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

Joseph Braswell

Of all my acquaintance, I know only one person who has houseplants. I'm not talking about white phalaenopsis – though perhaps I should be, given their omnipresence – rather about large plants like palms and figs used as decoration in interiors. They come and go, as it were, and last year, seemingly, the plant to have was the fiddle-leaved fig. Not, I think, as living sculpture as they might have been in 1960s modernist interiors, but more as an addition to the stylish bric-a-brac that today is dignified under the name of accessories. This isn't a rant against house plants for I don't care about them one way or the other – I like the occasional visit by a geranium but that's about it – but because I've been looking through 1970s magazines again I have noticed how they were used as foreground in photographs. Never seen nowadays, this peering through foliage (see the first photograph below and the lilies in the first photograph of the library) but so popular was this conceit in the 1970s it appeared even in the hand-drawn renderings of the time. 

I don't want to overstate this but, to my eye, large plants and their location both in a room and in relationship to the camera lens help date a room – much as white phalaenopsis date rooms to the first decade and a half of this century and, perhaps, fiddle-leaved figs will date rooms to the second decade. 

Not that these rooms at 740 Park Avenue, the erstwhile home of "international tastemaker Mrs Byron C Foy," decorated anew by Joseph Braswell for Mr and Mrs Homer Langdon, are dated; they all, including the library, have stood the test of time. The drawing room with its ivory, cream and yellow scheme, FFF (Fine French Furniture), could have been decorated recently, and the library, with its grey flannel and stainless steel, a superbly beautiful room, could well have been put together a decade later in France and only need refreshing today. 

Foyer

White marble floor, Louis XVI-style friezes, marble-topped console, 

eighteenth-century Coromandel screen hidden behind potted palm.

Drawing Room

Régence boiserie,18th-century Aubusson, yellow and cream striped sofas,

buttercup-yellow Louis XV chairs,  Régence-style ivory moiré armless sofas. Régence marble mantel, parquet-de-Versailles floors.

Drawing Room

"The walls were scraped and restored to the original woodwork, then finished with an eighteenth-century type water paint. Moreover, all the baseboards are the original marbleized wood." 

The Library

Matching bibliothèques flank the door, and a Flemish chandelier hangs above gray flannel sofa. Separated by a table supporting a treasured collection of Italian marble obelisks, a matching sofa faces the color television hidden behind a bank of false book bindings. 

The Library

In contrast with the oft-reiterated bronze and brass in the rest of the apartment, Joseph Braswell used stainless steel as the accent metal. The wall covering is a rusty-brown suede-cloth. The Italian marble fireplace is mounted on a sheet of stainless steel, stretching from floor to ceiling. 

Dining Room

Walls of aubergine cotton twill, red and gold Brunschwig & Fils water-taffeta curtains, 

silver and brass Louis XVI chandelier above 19th-century Directoire dining table

Daughter's Bedroom

Lit à la Polonaise draped in Colefax and Fowler's Berkeley Sprig

Master Bedroom

Joseph Braswell, despite being able with equal ease to step between residential and contract design, bringing to both the same erudition, color sense, and accord between style and purpose, was – as these photographs attest – one of the most underrated designers of the twentieth century. Click here for more about him. Braswell's design of the Helena Rubinstein corporate offices first caught my eye and it remains the supreme example of his work.


Photographs by Norman McGrath to accompany unattributed text (whence quotations) for Architectural Digest, March/April 1974.

Update
Two photographs illustrating my point about peering through foliage. Both are by Jeremiah O Bragstad and are from an article entitled In San Francisco: International Design Show in the same issue of Architectural Digest as above.

By Billy Gaylord

By Larry Peabody

By the waters of ....

... Babylon - well, the East River - I sat down and smiled.

Joseph Braswell's own apartment overlooking Sutton Place in Manhattan photographed in April 1974 for Architectural Digest is very different from what I expected, though that says more about me than Mr Braswell, for if you remember he was the designer of the Helena Rubinstein richly colored and immensely stylish corporate offices shown in Wednesday's post.

I realized, and this is the smile of the title, is that not only could I in a figurative sense have lived in this apartment with very few changes, details really, and what I really like about 1970s interior design I still seek today - the combination of clean-lined modern architecture, logical floor plans, historical reference, color, comfort, meaningful chotchkes, if any, securely corralled.

Mr Braswell's interior is all of this except that it is completely neutral in palette, "non-colors" as the designer said "In our work at Braswell-Willoughby we are steeped in strong patterns and colors all day, and it's easy to become surfeited. Here at home I wanted to restore myself in a tranquil palette of earth tones."

Color, such that it is, is intrinsic to the materials: sisal, rattan, lacquer, chrome, leather, suede, hopsack, mirror. This is 1977 and those materials in intrinsic colors and textures have never really gone out of fashion since. Emphasis has changed somewhat over the years: sisal had its heyday during the 1980s, but it's still around and been joined by seagrass; hopsacking is still in use as an upholstery material now called "Belgian" linen; suede, whether from the tanner or the oil refinery, comes and goes ; mirror, antiqued or not, a couple of years ago was applied to every unsuitable piece of furniture within reach and now its permissible again to clad walls with it; chrome momentarily was supplanted by nickel; lacquer, the real thing, is as fashionable as ever but that other lacquer comprising four coats high-gloss paint is beginning to be considered bad for the environment. Rattan? Least said the better.

The palm frond console in the foyer is 1930s Serge Roche for Emilio Terry. The paper sculpture (you cannot imagine the throb of nostalgia I felt at reading those words) above the desk is by Nancy Miller. Printed fabrics by Allen Campbell, I think.

Photographs by Peter Vitale from Architectural Digest, April 1977.

Title of post refers to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart and by extension to Psalm 137.

Down the hall

Down this forbiddingly bland hall in the General Motors building lay a feast of color unsurpassed in the corporate world then or since. The office suite had been designed in a curious blend of styles for the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics company by Joseph Braswell, a name that one comes across in older issues of Architectural Digest, and judging by these interiors a hellishly good decorator.

Color as part of a corporate identity was not a new concept in 1971 when these photos were published but this degree of individual identity expressed in the design of offices was rare, if not unique. That a corporate office was located in a Modernist building was to be expected by this time (it could be argued that by the seventies Modernism had taken over from Neo-classicism and become the preferred architectural style of authority) and also to be expected was a rigorous furnishing scheme based on a pared-down industrial aesthetic, in a relatively neutral palette.

What is so refreshing about this almost forty-year old design is the mix of style - Modernism, Baroque, Colonial and Park Avenue Traditional. I describe it a curious mix but if one considers the previous decade's upheavals and the resultant solidifying of traditional attitudes it should not be too surprising.

Here is the traditional corporation allying itself with the old guard, indeed stating by its choice of location, architecture, furnishings and art that it is part of the establishment, yet feeling the need to soften the totalitarian message with a reception room masquerading as a Park Avenue drawing room in full fig, flushed through with the bright colors of the 1960s, and by the use of Baroque and Colonial furniture from both sides of the Atlantic.

She moved down the hall

So I paid her a call

She flashed a smile

I stayed awhile ...

Photos uncredited as far as I can ascertain, but are from Architectural Digest, March/April 1971

Quote from She Moved Down the Hall by The Four Seasons.