Chickendale, light-filled, gentlemanly rooms, and being combed out

"I've told you about Miss Louise, haven't I?" asked my old prof over lunch. "Not yet," I replied, "but I'd love to hear about her."

"There isn't much to say other than she was a Southern lady of stately aspect – a decorator ... a marvelous decorator, who knew her furniture ...  no Chickendale for her, it was all good stuff ... at Rich's when Rich's was something in Atlanta. Did I ever explain what the five pieces of Southern furniture are?"

"Yes," I said, "but I've forgotten. Tell me again." "We're off!" thought I and settled into my Manhattan – it wasn't really a bourbon on the rocks kind of day: a bit grey, a bit dull, a bit overcast – and that was me, not the weather.

"Well..." she said, "I talk too much ... do you have time?"

"We're here for the afternoon, if we like – remember, they know us."

"Well. the five pieces of Southern furniture are the slab or the huntboard; the cellarette ... oh, those Baptists loved their cellarettes ... hid a multitude of sins, of course ... the sugar chest; the lazy susan and the biscuit board. I should perhaps say that they are the five pieces of furniture that were once considered Southern, and Miss Louise certainly knew what they were. She sold enough of them, and the real thing, too."

"Ah, yes, Miss Louise. What's so memorable about her?"

"She was a good decorator, a real lady who could laugh at herself. Stopped for speeding ... windows wide open, it was summer ... she told the tale that when the policeman came to her car, she patted her bosom as only a Southern lady could, crying 'a bee, officer, a bee. Can you help me?' He left very quickly – no ticket – and she sped on. But, it wasn't the way she lived, necessarily, that made her famous... more the way she went."

"Went?"

"Died. She died under the hairdryer at Rich's salon and ... well the phrase is – and if it's not on her gravestone, it should be – permed at Rich's and combed out at Patterson's [funeral home]."

I admired it then, and I love it still, the Virginia countryside home of Antony Childs. Two years ago I wrote about Childs' Georgetown house:

"There are what used to be called 'important antiques' dotted around, but in this room and the rest of the house a good balance between display and hospitality has been achieved. It's unlikely anyone entering the front door got the feeling they first should have checked their personal liability insurance.

"The most pleasing thing about these charming rooms is that they were created over twenty years ago yet are as fresh and classic as they were then. Nothing has dated – well, maybe the skirted dining table a little, though I must say I've always been partial to a good skirted table. The grand dining room curtains are pretty restrained in comparison to many a drapery from the same time, and would not look out of place today. Other windows in the house, judging by photos of the living room and bedroom, are simply furnished with Roman shades, that most classic of window covering. The wooden furniture is grand but not repellant in its pomposity and the upholstery is sane and welcome. I could go on about the contents of these rooms but they are visible in the photos. Unusual for the time there is no name-dropping provenance for any of the furniture.

"I didn't know this man, but I like his light-filled, gentlemanly rooms. These are spaces to be alone it, kiss a lover or two, listen to Roy Orbison, read (the phrase curl up with a good book comes to mind, but I shall eschew it), trip a light fantastic, play with a Game Boy, wax poetical, opine on how the world's gone mad today, good's bad today, black's white today, and day's night today when most guys today ... "

Though I wrote then about other rooms with other furniture, the qualities I admired in Georgetown I found and still find in the Virginia hunt country house: light-filled; gentlemanly; restrained; pleasing; fresh; classic and simple.

There isn't anything that does not continue to delight my eye – from Sanderson's Willow Minor bathroom wallpaper, a 17th-century Dutch ebony frame above Dana Westring's trompe l'oeil finely-painted chimney board, William IV leather-covered armchairs, Régence chair, 18th-century four-poster bed and French desk at its foot – there are none of the five pieces of Southern furniture. Perhaps, more important than any individual piece of furniture or decoration, is the sense of airy, sunlit space. As far as I can see there are only two concessions to "spirit of place" as it was often expressed in the 80s and 90s, the homages to imagined histories – the horn trophies on the dining room walls and the twig chair beneath the bathroom window. For the rest, it is an evocation of the real spirit of place – peace, quiet, comfort and hospitality of a weekend in the country.

Antony Childs, who died of AIDS in June 1994 at the age of 57, one year after the article was published – the last one about him – called the house, in comparison to what he did for his clients, "undressed." 

The Five Pieces of Southern Furniture

A Huntboard or slab as it is also known is, according to Merriam-Webster.com, similar to a sideboard but frequently simpler, smaller and taller. Allegedly used at hunt breakfasts.

A Cellarette is a small, portable wine storage chest, frequently made of mahogany, but without a water-proof lining that could hold ice. From Pinterest.

A Sugar Chest is a piece of furniture in the late 18th-century and the early 19th-century. Used to store large quantities of sugar for longer periods of time. From Pinterest.

A Lazy Susan is a revolving platform set into the top of a "self-waiting" table. From here.

A Biscuit Board is tautologous to say it's a board on which biscuits are prepared. From here, the most explanatory example I could find on the web. 

Patterson's Funeral Home designed by Philip Shutze circa 1928

When we first came to Atlanta twenty years ago the Spring Hill Mortuary, as it is also known, was covered in ivy and looked like a house on a hill. Since, as you see, it has been stripped of greenery and repainted white.


Photographs of Patterson's and its chapel by Timothy Hursley from American Classicist: The Architecture of Philip Trammell Shutze, Elizabeth Meredith Dowling, Rizzoli, 1989.

Photographs of Antony Childs' house by William Waldren from and article by Amy Fine Collins in HG House and Garden, July 1993.

To what end?

Recently, I was asked to recommend interior design books for a beginner's library. I rattled off a list of the names we all have on the tips of our tongues – Elsie de Wolfe, Syrie Maugham, Frances Elkins, Nancy Lancaster, Sister Parish, Jean-Michel Frank, Billy Baldwin, John Fowler, David Hicks, Albert Hadley and Mark Hampton. Eventually I wandered off, texting the bartender for another manhattan as I did so, and it occurred to me as I headed to the bar that, though a good list of names, I'd missed the point. Someone else that evening in our library during one of our cocktail parties had remarked how lucky I was to own all these books. Two manhattans in, the point I'd missed, whatever it was, eluded me momentarily – until my mind snagged on that word "lucky".

Indeed, but to what end? thought I, surprising myself with the force of it. I own each of the books on my quick list (and many more such monographs) and, irritated as I am to find it so, it took someone else's perfectly normal question to set me wondering why I actually do own and want to own so many books. To what end, precisely? Or, to be precise, what happens to them if, in the end, I no longer need them? How does one dismantle a lifetime's collection of books? Is it just so much paper that few, if anyone, would want?

I've mentioned before how the new president of a local for-profit university decided the modern student no longer needed books as "everything necessary is available online." He closed the library, deaccessioned everything, and at the time it seemed self-evident that it was to my benefit to have, at least, the books I'd ordered for the school library come into mine. After all, I was still teaching, would do so for the foreseeable future and I could use them for the blog. When, a few years later, I retire, that seemed yet another opportunity – I could spend golden years reading them all – visions of velvet smoking jacket-clad days spent in a paneled library, books piling (neatly) all over the place, creaking shelves reaching to the ceiling, the scents of leather and pot-pouri, the literary equivalent of new car smell, suffusing the room, all played in my head.

And, alas, it was almost to be, this bastion against the increasing tide of philistinism.

Despite illusion and delusion I continue to buy interior design books – though in fewer number than previously. Conversely, I delve into my shelves and stacks far more than ever I did for, perhaps not so surprisingly, they prove to be more satisfactory than what is available in stores.

If there is anything missing from my collection of books it is a coherent history of 20th-century and 21st-century decorating and design. A history of residential decoration could be cobbled together from the books I own, but if anyone were interested in design rather than decoration he would have slim pickings. Interior decoration, still a massive if shrunken industry, is but a tiny part of the national market – contract or commercial design taking the largest segment.

Thus, if I were asked again to suggest a beginner's library for an aspiring student of interior design I would recommend first reading Becoming an Interior Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design by Christine Piotrowski – an expensive and rather dry introduction to the business of design and the difference between decoration and design. Beyond that, I'd suggest books about architecture and historical styles – the golden oldie by Sir Bannister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. For furniture styles and the history thereof, I suggest John Moreley's The History of Furniture: Twenty-Five Centuries of Style and Design in the Western Tradition, and because its just fascinating, Geoffrey Beard's Upholsterers & Interior Furnishings in England, 1530 -1840.

For my neighbour who asked me for recommendations I would amend my original list to include both Morley's and Beard's books with the further addition of The Inspiration of the Past and The Search for a Style by John Cornforth to provide historical context for all the practitioners, both of yesterday and today, of traditional design.

Regarding residential design the following photograph will show you where my tastes lie and I can heartily recommend each of the books shown.

The photographs by Richard Felber of John Richardson's library/writing room are from the last issue of HG published in July 1993. I still miss House and Garden – besides The World of Interiors, still the best interiors magazine there was. It was replaced by Domino, of all things.

I kept that last issue for years but where it now is I've no idea. My friend Will Merril mailed me his copy for the article about John Richardson's library and to my joy I found also the last published article about one my circles-within-circles decorators, Antony Childs. More about him next time.

Hicks, Hermes and a book review

More than thirty years after this photograph taken in Wright Ludington's salon, David Hicks was interviewed (a post for another day) by Charles Gandee for House and Garden - a source for some of the content of my recent posts - probably the best interior design magazine that ever was, its demise after the glory years under the editorship of Louis Oliver Gropp, much regretted. In the 1980s the magazine was renamed and reformatted as HG, the first of its, in my experience, two changes in pursuit of the chimera of hip. The last and most frenetic of the three formats was followed after the final closure by the limp and, by me, unlamented Domino.

Today's post did not begin as a review of the state of interior design publishing, but whilst I'm on the subject I might as well say how disappointed I am by the quality of the design of the long-awaited biography of Billy Baldwin. I'm not going to complain about the fact that I learned little that is new for that perhaps says as much about me as the author, or about the fact that I've seen a great deal of the photographs in other books about and by Billy Baldwin. I do not question the author's scholarship or his writing style, for it is a learned, well-written and easily-read book, but what I will say that is that when it was announced it was to be published I asked myself what else there was to say about Mr Baldwin and now I have the answer.

My concern is this: at this point in twenty-first century book production it should not so be so that photographs, however old the original, can look so sad on the printed page. The major problem, I think, is with the old print films - four-color halftones that were made before the refinements of the 1980s, and which, when enlarged beyond their capacity, begin to look fuzzy and dull on the page. Not all the images suffer in this way, but there is many a photograph that is fuzzy and dull. None of this can be laid at the door of the author - he after all is at the mercy, if mercy is the right word, of his designer and publisher. In this case, the publisher should have exercised more editorial control over the graphic designers.  Did anyone think of doing a print check?

When buying a book online, and I increasingly do because they are cheaper, I cannot leaf through as I could in a bookstore. There's a lesson here, of course, for had I been patient and waited until this book appeared on the shelves I would very likely not have bought it. Of all the books that were slated for publication last month, two were of interest to me - Billy Baldwin: The Great American Decorator being one of them. I'm so disappointed I think I'm going to return it. The other I've yet to check out - in the bookstore!


Photograph of David Hicks from David Hicks, A Life of Design, by Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli, 2009. The second photograph of Wright Ludington's salon by John F Waggaman from The Collector in America, compiled by Jean Lipman and the Editors of Art in America, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

Chic happens

A while before I posted about Billy Baldwin's blue salon at La Fiorentina, and before I went searching in my old copies of The World of Interiors for Roderick Cameron's last house in Ménerbes I found an article written by Cameron a couple of years before he died about a house he decorated for an American client, Mr X, and his wife.

I did not set out to write this week about Roderick Cameron but, as you know, one thing leads to another and here I am cogitating a particularly rich aesthetic - rich not in any sense of being overbearing or displeasing in its showiness, but one that at first glance seems a little underwhelming and sometimes, mystifyingly, is described as chic.

Chic is a word that gets bandied about a lot - in a modish way, you might say. Chic, is ... well, to be chic is to be classy, but not quite in the way, if you'll pardon the slang, those old Hollywood broads were classy. A platinum blonde, totin' a piece, marking some big lug on her way to the big house might have been a classy broad, but she certainly was not chic.

So, what is chic and, as an extension of that, what is taste? Chic is a word destined or even intended to make any tyro quake in his aesthetic boots. Chic really does just mean classy or if classy ain't classy enough then chose a synonym: elegant, exclusive or dashing. In that word exclusive lies the nub, as it were, of the usage of the word chic and in a déclassé use of the word classy. Describing something a being chic is a classy way of showing that classy is as classy does!

But classy, like the word classic in classical music, or classic in the sense of time-honored is derived not from the Classical World (Ancient Greece and Rome) but from the word class - as in upper-class.

If chic, then, means being elegant and sophisticated and if, as many taste-makers proclaim, it is beyond fashion, what are they really saying? What we must remember is that language is a signifier of status, of background, of intelligence, of wealth, of culture, and perhaps more than all those, the ability to create a persona of persuasion. And so it is with interior design: words are class signifiers and the language of the upper class of the profession, the so-called Deans of Design, the Mavens, the Connoisseurs - or to put in an un-chic way, the Fixers and the Tastemakers.

Turning to Mr Cameron again... "Owing to the scale of the house, the colors had to be on the quiet side; many of the walls were to remain white, or just broken with a suggestion of green or yellow. The materials also had to be small-patterned and light. Basically it was to be a house that the family came to in the spring or early summer, and I wanted it to reflect this mood. The small sitting room has a white linen sofa, a clear Perspex coffee table in front of it, and armless comfortable chairs - the material covering them a very simple green-and-yellow patterned chintz. There wasn't room for real armchairs. The drinks table came from David Hicks and is white sycamore with a sand-colored marble top. The stone floor we partly covered with raffia matting made by Les Tapis de Cogalin near St. Tropez. The only hints of real luxury in the room are a handsome painting on silk of a white dog by Castiglione, the Jesuit father working for Emperor Ch'ien-lung in Peking during the eighteenth century, a faded blue-washed gouache of a Chinese Buddha, and a touching print found at Malletts in London of a girl offering a magnolia bloom to a fawn. An endearing early-nineteenth-century wooden owl from Austria presides over the drinks table set with old, rectangular, cut-glass decanters, and a handsome famille-verte vase made into a lamp stands on a low draped table by the sofa. This small room sets the mood of the whole house - great simplicity mixed with a touch of exoticism.

"The dining room was so narrow we furnished its length with two round tables covered in an attractive pale-yellow-and-white chintz from Colefax and Fowler. The eight chairs surrounding them are of unpainted wood with rush seats. A series of Hodges's engravings of India hang on the wall and an intricately carved marble plaque of the Mughal period hands over the fireplace. It was found in Lucca, where two young dealers, one Italian and one Siamese, having started a remarkable shop specializing in Oriental art. It is named the Galleria Craag after Carl Craag, the Siamese partner, and it comes as a delicious surprise for anyone interested in the Orient. I had the plaque framed in molded plexiglass, and it has become one of my favorite objects. The house if full of things I would have bought for myself and I feel this is the only way to work for someone else if one is allowed the luxury of choosing.

"Mr X consulted Gilbert Occelli, a talented young French designer. Gardening in Provence is not easy; the soil in most places is poor and the climate rude, too cold in winter and too hot and dry in the summer. One has to be well-versed as to which plants will or will not thrive. The top of a fairly exposed plateau with no great depth of soil did nothing to help matters and imposed its own restrictions. Mr Occelli found 40 old olive trees and planted them at the approach to the house, starting his garden plan from there. Two raised platforms to one side of the house, one divided into four and planted with herbs and the other spread with gravel and arranged with pots, formed one element. To the right of the approach, Mr X had been obliged sink a huge reservoir for his water, which is pumped up from a 120-meter-deep well. This gave Mr Occelli about fifty centimeters of soil, a problem he solved by making a little formal parterre with box and gravel paths centered around two large terra-cotta pots planted with clipped box. Two variegated hollies marked the entrance. The result is decorative and puts one in mind of gardens one has seen in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

"The swimming pool, blasted out of solid rock, lies below this and is reached by a descent massed with lavender which is kept clipped into tight balls when not in bloom. The garden, like the house, has been very simply treated and is very much in keeping with its wild surroundings. It's a place of utter enchantment, redolent with tangy smells and alive with butterflies, scuttling lizards, and a buzzing of bees, the whole bathed in the clear beautiful Provençal light."

To my mind, few things better pin down the wil-o-the-wisp concept of chic than these elegant, spare rooms, and Rory Cameron's deceptively simple descriptions.

Photographs by Jacques Dirand to accompany text written by Roderick Cameron for House and Garden, December 1983.

Hope or hype? Video killed the radio star...

What might well be photos of the last of Kalef Alaton's work caused in a roundabout way an over-a-glass-of-wine conversation about the role of blogging and its possible consequences for print. I wondered – and I realize I might be coming late to this discussion – if blogs are contributing to the decline of magazines.

So, if one compares a blog to a magazine it is clear that there are similarities: each has a distinct personality... generally speaking there is something to be seen or read not available elsewhere... expectations in terms of subject and style are fulfilled and, with luck, the envelope is pushed – but not too far... there is consistency from issue to issue yet there is something new each time... an editor picks good stuff that appeals and presents it, along with some analysis, critique or background... and there is reliability in terms of frequency (be it monthly or weekly).

In short, a well-curated balance of the expected and the novel: in this way is a loyal following created.

So what about this is distinct from what a blog does? (I'm not even talking about those blogs that are so commercialized they are nothing but advertorial.) Are blogs competition for magazines?

To some extent I think they are, but do not expect this competition to be deadly. If one looks at past predictions of the imminent demise of this or that industry, it's clear that whatever was hoped or hyped did not come to pass. The movies did not kill live theatre. TV did not kill the movies. And neither has YouTube killed TV - we still watch them all.

There are two distinct differences between blogs and magazines, which encourage me to believe that both can co-exist. One is that most magazines are graphically better designed than the average blog – though there are notable exceptions. The second is that magazines look good on the coffee table and even the best-designed blog has a hard time doing that.

Talking about graphic design reminds me of another example of the overnight demise of a vast part of that industry caused by technology and software advances. A generation ago, it became possible to be one's own graphic designer. (Some of you may not be old enough to remember that it was ever any other way!) The problem is, it ain't that easy to be a graphic designer without the training - look at any locally produced magazine - Photoshop might make it easy to create but it does not teach one about communication or aesthetics. Today, the same is happening to video - look at YouTube – and when you do look at YouTube, you'll notice that although it's fun and all, actually making a compelling video is not that easy. So it is with blogging - templates enable but do not guarantee clarity of communication or compelling content.

The foregoing notwithstanding, many dearly loved magazines have bitten the dust recently – and the same has happened to newspapers. The causes are different, though both have to do with economics and advertising. Producing and distributing a glossy magazine or a newspaper are both expensive endeavors. In the case of magazines, advertising dollars vaporized with the drastic shrinking of the luxury market – but this is at least in part reversible as the economy revives. Newspapers, on the other hand, are imploding because the advertising they rely on has moved to the internet - to eBay and Craigslist, for example – and because the internet provides timely news updates better than a printed newspaper can. And those are changes which are not reversible. Where newspapers remain valuable is in their synopses, opinion and analysis... although these roles, too, are increasingly being taken over by online media. In fact, one might contend that, in this aspect, blogs are a greater threat to newspapers than to magazines.

Blogs may have given magazines some degree of competition by allowing anyone to become a writer, publisher and editor. But still, most magazines do it better in terms of aesthetics, content, advertorial and advertising than even the commercialized blogs I've seen. In the same way, YouTube does a brilliant job of showing that good video is actually hard (and usually expensive) to make, thereby proving it is no competition for TV. However engaging the umpteenth cute kitten video or Lady Gaga lip-sync, at a certain point one just wants to sit back and luxuriate in the professional production values of, say, True Blood.* And let's not forget that blogs also provide a proving ground for new talent that magazines are now beginning to cultivate.

Photos by Tim Street-Porter to accompany text written by Pilar Viladas for House and Garden, August 1989.

* June 13th, people!

In search of lost time

Without wanting to sound boorish, I must tell you I cannot abide Art Nouveau and it is entirely possible that my detestation will leak out as I am writing about Vincent Fourcade's Bridgehampton house. I've tried to like it for thirty years and still I don't. Perhaps the odd bit of Art Nouveau jewelry is interesting but, beyond that, the entangled sliminess of the style repels me. Just wanted to get that off my chest!

Vincent Fourcade, though not unknown today, is possibly remembered most by those of us who, like chickens scrabbling in the dust, pore through old magazines, and get together over a dining table to yack away about what fascinates us the most - decorating, decorators and the juicy, often salacious, stories attached to their names. Yesterday, for example, over lunch with a friend, she and I talked about Fourcade with the chef/owner when he came out of his kitchen to say hello.

The house, as you see from the first photograph, is a Long Island Shingle/Colonial, a house so ordinary from the outside that the inside is totally unexpected. Not unexpected, surely, of Mr Fourcade, but such a facade might imply an interior of momentous East Coast antique furniture disposed in a rather studied manner over patinad floors alongside hand-loomed rugs and carpets, bolstered all with suitably rarified paintings and prints.

Not for Vincent Fourcade, anything approaching a pallid evocation of waspish middle-class gentility. He installed his, and seemingly ship-loads of it, family furniture from France in a deeply buttoned agitation of Art Nouveau furniture, Second Empire upholstery, Pompeiian panels, Empire mahogany beds, Directoire chairs, all atop needlepoint rugs, bounded by brocaded walls betwixt marbleized pilasters and moldings.

Despite the remembrance of things past, as it were, in the decor Fourcade created, together with his partner, Robert Denning, during the 1980s - years when vast fortunes were quickly made - the celebrity nabobs of the time, like their predecessors at the end of the nineteenth century, required visible proof for themselves and their pals that they were the new aristocracy. How better to do it than evoking a fiction of the golden, olden days at the Chateau de Ferrieres during the Second French Empire?

Fourcade and Denning, decorated in a manner only to be described as le gout Rothschild, and it certainly was so described in the 1980s, a time when that other exemplar of the Rothschild Style, Geoffrey Bennison, was working. It will be interesting to compare Fourcade's version of this style to Geoffrey Bennison's, which in my eyes has a lightness of touch, serious certainly, but not pompous.

Vincent Fourcade died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 58. Robert Denning survived Vincent Fourcade by 13 years.

Photos by Oberto Gili from House and Garden, June 1985.

Lunch, by the way, was at Le Lapin in Peachtree Battle and besides good food they make the best lemon cookies in the city.