A book recommendation and the persistence of an idea

I'm not sure why since I came back from California I've been captivated by dining rooms, but many a time I've sat in mine in the early morning sun, black dog at my feet, leafing through books searching for rooms I like. I found many of the formal kind, fewer of the less so, and not a few that were nothing more than showing off. Stylists rule, I guess. I came across old favorites, other rooms I'd forgotten about, influences and, two days ago at an evening event at my favorite furniture store, a book about a Spanish decorator, the Marquis of Azpeztequia, who died in January this year – a fact that surprisingly made hardly a ripple in the design social media here. 

I first knew of the Marquis of Azpeztequia, better known to the English-speaking world as Jaime Parladé, from the pages of The World of Interiors during the 1980s, with photographs of a house for a couple from Bilbao (I learn from the book it is no longer standing), which at the time made both of us fell in love with pink-lined linen sheers and cream-colored crewel upholstered furniture. Seeing those rooms again brings it all back and I would like to write about them in the future to see if I can recapture the magic – for magic it was and Señor Parladé was no trickster. These two dining rooms in Spain are by him, the first with walls of toile de jouy and the second of cordovan painted leather, and illustrate what I realize now I was searching for all those mornings and had to go out of the house to find – atmosphere. 

Nowadays there are many who decorate or, as my old prof would put it, desecrate – it all depends on your point of view –  but few create atmosphere. It could be argued that atmosphere is a combination of stylist, lens, photographer and lighting and I tend to agree, for one has only to see realtors' photographs of once famously atmospheric rooms to recognize that the skill of a good photographer is paramount when working with rooms of any subtlety. It is the combination of the two professionals – the two artists, if you will – that create the intangible that lifts off the page. 

Jaime Parladé

  Ricardo Labougle, Joaquín Corté, Derry Moore, photographers

This is the third of three books about decorators I have felt worth buying this year

The Formal Dining Room

"More than any other room in the house, the dining room is a place for old traditions, a scene of ritual use where we can indulge in memories of the way our parents and grandparents did things in days gone by. We can put to use objects we have inherited from previous generations without their seeming like irrelevant artifacts. Many otherwise modern people when using their dining rooms actually enjoy returning to the vanished world of manners commonly thought to have been more gentle and refined than our own."

Mark Hampton

Fort Worth, Texas

Almost thirty years ago, Mark Hampton wrote about the essential nostalgia and costly exhibitionism of dining rooms. His essay, The Integrity of Dining Rooms, written at a time of resurgence of an idea first established, allegedly, during the eighteenth-century – that of a room dedicated to dining, not communally in the medieval manner, but socially for members of le beau monde. So well-written and apparently personal is it, it is easy to forget that Mr Hampton's essay, written at the height of the trickle-down economy, should be seen as precisely what it was, a piece of marketing for the magazine in which it appeared, the long-ago defunct House and Garden, and his own flourishing business working for those who had created that economy. 

David Hicks

Oval dining room, Britwell Salome

David Mlinaric

The Salon Rouge, British Embassy, Paris

Geoffrey Bennison

Lord Weidenfeld's dining room 

Exquisite but unattributed from Instagram

An eighteenth-century dessert setting 

 A recreation of the French manner at Waddesdon

Formal dining rooms persist in this modern age – when for most people, I should think, beyond the seasonal reenactments of Rockwellesque family gatherings that are a powerful tool for selling the idea of family to families – the actual need for a room solely dedicated to dining, is rare. Essentially a room of ceremony and parade, the formal dining room co-exists with the "great room" – that combination of kitchen, living room and dining space so useful to the modern family – and unless the family is given to much entertaining at table, is a status symbol as vestigial as the human tail. Belonging as it does to the "public" part of a dwelling where the inhabitants are characterized by what they display in terms of possessions and behavior, an inordinate amount of money may be spent on it. And so the dining room goes on, generation after generation, lugged around as Coleridge said in another context:  

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks

Had I from old and young !

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung

The Happiness and Heartache

Christmas Eve

Carl Larsson

His First Birthday

Frederick Morgan

The Health of the Bride

Stanhope Forbes

Mariage de Convenance 

Sir William Quiller Orchardson

Two night ago, beneath a beautiful Venetian chandelier, seven of us dined on gumbo, salad and bread pudding and I thought then however grand the room, atmosphere also comes from the mood of people with whom one sits, not from dimmed lighting so beloved of restaurateurs and which has begun now to sap the joy from residential dining spaces. We were a crowd international in origin – Mexican, British, Spanish, Texan and Chinese – and a jolly one, despite three of us being very serious architects. We ended the evening, skirting the hiphop-throbbing frat houses of Georgia Tech, with a viewing of the College of Architecture's adaptive reuse of the Hinman Research Building. It's the kind of thing one does, at midnight after a good dinner with architects,

A most magnificent space, an erstwhile machine shop, likened too easily to a cathedral as are many older industrial spaces (the present-day Tate Modern, for example) and not shown to advantage by my iPhone photographs, hence this link to official Geogia Tech images.

Personal Preferences

Melvyn Dwork

New York

Joseph Braswell

Manhattan

William Hodgkins

Tino Zervudachi

Manhattan

"Atmosphere" is where I begin my search for images of rooms that could give me ideas for our sparsely furnished dining room. More alcove than room, we use it every day and at the weekends we breakfast there too. Facing full east, it's the ideal place for weekend relaxing over a second cup with iPads, especially when the the plumbago is in bloom, the hummingbirds squabble and dart about, and the clouds build.

Some of the best times have been spent at that table listening to the Jeweler, such a rare friend and a superb raconteur much given to elliptical digressions and occasional jaw-dropping transgressions that can cause tear-inducing and cathartic belly laughs. His partner, the Celt's much valued friend, is of a quieter bent – though occasionally disposed to slipping off dining chairs onto dogs – and typically looks on in wide-eyed, if speechless mellowness. The rest of us try not to simultaneously inhale and chew, and end the evening with a feeling of magnificent well-being that has nothing to do with bourbon and everything to do with companionship and laughter.

Drama we don't need – gawd knows the world provides enough of that – but good lighting is an absolute. Since my eyes have deteriorated, I cannot clearly see who is at the other side of the table but the whorls of fingerprint left by the maid on the silver is completely identifiable and as to the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, I can be precise. Candlelight is wonderful for smoothing out wrinkles; Botox better, I hear, but until the mooncalf look becomes acceptable for everyone, I'll keep the beeswax burning. Candlelit dining tables are divinely romantic but I do worry once in a while, when surrounded by acquaintances caressing their newly Botox-injected faces to see if they still have them, that these candle flames, by some mischance, a stray breeze and the clouds of fragrance with a superabundance of sillage, might become the final conflagration that takes down the whole universe.

Atlanta, Georgia

Early morning coffee with one of my peeps 

Beyond, a view to the dining table

The Health of the Bride, Stanhope Forbes from Paradise Lost, Christopher Wood, Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1988

Mariage de Convenance, Sir William Quiller Orchardson, from Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood,  Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, 1999

His First Birthday, Frederick Morgan, from Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood,  Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, 1999

Christmas Eve, from The World of Carl Larsson, The Green Tiger Press, La Jolla, 1982

Recreation of an eighteenth-century dessert setting in the French manner at Waddesdon from Flora Domestica: A History of British Flower Arranging 1500-1930, Mary Rose Blacker, photography by Andreas von Eisiedel, The National Trust, Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Photograph of dining banquette by Melvyn Dwork from Manhattan Style, John Esten with Rose Bennett Gilbert, Photographs by Chinsee, Little, Brown and Company, 1990

Photograph of kitchen dining table from Tino Zervudachi: A Portfolio, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Pointed Leaf Press, LLC, 2012

Photograph of Joseph Braswell's dining banquette by Peter Vitale from Architectural Digest, April 1977

Photograph of William Hodgkin dining table and chairs by Peter Vitale for Architectural Digest, May 1983

Photograph of Lord Weidenfeld's dining room by Geoffrey Bennison from Geoffrey Bennison: Master Decorator Hardcover,  Gillian Newberry, Rizzoli, 2015

Photograph of the Salon Rouge from Mlinaric on Decorating, Mirabel Cecil,  Francis Lincoln Limited, 2008

Photograph of the oval dining room, Britwell Salome from David Hicks: A Life of Design, Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli, 2009

Photograph of Mark Hampton's Fort Worth dining room from Mark Hampton: An American Decorator, Duane Hampton, Rizzoli, 2010

Vulgarized by misuse

"Taste is a particular person's choice between alternatives. It is choosing a tie to go with a shirt to go with a suit to go with an occasion. It is the way you arrange oranges in a greengrocer's shop; the way you light your room; the colour you choose for the outside of your motor car. It applies to food, to interiors, to manners, to anything where it is a question of choice between one alternative and another in connection with colour, style or behaviour.

"There is a certain stratum of people around the world who consider that they know what a good choice of these elements is: this is what has become known as good taste. Thus you can have what is generally considered to be good taste in pictures, good taste in gardens, good taste in interiors, and conversely you have kitsch taste, theatrical taste, vulgar taste and common taste.

"The international cognoscenti elect themselves over the generations. At the end of the nineteenth century John Ruskin made tremendous proclamations about taste which you cannot really argue with today: he was right within the context of what he was preaching. In the 1900s Edith Wharton was regarded as a paragon of taste. People like Syrie Maugham and Elsie de Wolfe were regarded as leaders of fashion and style in interior design in America, England and France in the late twenties and thirties. History has not, on the whole, proved them wrong.

"Taste is not something you are born with, nor is it anything to do with your social background. It is worth remembering that practically anyone of significance in the world of the arts, whether in the past or today, was nobody to start off with. No one has ever heard of Handel's or Gainsborough's father. Nepotism and parental influence count for little in the history of talented designers, architects, painters and musicians. Good taste is something which you can acquire: you can teach it to yourself, but you must be deeply interested. It is no way dependent upon money.

"Many things are palatable to those of us who are supposedly people of taste. But then they are copied and become vulgarized by misuse; through association with their misuse they become unpopular with us. But I am always open to revivals – it is just a question of  reusing something in the right way. There was a time in my life when moiré or watered silk was absolutely intolerable to me, but I now find it acceptable because the mass of vulgarians have moved away from it; now I can reintroduce it and reuse it in a sympathetic way. There was a time when I loathed vermicelli quilting – it used to be done by pathetic lady decorators on watercolour chintzes of no character whatsoever. But now I like it and use it. It must be done on plain chintz though, and not on a patterned fabric. One reason why I like it so much now is my deep interest in rustication in architecture, a theme which has played a very important part in classical and baroque architecture throughout the centuries.

"There is in fact an acceptable way of using almost everything. If someone asked me to design a room for them, but confessed they collected gnomes, I would make a gnomescape on a table. If someone had a passion for flights of ducks I would say that I would use not one but nine flights and would arrange them in a Vasarely-type way, painting the ducks black and white alternatively."

All very well, Mr Hicks, I thought, but I'd've loved to have seen what you could have done when faced with what in my youth was a nadir of taste: two dolls, a flamenco dancer prancing on top of the telly, light from a low-wattage bulb shining through the black lace flounces of her skirt, and her sister in the loo, forever frozen in an attitude of dramatic renunciation, hiding a spare roll of bathroom tissue under her flaring skirts. So kitsch were they then, those dancers, that now seem so retro as to demand homage.

My taste, be it good or bad, has been formed principally by an aversion to the popular or, as David Hicks describes it, vulgar and common taste – a result, I suspect, of my early years in design school and later in university where I read two magazines almost religiously and for years. The more important of the two was Design, the magazine of the now defunct Council of Industrial Design, and Graphis, a Swiss-produced graphic design magazine that was glossy, expensive and precious. There was a third, but at this remove I cannot remember the name. All I know is that it was in the pages of these magazines that I first read about Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, Moshe Safde's Habitat 67, Buckminster Fuller's geodisic dome, and many a sleek, well-designed product. It was an era of good design when the why, how and what for were paramount – an era of innovation rather than of imitation and restyling.

On my bookshelves I recently came across Phoenix at Coventry, The Building of a Cathedral by Basil Spence. I wonder if I bought it, put it away intending to read it another day and never did, until now. In my youth I once visited the new Coventry Cathedral (the 14th-century St Michael's was bombed and ruined in the Second World War) and it's clear now where my love of combining old and new comes from – for the the power of seeing that ruined stone through the huge engraved screen of window still has resonance. The combination of old and new is still at the basis of my aesthetic though the proportion of each has changed.

Neither ducks, flamenco dancers nor gnomes are in evidence in these two rooms – though a gnomescape might be a splendid, if impermanent, addition to the first, serene, if curiously under-lamped room. Here the combination of modern and old is exciting and, if truth be told, more reminiscent of the 1960s than the architects might care to acknowledge. The modern leavened with the old, rather than the other way round, seems balanced and fresh.

The second room is the one where one might well meet a flight or nine of ducks crossing a wall and as different a room from the first as can be. Or, so you would think – most of what is visible is modern, but what differentiates it from the first room is not only plumpness of shape, but horizon line, color, lack of emphasis on the vertical, and clutter. The eye does not rest as easily in this room as it does in the first, though the backside may well do so.

The first room is from the excellent and stimulating Shelton, Mindel & Associates: Architecture and Design, and the second from a book new to me, The World of Muriel Brandolini, my purchase of which elicited a raised eyebrow from the Celt. He was silent as he read it and made a sage comment afterwards. "Hmmm," was all he said.

Shelton Mindel's room, reminiscent of no period but its own, has a neutral, timeless quality to it, but the Brandolini room, on the other hand, reminds me no end of the late 1960s though its arch cleverness dates it to today.

I surprised myself by liking Brandolini's book for there is little that gibes with my own aesthetic. Yet, though the author veers too frequently towards kitsch there is a freewheeling quality to it all that I find appealing. Would I recommend it? I'd recommend you go to a bookstore and look through it then decide if you want it. I did.

The World of Muriel Brandolini: Interiors, Muriel Brandolini, Amy Tai, Pieter Estersohn (Photographer), Rizzoli.

In a previous post I wrote: Shelton, Mindel &Associates: Architecture and Design is one of those books I bought in a "must-have" moment and, despite it being an impulsive purchase, I remain glad I did. In the Amazon blurb above the most telling phrase to me is "luminous aesthetic" – for light enlivens every page. On the other hand, there is a faded-in-the-sun look to many of the rooms but the powerful integration of architecture, space and light cannot be denied. Not a coffee table book, but it does look splendid on a Barcelona table.


Photograph of Flamenco dancer from here.
Photograph of flying ducks from here.
Photograph of gnomes from eBay.
Pelican bookcovers from here.
Photographs of Coventry Cathedral from Wikipedia.
Poster of 2001: a space odyssey from Wikipedia.
Photograph of Aston Martin DB5 from Wikipedia. 

Two portraits

"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

Tell me, my dear: is it good?

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.

A sneak peek

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

I am really just bored with the interior design scene

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

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.