There was a child went forth every day

The last two weeks seem to have been – witness my new waistline – nothing more than a round of lunches, dinners and, ultimately, a reception given by a good friend, celebrating our wedding. Bemused as we both still are about our new legal state and suffering, variously, from indigestion, hangover and, in my case, occasional bad temper, it has proved difficult to knuckle down and continue my posts about timelessness in decorating.  (By the way, in this photograph I'm the one at the back in the Liberace wig and the botox.)

One thing I have done, though, is look through the blog for posts when I have used the word "timeless" and have come up with a few examples for, seemingly, I have been concerned for quite a while with interiors "standing the test of time". A reader pointed out that for him the rooms by David Mlinaric in the last post were redolent of the 1980s and though for me they were not – Post-Modernism and English Country House Style is what I associate with those years – I have given and continue to give his reaction some thought. The following, which I quote from here, I wrote three years ago 

"It never ceases to impress me how some interiors, at their creation completely contemporary, do not date and retain that quality of here today here tomorrow. Why some interiors look dated and why some do not is a question occasionally on my mind and if I have reached a conclusion it is this: when a decorator trysts with or construes contemporary interpretations of living, it is at this point that the spectre of senescence begins to take form as an identifiable characteristic of a period.

To my mind, one of the characteristics of good 20th century decorating is a refusal to draw the curtains against the philistine dark but instead to embrace the best of global aesthetic culture. It's an axiom, a "truth universally acknowledged" to say that the best of one period will fit with the best of another, and whilst this is totally debatable, as a maxim, assuming we all agree what is the best of ...... well, you know the rest of that argument."

Today, thus, I'm giving a few images from past posts (all photographs from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s) that illustrate my interpretation of timelessness – there yesterday and here today. 

Kalef Alaton

Alberto Pinto 

Arthur E Smith 

Geoffrey Bennison

 Roderick Cameron

Antony Childs 

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder,

pity, love, or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day, for a certain part

of the day, and for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

William Baldwin 

Generally speaking, all the rooms I consider to have stood the test of time have a certain asceticism – I have referred to it as absence – a refusal to fill space for the sake of it. The other day, I came across the quotation (above in Italics) in my favorite book of the moment Art in Everyday Life. A book written at  a time when concepts such as good taste and character were not snigger-inducing, it is proving a salutary experience to revisit the principles and opinions underlying my training as both a graphic and interior designer: to read the unselfconscious acceptance of those verities considered eternal before marketing, branding and cult of personality removed any need for them. The quotation above from Leaves of Grass begins the following from Art in Everyday Life. 

"Mere belongings have a tremendous influence in forming character. It would take an unusually strong character to remain true to high ideals of truth and sincerity if dishonesty were the keynote of the home surroundings. Such things as wall paper and metal made to simulate wood; too shiny fabrics imitating costly damask – all these would be avoid if there significance were understood.

"Unfortunately, quality in things is more or less intangible – as difficult to define as personality in an individual – but the outstanding feathers can be recognized and classified. With the eyes opened one very quickly reaches the point where every picture, every piece of furniture, or drapery pattern speaks its note of social grace or friendly domesticity, vigor, or fineness. Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon told as much about themselves in the furniture and decorations with which they like to surround themselves as we are able to learn from historical records. Similarly, we are better acquainted with people after a short time spent in their home, surrounded by their own things, than we would be in a long time spent  with them in a hotel or any other impersonal setting.

"If the reader happens to be one who has never realized that the things people chose tell about their character and their ideals, let him think for a few moments about impressions which he has received at the theater. The curtain rose, let us say, upon a living room; before anyone came on to the stage the audience formed a very definite idea of the kind of people who would be at home in that room; and, if the stage decorator understood his craft the people would prove to be just about what was expected. If a stage setting shows a living room with glaring lights, florid wallpaper and rugs, showy lace curtains, and overdecorated lamps, one expects the people who live there to come on stage in flashy clothes and using a great deal of common, unpicturesque slang. Suppose, however, that the setting shows a room with soft and mellow lights, yellow walls, rugs with subdued and harmonious coloring, thin white glass curtains with attractive chintz over curtains at the windows, well-designed furniture, with some comfortable chairs in front of an open fire, plenty of books, flowers, a few good pictures and decorative objects that catch the light and create points of interest. The audience would expect the people who live in this room to be tastefully dressed, well-bred, and charming.

One of the wondrous things about the above quotation is the elitism of good taste, the prevailing class stereotypes as illustrated by interiors (first written in the 1920s) and the assumptions we all still make about each other based on what we wear, where we live and how we live. 

I wonder sometimes if what dates a room is not objects or atmospheres attributable to certain decades but our concept of class and the way it is used when selling to us. 

All photographs except for the first which is mine attributed in previous posts.

Not from around here

If he agreed with his erstwhile employer and partner, Billy Baldwin, that "decorators should provide a serene, uncluttered background for people, pictures, flowers, books, and the unavoidable confusion brought into a room by living," then I wonder what Arthur E Smith's reaction was when he first saw these lodgepole pine walls - surely one of the most unquiet backgrounds within which he ever had to work.

There is a certain power, if not grandeur, in this kind of architecture that defies, I would think, all reasonable attempts to work within it without resorting to bucolic triteness. Arthur Smith said "he didn't want to overwhelm the architecture"* showing a certain savoire faire on his part - and it does him credit that he did not resort to brobdingnagian-scaled furniture to fill the a ponderous volume. And, to a degree, this house, with its beamed wooden roof evocative of early churches, resembles more a godlet's man-cave at Asgard (though whether Early Asgard or Late Asgard is hard to say) rather than anything fittingly called a cabin.

Nowadays, allusion to the genius loci is a customary, if occasionally tiresome event in decorating, but it has an august history. If it began with Victoria and Albert spreading acres of tartan over the floors of their newly remodeled pile in the Cairngorms, I don't know, but it sure do go back a long way. Even more commonplace is allusion to the spirit of genius ibi - be it a Provençal mas in the suburbs of Texas, a Gustavian slott in Florida or an Umbrian studiolo in Hell's Kitchen - for, seemingly, somewhere else is more attractive than right here, right now - and it's an odd phenomenon.

Of course, the allusion in this case is not to where but to whom - huntin', shootin' and fishin' clients who, having done so over the world over, wanted finally to build a house - a reminiscence, though on the scale of a castle - of cabins they had used down the years.

The ossuary-like antler chandeliers, antler and brass tables, twig tables and chairs, rush-seated ladder-back chairs, scenic-painted sideboard, duck decoys, rhinoceros and bear figurines, salt-glazed pottery, birch-bark baskets; half-barrel cachepots, a vessel in the shape of a tree trunk, rustic pitcher and brass candlestick lamps with twig or raw silk shades, wool plaid, leopard-print carpet and needlepoint rugs - and the laciest curtains ever to grace a log cabin: sill-length, swagged, jaboted and chouxed, atop floral shades matching the print of the coverlet on the maple log bedstead - all suggest an homage to spirit of place, albeit seen through the rose-tinted lens of a rifle-sight, and to Smith's client's fashionable taste in Americana.

It is, I think, because we live in a world of globalized tchochkes, where Americana is more likely to be found in the pages of airline catalogues - and despite protestations by many a decorator that their work is uniquely American - that America as genius loci is less fashionable than it once was. To claim uniqueness suggests that their work is happening nowhere else. And perhaps in the sense that the Mid-Atlantic, the Anglo-American, or the Cotswold-Virginia Style - call it what you will - is more a provincial than a universal phenomenon - the style is unlikely to be current in Paris, Stockholm, Vienna or Istanbul - one could claim uniquity, at the very least.

*Quotation from Sporting Life at Fort McKee by Hunter Drohohowska,

Photographs by Peter Vitale to accompany text by Hunter Drohojowska, Architectural Digest, June 1991.

Perfect

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. 

The Twang's the Thang Redux

"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

Really?

"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.

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.

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.

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?