took her arm and we walked off down under the pergola. Excitedly she exclaimed on this and that, and turning into the spring garden she showed me where the family used to play boulles: 'and you know, we could get so worked up that we stuck a candle on the couchonnet and went on playing in the dark'. She carried her years well and there was no faltering or fumbling for words. 'You still have that palm, I see. You know the coastguards were always after my father about cutting it down. They claimed that it made a landmark for the smugglers.' Again the tears of joy behind the glasses: "And the Madonna up there' - she was referring to a twenty-foot Virgin and Child cast in copper which stands next to the King of Sardinia's mortuary chapel capping the head of the point. 'The sculptor was a friend of my father's and he used my hands as his model.' The Madonna is not actually in the garden, but looms over the wall and was originally intended for the tower - all that remains of the original fort. Her role was to be that of guardian angel to the fisherman, but somehow she never quite made her supposed elevation and now dwarfs her surroundings, a miniature Statue of Liberty, an ecclesiastical landmark cradling the Christ Child instead of holding aloft a lamp of liberty.

"Before leaving, I asked Madame Delor to sign the visitors' book: the date is 20 May 1974, and without hesitation she wrote out her piece, ending with a well-turned phrase, thanking me - 'Who has given me today, at the age of ninety-one, the opportunity of reliving my early years'."

There it stands, next to the eleventh-century Chapelle Saint-Hospice, the inordinate bronze statue of the Virgin, overlooking what was Roderick Cameron's garden and, at her feet, the ninety graves in the First World War military cemetery - graves of Belgian soldiers who died at Villa Les Cedres, the house belonging to the Belgian king Leopold II, that had been converted to a hospital.

Occasionally, I think I'm done with Roderick Cameron and his friends, yet each time more connections are made and new ideas present themselves. Nevertheless, for a while at least, I want to move away from Cameron and look in other directions and broaden my theme of circles within circles.

Photo of the Madonna by Eric Hoekszema from Google Maps.
Screen shot from Google Maps.
Quotation from The Golden Riviera, Roderick Cameron, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.

I am really just bored with the interior design scene

2011-03-27T21:49:00.003-04:00

More than twenty years ago, David Hicks was asked what he thought about the then current state of decorating. His answer, quite shocking at the time, I suspect, still has a resonance today. It was a longish interview, unsatisfactory for the interviewer if I'm correctly reading between the lines, and one that still after all this time seems oddly sad - until, that is, one realizes that it was published the year he turned sixty and his lifetime's investment in his career had drastically begun to depreciate. However, that's a tale well covered in his son's biography. What he said was:

"I am really just bored with the interior design scene. I think it has become an uninteresting subject because everything has been said, everything has become sort of tired and finished."

This set out to be another post but when a friend sent me this link, it occurred to me that what David Hicks had said all those years ago had not lost its force, at least for me. I, too, sometimes think I've seen it all. As well I may have.

I saw the book referred to in the link, Undecorate: The No-rules Approach to Interior Design, on the bookshelves the other day and I admit I, in my blasé way, walked on by, thinking that finally we had come to this: someone sat in an office somewhere planning the ~~the next wave~~ marketing ploy, and this is the best that could be thought of?

About a hundred years after the profession of interior design began - arguable, I know, given the history of the upholstery trade from the 18th century onwards, but bear with me - all, it seems to me, we are left with is trend. Nothing is new - the comfortable armchair as we know it developed in 18th-century France; was refined, if that is the right word, during the 19th century; and since then the only changes have been in manufacture and materials. A table is still a table, whatever its function - arguably the only new piece of furniture the 20th century produced was the salon- or coffee-table. A sofa, for all its comfort, is still a development of the settee, which in its turn was a development of the bench with an attached back. That most iconic and most uncomfortable of chairs, the Barcelona chair, is nothing more than a 1929 adaptation in modern materials of the ancient klismos. Seemingly, all we are left with at this juncture is to restyle or remake in another material. And I wonder sometimes what the implications are.

Much, in the magazines, is predicted in terms of styles yet little actually stays the course. The mainstay of traditional decorating from the 1980s onwards, the so-called English Country House style as personified by Lancaster, Fowler, Buatta and Parish, and the American Style personified by Billy Baldwin, Hadley and few others, were merely longish-lasting fads - we're all trapped in our times and subject to the ultimate influence of our time - selling. The fads of one generation become the justifications for the succeeding generation to cite the names of its (preferably dead) practitioners and thus, it is hoped, give credence to their own work and place in history. Ultimately, I think, it doesn't actually matter. For if the only standard is to sell, and if quality - if it still exists - has been usurped by the logo merchants... then what hope is there?

New, in interior design, as in fashion, is nothing more than the re-styling of what has already been used but deemed out of style. Unfashionable and its siblings new and classic is but a concept that drives the wheels of industry, and turns the pages of books and magazines. Much as the words new and improved sell washing powders (even as the contents remain the same), the self-same same words or their synonyms are designed to sell magazines and the products the editors have to all intents and purposes discovered. New is never, however many times the taglines repeat it, about style.

Perhaps, then, here is the explanation for the growth in propping and accessorizing - the fictionalizing of interiors as I've called it before, with its underlying desperation for novelty where there is none - where nothing changes except for superficialities. Interest must be created somehow. The latest superficiality, seemingly, is to make a fashionable virtue out of disarray - mess, some of us would call it. Perhaps that pile of last week's clothing still on the bedroom floor, the unmade bed, sex toys on the nightstand, last night's dinner still on the kitchen countertop - in fact, all that is slatternly could, arguably, become storybook elements for the interior design stylist.

Accessorizing may also be a reflection of the way our current culture celebrates the famous. In the past, celebrities were seen from afar, on the big screen and in the picture weeklies - in a distant and controlled manner, on a pedestal. Today, the pedestal is long broken and celebrities are seen close-up, warts and all, their all-too-human foibles writ large on the small screen - indeed their shortcomings, their "just like us"-qualities are the most celebrated. Celebrities are no longer role models, they're just people in the 15-minute glare of the moment that "could happen to you."

In the same way, we are no longer content to view interiors in serene, inviolate perfection – that's too stuffy, too sterile for our democratic 21st-century everyman-celebrating appetites. Instead, we want to see the rooms as lived-in, the detritus of everyday (albeit oh-so-artfully and aspirationally styled) in evidence. "Oh look, they use the same brand of toothpaste we do." It's more relatable-to. More gritty. More real – real, that is, as in reality TV.

This room, Hicks' set in Albany, is an abiding favorite of mine, and the absolute antithesis of what is happening in interior design today. It was, if I remember aright, an announcement that he was still around and relevant. Relevant, in my mind at least, he remains - especially in the light of what is happening, or rather not happening, in today's interior design. In my opinion, David Hicks is one of the most significant decorators of the twentieth century and did not have to rely on stylists to increase his worth - in fact, stylists hadn't really been invented. Effectively, he was his own stylist.

I understand from some commentators that Hicks, the man, was not well-liked. I have little to say in response, except that I believe a man's work should not be judged by his character but by what he produces and the influence he has. Having made that statement, I can also argue that in other cases the history of a person is very hard to disassociate from the work they do - a theme certainly for another post.

Photos from David Hicks: A Life of Design, Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli 2008.
The interview referred to is of the series Gandee at Large published in House and Garden, March 1989.

The decorator and the writer

2011-03-21T21:07:00.004-04:00

Twenty-eight years ago I bought my first issue of The World of Interiors and was immediately captivated, especially by an article about Grange House, the redecoration of which was done by David Hicks for a London businessman and his family. Grange House seemed to me to be the most comfortable and stylish of English country houses - not too grand, nothing pompous and actually great fun.

Imagine, then, my surprise when - and I don't remember precisely how much later - I discovered that the name of the house and its owners were completely fictitious. I've never found the explanation for the subterfuge and it could be there is an official one somewhere, but I missed it.

The story is this, and I quote the writer of the article:

"David Hicks' most recent, and coincidentally one of his favourite, commissions was to redesign Grange House - a pretty, rather small farm-house in Oxfordshire - for a London businessman, Peter Westbury, his American wife, Louise, and their two children. He confesses that the reason he enjoyed the job so much was due mainly to the Westbury's sense of style and taste - a style so much attuned to his own that he became involved in redesigning their garden as well.....

"The Hicks' maxim - that he sees himself merely as an interpreter of his client's taste - never once presented a difference of opinion in the case of Grange House. He was dealing, too, with a family who had formerly lived in a much grander house and who had quite a collection of possessions; so they were able to chose the best of these, which give the house its distinct personal style."

By now you're probably saying "but, I thought that house was ..." and you'd be right. Grange House was, in fact, The Grove, and Peter and Louise Westbury were David and Pamela Hicks - their former "much grander house" being Britwell House.

The story as presented is quite cohesive, with lots of telling, or misleading, details - for example:

"Although Grange House is fairly old - early 18th century - with a double-height drawing-room added on in 1825, it clearly couldn't be too grand, except for the drawing-room, where David Hicks felt justified in adding a stately touch or two. But, because Peter and Louise were used to living in more generous surroundings, he felt that he had to give them a sense of scale to get away, as much as possible, from the existing cottagey atmosphere.....

"Granting that, in this instance, David Hicks had a great deal of possessions to chose from, he finds that on the whole (especially in the United States) his clients have none, or don't wish to use what they do have, preferring to start afresh. They want to be told what to collect and his advice often extends to buying antiques too. 'I think it is terribly nice, and flattering, and I suppose it's better than making mistakes ... but it does seem odd to me......'

"The pale-blue dining room, is a tribute to Hicks' skill, as the most dominating feature, and extremely attractive and decorative mural en grisaille with silver and pale-blue, executed for the Westburys' previous house, had to be included. The original beamed ceiling was obviously unsuitable for anything so sophisticated, and the room wasn't tall enough, so the floor had to be dug out to fit it in. The dining-table is, surprisingly, a plywood top on a circular drum base, covered in a Hicks-designed print. 'I can't see the point of spending a lot of money on a table and then covering it up with a table-cloth - and I happen to like table-cloths....'

"David Hicks and Peter Westbury designed Peter's dressing-room as an audacious combination of bedroom, bathroom, and library to take Peter's collection of books which go over, around and under the window. A 19th century chintz with a black ground and autumn colors was used for the bedspread and roman-blind, whilst the bath alcove is lined with Gothic engravings. ...

"As David Hicks was nearing the end of resdesigning Grange House, the garden began, increasingly, to take up more of everyone's thoughts. He hadn't been asked to help with garden-design in the past, although, having just written a book on the subject, it is obviously a consuming interest of his, and, in this case, he was able to design it from scratch. 'Of course you can see it is still a young, new garden which needs to a good ten years to mature.' "

As I say, a cohesive tale with lots of telling details, and they really must have enjoyed, the writer and the decorator, constructing this quite entertaining work of fiction! And, while on the subject of fiction, I can't help but notice that there isn't an abundance of tablescaping in these early photographs of Hicks' house, and I wonder if perhaps, on occasion, they too were fiction, those tablescapes - stories invented for the moment and the camera lens.

There is another way, of course, of looking at the dearth of objets on Hicks' tables. Until quite recently, rooms were not photographed in a state of freewheeling clutter, beset with the risible detritus of lives lived untidily in rooms created for the camera lens - the ficionalization of interiors, about which, months ago, I wrote a small essay. It was an essay in which I also expressed the belief that there is a tendency to write adoringly about aristocracy, royalty and celebrity as icons of style, their deplorable behavior and affiliations being ignored. But, that is a story, or non sequitur if you will, for another day.

"It is easy, in elegant diction
To call it an innocent fiction;
But it comes in the same category
As telling a regular story."

W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

Photographs by James Mortimer to accompany text by Annabel von Hoffmannsthal for The World of Interiors, December/January 1983.

Quotations are from Annabel von Hoffmannsthal's text.

Ensplendour'd

2011-03-16T12:45:00.147-04:00

It is difficult to take the measure of a man through someone else's eyes and experience. After all, we don't actually meet them, except, perhaps, in the pages of diaries, magazine articles, even cookery books - as is the case, in my experience, with Norman Douglas. Over the years, I haven't bothered to read any of his books, and the other day I remembered why. I shall read them now - I discover that the university library has some - South Wind, Old Calabria and even a collection of limericks entitled Some Limericks, Collected for the Use of Students, Ensplendour'd with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes Explanatory and Critical. Anyone who can write such a title deserves to be read, however bawdy the contents of his book.

I was put off Douglas years ago because of what I read or, rather, read into the quotation below, another from Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. The young man referred to, it seems to me,was simply being inexperienced, adulatory and looking for what we nowadays call validation for expressing what was, in post-war Europe, and could be still, a valid socialist point of view about the haves and the haves-not. Looking back, I wonder if I, young as I was, took Douglas, and the victim (as I considered him), and myself far too seriously. I wonder also, as I write the last sentence, if a reproof ever really needs be annihilating.

"In the summer of of 1951 there was much talk on Capri, and elsewhere in Italy, of a great fancy-dress ball to be given in a Venetian palace by a South American millionaire. The entertainment was to be on a scale and of a splendour unheard of since the great days of the Serene Republic. One evening, Norman, a group of young men and I myself were sitting late at Georgio's cafe in the Piazza. Criticism of the Palazzo Labia ball and the squandered thousands was being freely expressed. Norman was bored. He appeared to be asleep. At a pause in the chatter he opened his eyes. 'Don't you agree, Mr Douglas?' asked one of the eager young men. 'All that money.' He floundered on. 'I mean, so many more important things to spend it on ....'

" 'Oh I don't know.' Norman sounded very far away. Then, gently: 'I like to see things done in style.'

"And he stomped off. Evaporated, as he used to put it. The reproof had been as annihilating as any I ever heard administered."

Charles de Beistegui's fancy-dress ball took place sixty years ago and is as far distant in memory and relevance as the Ball of the Yew Trees given at Versailles in the Galerie de Glaces. Either ball could be called legendary - the one attended by royalty, aristocrats and artistic riff-raff, snobs and panderers, a group of loose associations and equally loose living – now collectively described as cafe society – and the other ball where Jeanne Antoinette Poisson tangled with the King's hunting horn, went on to become royal mistress, great patron of arts and literature, and lend her name to a hairstyle much beloved by tele-evangelists. However, legendary isn't an adjective I'm disposed to use and I wonder, perhaps, if there might not be a description less travelled-by, as it were.

Celebrated, fabled, notorious, out-of-sight, doozie, outrageous, rad, fantastic, fabled and stupendous are all adequate synonyms, depending on your point of view and age. I don't think there's anyone still alive who might say out-of-sight, man except perhaps ironically, though there are plenty of us who remember it. Rad is, well, no longer rad, fabled is such an advertorial phrase, notorious has long slipped into the porcine vocabulary of reality TV, and chic has lost its cachet in some quarters - though not in mine, as I quite like the word still. My style guru says that crispy is a word of the moment but the moment might have passed by the time I finish this sentence. I shall fall back on the old word, gratin to describe if not the ball, then the guests, and in that I am definitely not being original.

When the gratin - European royals and aristocrats, American and South American millionaires, Hollywood movie stars, politicians, artists and general hangers-on - moved on after the ball in the not-so-early hours of the morning, they left behind not a legacy of taste and style for the aspirational, as is occasionally supposed, but something of far more lasting value. That something, which for a few short hours, was merely a theatre for one of the silliest of human activities - striking attitudes, playing at tableaux, and seeing and being seen - that something was the glorious set of rooms at the Palazzo Labia.

The ballroom is the star, with its frescoes by Tiepolo of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, a tale from the ancient world, transposed to modern-day Venice. The pair, as with everyone else in the frescoes, was not clad in Roman or Egyptian fancy dress, as had been Besteigui's guests dancing in front of them, but in seventeenth-century aristocratic dress - the equivalent of being portrayed today in a tuxedo and a couture evening gown.

The conversation Elizabeth David recorded took place in 1951, three years after de Beistegui bought the house from a Labia widow, and only six years after the end of the Second World War - a war that had laid waste to Europe, the East, and to unimaginably vast numbers of people, in the Shoa, on battlefields and at sea, and which rewrote the manuals on Fascism for succeeding generations. Undoubtedly, in those early years of reparation and repair, an ostentatious event such as the Villa Labia ball could be viewed as a rich foreigner's attempt to buy his way into an old and hermetic society - much in the same way as did the Labia family centuries before - and, given the rawness of the early post-war years, perceived as spitting in the face of the still-suffering populations of Europe. That is how, I think, the young man in Elizabeth David's tale saw the situation. If I have taken his measure correctly, the young man, the anti-hero, saw the situation for what it was.

Photographs of Villa Labia rooms by Gianni Berengo-Gardin for an essay published in The World of Interiors, April 1987.

Painting of Palazzo Labia by John Singer Sargent from Wikipedia Commons.

Paintings by Tiepolo from Wikipedia Commons.

The light of a Venetian dawn

2011-03-11T20:45:00.002-05:00

"Of all the spectacular food markets in Italy, the one near the Rialto in Venice must be the most remarkable. The light of a Venetian dawn in early summer - you must be about at four o'clock in the morning to see the market coming to life - is so limpid and so still that it makes every separate vegetable and fruit and fish luminous with a life of its own, with unnaturally heightened colours and clear stencilled outlines. Here the cabbages are cobalt blue, the beetroots deep rose, the lettuces clear pure green, sharp as glass. Bunches of gaudy gold marrow-flowers show off the elegance of pink and white marbled bean pods, primrose potatoes, green plums, green peas. The colours of the peaches, cherries, and apricots, packed in boxes lined with sugar-bag blue paper matching the blue canvas trousers worn by the men unloading the gondolas, are reflected in the rose-red mullet and the orange vongole and cannestrelle which have been prised out of their shells and heaped into baskets. In other markets, on other shores, the unfamiliar fishes may be vivid, mysterious, repellant, fascinating, and bright with splendid colour; only in Venice do they look good enough to eat. In Venice even ordinary sole and ugly great skate are striped with delicate lilac lights, the sardines shine like newly-minted silver coins, pink Venetian scampi are fat and fresh, infinitely enticing in the early dawn.

"The gentle swaying of the laden gondolas, the movements of the market men as they unload, swinging the boxes and baskets ashore, the robust life and rattling noise contrasted with the fragile taffeta colours and the opal sky of Venice - the whole scene is out of some marvellous unheard-of ballet."

I thought I might end the week with a lovely piece of writing by Elizabeth David from her book Italian Food, a Penguin Handbook, 1971. This book was first published in 1954, the year that Second World War Rationing ended in the United Kingdom - imagine its impact!

Photographs by the Celt.

Piercingly aromatic

2011-03-09T21:26:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure how well-known one of the most literate of food writers, Elizabeth David, is this side of the Atlantic, but if you like simple, authentic French food then let me recommend her books to you. She was not the kind of writer who played the celebrity game, though she certainly was famous - but, unlike many today, very private. Her books, generally speaking, are without illustrations, except perhaps for decorations at the beginning of chapters, and she uses Imperial measurements which means using a scale and weights. There is little glamour beyond verbal sketches of the places, the countryside, small regional restaurants and cafes, occasionally a very grand restaurant, charcutiers and patissiers, and the markets - but the descriptions of the ingredients, the methods and the final results are superb.

I was trawling for something else when I came across these photographs, published a year after her death, of Elizabeth David's kitchens - summer and winter - shockingly and unexpectedly ordinary by today's standards, but the kitchens were where she cooked for good friends, tested her recipes and, sitting at her kitchen table, wrote her erudite, authoritative and immensely readable cookery books. Luddite by our standards today, these kitchens were without dishwashers, built-in double ovens, microwaves, food processors, gadgets and fitted cabinets. Elizabeth David furnished her kitchens, she did not fit them out.

I remember a similar sink and wooden draining board from my childhood. I remember too, the fad during the 1960s and 1970s for all things French - the rage for beige, white porcelain tureens and soup bowls with lion-headed handles, rivet-handled knives, wide, heavy, green, gold-rimmed coffee cups, the cafetière, iron casseroles, oval earthenware gratin dishes, fondue, pissaladière, gratin dauphinois, ratatouille and Moutarde de Meaux, sea salt and herbes de Provence - oh and lest I forget, quiche lorraine, which, according to Elizabeth David, is a simple mixture of eggs, bacon and cream in the thinnest of crusts.

They still ring true, these words below, a quotation from her Summer Cooking, written nearly fifty years ago, about simplicity, appropriateness and taking part, however temporarily, in the foreignness of life going on around one.

"In the summer there is also holiday cooking. That may well mean food cooked in an unfamiliar kitchen equipped, more than likely, in an impersonal and inadequate fashion by the owners of a house, holiday villa, or caravan hired out for the summer. For some, and the numbers are increasingly yearly, this temporary Paradise will be situated close to a Mediterranean shore. Food shopping will be done in a general store, or in some chaotic little market where the best produce will be sweet ripe tomatoes, mild onions, olives, and cheese of an undistinguished nature. The eggs, however, will be fresh and the bread authentic. Meals will be primitive - and, so long as one has learned to be adaptable and not to hanker for roast meat and steaks - entirely delicious because perfectly appropriate to the time, the place and the circumstances. There will be cheap coarse red wine to drink and the wise will follow the example of the local people, dilute the wine with ice and have a supply of bottled mineral water as an alternative."

Elizabeth David belonged to the same generation as Van Day Truex and Roderick Cameron, and in her writing subscribed to the same standards as they, or at least the standards I ascribe to them - suitability, simplicity and proportion.

Frequently Mrs David writes of her great friend, the writer Norman Douglas. He was seventy-two and she twenty-six when they met and their mutual admiration was immediate - teacher and pupil, master and disciple, friend and friend. He is someone to be looked at in a later post. In the meantime a quotation from her book An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

" 'For Liz. Farewell to Capri,' Norman wrote in the copy of Late Harvest which he gave me when I said goodbye to him on 25 August, 1951. For me it was not farewell to Capri. It was farewell to Norman. On a dark drizzling London day in February 1952 news came from Capri of Norman's death. When, in the summer of that year, I spent six weeks on the island all I could do for Norman was to take a pot of the basil which was his favourite herb to his grave in the cemetery on the hill-road leading down to the port. I went there only once. I had never shared Norman's rather melancholy taste for visiting churchyards. A more fitting place to remember him was in the lemon grove to be reached only by descending some three hundred steps from the Piazza.

"It was so thick, that lemon grove, that it concealed from all but those who knew their Capri well the old Archbishop's palace in which was housed yet another of those private taverns which appeared to materialize for Norman alone. There, at a table outside the half-ruined house, a branch of piercingly aromatic lemons hanging within arm's reach, a piece of bread and a bottle of the proprietor's olive oil in front of me, a glass of wine in my hand, Norman was speaking.

" 'I wish you would listen when I tell you that if you fill my glass before it's empty I shan't know how much I've drunk.'

"To this day I cannot bring myself to refill someone else's glass until it is empty. A sensible rule, on the whole, even if it does mean that sometimes a guest is obliged to sit for a moment or two with an empty glass, uncertain whether to ask for more wine or wait until it is offered.

"In the shade of the lemon grove I break off a hunch of bread, sprinkle it with the delicious fruity olive oil, empty my glass of sour Capri wine; and remember that Norman Douglas once wrote that whoever has helped us to a larger understanding is entitled to our gratitude for all time. Remember too that other saying of his, the one upon which all his life he acted, the one which does much to account for the uncommonly large number of men and women of all ages, classes and nationalities who took Norman Douglas to their hearts and will hold him there so long as they live. 'I like to taste my friends, not eat them' "

Appropriate, pagan, simple, loving, sacramental, that hunch of bread sprinkled with oil, swilled down with sour wine.

Photographs by James Mortimer to accompany text by Mirabel Cecil written in August 1993 for The World of Interiors.

Image of Summer Cooking, a Penguin Handbook, Penguin Books Ltd, 1974 (when I bought it).

Full circle

2011-03-04T19:24:00.003-05:00

Van Day Truex is a man I've never written about. I've quoted him, referred to him, quoted other people about him but I've not written about this essential link in my circles within circles. I intend to, I keep telling myself, knowing as I do that he was more than a decorator, artist and teacher - designing for Tiffany, Hinson, Minton and Wedgwood as he did - but Van Day Truex's history* has already been written.

It seems to me that as the world turns and time passes, the more individual his later rooms become and the harder they are for modern clients, decorators, and, in my case, students, to understand. The interiors of his that I admire the most, and I think many would agree, are not those of 1940s New York, but those in his last house at Ménerbes - simple, unpretentious, symmetrically arranged distillation of stone-floored and plaster-walled spaces furnished with rattan and wood, softened with linen, cotton and African art.

I have shown these later rooms in lectures to students as part of a history of interior design and the reaction almost without exception has been one of wonderment that I find significance in them - that they are set apart from the work of his colleagues. They are so beguiled by fad and fashion, it makes me wonder if I am wrong in how I try to portray the man and his work. As I see it, the younger generation is increasingly swayed by the deepening relationship of celebrity and marketing, where few standards beyond cute and famous are relevant. With the dissolution in modern design of many precepts Truex might have recognized, I should perhaps not be surprised to find myself and what I value increasingly off-topic.

Truex's influence is undoubted, as his place in the history of interior design, but it seems he is too far removed from this present generation for them to care - he died over thirty years ago - and there are many newer names jostling for position. Unlike David Hicks, Angelo Donghia, Geoffrey Bennison and Michael Taylor, there is little that exists to carry his name - unless Tiffany reissues his designs.

Truex's name is still well-known, more so than that of his friend Roderick Cameron, but I wonder to whom. Is it a generational phenomenon - the Olympians of one generation fade into legend and new kids on the block with their own idols take their place?

A while back I bought The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera because it contained an essay with photographs of Roderick Cameron's last house, Les Quatres Sources, in Provence. The book was produced in the middle 1980s and has all the choppy, scattered arrangement of a page characterized by small images, floods of negative space and muddy photographic reproduction - a style of design that has not stood the test of time. However, the quality of 1980s book design is not what this post is about.

"I was luckily on my own when I first visited this garden. I discovered the garden of Les Quatre Sources shrouded in the morning mist, my steps accompanied by the light-hearted rhythm of the overture of Don Giovanni, faultlessly whistled by the music-loving gardener. From the underwood covered with dew to the terraces soaked in the morning sun, along paved paths, and up hidden stairways, I had the feeling of I was discovering a new universe, where each planet sent out its own perfume, its own message or myth; wild mind, lavender, rushleaved broom, and dead leaves combined their fragrances. One should know the language of scents to understand this garden."

So wrote the author of his visit to Les Quatre Sources, and whilst there is much more that could be quoted about how Roderick Cameron and his lover Gilbert Ocelli created their garden - a garden so personal as to hold a memorial to Cameron's mother that read Enid, his beloved mother, Countess of Kenmare, one of the beauties of her time - and, as the following paragraph tells, the ashes of Van Day Truex.

"Higher up on the last terrace, an obelisk flanked by two urns, interrupts the perspective. Under the obelisk lie the ashes of of the friend who showed this place to Roderick Cameron. Roderick Cameron wanted his garden to be inhabited by all those most dear to him. Unfortunately, this master landscaper has since died. 'I wanted to create a romantic garden,' he had confided to me."

Roderick Cameron's ashes were scattered in the garden he created around Truex's obelisk. Where Gilbert Ocelli's ashes lie I have no idea.

So there, scattered in a garden in Provence, the ashes of the two lynchpins of my circle within circle theme, lie close by a memorial to the woman of whom her daughter writes: "Mummy and Rory both had the same quality of innocence. The dark spots of life were discarded and not allowed to intrude on their existence. They saw the world through a golden haze and if you were lucky enough to be part of their magic circle they took you through into that fairyland where life was always fun and always filled with beauty. The reverse simply wasn't tolerated, or perhaps noticed."

Quotation and photograph from The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera by Michel Racine, Ernest J-P Boursier-Mougenot and Françoise Binet. The MIT Press, 1987.

Photograph of Roderick Cameron and Van Day Truex in Ireland from *Van Day Truex, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, 2001.

Quotation about Roderick Cameron and his mother from A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney 2004.

Decorator or designer?

2011-03-03T12:45:00.002-05:00

Last week, in my post Il Gattopardo I made a remark about David Hicks to the effect that he "... was undoubtedly a snob, but in that he was no different from many a modern decorator or, as they frequently prefer to be called, designer - another step in the dance of status and branding."

There were comments, of course, and on reading them, it occurred to me that there might well be a confusion about the difference between a interior decorator and an interior designer or, even, that there is a difference. I tend to use the term decorator because I almost exclusively deal with residential design and would rather refer to myself as a decorator than a designer. Some decorators prefer to be known as designers and with that, personally, I have no problem for it is a matter of peceived status. But I will say that in many people's minds the two terms are interchangeable - yet there difference, and I would like to explain something of that difference.

Basically the situation is this: states regulate the professions that impact health, safety and welfare of the public and in twenty-six of those states interior design professionals are included in that regulation - they must be licensed to practice and the title of interior designer is specific to those individuals. The main path to licensing is long - a four-year bachelor's degree from an accredited interior design program, followed by an internship for a minimum number of years with a licensed practitioner before one can sit for the NCIDQ* examination. The point of professional regulation is to set a minimum level of competence required to safely practice a profession - in this case, that of an interior designer working predominantly in contract design. A decorator, on the other hand, suffers no such regulation in any state (I think).

The quotation below explains the difference between interior decorator and interior designer very clearly, if a little tendentiously. I have no disagreement with the definition of what an interior designer does but I have reservations about the explanation of what a decorator does. However, those reservations could consume many an hour and I shall spare you that. I wonder, though, if you decorators recognize yourselves in the quotation. Italics are mine.

"Interior design is the art and science of understanding people’s behavior to create functional spaces within a structure. Decoration is the furnishing or adorning of a space with fashionable or beautiful things. Interior designers may provide interior decorating services, but decorators are not qualified to provide interior design services.

"One primary difference between the two professions is that interior designers are responsible for the elements that affect the public’s health, safety and welfare. For example, an interior designer can evaluate wall finishes based on durability, acoustic properties, cleanability, flame retardancy, allergens, toxicity and off-gassing properties. An interior decorator can evaluate finishes based only on color, style and texture."

There is absolutely no connection between the paragraphs above and these photographs of the ravishing Gallery of Mirrors in the Palazzo Gangi - the room where, as I mentioned previously, Luchino Visconti filmed the ball scene from his movie, The Leopard. I simply find the room one the most beautiful and atmospheric I've ever seen. A room redolent of warm winds and roses, candlelight and perfume, silk and damask, coruscation and lambency, blushing and fading, black-eyed men and etiolated chaperones - the one louche and vigilant of honor, wives, mistresses and daughters; the other spiteful, fans atremble with scandal and malice.

First two photographs by Joel Laiter to accompany text by Lydia Fasoli. From The World of Interiors, October, 2002.

The last is by Marc Walter. From the book Private Splendor: Great Families at Home, Alexis Gregory and Marc Walter, The Vendome Press, 2006.

Il Gattopardo

2011-02-18T20:44:00.001-05:00

This brooch from 1957 - a contemplative, if not downright melancholic leopard of gold, platinum, rubies, diamonds, emeralds and pearl - is a beautiful thing and has the simplest of connections with this post - Fulco di Verdura was the cousin of Giuseppe Tomas di Lampedusa, author of Il Gattopardo or, as it is called in English, The Leopard. The eponymous movie, from 1963 and starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, was made by Luchino Visconti, a friend of Verdura's since the 1920s in Paris.

I have not read the English translation of The Leopard and being still at the come si dice stage in Italian 101 it'll be a while before I get to read it in Italian - if ever.

When we were in Italy at Christmas, it quickly became evident that to really understand what was going on around us, some fluency in the language was necessary. I'm not talking about the allegation that tourists in Venice pay more in restaurants than do residents, or that one takes on trust the English translations in churches and museums - more that, without a real knowledge of language, one only skims the surface of a culture - never actually experiencing it, beyond commerce, at all. Yet skimming the surface may only be what is required if the destination is yet the latest of a long list of trophy places to be brayed about across dinner tables in the fashionable restaurants.

While on the subject of fashionable restaurants - last night we ate with friends and new acquaintance at Atlanta's latest offering, where to my amusement the waiter as part of his spiel about the chef's sourcing of ingredients locally, the rampant popularity of certain dishes... at this point I switched off and read the menu where there was nothing overly attractive except for fois gras with strawberry conserve. I've mentioned before, I think, that I find fois gras irresistible, but yesterday I discovered I don't really like it with sliced strawberries and dry rusk-like toasted brioche. It truly has become a culinary cliche, this fois gras with fruit, and when the combination is a stretch, or not even well-done, it falls flat on its gras little face.

What brought me back to my manners, the company and the waiter was his reference to an item on the menu as "my personal favorite..." clearly, he hoped, the most persuasive of all accolades. Now, I realize I live in a democracy and if I am to retain some semblance of civilization, the delusion that we are all equal has to be maintained. But, call me a snob if you must, I really don't care what a total stranger's personal preferences are, at table or anywhere else, for that matter. What I do care about is that someone, whether I like them or not, stranger or not, isn't humiliated - so, in the case of the waiter, though a retort was on the tip of my tongue, I kept quiet and sipped the sweetest, and possibly the worst, Manhattan I've ever had. Of course, the waiter was only doing what he hoped was the best interpretation of instructions from the manager and I as a customer was doing the best I could to play the game. But, I suppose, it's all part of the disneyfication of eating out and what a pity it is.

Last week I quoted a remark, snobbish, delicious and apt, that Fulco di Verdura made about David Hicks; and maybe Hicks was humiliated by what was meant to be a skewering of his pretensions, yet Hicks was undoubtedly a snob. You might say, if you were being polite, he had standards. Standards, and by that I mean accent, culture, and manners, are not normally innate - and here I am really stating the obvious - they are acquired. Upbringing is but a starting point, for beyond that we make the acquaintance of those from whom we continue to learn - those useful connections and introductions into circles previously beyond our ken or reach. In Hicks's case, and in relation to my posts of the last few months, it was Roderick Cameron, Wright Ludington, et al, from whom he absorbed, but did not necessarily copy, perhaps even had confirmed, other standards and taste. A chameleon-like aspect of character must never be ruled out when it comes to social climbing but it behooves one to remember the old saw about people in glass houses.

As I remark above, David Hicks, in my opinion one of the most significant decorators of the 20th century, was undoubtedly a snob, but in that he was no different from many a modern decorator or, as they frequently prefer to be called, designer - another step in the dance of status and branding. Arguably, if being a snob is part of your brand and you profit from it who's to say that it is wrong? Which of us is free of pretension - or snobbery for that matter?

Photograph of the leopard brooch by David Behl/© Verdura from Verdura: The Life and Work of a Master Jeweler, Harry N Abrams, New York 2002.

Photograph of the Gallery of Mirrors of the Palazzo Gangi at Palermo, the setting for the ballroom scene in Visconti's movie, is by Marc Walter. From the book Private Splendor: Great Families at Home, Alexis Gregory and Marc Walter, The Vendome Press, 2006.

St Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T00:13:00.001-05:00

Because it's been over thirty years ....

Platinum and diamond butterflies on a 61-carat aquamarine brooch by Fulco di Verdura, 1969.
Photograph by David Behl/© Verdura, from Verdura: The Life and Work of a Master Jeweler, Patricia Corbett, Harry N Abrams, 2002.

A connection and a laugh

2011-02-08T16:56:00.002-05:00

The loan of a book, timely as it turned out, from a friend brings me, not quite full circle, but certainly back to the South of France, Roderick Cameron, La Fiorentina and that raft of men who at various times, whether by choice or duress, inhabited that ancient part of the Mediterranean coast and its hinterland.

Fulco di Verdura, though he flits through style icon hagiography, and Billy Baldwin's autobiography, has never really impinged too much on my consciousness. Of course, I knew he designed jewelry but not being fascinated by that particular form of quincaillerie, I wasn't all that curious about him. That is no longer so, for besides my liking for his "Night and Day" cufflinks, Verdura is a link in circles within circles - he knew Roderick Cameron, in whose house - almost a clearing house of talented gay men it seems to me - he met Tom Parr who had partnered with David Hicks who knew Wright Ludington and Hermes, Messenger of the Gods, employed Mark Hampton, and decorated Roderick Cameron's Le Clos Fiorentina for Sao Schlumberger, a house that eventually came to be owned by Hubert de Givenchy, the great friend of Walter Lees, who appears in one of Nancy Mitford's books, through whom I was introduced to Lord Mullion, and who was a confidant of the Windsors who were, in their turn, chums of the Mosleys, and knew Billy Baldwin's great friend, Van Day Truex at whose house in Menerbes Billy MacCarty was photographed in the years before he met Douglas Cooper at Henry McIlhenny's house in Philadelphia - a house in which hung a portrait of the Comtesse de Tournon through whom I came to learn of Alexander Baillie and Jørgen von Capellen Knudtzon. James Lees-Milne very likely wrote about many of them - except perhaps for Arthur Smith, Andrew Crispo, Joe Cable, Ruben de Saavedra, William Gaylord, and Kalef Alaton.

"He spent most of his time in London, however, in the city in which Tom Parr, whom he met in 1954 at Lady Kenmare's Villa Fiorentina on the Riviera, lived and worked. Tom had just set up an interior design decorating business with David Hicks, which he soon left for Colefax and Fowler, where he was president until his retirement in 1995. Their relationship was to last until Verdura's death, when Tom took his ashes back to Sicily. It was also in London that, as he was leaving a dinner given by Daisy Fellowes in Belgrave Square, he suffered a serious road accident that was gradually to erode his health. In the 1950s, Verdura started to paint, thereby returning to a youthful passion. Caricatures of his friends were his forte, along with humorous miniatures. It was this light wit, ever present in his conversation and his creations, that encapsulated the charm of the man who himself embodied all that the Old World could bring to the New: a name sonorous with history, immense knowledge, education, and natural chic."

I found a lovely quote in Patricia Corbett's excellent book about Verdura's life and work - the ideal thing to end a post about connections, and it made me laugh.

"Hearing that the daughter of David Hicks and Pamela Mountbatten had been christened India, he suggested helpfully that the next child might be called 'Suburbia, after the father's side.'"

Photographs of Tom Parr's house by James Mortimer to accompany text by Min Hogg for The World of Interiors, February 1988.

Quotation from Cafe Society: Socialites, Patrons, and Artists 1920 to 1960, Thierry Coudert, Flammarion, Paris 2010.

Quotation about David Hicks from Verdura: The Life and Work of a Master Jeweler, Patricia Corbett, Harry N Abrams, 2002.

Ils dansent mais ils ne marchent pas

2011-01-30T15:19:00.002-05:00

In the words of a recent correspondent but apropos something else, ils dansent mais ils ne marchent pas

It's been good interlude, but it's time to begin again with connections and circles within circles.

I ain't doin' it, Robbie!

2011-01-25T15:25:00.030-05:00

Last week, Lindaraxa was kind enough to give me the Stylish Blogger Award. I was touched, of course, flattered certainly, and in a private email I thanked this near neighbour, but, actually, I was at a loss as to what to write about myself that is not already known. Twice before I been awarded something similar - the first time I compiled a list of things about me that might be of interest and the second I'd written about books that I was reading. Besides I felt my blog posts are threaded through with aspects of my character and my life - how could this occasional diary of opinion, history and derring-do be anything else?

For a while I've toyed with the idea of writing about a dinner party I'd like to give for fellow bloggers - and today, January 25th - Robert Burns' birthday - gives me the ideal opportunity to give a dinner party and throw the rules of the CBA out of the window with the haggis, as it were. While on the subject of Haggis, the so-called national dish of Scotland, let me say that I ain't doin' it - at least, not in the way it has been presented to me at past Burns Night Suppers. A sheep's belly stuffed with offal, oatmeal and spices, might be explained away as a large sausage, and here I must say I really do like the Haggis, but presenting it , whether followed to the table by a kilted piper or not, in all its steamingly inflated, grey bagginess, to the delicate sensibilities of my American guests does not bear thinking about.

The Celt, as you know, is Scottish, thus this Burns Night Supper is heavily influenced by his tastes but very definitely modified by mine!

The Burns Night Supper in The Blue Remembered Hills

The first course, caramelized fois gras on pain d'epices and Scottish smoked salmon sandwiches, tiny triangular morsels, would accompany cocktails in the living room. Champagne will be on hand, naturally, but my choice would be a Manhattan made with Talisker whisky, that lovely smokey distillation from the Isle of Skye. I'm not sure there's a Scots version of the Negroni, the cocktail likely to be the Celt's choice.

Then to table where the Selkirk Grace would be spoken.

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae let the Lord be thankit

Haggis has to be the star of this evening's meal - a meal taken at a table dressed to the nines with linen, silver and crystal - and very difficult it is to make it so given its aforementioned unprepossessing appearance but I'd probably have the Haggis taken out of its bag and baked in a thin hot-water crust, very like a Melton Mowbray pork pie, and served with the obligatory bashed tatties and neeps. Lor' help me, but I must tell you that despite my liking of Haggis, I find the combination with mashed potatoes and mashed rutabaga totally tedious. Nonetheless, its the traditional combination.

What to drink with Haggis? In our house, it probably would be a shiraz but whisky should always be within reach for any toasts that will surely be made - the Address to the Haggis (that great chieftain o' the puddin' race), and the toasts to the Lassies and the Laddies.

Dessert in our house is always the most discussed part of any dinner party and frequently the only possible option according to the Celt is trifle - a pudding, in the Brit sense of the word, he deems suitable for any meal, any occasion and any dinner guest. There are more traditional Scottish desserts, perhaps, but trifle defeats Cranachan every time. Trifle, not quite the bagetelle the name suggests, is much beloved in all its forms but has over the years distilled into one particular version for which one needs first the prettiest, deepest crystal bowl, in which sugary lady finger cookies, gobbets of apricot jam and amaretti, piled layer upon layer and soaked in sherry and brandy - not for us the delicate sprinkling from a spoon, more the upending of both bottles until the trifle base sings softly to itself - and followed by lightly sweetened cooked apples topped by home-made vanilla custard that itself is covered in deep billows of whipped cream. Drambuie with the dessert is possible, though I would have it brought to the living room with coffee.

As I said last time I was awarded something similar, if you're on my blogroll you can be assured I'd like to see you at my dining table. If you comment frequently, either as a fellow blogger, or as commenator - The Ancient, Home Before Dark, Bruce, et al, or write to me privately as does the Gentleman in Washington, I'd also love to see you at table.

My guest list

The Down East Dilettante
Treasure Hunt
Reggie Darling
VoiceTalk
ArchitectDesign
Rurritable
A Devoted Classicist
Architectural Tourist

If you are not on this list it simply means you will be at the table next time. If I thought I might have got away with a Burns Night cocktail party then the guest list would have looked much different - thirty-seven bloggers plus commentators. What a time we could have had!

Antica formula

2011-01-18T21:50:00.005-05:00

Perhaps I was tired after a long morning at the Uffizi Gallery and the train journey from Florence, but Venice did not immediately appeal - it seemed crowded and cold - both of which it was, of course, but in that not an exception. Rome had been cold, wet, incomparable but exhausting. Florence, colder than Rome, comfortably walkable and a delight. Venice, thus, had a lot to live up to and at first glance, candidly, it did not. Odd, though, considering we'd walked out of the Venezia Santa Lucia right onto the vaporetto and taxi dock and there spread out before us at the beginning of the Grand Canal was Venice in all its colorful, crumbling variety under a blue metalled sky.

However, after a taxi ride the length of the Grand Canal and, not an hour later, a shivery stroll from our hotel - a converted Gothic convent, next to the Santa Maria della Salute, that great Baroque thanksgiving for deliverance from the plague epidemic of 1630, standing sentinel at the mouth of the Grand Canal - past the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, towards the Accademia Bridge and over to St Marks Square, where the Basilica in all its Byzantine splendor, the brick and stone campanile, and the Doges' great gothic pink and white palace glowing in the westering sun lightened the mood as feet, nonetheless, got heavier and the wind off the water, sapping what strength remained, finally sent us to Caffè Florian where a pot of hot chocolate, a glass of wine, two tramezzini, and a few bemused glances outside to the frigid square were all it took to comfort both body and spirit - and bring the city of Venice into beautiful focus.

Light, by turns clear, shrouded, enveloping, transporting, mercurial, is one of the aspects of Venice that has made it a subject of paintings for centuries. A cliché, I know, but it's obvious the omniprescence of water that makes the light, even the lack of it, what it is. In twilight we walked back over the Accademia Bridge, to the hotel bar for a Manhattan, this time alas without the antica formula vermouth I'd been introduced to in Rome, and for the Celt, a Negroni. Hotel bars, like hotel lobbies and buses in New York City, are perfect places for sharing sometimes surprisingly personal anecdotes and experiences, practicing second or even third languages, tricking, comparing notes, taking advice, or just sitting by the window watching reflections dance on the water as the world sails by.

That evening, after sprucing up in our gold-leafed bathroom (floor, ceiling, walls and shower stall all covered in squares of gold leaf behind sheets of glass) we strolled alongside narrow canals, by empty market places, through cramped, ill-lit alleys and on over small squares, to dinner. Dramatic after dark, Venice is one pool of light after another, mostly given over to an amusingly noir chiaroscuro, yet the city is unthreatening and happily friendly. The crowds being mostly absent, walking is easier at night - wandering under a starry sky over the innumerable small narrow bridges, with the help of an iPhone, Google Maps, and the frequent hand-lettered signs pointing towards San Marco, Rialto, Accademia, and Santa Croce, is one of the best of things.

The Celt took the photographs mostly with his iPhone.

It almost slipped by

2011-01-13T17:18:00.003-05:00

without me noticing, that yesterday was the second anniversary of The Blue Remembered Hills.

I'd like to thank everyone who reads this blog; everyone who has commented and contributed and made the last two years a joy. As I said recently, it's the discourse that makes The Blue Remembered Hills what it is, and I'm grateful for it.

Thank you.

Photograph, copyright the Celt, of Borromini's wonderful helicoidal staircase at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Onward and upward!

A feast

2011-01-12T20:24:00.001-05:00

Having once been fooled or, rather, been naive enough to believe reviews on TripAdvisor, I've become leery about hotel and restaurant recommendations - except in person, that is. Let me say, before I continue, that only once did I feel we ate badly in Italy and that probably was because we were too tired after a night flight and a walk around Rome to take a taxi on a wet night to a recommended restaurant. We stayed in the neighborhood of the hotel and ate, not actually badly, but certainly gracelessly in a room reserved, it appeared, for tourists who did not speak Italian. And therein, not speaking the language of the country one visits, lies the essence of the problem.

Assuming, as I must, that you and I are of like mind, let me say that we all have a list of places we want to visit; the architectural icons, repositories of history and culture, that frequently play a role as signifiers of quality in advertising, serve as identifiers of location in movies and television drama - for which film star has not been involved in a car-chase by the Ponte Vecchio, the Duomo, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, Houses of Parliament, depending on the need for local color in what are increasingly homogeneous cityscapes?

In most cases, modern guide books and travel magazines serve us well, but my skepticism is awakened when I read recommendations especially of those secret, known-only-to-the-writer, small off-the-beaten-path restaurants serving gobsmacking food from a kitchen the size of a closet, furnished with a miniscule stove and staffed by a man who learned to cook at at the knee of nonna - a woman who used no recognizable means of measuring - and whose wine is always local if not from his own vineyard. The world is too small for this or that best kept secret and probably if somewhere has been unknown for so long there is a good reason. Anyway, best kept secret really just means now being marketed.

Of course, it's the language of persuasion: the use of superlatives; the implication that if one goes to these places; is able to get a reservation; eats this ineffable food, one becomes a member of a select band of great refinement, and, latterly, is able to have yet another set of photographs for Facebook.

But what of food - that purely late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century reason for being a tourist? Before this vacation, our experience of Italian was limited. Not that we subscribe to the tomato-saturated pasta, greasy garlic bread and overdressed salad - staples of chain restaurants that rely heavily on family and friendship in creating their image. No, we are blessed with two, to my mind, excellent Italian restaurant restaurants here in Atlanta, which coincidentally are my favorite places to dine.

Last Friday, not a week after we came home, we ate at one of them and during that meal mulled over what I had eaten in Italy compared with what was on the plate before me. In one of the two local restaurants, Pricci, I usually eat fettucini alfredo with a dusting of nutmeg and, in the other, Veni Vedi Vici, spinach gnocchi with gorgonzola, speck and cream. I worked out a long time ago - and I recognize this might be considered picky eating or even a lack of curiosity - that when you find a dish to your taste, stick with it: a situation that cannot obtain in a city unknown to one, and nor should it. If either fettucini alfredo or gnocchi were on the menus in Rome, Florence and Venice, I have no recollection, for we were at pains to eat local, as it were.

On the subject of breakfasts, let me say that they were of superb quality, varied, and more than ample. Coffee, for that is my choice at breakfast, was of two sorts - the delicious smear of dark brown liquid with crema, or what is known, tragically in my opinion, as caffè Americano - the Italian version of the swill available in any gas station or restaurant in this country. What a pity that such a thin, stewed, brown liquid should be called American!

In Florence we ate very well, as we did in Rome and Venice. Breakfast at the Hotel Savoy was perfect and sufficient to keep us going through long cold days of walking until late afternoon when a chilled Manhattan served with aperitivi - delicious tapas-like snacks that accompany every drink - sustained us for our walk to dinner.

When we arrived at La Pentola d'Oro, we were shown to a basement room of white-clothed tables. We asked instead to sit upstairs in the main room by the door, on wooden stools at bare tables where it seemed to me, locals - and so it proved - were more likely to eat. Pappardelle alla lepre, wide noodles in hare sauce, were perfect for the Celt and surprisingly good to me. But, oddly, I'm not sure what I ate though I clearly remember telling the waitress, and meaning it, that it was one of the best things I'd ever eaten. I suspect what I ate was il pepos del Brunelleschi, beef in red wine, but mostly I remember the smiling face of a young baby lying quietly by her parents and who seemed to be so happy to see me.

Cibrèo, highly recommended, was disconcerting at first and my heart sank when we were told that someone would come to the table and explain what that evening's menu was. Perhaps Cibrèo is aimed at tourists, as I surely felt it was, but it turned out it didn't mean the food was unconsidered or the experience poor. In fact it was excellent. After the manager sat at our table and explained in perfect English that the restaurant specialized in game - the mention of roast pigeon made the Celt's eyes light up - I had the distinct feeling I was in the wrong place. The Celt, indeed, chose roast pigeon stuffed with fruits in mustard (marvelous combination) whereas I went for what I thought was a fish stew. Fish it was, if squid are fish, and stew it was if squid cooked slowly with spinach for hours make it a stew. What arrived at my side of the table was unprepossessing - a bowlful of dark green sludge that at first I couldn't even consider dipping a fork into it. I tried it, declared I was unable to eat it. The Celt, who had just begun dissecting the pigeon with all the delicacy of a surgeon, murmured sympathetically, and I being the big boy I am, speared a tiny amount on the tip of one tine, then another and another and another until, three or four minutes after announcing I couldn't possibly eat this damned muck, I was wolfing it down.

Walk we did, as in Rome, seemingly all over the city, but really within quite a small area, for the centro storico of Florence is not big. Brunelleschi's Pazzi chapel, part of the church of Santa Croce, where Michaelangelo, Galileo, and Ghiberti are buried, and the ruined Cimabue crucifix hangs, is a beautiful and subtle feast for the eyes - its interior as empty and as beautiful as the grey skies above it. The chapel, it struck me as I shivered my way around it, does not have the grand scale some textbook photographs have implied. It also occurred to me that as a tourist one needs balmier days and more supportive shoes if one is to do the job properly.

The perfect pre-prandial to get used to the idea of getting out in the cold again. With the aperitivi.

A fellow guest. Probably not a local.

Photo of the Basilica di Santa Croce from here. All other photos by the Celt.

If, by chance,

2011-01-08T17:20:00.004-05:00

you had a map of Rome to hand, and if you had the inclination, you could see quite how far we walked that day, the wettest of Christmas Days: from our hotel atop of the Pincian Hill, by the Villa Borghese, to the peak of the Janiculum and down the other flank. Easily written, those few words - from the top on one hill to the top of another but, as I say, if you had a map ...

That morning, rather than take the Spanish Steps, we turned left and descended the hill along the Via Veneto, one of the main characters in La Dolce Vita, to the Piazza Barbarini with its Fountain of the Triton. There's a thrill to walking in a city that makes itself known in great baroque crescendos - and there are many such amid the slow marching bands of tourists like, and yet very unlike, yourselves - when passing by the small, closed-for-the-day shops selling pork, fowl, pasta, each with its wares neatly covered in sheets of white paper, a corner is turned and there, its pool rimmed by camera-wielding barbarian paparazzi, stands the diva of all fountains, the Trevi, reduced to being a mere backdrop to photographs of proudly smiling children, wives, husbands, boyfriends, et al. That there might be a place reserved in hell, it seems to me, for the inventor of the phone camera - not mine, you understand, just everyone else's - appealed at that moment to my sense of justice.

From there, over the cobblestones, surely the most cruel surface for tired feet, via the monstrous Victor Emmanuel II monument, to the the Forum where, wielding umbrellas, we walked its sodden paths towards the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine and, eventually, rounding the Palatine Hill with the Circus Maximus to our left we headed off in search of Bramante's Tempietto. We passed the beautiful sixth-century church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, with its simple twelfth-century Romanesque campanile bell tower and portico, reading too late that the crowds in the portico were there likely not for a service but for the Bocca della Verità in which, famously, Gregory Peck did not lose his hand whilst losing his head to Audrey Hepburn, yet with the Temple of Hercules, its neighbor the temple of Fortuna Virile and the remnant of the Theatre of Marcellus in view, it was hard to notice anything else - even the traffic swirling around the puddled lawn where they stood.

Across the Tiber, swift, swollen, and snuff-colored, to the tiny Isola Tiberina with its church and orphanage, then the Cestio Bridge, to Trastevere where we began what became a gruelingly wet climb towards the summit of the Janiculum hill.

Coffee in, coffee out is a phrase that always brings to mind the mother of an old friend who made the Celt and me as much part of her extended Jewish family as her own children - at least, because of her warmth and pleasure at seeing us, that's how it felt. Well, coffee in it was on a cold, dripping cafe terrace, and coffee out in the tiniest of toilets and the first where I noticed what became an Italian phenomenon, a toilet pot without a seat - not that one could have sat if one tried.

There are moments in Rome when the past, not intrusively, is as real as the day. Walking across the square towards the twelfth-century basilica, Santa Maria in Trastevere, we entered to find the nave flanked with spolia columns, and filled with tables at which sat much of the local community lunching, glumly it seemed to me, and listening to a much-applauded ancient priest, a cardinal I think, propped upright by a younger co-worker. An event as old as the church, perhaps, with deep roots in the community - no echo this of Saturnalia with its licensed overturning of social order but more a confirmation, Janus-like, that so it once was, so shall it be.

The facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere is covered with or, rather, built of spolia - irregular blocks of stone with fragmentary inscriptions - an absolute delight of Roman lettering which since I came home has led me to Nicolete Gray's A History of Lettering on my bookshelves.

Taking a short flight of steps we began the climb up the Janiculum Hill to find the Tempietto which, on reaching the plateau with its Baroque fountain-termination of an aqueduct built by the emperor Trajan, and the Garibaldi memorial, was not to be found and indeed was not mentioned by a single sign. We did find it, eventually, as we turned from the view of Rome beneath us - a column or two, part of the drum, just visible behind a narrow, locked iron-gated entrance to the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio. We had to kneel to photograph the little temple and no bad thing, perhaps, on Christmas Day, to kneel at the place where St Peter was crucified. I wish that gate had been unlocked, but I had seen, however imperfectly, one of the two Roman buildings, each separated by fifteen hundred years and many a sodden kilometer, I'd looked forward to visiting.

Back down the hill we went, past the Villa Farnesini and on over the Tiber, back through the Piazza Navone and the Via della Scrofa to the Spanish Steps, and up to the hotel and a long, hot soak, and a deep, chilled Manhattan.

That evening, Christmas night, we ate an excellent dinner, accompanied by a seagull on the window ledge near our table - an enormous bird watching all that went on in the restaurant and waiting to be fed under the barely-opened window - at the Hassler Villa Medici hotel. The view from the restaurant out over the city to the Basilica was magnificent, especially when viewed while eating the most surprising item on the menu, Christmas pudding!

Photograph of Santa Maria in Trastevere from here. Cannot think why we did not photograph it ourselves. All other photographs by the Celt!

The ancient world, pink fur cuffs, rain and writing

2011-01-04T21:57:00.004-05:00

Rose and I discussed it on Saturday over tea in the National Portrait Gallery's Portrait Restaurant, this sometime inability to write anything of satisfaction. The view, by the way, from the restaurant, out over Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall past Lutyens' Cenotaph, Horse Guards Parade, and Inigo Jones' Banqueting Hall where King Charles lost his head after Rubens painted the ceiling, to the clock tower, usually and quite wrongly called Big Ben, at the Palace of Westminster, is pretty grand but not dramatic enough to detract from the conversation-stopping tower of sandwiches, cakes, scones, creme brulee, clotted cream and jams, delivered to the table for the delectation of the Celt and the lady, our blind date, dressed in the finest of navy blue bracketed with pink fur cuffs. I nibbled a crumb or two whilst the three of us got to be very comfortable at the table in front of the window - I'd like to say a window streaming with the setting sun but actually is was just rain.

It seems the Celt and I cannot walk by St James's Park without it beginning to rain. There had been a New Year's Day parade that day in central London so our taxi driver, unable to take us near the National Portrait Gallery, dropped us at the end of Downing Street and we scurried in increasingly heavier rain, eventually squelching our way around the Thomas Lawrence exhibition - an agreeably sized presentation of brilliantly alive portraits of the Regency period.

Rain it did too, the day we arrived in Rome - a day earlier than planned because of Heathrow being snowed under, and the day we began the first of our walks around Rome - solidly and torrentially, so heavily in fact that Bernini's great Tuscan colonnade at St Peter's Basilica, sheltering many a dripping tourist, leaked like a sieve. The ellipse in front of the Basilica, centered with a Nativity ensemble at the foot of the obelisk and furred with rain held a long, huddled line of umbrellas shambling its way to the entrance at the foot of the steps, dwarfed both by the basilica and the downpour.

We turned around, umbrella aloft, leaving to another day the path across the piazza to join the queue, and walked back past the Castel Sant'Angelo, talking about the Corridor, that papal escape route to what had been Hadrian's mausoleum, as we crossed the Tiber between Bernini's angels – each holding a symbol of Christ's agony – on eventually to the Piazza Navone with its Christmas market, finally coming to the Broken Boat fountain where we took the Spanish Steps up to the Pincian Hill and our hotel.

So, this occasional inability to write is a merely a symptom, it seems, of the process of discovering, a finding of the one drop in the rain of ideas that could become a river - what one really wants to write about, but rarely that which brings one to the keyboard - in my case, at least.

Silenus and the baby Bacchus, a sculpture I saw on St Stephen's Day in the Vatican Museum, took my breath away - such an unexpected version of the parent and child, the grouping that predates the midwinter festival celebrating the birth of a child. That so much beauty remains from the ancient world took me by surprise and that definitely is a tale for another day - a rainy day, perhaps.

Auguri!

2010-12-31T17:59:00.001-05:00

At the end of the year what a wonderful treat it is to be in this marvellous city on the final day of our Grand Tour. I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who has read The Blue Remembered Hills this year; everyone who has commented (because it's the discourse that makes this blog what it is); and finally all those other fascinating bloggers who are my must-read list. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and see you again in 2011.

God rest you merry, Gentlemen

2010-12-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

Let nothing you dismay

Photograph by Evelyn Hofer, House and Garden December, 1983.

Connections

2010-12-18T17:02:00.002-05:00

"Here he amassed his immense art library, paintings and drawings and such memorabilia of Picasso, a close friend and neighbor. Here he drew around him that circle of painters who shed a special luster over the first half of this century, so that their work - which he began acquiring around 1928, in his ambulatory years between London, Paris and Berlin - became less collector's trophies than records of personal relationships. 'The Chateau de Castille was a noble house, and people came there, and I was able to ennoble it,' says Douglas Cooper, describing the legendary Picasso wall, which ran the length of open loggia used as a summer dining room. Its concrete surface was ornamented with five 1962-63 drawings by Picasso, projected by magic lantern, traced and then sandblasted - the lines being created by black basalt chips embedded in the grout. The subjects, which were specially chosen by the artist, had a personal meaning and relevance for him.

"Abandoning a life of such dimension for the restrictions of an apartment might appear daunting. It is certainly surprising to find this profoundly cultivated, yet rumbustious force de la nature among the high rises of the principality of Monaco. 'It was a question of timing,' he says. 'You know, about ten years ago I did manage to foresee the problems of inflation, taxation and staff shortages closing around. Besides, when you have created something, and perfected it, it's time to move on. Life is a cyclic affair. Most of those who came to the chateau had died. Can you see me stagnating among the bourgeosie in the small town of Nîmes?'"

Cooper's life at Chateau de Castille is not really of any interest here, except as another step in my theme of connections because two more associations are made. After John Richardson - Cooper's companion at Chateau de Castille, who had yet to write Picasso's biography - left Cooper to work at Christie's, New York, Cooper met William McCarty, the man who became his lover, adopted son and heir, at the Rittenhouse Square house of Henry McIlhenny.

The chateau itself is of interest, not really for its architecture or age, but for the designer to the owners after Cooper, an émigré American, Dick Dumas. Dumas, a name not I think much known this side of the Atlantic, but one I'd first heard of twenty-five years ago at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in Provence. In a sense, thus, with Dumas I've come full circle, or at least so it appears.

Dick Dumas, born in Bryn Mawr, spent his teenage years in Detroit, joined the navy during the Second World War, had bit parts in Hollywood movies, married, divorced, worked for Charles James, had his own label, moved to Paris from New York, and eventually bought what became his fourth house in France, a former café, in Oppède-le-Vieux, a town not four miles from Ménerbes, where not only Roderick Cameron, but Peter Mayle, the author of A Year in Provence, also lived.

Dumas' provençal interiors typify, in my estimation, what may be thought of as expatriate interior decoration, beguiled by the sun, bedeviled by the wind, light-toned, pretty, comfortable, bucolic but not churlish - in fact, simply a one-sided conversation with the spirit of the place, and of little significance beyond that.

What is of significance for me is that as the end of the year draws near, I feel the need to reiterate, but not draw a line around, my themes of the last few months. I began thinking about my theme, to which I have only recently given a name - circles within circles - with this post on Billy Gaylord. He was not the first of what a friend has called my "dead decorators" series; but something written by an anonymous commenter, who has subsequently became a dear friend, made me see Gaylord, this man who died of cancer when forty years old, as perhaps emblematic of a theory, the structure of which I had not yet perceived.

The history of 20th century interior design has, in my opinion, been skewed by two major tendencies: the first, the predilection for beatifying celebrities to the frequent exclusion of quality, originality and what the ancient Greeks believed be the three components of beauty: symmetry, proportion and harmony; the second, the growing ignorance about those men who died during the last two decades of the 20th century, frequently of AIDS.

I use the word men in the last sentence quite consciously. For various reasons, I have limited myself to writing about men, not all of whom were gay. Yet there was such a preponderance of gay men who died during the 1980s and 1990s that it could be argued that the history of 20th century interior decoration is gay history - a theme to be investigated in the new year.

I cannot tell you the name of the photographer for these images as the page where his or her name would have been was cut from the magazine before I acquired it. If someone can tell me I would be grateful.

The text they accompany and from which I have drawn notes was written by Dodie Kazanjian for HG, January 1989 - that much was in the table of contents.

Sugar bag blues

2010-12-15T18:23:00.003-05:00

Dominique Browning's post today reminded me that for various reasons I had neither completed nor posted this draft I began weeks ago. One day, it being time to begin the annual fruit cake making ritual - an observance much followed in this house, for a Dundee cake with its preponderance of currants over raisins (etymology of currant: Corinth - currants were once known as raisins of Corinth) topped with concentric rings of almonds is a much appreciated accompaniment to the Celt's afternoon cup of tea - I went looking for bulk-buy dried fruit.

What I found, however, was that in the so-called bulk-buy section, my local foodie-foods supermarket's pride in its much-touted organic mission had been subsumed under a welter of small plastic packaging. The more the mission was touted, it seemed to me, the more plastic there was and bulk-buying had been reduced to small plastic packages of a few ounces.

I've been worried for a while about the increasingly larger role plastic packaging plays in my life. I find it virtually impossible to buy food previously packed in glass not packed or shipped in plastic. Even many of the corks of the wine I buy, and I admit it is not that grand a wine, are plastic and seemingly becoming the norm.

It is not just nostalgia that makes me remember the food retailing during my youth - the local, within-walking-distance, butcher, baker, greengrocer, grocer, and I might as well say it, chip shop. My grandmother always kept a separate shopping bag - cloth, homemade and washable, if I remember well - for potatoes which were not today's perfectly washed and processed specimens and usually came with the black earth clinging to the skins. Other vegetables, carrots and parsnips went straight from the weigh-scale to another cloth bag without being wrapped. Brussels sprouts required a paper bag, usually brown. Summer tomatoes (not a redundancy, that word summer, for there were no tomatoes except for a few short weeks in summer) were bagged in paper after weighing and soft fruits came, magically to this child, in mini wooden crates, or punnets we called them. Bread, baked behind the shop, as were the pies, both sweet and savory, was wrapped in paper when sold. Delicate cakes, individual pies - pork, Scotch, nutmeg sprinkled custard, bilberry, and apple and, in season, mince pies, jam sponges, fancies, fairy cakes, Battenbergs, and meringues, were placed carefully, reverently even, in thin card lidded boxes, for they were an expensive and much-planned-for treat to a cotton worker working, as she would have said, "all the hours God sends." Sugar, and this really is years ago, came ready packed in blue paper bags. Milk was, and still is in some parts of Britain, delivered in glass bottles to the doorstep each day, meat from the butcher - and he was a real butcher - was wrapped in "grease-proof" paper, as was cheese, usually locally-made Crumbly or Tasty Lancashire - the best cheese you'll ever find for Welsh Rarebits or to be eaten with a slice of well-fed and matured fruitcake. Crumbly described the soft granularity of the immature cheese and Tasty the sharpness of the firmer matured variety. Of course there was canned food, tinned as we would have said, and the odd thing is, despite finding most not worth her notice, my grandmother bought cream and fruit in a tin.

There was a brief period that Lancashire cheese, much to my delight, was available at the cheese counter, but the problem was, I understood, when eventually it disappeared, it quickly molded under its plastic wrap and there was too much wastage. As well it might, I thought, for cheese if is to be wrapped should be wrapped with paper only. Of course, as far as retailers are concerned paper is not transparent, and if the product, sliced, packaged and visible, sits in an open case, then for hygiene's sake plastic seems to be the obvious choice. Why then, I wonder, are some cheeses, not plastic-wrapped, sitting glamorously, like jewels from the dairy, in closed vitrines? Why then, I wonder, in my cynical way, is "cheese paper" available in its own display atop that vitrine - a display with its tagline suggesting that cheese needs to be treated with respect?

So, in a way, my no-longer-available hometown cheese is to me emblematic of the ills of food packaging in general. The most worrisome aspects of packaging are the chemicals that leech from plastic into food, and the gross amounts of plastic disposed of every day.

What I also went looking for that day, coincidentally, was mayonnaise. As far as I could discover, and this came as such a shock, for it seemed to happen overnight or, at least, between the buying of one jar and the next, mayonnaise, even the kind emblazoned with claims of organic rectitude and imparting this or that, yet-to-be-determined-by-the-FDA, health benefit, is hardly available anymore in glass. I have the impression that despite any qualms consumers might have about transference of harmful chemicals from plastic to fatty foods, nut butter manufacturers also went from using glass to packaging in plastic - a big change that happened, in my experience, this year. I cannot quantify it, but I really have a strong impression that plastic packaging has increased exponentially this year.

I can make some changes and am doing so - fruit and vegetables go straight into the trolley, admittedly on top of my shopping bag, without first going into a plastic bag. I buy the last packed in glass mayonnaise, at least the one I can stand eating. Increasingly I am not buying ready-made foods or other types of prepackaged food, such as frozen vegetables if packaged in plastic, or prewrapped cheese for more reasons than the leaching of chemicals. If peanut or other nut butters are eventually only available in plastic jars then I shall no longer buy them.

That it's all a question of convenience, is undoubted, though whether the convenience of the consumer as is usually suggested, or of the manufacturer, I question. I cannot say I'm totally convinced by the truism or, perhaps, the marketing ploy that convinces us we work harder than our ancestors or that we have less time to enjoy life than they and that convenience packaging is a palliative for our stressful lives.

By the by, anyone ever wonder what the carbon footprint of a blueberry from Peru at this time of year must be?

The photo of a vermeil fruit basket, designed for Tiffany & Co by Van Day Truex, from Tiffany's 20th Century: a portrait of American Style, John Loring, Harry N Abrams. 1997. The small black and white photograph is of the designer and for which I have no photographer's attribution. That will change.

Vin chaud and white lights

2010-12-11T05:20:00.000-05:00

It's three in the morning and here I sit, glass of hot vin chaud - the spiced and brandied red wine I made earlier this evening to have with leftover boeuf bourguignon, and it finally hits me that after a more than a week of visitors, Christmas parties, finals, grading, faculty meetings, and yet one more party to come, that it is only eleven days before we set off on our winter vacation. Normally, we would take the winter vacation in New York but this year we going to Rome, a city neither of us has been to. Florence is on the itinerary as is New Year in Venice. Of all the buildings I'm going to see, Bramante's Tempietto is the one I'm most most looking forward to.

Christmas, in its own way, a festival of lights, when in the short, dark days of the northern midwinter fires were lit not only against the cold, holly and mistletoe, the greenery of the old gods, hung above doors and windows, and trees ornamented with candles. One of my most clear memories of childhood Christmases is of a card printed with a snowy coaching scene that because of its metal foil surface and a shred of embossing glinted magically in the light of the fire. The magic of that glint, the glow of fire in a dark room, the blue shadows beyond the slab of light from a window thrown across snow, has never left me. Last night at our condo holiday party the major decorations were large glass vases filled white lights and white twigs from which hung many icicles - to me the most glamouring of combinations, frost and fire. It's good sometimes to snatch a few seconds, just to appreciate how light in the dark is so essential and elemental a condition.

When, last weekend, I asked the Celt what we might serve for his sister-in-law's last-night-with-us dinner with friends he immediately said boeuf bourguignon, gratin dauphinoise and roasted asparagus with a bought-in fruit tart to follow - suggesting he'd hitherto given it a tad more thought than had I. Boeuf bourguignon it was but the odd thing is I realized I'd never made it before. I'd made the Flemish version of beef in beer, slowly stewed beef with prunes and red wine, even stroganoffed filet (the "t" is not silent in this household) with sour cream and mushrooms - in fact over the years I'd stewed a lot of beef but had never done the classic, Julia Child popularized, blogged-about and movie-starred boeuf bourguignon. Well, I made it and I can tell you honestly it was a total disappointment - until, that is, on reheating two days later and with the last minute addition of buttered mushrooms and pearl onions, it had evolved into the most salubrious of casseroles. There's a morsel, perhaps not served well by a second and third reheating, left for lunch tomorrow.

As to gratin dauphinoise, and this is where I recognize the irony of taking anti-cholesterol medication, I like it simple - well-seasoned, thinly-sliced potatoes, layered with cream and lots of garlic (none of the rub the dish with garlic nonsense) and slowly, slowly baked. Simple, subtle, and salacious.

I shall resume posts about connections, circles within circles, next week.

Shut the France up!

2010-12-03T21:03:00.004-05:00

"I'm not allowed to say the "F" word" announced my six-year-old goddaughter one morning recently to her teacher - a statement probably not the most inconsequential to be greeted with at the beginning of a school day, and undoubtedly one that spawned all the normal signs of panic - palpitations, sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing, if not a distinct impulse to head for the door.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, indeed, comes much to amuse and divert and yesterday was no exception. Over dinner the Celt's beloved sister-in-law, in town for a couple of days, told the story that caused me almost to lose it. I was luckily not chewing or drinking at the time so I didn't choke from food only from sheer hide-my-face-in-my-napkin, unstoppable laughter - something I needed for I was very grumpy about the level of noise - a jazz band and singer, no less - in my favorite, if low-ceilinged, restaurant. Boy, did I need to laugh.

Whether or not the teacher immediately twigged what was going on, I cannot remember, but at some point, if only in a conversation with mama at the end of the school day, she must have done - my god-daughter and her father were taking a trip to France and were not yet telling her four-year-old sister. Her father, a lover of puns, told her not to mention France and phrased it "Don't use the "F" word."

The delight of it kept coming back throughout the meal and each time reduced me to giggles - so much so, the Celt told me to "shut the France up!" which set me off into giggles again. Absolute delight!

A digression.

Fakin' it

2010-12-01T21:33:00.001-05:00

I'd like to say it was seeing The Birth of Western Civilization in the role of book-as-cultural-talisman, that crystalized my thoughts, but actually it was reading Famous Last Words, a book recommended by a correspondent who thought I might find it relevant to my theme of the past few months - circles within circles - and relevant it is, this tale about an American citizen, friend of European aristocracy, confidante of the Duchess of Windsor, and spy for the Third Reich. Though set in times too recent for it to be considered an historical novel, the book is in its way pertinent to today's post about a history of decorating - itself a fiction if ever there was one.

Sometimes simple things have little individual significance, but occasionally they coincide and together have more import than they might severally have had. And so it was with these two books - one a propper's accessory in a pretend apartment designed for imaginary inhabitants themselves characters from a movie about spurious relationships; and the other about chimerical alliances and duplicity with and by mythical fascists. From one extreme to the other, you might think: but the common thread is that of duplicity - fakin' it, in other words.

For a while now it has been obvious that shelter magazine editors and by extension we the readers are not satisfied with a mere portrayal of rooms - there must be a story. Whether a story of celebrity, notoriety even, or just plain old-fashioned worship, a story there shall be. The plot, or subterfuge, if you will, is frequently the same - someone just walked out of a room that is littered with aesthetic and cultural detritus emblematic of riches and free time. An alliance between theatre and fiction, no less, the scripted yet supposedly extempore situation is the decorating world's equivalent of reality television.

I wonder if this making of backgrounds, stage sets really, for the mini-dramas of the rich and notorious is compensation for the neutralizing - one might say the dumbing down - of interiors that has happened over the last two decades? Interest must come from somewhere, after all, and the more complex the storyline, the more layers are applied to the room; thus the greater the opportunity for product placement - not in itself a bad thing, I'm sure you would agree.

I wonder also where stylists go from here. To those modern sanctuaries, so-called retreats from the stresses of modern life - the bedroom and the bathroom, perhaps? In the cause of creating camera vérité, could a disheveled bathroom with its toothpaste bespattered mirror, a toilet seat not returned to a genteel horizontality, and a pair of his and his robes, room fragrance by... not be emblematic of a life well-lived? Or the bedroom, perhaps, with a trail of discarded clothing leading to a bed déshabillé - while we're there, why not three trails and a set of handcuffs on the bedposts? Now there's a story!

Famous Last Words? though fiction, is an unvarnished portrait of a number of historic figures, Wallis Windsor being one of them. It appears to me that in our little outpost of the blogosphere there's a tendency to write adoringly about previous generations of aristocracy and royalty, be it actual or plutocratic, without overt cognizance of history, character, or politics. They are presented simply as style icons, their often deplorable behaviour and affiliations being totally disregarded. They are, merely by virtue of being old, rich and (mostly) dead, fabulous. In such a way is history rewritten, for in my opinion, there cannot but be a dimension beyond the superficial and the iconic.

Fakin' it, thus, is where it's at. I don't want to appear overly serious about what I see as the fictionalization of interiors, but I wonder what happened to require such a change. A change perhaps that came hand-in-hand with an apparently ravenous purience about the lives of people who are highly unlikely ever to be our intimates. Perhaps an appetite so strong it needs to be fed, however blurred the lines between reality and fable.

To everyone, a Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T12:59:00.001-05:00

Decoration from The England of Eric Ravilious, Freda Constable with Sue Simon, Lund Humphries, 2003

A connection, and a little bit of hero worship

2010-11-22T21:35:00.001-05:00

When, last week, I wrote about Henry McIlhenny, I didn't include this view of his green drawing room in Rittenhouse Square. I'm not sure what exactly my reasons were for not using it, but I remember that the Ingres portrait of the Comtesse de Tournon stirred a vague memory of reading something, somewhere, that connected to my theme of past weeks. A drawing rather than a painting - of an Englishman, I thought, and somewhere in one of my books.

I found it, this graphite portrait of Alexander Baillie, not of an Englishman but a Scot, in the same book, a catalogue of an exhibition about Ingres, as the portrait of Comtesse de Tournon.

Alexander Baillie, eldest child of a rich merchant with interests in Jamaica, met the man, the Norwegian Jørgen von Capellen Knudtzon, also the son of a rich merchant, with whom he was to spend the rest of his life, short of six months, when his boat rescued a group of people who had been shipwrecked. I remember the surprise and pleasure I felt ten years ago when I read the short essay accompanying the pencil portrait, for however liberated, and I use that word judiciously, gay life had become at the end of the twentieth-century, it was unusual to find such an open, uncomplicated acknowledgement of the love between two men.

There are other connections to be be made, of course, for both Baillie and Knudtzon had portrait busts carved by Bertel Thorvaldsen - Knudtzon and the sculptor were close friends - and with David Hockney who in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters posited that artists such as Ingres used an optical device called a camera lucida as an aid when drawing. Hockney's theory, published ten years ago, remains interesting and because in some quarters it was thought he accused artists of cheating, it is much refuted. It's not something I care too much about, this bewailing of attacks on untouchables - for isn't it frequently so that the polemic of one generation becomes the orthodoxy of another? Years ago, it was said to me that I'd never met a sacred cow I didn't want to barbecue. At the time, I didn't know whether to feel proud or worried about being negatively critical so, typically, I did both. What I care about is that discourse remains humane - kindness and compassion being qualities missing from much discourse, political or otherwise, in the present day - as humane as the mention of the importance of these two men to each other.

And that was it, the connection - nothing more important than a synapse or two sparking at each other.

Alexander Baillie was also painted, as a child with his family, by Thomas Gainsborough.

Portrait of Alexander Baillie from Portraits by Ingres, Image of an Epoch, edited by Gary Tinterow and Philip Conisbee, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry N Abrams, 1999.

Images of portrait busts from here.

Thomas Gainsborough painting courtesy The Tate Gallery.