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.
Here, thus, is one of the most delightfully enduring of interiors - one created in the late 1970s by the excellent Alberto Pinto for clients in Paris - showing how in the hands of a master ecumenical choices lead to congregations of serenity.
Photos by Alain Dovifat from an article written by Brigitte Baert for Architectural Digest, October 1977.
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