Forty years ago, David Whitcomb on Beekman Place

"Everything that goes into a room should be meaningful to the owner – status decorating is over." So declared David Whitcomb in 1974 when interviewed for Architectural Digest. Would that his claim had carried weight with more people in the following decades – it's quite clear that status decorating has never left us and probably never shall.

The interviewer is nowhere recorded, surprisingly, but I intend to quote both him and Mr Whitcomb himself to describe the decorator and the decorator's own home – a place clearly full of things meaningful to the owner – they both will do a better job than I. If there's any emphasis on status in this house, and I'm sure there is, it is not crude. I have written about Mr Whitcomb before  and should you wish to see more of his talent and his, to me, timeless decorating please click here or look for his name in the sidebar "Labels."

"Just in from his second home, in upstate apple/dairy country, David Whitcomb, in well-broken-in walking shoes and a cozy, stretched-out sweater, settles himself down on a u-shaped bench in the duplex where he's lived since 1959, the same year he purchased the five-story graystone townhouse. A seemingly relaxed man, with nice blue eyes, graying hair and a quiet sensibleness about him, he admits:

" 'It's difficult for me to talk about myself and my design work, especially something that is so basically visual. Words, somehow, aren't right in this case. And you see, I'm not one of those designers on an ego trip. It's very important to me that the results I try to achieve do not come out looking like Joe Whosit or Jane Whatsit did them. I've seen so many designers only interested in themselves, it's made me turn around and get more into my clients' point of view. Frequently clients don't have the time or interest or knowledge, but they always have a point of view.

" ' I don't know if I have a word for my style. I don't like that word 'eclectic.' Let's say it's a collection of dissimilar pieces, both in county of origin and period of time, from this bench to that highly carved Chippendale armchair in flame-stitch fabric.

 " ' As a designer I see so many objects that turn me off. I'm very particular about what I want around me, even to the simplest things. I feel that everything that goes into a room should be meaningful to the owner – objects one loves, not just things that represent money. Status decorating is over. After all, really incredible beauty is often something you cannot bring into a room. Like a tree branch coated with ice. There's transitory beauty!

" ' The act of design is a creative one, which makes for a certain amount of ego, I guess. I'm proud of what I do but I don't think it need to develop into egotism ..... I have never had a client who didn't have taste. That's why they come to me.' "

As I wrote above, I've let David Whitcomb speak for himself and as far as I am concerned his house needs no description of contents and finishes for it, too, speaks for itself. This is a house, as have all of Whitcomb's been, a place I would have like to have spent time, talking, reading and listening to music. It is a subtle and sophisticated room, long-gone, I'm sure, and to my eye quite undated.

That "Kentian" table in the second photograph reminds me that I'm catching a plane in a few hours, first to New York, thence to London where we'll visit the William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum – an exhibition I'm looking forward to immensely and one I missed when it was at the Bard Graduate Center before the end of last year.

We are going to New York, London, Edinburgh and Dundee for theatre, exhibitions, a birthday party, a family reunion, reunions with old friends, and to spend time with two very excited nieces, eleven and thirteen years old. The twenty-four-year-old nephew is being very cool about it all – as is only to be expected. I, on the other hand .... well, more about that from over there.

Photographs by Daniel Eifert to accompany text written (anonymously, as far as I can see) for Architectural Digest, May/June 1974.

Rapture and End-Times?

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 problem with real life ...

... is that it gets in the way of blogging. We all have these weeks, lifetimes even, when looking back one wonders where the time went - and, just in case you were wondering, it really does go by faster the older one gets. I won't bore you with an account of a misspent fortnight, just suffice it to say that after many a tired moment and guilty feeling I'm back at my desk with a bit more energy than I've had for a while.

I first came across William McCarty's name two years ago in a forty-year-old Architectural Digest, and noting that he did not appear too often, at least in my collection of old magazines - a clear case for not writing based on assumptions - I wondered why he never made the big time. Little did I know, for when I began to research him as part of my personal history of late twentieth-century decorating, I discovered what to many of you might be an established fact: McCarty had been very well-known as a decorator in London, had worked for David Hicks, thereafter established his own firm and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. However, McCarty-Cooper, as he became, is of interest beyond any rooms he may have created.

There is a lot of available information about William McCarty, written after his death, and I felt rather put out that this, for me, new discovery - a member of the lost generation as I thought - was in fact very well-known. I was so put out, I deleted the essay about him I'd begun and got on with other subjects. But as the saying is, what goes around ... etc.

Earlier this year, in the office I came across a pile of Connoisseur magazines from 1991 and there written by David Patrick Columbia in the December issue, was an account of McCarty's life - all a run-up to the sale of his estate with its estimated $30,000,000 worth of art, the remnant, if remnant is the right word, of an inheritance left to him by his lover and adoptive father, Douglas Cooper - the man McCarty first met at the Philadelphia home of Henry McIlhenny. Also, and this is what tipped the balance of my renewed interest, there is a photograph of William McCarty at Van Day Truex's house in Provence - circles within circles, thus. In Columbia's account of William MacCarty's life is a curious quotation from Jay Steffey that in its way relates to what I have been writing about these past few weeks - circles of influence and friends of friends.

"He met people the way an attractive intelligent young gay man did in those days. There were cliques of older men. They found him; he didn't find them. Being homosexual and intelligent, Billy wasn't the type to spend his life running around bars and being a hooker."

As I say, a curious, if not dubious, implication about an older generation of gay men, cliques no less, roaming the cultural byways of Europe and America seeking in a Pygmalion way the young and the ready for advancement. Whatever the process, the twain - the older man and the young flibbertigibbit - Cooper and McCarty met, and history was made.

Here you see photographs of Douglas Cooper's Monaco apartment decorated by William McCarty - described in the text of the article as "an old friend and therefore aware of Cooper idiosyncrasies" - an apartment which, despite the poor quality of the twenty-year-old images, is pretty impressive, if in an hermetic way. These are rooms in a highrise building overlooking the Mediterranean, created out of newly-constructed raw space, that have the character of a reliquary, precious, preening and protective of priceless contents - and perhaps it is precisely those contents, the paintings, the sculpture, gouaches, medallions and drawings by artists such as Henri Laurens, Picasso, Giacometti, Gris, Miró, Léger, David d'Angers, Braque and Klee, rather than the architecture and decoration, that make these rooms interesting. Not that I wish to diminish William McCarty's achievement - for it must be said that the space does not seem vast and my image of a reliquary, small-scale, enameled, inlaid, chased, gilded and lined in costly stuffs, is not far off the mark.

Beyond what I have written here about McCarty, I think it a better use of your time if you read this and this. It would be redundant to repeat either. However, what is of interest are the connections, circles within circles and who know whom. Much of the history of twentieth-century decorating is, in my opinion, an account, albeit deeply buried, of talented gay men who had connections, cultural and social, both covert and concealed.

William McCarty-Cooper died of AIDS in 1991, aged fifty-three, having disposed of his estate beyond a few small bequests equally amongst family and friends.

Photographs of William McCarty's work by Derry Moore to accompany text by Lesley Branch for Architectural Digest, February 1981.

Photograph of William McCarty in 1973 at Van Day Truex's house in Provence by Gloria Braggiotti Etting, published to accompany an essay Sons and Lovers written by David Patrick Columbia for Connoisseur, December 1991.

Don't ask, don't tell

On selling La Fiorentina to the Harding Lawrences, Roderick Cameron removed to the smaller and nineteenth-century Le Clos Fiorentina which, in turn, was sold to Sao Schlumberger who called on David Hicks to decorate it.

Hicks' decoration of a house he knew well, having stayed there a number of times during Cameron's ownership, judging by the grainy photographs, is as fresh and up-to-date as it was when first published thirty-two years ago. It's a cliche to say that photographs speak for themselves, but nonetheless they do and because of it I feel there's little more to be said about an interior by David Hicks that hasn't already been said elsewhere.

Gardens designed by Roderick Cameron, built in a succession of smaller gardens on a terraced hillside and so beautiful it was they that drew the new owner to buy the house they surrounded. David Hicks, intent on preserving the gardens during the year-long remodel of the house and the building of a swimming pool, had a bridge built over which trucks could drive without damaging the planting. So delighted with them was Hicks that he referred to them again, though by this time the gardens were no longer owned by the Schlumbergers, in his book, My Kind of Garden.

I have spent some time writing about Roderick Cameron - someone who until recently had not, other than when I remembered his house at Menerbes, impinged too much on my consciousness. Only as part of my delving into 1970s and 1980s decoration has he become apparent, but I must say – and perhaps I am finding significance where there is none – but it really seems to me that Roderick Cameron holds an influential if not crucial place in twentieth-century decorating. At first, to me, a shadowy figure, but one who through his friends' comments, his client's trust in him, and what his employees have had to say brings the man into clearer focus.

Roderick Cameron did not generate a style, but worked within a mode that we have come to recognize as a way of making a house welcoming, comfortable, reasonable and, above all, suitable. Cameron never became a famous decorator in the way his friends did - Baldwin, Truex, Hicks - all names still well-known well after their deaths - and finding what he created has been a bit of a journey and worth every minute.

There are many decorators and designers who, on reaching a certain maturity and fame, have titles as such as Dean bestowed on them. And what a frightening title it must be to receive - almost like having one foot in the grave. Oh, I know, accolades such as this are pretty meaningless in the great scheme of things, but if such a title were to be given posthumously it could, in my opinion, be bestowed on Roderick Cameron.

Most of the men of Roderick Cameron's circle were gay - some not but, as we would say nowadays, straight but not narrow. These were the men who, living in a society hostile to their nature, built their own networks, their own clubs, and whilst existing in a DADT relationship with their clients, nonetheless created some of the most memorable interiors ever to grace a photographer's lens - men who took place with the lady decorators, those powerful women who founded the business and had reigned for nearly half a century.

Photographs by Pascal Hinous to accompany text by Susan Heller Anderson for Architectural Digest, January/February 1978.

My man, wassup?

Wassup? 

Errm... ? is not the politest response to such a question but it does indicate how mystified I feel when I'm greeted in such a way. I have a similar response when asked who my favorite decorator is. I know its a way of beginning what the questioner hopes will be an interesting conversation, but every time I'm asked it stops me in my tracks. Do I just take a swig of my cocktail and forge ahead with a name, any name, or do I sedately discuss the idea that there cannot be one favorite?  In either case, eyes will glaze over and panic set in, and not necessarily on the part of the listener.

Who our favorite decorators are is a question we're all asked at some point in our careers. In my case, often, it is students who are looking for direction or even something to disparage - either is good, for it means a discussion can ensue. Limiting certainly, depending on the context, but it does concentrate the mind as to which decorators - and it has to be plural rather than singular - I think have had some real significance. Yes, I have favorites, but not quite in the way the questioner usually means: for those that I find to my taste, generally speaking, are long gone and not the usual names that get bandied about.

The weak point in any discussion of taste, which is really what is behind such a question, is personal predilection. Snares are many on the journey of taste from seventeenth century France, where it began, to today's romantic historicism. I'm promiscuous when it comes to style and I'm drawn to blue - from where I sit there is blue in various quantities around me - the sky (well, bits of it), the stripe lining a ladder-back Provençal kitchen chair, the kitchen cabinets themselves, the plumbago on the terrace, the tulip vase by my left hand, the silk at the windows, an armchair in the living room... even a dog in a garden below, blue in the face, no doubt, from the yapping it has been doing for the last hour - and because my predilection is so strong I have to be wary. It is, after all, just my taste. But not all that is blue is to my taste.

In matters of taste, designers are often accused of being original which is a pretty sobering accusation - one that can lead to tweeting between the Fates and the Furies, and in the rarest of cases, hubris. In reality original as a concept is pretty nebulous, if not downright bearing of false witness. And in contemporary use, original in its simplest just means recast and at its most rare, transfigured. 

With today's designer, Arthur E Smith, taste and transfiguration are happy companions. Thirty years ago, when I first saw this house, Smith's own on Long Island, it was I who was transfigured, with this man's taste. Smith, definitely a favorite of mine - one of the band of designers who took over when the old guard such as Billy Baldwin retired - is not unknown today, but the longer the remove between the end of his career and the careers of those practicing today, the greater the danger he and his like fade from memory.  

All that serious stuff aside, isn't this dining room delicious? Delicious, certainly, but original? Who cares? The room, as are the other rooms, is a superbly beautiful, urbane, comfortable, classic and as bang up-to-date as it was when published in 1989. Originality has nothing to do with it - but taste has everything to do with it.

Photos by Peter Vitale to accompany text of an interview with Arthur E Smith, written by Patricia Warner for Architectural Digest and published in July 1989.

The problem with blogging ...

... is that it could, if one were not careful, get in the way of earning a living. In its own way, blogging is a scholarly activity, whether by dilettantes or acknowledged scholars:  a bookish pursuit. I'm lucky to have my own library and the use of a university library – where, frankly, the interior design content is nowhere near as good as my own, but which does boast a collection of Architectural Digest going back to the late 1970s. All bound in half-yearly increments but alas with many a page, sometimes whole articles, missing.

The 1970s and 1980s are proving to have been such fertile decades for interior design. Many of the decorators and designers who died young, often of AIDS, in those years, I have already written about, and one of the most moving aspects of my research is noticing how their names no longer and with no marker of their passing, simply disappear from tables of content. Luckily, those men were prolific in their output, ranged in terms of creativity from the gentle to the sassy, and were published often.

Here I want to pay tribute to the woman who guided Architectural Digest from a rather stuffy West Coast magazine to an internationally recognized phenomenon. Over the last few years, the magazine began to feel rather desperate, relying almost on celebrity rather than aesthetics - really low points recently being Gerard Butler's and Michael Jackson's houses. In a way, of course, this was no different from what the magazine showed in the past - many a celebrity, movie star, politician or television personality got decorated and published, and frankly their interiors were dire and it did not matter. So if nothing has changed, what happened? The magazine and its editor may not have changed, but the world changed around them – and suddenly a long- and much-respected magazine had lost relevancy and it was as if they did not notice.

Much has been written in the bloggersphere about Paige Rense and in recent years less than flattering. And in a highly visible job such as Editor-in-Chief of a prestigious publication public criticism comes as an occupational hazard. It would be all to easy for me to jump on that bandwagon but I've had some time this week to reflect. And on reflection I think she's done a remarkable job especially when one considers Ms Rense has done it for thirty-five years.

My tribute, then, to AD's Editor-in-Chief, Paige Rense Noland, is prompted by my overview of her magazine's contribution to the history of twentieth-century interior design. To sit at a library table, day after day, looking through past issues of the magazine has led me to the conclusion that here was a majestic sweep of frequently original, often exciting, persistently traditional (and occasionally pretty bloody awful) interior design, as defined by one personality.

Thus, back to my theme: that group of acquaintance that included Billy Baldwin, Roderick Cameron and Arthur Smith, Van Day Truex, and Hardy Amies, remains a subject of fascination to me. It's clear Arthur E Smith was one of the best decorators of the twentieth-century: assistant, business partner, successor to – but in no way imitator of – Billy Baldwin.

Today's post, a pavilion overlooking the Mediterranean, designed by architect Tom Wilson, decorated by Smith, and belonging to "an American couple who own one of the most beautiful properties in the south of France" is perhaps the most Baldwin-like of all: beautifully restrained, tailored and agreeable.

The owners are not named, but their identity may be guessed-at. This pavilion, Palladian in style, overlooks their infinity-edged pool, one of the few true ones, that visually ends in the waters of the Mediterranean.

A dream of a setting, worthy of that synthesis between a great magazine and a great designer.

Photos by Peter Vitale to accompany text written by Valentine Lawford for Architectural Digest, April 1979.

Authenticity

A few days ago in a post based on a comment I made to Mr Victoria and to some extent lamenting the lack of discrimination in modern design, I used phrases such as "inspired by...," "in the manner of... " and "an homage to..." which to me are all euphemisms for that well-known to-the-trade-over-a-drink phrase – not that anyone would impolitic enough to tell the emperor he's nekkid – "knock-off." I concluded by saying that authenticity is almost as slippery a notion as chic, and to my mind all the more interesting in a society where furniture designs cannot be copyrighted.

Friday was a reading day – beginning about six-ish with The Private World of Yves Saint Laurent  & Pierre Bergé, Elizabethan Architecture, and Mark Hampton: American Decorator. Van Day Truex and I landed together on the library sofa sometime in the afternoon.  

In Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style it is mentioned that Truex had written an article about Jean-Michel Frank for Architectural Digest in 1976. I remembered that amongst my stack there were some issues, two in the event, that had essays by Truex but neither turned out to be the one I was looking for. What I did find was an essay Van Day Truex on Design subtitled Reproduction Furniture: The Pros and Cons - an essay definitely grist to my mill.


"There is no question that those of us who are interested in our own times in design prefer the contemporary solutions. We usually prefer to possess a contemporary design and, if we select from the past, we prefer the original, not the reproduction.

"There are certain situations that justify reproduction. I quote William Gaylord in Architectural Digest, May/June 1977, concerning the four Louis XVI armchairs in the living room of his San Francisco apartment: 'The only reason I have Louis XVI armchairs is that I have never sat in a chair more comfortable.' He possessed two signed original examples and he has expertly reproduced two more to fill the need of a dominating group of four in his eclectic apartment. I wish he had added to his reasons: 'and because they are subtly designed, so excellent in their restrained use of moldings and other architectural motifs.' In other words, so successful in function, form and embellishment."

Van Day Truex also mentions a David Adler house the dining room that contained eleven reproductions of one original Chippendale chair and that for him, "The original possessed such bold style and comfort, I did not question the urge to reproduce, because the reproductions gave a strong rhythmic emphasis to the room."

Further, he opines, "I wonder if our dislike of a copy in furniture, when we cannot possess the original, stems from the sorry state of too much reproducing and too many inferior examples - a choice not determined by a designer's eye but one that is mainly and plainly promotional in character."

"I would like to see a list of furniture designs from the earliest production to the present moment, selected by a top-ranking designer - the choice determined by a highly sensitive objective eye choosing models of lasting, timeless merit. Herein would appear examples that are purely functional, such as an Egyptian folding X-stool, an early Chinese console, simple chairs and tables from the eighteenth-century - excellent in proportion and function, with the minimum of superficial decoration; certain Shaker designs, some Thonet models. There has been too little production of such expertly selected examples and far too much of badly selected designs."

Towards the end of his essay, Truex asks why we should be deprived of good furniture design from the past just because we can't have the original. "We use beautiful Edwardian chintz patterns, we continue to enjoy Morris wallpapers, we copy from primitive African fabric patterns."

He continues with what I think the most interesting thought of all in light of the growth of interior design marketing since the 1980s: "As furniture becomes more edited, as we use more built-in storage space and more upholstered pieces, we are eliminating more and more unnecessary furniture. This means there is all the more need for the remainder to be well-designed. The criterion should really be quality of design."

Perhaps one aspect of design that Truex did not foresee was the alliance between manufacturing, marketing, morality and mindset - the you deserve it approach, for example. That he foresaw modern America "eliminating more and more unnecessary furniture" is of the greatest irony – for nowhere in contemporary design is that to be seen, either in fact or as an idea for discussion.

On reading Truex's very polite biography, it becomes clear his aesthetic and by extension that of his friends, Billy Baldwin and Roderick Cameron, is as straightforward as his food and clothing – the one simple, fresh and moderate, served on restrained, but not necessarily undecorated, china; the second lucid, elegant and well-tailored. To put it another way, there should be neither physical gluttony nor aesthetic greed. Somewhere along the line, the phrase the elegance of refusal has become attached to my memory. It is a concept with which we no doubt all would agree – provided we do not have to practice it.

I'm not writing a polemic here, but surely to discriminate is to have learned, to have trained not only the eye but also the wallet; to have understood basic principles of proportion, space and even time. To chose is to not uncritically accept brand as signifier of quality. To distinguish is to think. To think, to know, to discern, to be critical, is to be educated. I do not believe in innate taste; however, I do think a predilection for exercising critical faculties is both innate and something that can be enhanced by practice and training. Education is all.

So what is authenticity? If a chair is made using the same methods and materials as its antique prototype, is it any less authentic for being a copy? Of course, pedigree plays an important role, especially when one draws near to the border between authentic and counterfeit. In that word authentic lies a whole world of assurance of quality yet I wonder if that very assurance is in itself a mere counterfeit.


Quotations from an essay entitled Van Day Truex on Design, subtitled Reproduction Furniture: The Pros and Cons published in Architectural Digest October 1977.


Photo by Russell MacMasters from Architectural Digest, May/June 1977.


Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, Penguin Group 2001.

Accessible

Over the weekend I received a very interesting comment on Friday's post Tone Deaf from a correspondent who, though I had not posted pictures of the exterior, recognized the house. I deleted her name from the comment for her privacy's sake.

I had no idea when I wrote Friday's post that the house I featured was a replacement for a David Adler house - not one that had been torn down, I hasten to add, though that nearly happened - one he'd designed in the late 1930s for Mr and Mrs Louis B Kuppenheimer, Jr. As you will see from the comment, the Kuppenheimer house (see black and white photos) was saved from demolition and erected on their grounds by a family who lived across the street.

What I had passed over, dismissed perhaps, in the original magazine article - I had read it only with an eye to aesthetics - was what the author described as the homeowner's "passionate commitment to universal accessibility" and that "She is on national and local committees setting policy for the disabled, and she made it an absolute criterion that the house be accessible to everyone, regardless of their degree of physical mobility."

Here, I think, is not the place to discuss historic preservation despite what I said about the Kuppenheimer house nearly being demolished, for what really struck me on rereading the article was that phrase universal accessibility - a subject not frequently touched on in shelter magazines. Surprising, really, given what is politely called a "rapidly aging population" - and I wish it were possible to express, without inducing panic in anyone nearing forty, the speed with which aging happens - as well as the statistics on the numbers of Americans who are disabled.

What makes the room so thrilling is that – besides its beauty and refinement – it is accessible. Let's face it, this is not the picture one's mind conjures up when one hears "wheelchair accessible."

The principles of universal design are to be found here if you would like to know more about them.

Black and white photos from The Country Houses of David Adler, Stephen M. Salney, W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.

Color photo by Tony Soluri for Architectural Digest, August 1998.

Tone deaf

I've just listened on YouTube to what for years I've thought of as the only piece of jazz I could ever tolerate - Dave Brubeck's Big Noise from Winnetka. But it seems at this point I have to concede that my level of tolerance has sunk even further - jazz, both traditional and modern, remains one of the most irritating noises I could ever try not to listen to - nails on a chalkboard, that sort of thing! Sadly, merely stating that I cannot abide the stuff typically raises many a hackle – or many a look of pity.

Let me say, before I raise more hackles, that noise to me is one of the biggest polluters of modern life and I am one of those people who cannot zone it out. The Celt, on the other hand, could sleep on the orchestra conductor's baton during the cannon fire and pealing of bells celebrating the retreat from Moscow.

None of which has anything to do with this photo except that it is of the living room of a Winnetka, Illinois house, decorated by Stanley Falconer - a house purporting to reflect "a late-eighteenth-century French country house."

One wonders why in 1990s Winetka, Illinois, or anywhere else on this continent for that matter, there was a need to reflect another century, style or place. The other day I commented in response to F P Victoria's post in part about discrimination or the lack thereof, and about what he hesitated to call knock-offs by saying that we all notice phrases such as "inspired by...." "in the manner of ..." and "an homage to ..." being used in shelter magazines and trade publications. I went on to say that anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of decorative arts cannot but be aware of the many familial resemblances in popular catalogues, mall furniture stores, to authenticated designs.

So it is with this house - the evocation of another time, place and lifestyle - enshrined in the language of display. Over the years there has been a predilection for evoking other lands, past times and in many cases long-dead designers as if giving credence to the decorator's or architect's own work. Look back through 1980s and 1990s Architectural Digest, for example, and you will see a constant conjuration of some golden back-when whether it be eighteenth-century French palace or province, the Paris of Napoleon III, the country houses of the English aristocracy, or 1930s Wyoming. However, such imitation-evocation is almost entirely restricted to interior design. I'm pretty certain the inhabitants of these homes did not totter about in Marie-Antoinette flounces, wear the likes of Prinny's knee-breeches, or creak around in chaps and spurs at cocktail parties - except, perhaps at a fête costumée. To do so would look anachronistic and ridiculous. Yet acres of rooms, staged at vast expense, milk those times and places, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Authenticity is almost as slippery a notion as chic – and to my mind all the more interesting in a society where designs of furniture cannot be copyrighted – a concept I shall enjoy exploring more in a later post. In the meantime, do please enjoy the undeniable beauty of Mr. Falconer's facsimile.

Photos by Tony Soluri to accompany text by Jeffrey Simpson about a house designed by Thomas H. Beeby, decorated by Stanley Falconer of Sybil Colefax and John Fowler and published by Architectural Digest August 1998.

A man of most remarkable taste

One of the pleasures of being given lots of old magazines, as I was last week by friends who are moving house and needed to downsize a magazine collection, is renewing acquaintance with rooms long buried in files which for the life of me I cannot find. Gone, no doubt, the way of the family bible ...

So it was with great delight I found Billy Baldwin's salon for Mr and Mrs Harding Lawrence at La Fiorentina - which of us doesn't know it, especially to those of us who own Billy Baldwin Decorates? Of course, it was the blue that caught my eye way back in 1999 when the room was already nearly thirty years old, and it has become a treasure image lodged at the back of my mind since. Once I had a clipping and now I have the whole article again.

Since I began blogging it has occurred to me a number of times that one's collection of magazines should never be disposed of – squirreled away if necessary in a dry basement or stored on bookshelves, but never thrown away. Of course, that presupposes that there is room for more bookshelves, and in my case the increasing number of shelves has not kept pace with the books or magazines coming into this house. My collection of The World of Interiors, begun in the early 1980s, takes a remarkable 112 linear feet to shelve. I ask you, who begins a collection of magazines? Like husbands, they just mount up. The number of other design publications arriving in the mailbox has dwindled without really causing torment, and will dwindle further if Elle Decor doesn't try, even a little, to be interesting.

We are both readers and that means that we have a never-decreasing library that ranges from the obvious interior design and architecture, thru Western art both fine and decorative, to cookery books, books on genetics, history, novels both trashy and inner-landscape, biographies, to curiosities such as Our King and Queen and the Royal Princesses, and Hill's Manual on Social and Business Forms: A Guide to Correct Writing, Showing how to express Written Thought Plainly, Rapidly, Elegantly and Correctly.

And it was such a correctly, if not terrifically plainly written, biography Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography, picked over again during the deepest pout of my weeks-long bloggers block last weekend, that led me to remember the name of someone I'd wanted to write about for a while - the man described by Baldwin as "a man of most remarkable taste" - Roderick Cameron. Son of Lady Kenmare and friend of Van Day Truex who apparently also "was absolutely smothered with taste."

A subject quite absorbing, Taste, and I shall return to it in a subsequent post.

Roderick Cameron began as the subject of this post but has almost been demoted to a footnote, so I'll try to remedy that by quoting Billy Baldwin one more time and by saying I intend to write more about Cameron later this week.

"His mother, Lady Kenmare, was an Australian beauty and twice a widow when I first met him. Lady Kenmare and Rory with a combination of American and Australian money had bought a property on the Riviera which was a wreck due to damages done to it during the war. This remarkable building was known as "La Fiorentina," and it certainly did have, for one thing, the most beautiful views and sights on all the Riviera. It was clinging on to the tip of Cap Ferrat, and surrounded by the perfectly fantastic gardens, terrace upon terrace, most of which had remained in pretty good condition in spite of the war.

"The restoration began and it was lucky for everybody because Rory was a young man of enormous taste, great enthusiasm, and plenty of money. Together with his mother, they bought a great deal of the furniture for the house and turned it into the most beautiful house on the entire Reviera. The restoration was by no means an exact copy of what it had been before the war and before the bombing; instead, Rory brought the whole thing into the present time with a remarkable clarity, a great feeling for textured materials of the day, a lovely absence of color in that most of it was rather bony or very pale, and the introduction of contemporary French furniture, most notably tables by Jean-Michel Frank, who was the last great cabinetmaker in Paris."

Photos by Durston Saylor for an article written by Aileen Mehle for Architectural Digest, January 1999.

God knows they need some taste

In his autobiography, Billy Baldwin tells of the occasion when, before lunch with the Spencer family, he sat next to Amelia Nettleship, the not-quite-yet step-grandmother of the-not-quite yet Princess of Wales, and the author of a seemingly unending series of bodice-rippers. Never having read one of her novels, I remember her more as a gaudily beruffled and brocaded television personality wheeled in front of the camera whenever an opinion was required to further deepen the class divide.

Mr Baldwin relates his conversation with this lady, the writer of this book of etiquette - here quoted in part.

"You are what?" she said.

"I am a decorator."

"Well," she said, "I've just come from your California, and I hope to God you're not a decorator from California, are you?"

I said "I have done some work there."

"Well, you'd better go back again," she said. "God knows they need some taste. Another thing you might do while you are at it is to tell the airlines to have a little manners. When I travel on this side of the Atlantic I've been accustomed to having at least two full seats because I am not a young lady and I get tired and it is very necessary for me to stretch out. So, naturally, out of politeness and courtesy, I am given at least two seats and sometimes three. To my great disgust, the last time I came back from your country, on your airlines they wouldn't let me have two seats, and I wanted three."

Arthur Smith, Baldwin's associate, and the decorator of the rooms below, was with him on the visit to the Spencers and clearly had a better time of it for he sat next to "an absolutely charming, very pretty girl called Lady Diana, who was full of charm, full of wit, and full of humor."

One of the reasons why I like looking backwards is I can see so much of what I miss in modern decorating - color. The modern pallid palette, a range of bloodless tones that began to have currency in the late 1980s still holds sway and though this is an opportunity to rail against the way color is not taught in design schools, at least judging by what I see in the magazines, I shall resist that temptation.

Recently I renewed my department's subscription to Architectural Digest - for home I subscribe to Elle Decor and The World of Interiors. I hesitated about renewing Architectural Digest but I can use it as a teaching aid about celebrity, marketing, and aspiration. What strikes me about both Architectural Digest and Elle Decor is, in the editorial sections at least, how boringly lacking in color they are.

Elle Decor is a magazine with which I've had a difficult relationship over the years - I find the editorial emphasis on bedraggled and rather wan interiors increasingly disappointing - and am probably not renewing the subscription. When I think that I have kept up a subscription to The World of Interiors since 1983 it is clear that the magazine has far more to offer me than any other on the market. It may be invidious to compare other magazines to The World of Interiors, because the writing, photography, printing, paper – what insiders call its "production values" – are so high, and it remains consistently inventive. But the fact remains, these magazines are all competing, for both my dollars and my attention, so comparison is inevitable.

Photos by Peter Vitale, accompanying two short paragraphs of text written by Elaine Green for Architectural Digest, October 1983.