May I have a blogging room, please?

Arthur E. Smith decorated a house overlooking Long Island Sound for clients of long-standing: previously, he'd worked on Texas and Florida apartments for them and an eighteenth-century seven bedroom cottage from which they upsized to this twenty-five room house.

Mr Smith's task, as he put it, was to make a house in which "you can walk yourself ragged" seem not grand. A mighty task given the number of rooms and the size of some of them: a dining room that appears so intimate in the photo below could seat twenty-four, a hall that could hold 125 people dancing (who, one wonders, was the wallflower?) and a room superfluous enough to be designated the telephone room. It seems, this telephone room, a swanky throwback to a time when a butler answered the single telephone in a closet off the hall, that a room in the mid 1980s could be used solely for telephoning. Probably unimaginable to the modern generation, given phone and social networking technology, and even to those of us old enough to have witnessed the Wright brothers fly.

I say, unimaginable, but witness the boom years before the present economic melt-down when builders, architects and realtors dredged up archaic designations for rooms: butler's pantry, keeping room, library, great room, and made fortunes doing so. Did I mention the bonus room?

Arthur Smith created rooms, of which there must have been many not published, that were a humane response to the scale of the place and the clients. It could not have been easy to make this house seem intimate, to have the feel of a cottage - though that depends on how cottage is defined. Cottage in the sense of a staff-cottage or a Newport cottage? Clearly the latter, in this instance.

Comparing these rooms to the sober interior Arthur Smith designed for Andrew Crispo, and to those for another client in 1977, you will see how versatile a decorator Mr Smith was and what a pity it is for interior decoration that, like so many of his generation, this Vidalia, Georgia native, protegé and business partner of Billy Baldwin was lost to the plague. Mr Crispo, described as Mr Smith's companion in an obituary survived him by a number of years, enjoying a certain notoriety.

Photos by Peter Vitale from an article written by Louise Bernikow, published in Architectural Digest, February 1987.

P.S. I wonder if the bowls of oranges in the first photo was one an early instance of fruit being uses as decoration? I remember bowls of green apples being ubiquitous for a number of years.

Oh, and talking of the first photo, aren't those candlesticks glorious?

Mr Crispo's decorous background

Arthur E. Smith, Billy Baldwin's protege and partner before Baldwin's retirement in 1972, created these rooms for Andrew Crispo, a Manhattan gallery owner, of whom much has been written elsewhere. However, the client is not under review here - merely his possessions and good sense in choosing Mr Smith as his decorator.


In the original article written by John Loring a list, in the guise of being a distillation of works by preeminent artists, designers and craftsmen of the 1920s and 1930s, of Mr Crispo's possessions is gazetted, and an impressive account it is: a 1933 William Zorach bronze; Morris Louis, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove and Robert Motherwell paintings; studies by Geogia O'Keeffe and Marcel Duchamp; an Eileen Gray cork folding screen; Emile-Jacques Rhulmann armchairs and table; Josef Hoffmann vase and cache-pots; an Egyptian mask; Jean-Michel Frank table, desk and dining chairs; Tiffany plates and Jean Puiforcat cutlery.


"The room's pale-toned decorous background intensifies the pure contours of the furniture and was created for Mr Crispo by a close friend, Arthur E. Smith, who also helped select some of the rare furnishings throughout the apartment."


Designed and to a degree curated by a decorator who had worked for and with the best and who in his time became one of the best of his generation, this rooms have dated little. In a previous post about Arthur E. Smith I said the same thing about a 1977 design - in its aesthetic differing from his work for Crispo, but sharing the same quality of agelessness.

Another quality Mr Smith's work shares with most of the other decorators I've mentioned in the past weeks is that of gentleness. Not from him the aggression or the excesses of some of 1970s decoration, just a job done well, illuminated with a clear understanding of what is appropriate.







Photos by Peter Vitale from an article written by John Loring (from whom the quotes) for Architectural Digest, March 1980.


The cocktail of the week is a Foggy Day and given a week which included a partner who awoke in the middle of the night to find he's allergic to mussels - this after years of eating tons of them, and all other sorts of hell breaking out, the name of the cocktail is entirely descriptive of my state of mind.


1 1/2 oz gin
1/4 oz Pernod
1 oz water
1/4 oz lemon juice


Stir and pour over ice.