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.

Crossing the Rubicon

The other morning at the only surviving bookstore in this part of town, ready to be persuaded despite the histrionic title that I really needed to have the latest book by a well-known decorator, an erstwhile favorite of mine, and someone, I'm sure, nominated tastemaker and trend-setter many times over. I wasn't going to buy the book then and there because, being willing to defer gratification by a few days, I intended to order it online. In the end, though, after going through the book twice, I decided not to buy it at all. When a book, to my eye, is nothing more than a series of vignette after déshabille vignette, I find, much to my and undoubtedly the Celt's relief, that I no longer can be persuaded that I really need a book for its potential historical value, especially when, disconcertingly, I hear myself saying I might not live long enough for it to become history.

However, this isn't going to be a criticism of that particular decorator's work or even about the fatuous language used when writing about celebrity interior designers (tastemaker and trendsetter) or those that wish to be so - rather more a plea for fewer vignettes and less styling thereof.  Perhaps I'm being lazy, but sometimes it's hard to understand how a room as a whole works. I'm sure I don't need to elucidate because you've all seen the petal and leaf bestrewn table tops, the asymmetrically arranged mini-gallery of mini-art, assortments of trinkets disposed on bookshelves and on and under tables, darling little lamps on kitchen countertops ........ well, you've seen 'em all and possibly loved 'em all as well!

Dear reader, it is what it is.

One of the more restrained and interesting riffs on the Post-Modernism of the 1980s, a mix of allusion and illusion, modern with the seeming old, David Whitcomb's four pavilions connected to a long hall, an eighty-five-foot-long spine, set high on a ridge overlooking the Hudson River was, I thought at the time, one of the most exciting houses published in the 1980s. I still find it interesting but, to be honest, not quite as exciting as it once was.

Perhaps my eye is a lot more critical than it was twenty or thirty years ago and Whitcomb's house is very definitely of its time. Not that I wish to imply that for a house to date is a bad thing but there are some decades, being afflicted by extremes as were the 1980s, that have a very strong flavor and cannot but date.

 

I struggled with what I wrote above (a train of thought I still cannot complete) about as much as I struggled with the feeling that sometime during the the late spring and early summer I crossed a personal Rubicon, and over the last month I came to realize my own "summer stream"(to misquote H V Morton)* had dried up. Many a time I've opened this post to continue writing and each time I went away frustrated with myself. It is clear to me, much as did the Rubicon of old, I must set a new course.

*H V Morton, a fellow Lancastrian, prolific travel writer and, for me, a newly-discovered pleasure and one of the positive aspects of what I suppose has been a kind of writer's block. In the hopes of finding a remedy, I haunted the university library and found many a book to occupy me and dampen my frustration - Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, E M Forster's short stories The Life to Come, Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham, Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, Wilde's Devoted Friend by Maureen Borland, and Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.


A Traveller in Italy by H V Morton, not actually found in the library but given to me recently by my old college professor - a happy coincidence given that we are planning our own travels in Italy - is a such a pleasure to read. I cannot say travel writing is a genre that has heretofore particularly interested me but I can see me reaching for more of Morton's books, especially those about Rome. The Fountains of Rome was a darn good read if a little too heavy (physically) for bedtime reading.

"A few miles north of Rimini, on the coast road to Ravenna, I came to a trickle of summer water that was flowing under a bridge. Its name was the Rubicon. It was once the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Rome, and any general who crossed it with his army, without the permission of the Senate, was committing rebellion. Caesar crossed it because his spies had told him that his enemies in the capital were plotting his downfall, and he knew he had to march on Rome or perish.........

"It is curious how often famous rivers fail to live up to their associations: the Tiber is not much to look at, and the Jordan is hardly wider than the Rubicon. In winter, of course, the Rubicon, like all torrents, would be formidable, and Caesar forded it on January 10, in the year 48 B.C., which, as the unreformed calendar was about seven weeks ahead of the sun, would really have been during the November floods. As I stood looking at this stream, to me one of the most thought-provoking sights in Italy, cars, motor-cycles, scooters, coaches, and caravans continued to rush past; and during the few moments I was there several hundred people must have crossed the Rubicon without being aware of it."

Photographs by Langdon Clay to accompany text written by Gini Alhadeff for Architectural Digest. Architecture by WM. Richard McGilvray and interior design by David Whitcomb. I cannot cite the date of publication yet.

A country house

During the last few weeks as my life creaked its way to back to normality, I did much planning of the country house that looms large in my imagination and which, despite all my attempts at getting us to reconnoitre lake and mountaintop, we have yet to buy.

It's the English half of me, I think, that longs for a house in the country - I read somewhere an acerbic comment that when Brits make a pile of money they all head for the country, heads filled with notions of joining the gentry, to refurbish every bothy, parsonage and manse in sight - whereas the American half rather would like a snappy little cottage, fit only for ourselves and a couple of friends, atop a gusty dune by the ocean. The Celt, raised as he was by parents who for various reasons lived in the Scottish hinterland, considers the countryside nothing more than psychical and cultural wilderness, brimming with rain, flies and shit. Undeniably, the countryside does have a lot of each, but my relationship with a romantic idea remains strong despite me knowing that, were I there, I'd probably spend a lot of time sloshing, swatting, dodging and squelching. The Celt, as I say, does not think as I do.  

I can accept that one might, romantically, wish to connect the interior of a country house to its surroundings - give a nod to the spirit of place, as it were. I accept, also, that in the language of design there is a degree of cant - conventions and pieties that seem to express an esoteric level of connection. For example, the once de rigeur phrase bringing the outside in has been supplanted by a more mystical honoring of the landscape beyond the windows - a paying of tribute, nymph-like, to the trees, the streams, the flora and fauna. What it means, of course, is that wicker, grass, rust, distressed paint, driftwood, flour-sack pillows, litters of herbal, avian and floral motifs, even a jelly-jar or two, aflitter with lightening bugs, cosy up together with hand-adzed beams, reclaimed barnwood walls and floors, faded oriental carpets, crusty antiques from last week yesteryear in a tasteful tizzy of rustic whimsical cliches. None of it actually risible, if that is what you like or, at least, lust after, but to me it is about as real as the stylist's set pieces in magazines where one sees tea tables set out on a lawn or under trees - as if there wasn't a fly, mosquito, a chigger, flea, tick or snake within a million miles.

Our friend Will emailed to tell me about photographs of David Whitcomb's country house that he'd found and another friend kindly lent me the book. I recognized it immediately, of course - somewhere here there's a box of clippings amongst which is the original article about the house - I was so impressed thirty-odd years ago, when I saw the photographs for the first time. In fact I still am, and it's quite clear that Mr Whitcomb had no truck with a gimcrack pantomime of country life. His house, a converted mill, which he enlarged with a stainless-steel structure as simple as a child's building block, became his year-round residence after he gave up his city apartment.

I could bang on about Mr Whitcomb's sense of place, his appreciation of the structure of the old mill, his taste in furnishing it, and how the more contemporary room, the steel studio, has stood the test of time, but I don't need to - its clear from these photographs.

And it's clear to me that this is precisely the kind of house I would like for us to inhabit. Oh, I don't necessarily mean a mill-house, though that would have its charms; rather, a house comfortably and amply furnished, cognizant of infirmity and youth, and with those most valuable of commodities: space, peace and quiet.

Photographs of David Whitcomb's country house from Architectural Digest: Country Homes by Daniel Eifert to accompany "original text adapted by Cameron Curtis McKinley." The Knapp Press, Los Angeles, 1982.

Soignée

"I often think designers should keep their thoughts to themselves, and just let the results show their point of view. But in this particular case, I am anxious to talk about my work, because I think that what is most eloquent in this house is what doesn't meet the eye. I'm referring to absence - or abstinence, if you will. The most important thing about the house is what didn't go into it."

So said David Whitcomb over thirty years ago during a conversation about a 1950s modernist glass box he'd decorated in the Appalachian hills of Tennessee. What he said about absence in an interior struck a chord with me, for I like a certain simplicity, emptiness and a lack of visual clutter - qualities common to many of the interiors I've written about. All my favorite decorators of the last forty years share the same eye for proportion, simplicity, and appropriateness - an analogy with tailoring (bespoke is implicit) comes to mind - how a garment is constructed of fine stuff by hand after years of training of both hand and eye. In interior design there has to be training and knowledge, not just of historical styles (in which I include early and mid-century modernism) but of how the forms of furniture, the drape of textiles and the texture of color inhabit both a volume and the lives of the clients.

I'm not sure if it's a phenomenon of aging but I have come to feel the oppressive weight of possessions. I've never been a collector per se, and I don't think that nine framed drawings, two etchings, one large abstract painting, two watercolors, three photographs, a framed Hermes scarf, a small bronze, a tiny terracotta Grand Tour souvenir, 125 square feet of books, and twenty-eight-years-worth of The World of Interiors actually count as a collection - more, perhaps, the evidence of a life well-loved and a hell of a lot of dusting required.

I was reminded recently - it happens every time I see a piece of majolica - of a house early in the 1980s that in my memory was awash in chintz and majolica. No surface nor shelf was free of the stuff. The lady of the house had been persuaded by her decorator to collect majolica, as if by building this collection she was in some way validating her existence - I collect, therefore I am, as it were.

As frequently happens, when in search of something else, my eye was caught by something I was not looking for - this time, a mildly repellent passage in Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's autobiography and, suddenly, there it was - the word I didn't know I'd been looking for, which sums up my thoughts about much of today's interior decorating.

Soignée is a word not much used nowadays, and it's surprising, really, given that its meaning is quite simple. It just means well-groomed, carefully and elegantly put together. Before I develop my thought, let me quote the passage in which O'Neill refers to a famous, now dead (thus arguably fabulous) personage:

".... He had another hang-up, which was horrid. He liked all his women to smell au naturel and remain unshaven. I used to watch in horror all those beauties becoming unsoignée, going without makeup and gradually losing all their glamour. Having reduced them to the mundane, he would move onto the next one and repeat the process."

Unsoignée is precisely the quality that has become so much a part of modern interior design in America. It's not just the plethora of mise en scene props and accessories that overlay most horizontal and vertical surfaces, but also the unconsidered, and some might say benighted, groupings of mismatched pictures in small frames, and in the (to my mind) uneducated juxtaposition of furniture from various periods and styles. I'm not going to argue that the juxtaposition of, say, an Eames plywood chair with French a canapé or Verner Panton plastic with a farmhouse table is wrong, per se, but what I am going to say is that if brand, logo, name or provenance is the deciding factor, that leaves no room for proportion, scale or suitability. One imagines the intent is to be "eclectic," perhaps even worldly - but the result is all too often mere randomness, evoking an upscale flea market.

There was a time, starting in the 1960s, I think, when young designers began to take a piece of what nowadays is called important furniture and display it in isolation, spotlit, against a white wall and with lots of space around it. White wall apart, the point is, placement in relation to immediate surroundings and effect on the viewer, were considered. The unsoignée character of and the apparent lack of consideration in much of modern decorating is a clear example of how innovation - the mix of styles - becomes established practice and eventually descends into retrograde performance art.

How, you might ask, did we go from well-groomed and considered elegance to the accessory- and collection-riddled interiors of today? The answer to that lies, I believe, in the nineteenth century and is for another post. 

Photographs by Daniel Eifert to accompany text, from which the quotation comes, written by Peter Carlsen for Architectural Digest, March 1979. The quotation of Patricia Cavendish O'Neill is from A Lion in the Bedroom, Park Street Press, 2004.