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

The best known decorator of his time

On looking through my piles of old, often mildew-perfumed, magazines I came across a room designed for a New York charity benefit in 1961 by William Pahlmann. I'd passed over it a few times in my trawling but it was only now, nearly fifty years after it was created, that it struck me as classic as it gets but, as one might expect, with certain dated elements.

Mark Hampton, in his book Legendary Decorators of the Twentieth Century, wrote:

"If one were to come up with just the right phrase to describe the late Bill Pahlmann, it would probably be 'the best known decorator of his time.' " He became a household word, as well as an enormous influence on the design world, both commercial and private. He was also the first man to do so – not that one wishes to sound sexist. Before Pahlmann, there had been some very famous ladies in the decorating business who dominated nearly every aspect of the field, most notably the publicity that surrounded it ...."

" .... sooner or later a Siegfried figure was bound to arrive upon the scene. His name was William Pahlmann. Thirty five years ago*, anyone in America remotely interested in decorating would have known immediately who he was."

I'm sure William Pahlmann is not as well-known today as he once was and, occasionally, one still comes across photographs of rooms done by him that illuminate what Mark Hampton meant.  On the other hand, there are photographs of rooms that make one wonder how he became as famous as he did. This is not to say Pahlmann was not a good decorator because he was, as this room shows. It is a room that could be extant today and be charming enough to be considered a time-capsule.

However, to my mind, there is a direct correlation between what made him famous and what makes some of the present generation of decorators famous – those elements of novelty and fashion that titillate the national publicity machine to giddy heights of febrility (and, which, inevitably date a room.) Also, to my mind, what gives this room a degree of modernity is the degree of visual clutter.

In her new and excellent book, George Stacey and the Creation of American Chic, Maureen Footer mentions William Pahlmann as a friend of Stacey's and that each influenced the other. George Stacey's influence certainly comes to mind here, not solely in the quality of the antique furniture, but  in the gemstone-hues (that wonderful emerald–green chandelier) used in Mrs Carll Tucker's townhouse in New York City – the venue in 1967 for a decorator's showhouse to benefit the Epilepsy Association of America.

The dark paneled walls, offset by a bright gold painted ceiling, seem to me a beautiful and restrained setting for an effervescent printed linen that, frankly, might well have led the old-guard carpet to wonder about the younger generation, the flower-children of the 1960s.

In comparison with a room by his friend George Stacey, Pahlmann's rooms have, however formal the basis, a definite air of informality – as Mark Hampton wrote: "he could guarantee an atmosphere of lively, unconventional modernity where dinner jackets and finger bowls were less common than television and cashmere cardigans."

I'll write again about William Pahlmann in future posts. He's worth getting to know. I write above that one comes across photographs of rooms done by him that make one wonder why Pahlmann became as famous as he did, but I question now if his diverse (I won't use the word "eclectic") approach to design and modernity is lost to my jaundiced eye. Clearly I need to investigate further.

The fabric on the sofas and the curtains is, I think, "Carmel" by Franciscan Fabrics – a kind of floral sadly missed by those of us regretting the dumbing down of design ..... nope, mustn't say that sort of thing. Sensitivity training, and all that! However much I might wish a 1960s free-wheeling gutsiness were again visible in textile design, it isn't.


The photographs are by Alexandre George for Architectural Digest, Fall 1967.

* Written in 1992.

George Stacey and the Creation of American Chic

A while back I read that a book about George Stacey was soon to be published and I must say I looked forward to learning more about the man I'd first read about in Mark Hampton's Legendary Decorators of the Twentieth Century. Charmed, over twenty years ago, as I was by Hampton's watercolor of Stacey's living room at Le Poulailler in France, and impressed by what he wrote about Stacey, then ninety, I'm even more charmed and impressed by the new book, the first, about George Stacey – George Stacey and the Creation of American Chic. In a time when, generally speaking, indiscipline and ignorance of history holds sway it is good to read a well-illustrated book showing why George Stacey was considered a "legendary" decorator by another of that ilk.

"A short while ago I went to see a house in East Hampton decorated by George Stacey nearly thirty years ago for Mrs. William Lord, a woman who has bee his friend and client for many years and who lives there all year round now. Its rooms still bear the Stacey stamp of boldly stylized chic that, paradoxically, has aged to a mellowness one rarely finds in fashionable statements from the past. One reason we redecorate so often is to erase the trendy flaws that reflect the unconscious mistakes we make trying to be in style. Twenty-five years or so ago, when this lovely East Hampton house was being done up, there were a lot of popular trends now almost impossible to remember, they've been buried so deep. George Stacey, however, never embraced Mylar wallpaper or chrome and plastic tables. He relied on strong color schemes and carefully selected and arranged pieces of furniture, each one beautiful on its own. Because he is a classicist of sorts, as well as the possessor of a fine and highly trained eye, his choices have survived the years, carrying their beauty with them." [Mark Hampton]

"One of the requisites of a competent decorator is real knowledge of period furniture of any country. It is, in general, a fairly complicated study involving research, comparisons, and a liking for both art and history. With this knowledge, and with a knowledge of color, any young decorator is, I feel sure, well on his way." [George Stacey]

"In answer to the questions most often put to me  about decorating, I would say the following. My favorite classic styles are eighteenth-century French, Italian, and English – in that order. I prefer painted French and Italian furniture to plain wood, and simple rather than elaborate design. I definitely believe in mixing different styles of furniture both in a house and in a room. One of the most common errors people make in decorating is trying to make a room perfect in all the details of a single given period, which inevitably results in a stiff and impersonal background." [George Stacey]

George Stacey and the Creation of American Chic, by Maureen Footer, with a foreword by Mario Buatta, is to be released by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. of New York on April 1st. It is a book to read and learn from, is well-designed and though it will add a certain currency to a cocktail table or to a modish stack, it is really – and I repeat – a book to read and learn from.

A brilliant stroke, in my opinion, on the part of the book designer – and it is a well-designed book – was to repeat the bright shiny red of the lampshade in the book jacket photograph as bright shiny red end papers.

If I were you and I lived in New York I'd go to the Rizzoli bookstore on 31 West 57th Street, buy the book and sign the petition to save what is one of New York's finest bookstores from demolition.

Photos of George Stacey rooms taken from the book.

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.

Given the chance ...

... was my answer when earlier this year I was asked if I always wore blue. Seemingly I had worn blue shirts and blue sweaters so frequently, probably daily given my predilection for the color, it had become a matter of remark amongst my students. I've checked in my closet and of the forty-three shirts hanging there twenty-two are blue or blue and white. Simply put, I like blue.

Imagine then the effect this room had (partial photo, I'm afraid) when I turned the page to it. Of all the beautiful interiors in Mark Hampton, an American Decorator, this room is probably the one I would have requested of Mr Hampton had I had the chance.

Mark Hampton, an American Decorator is a book long-awaited - it does not disappoint and lives up to the fanfare. One cavil: there is a pretty major proof-reading glitch - a large chunk of text repeated and a misnaming of a chair - beyond that, perfection.

Nowadays there's an apparently unending stream of books by and about modern decorators in which it seems to me there's little that is not trite. Lack of originality is a accusation levied at Mr Hampton but this book should give the lie to that, if only from the point of view that originality is a quality much hyped in this business but of which little is ever seen.

Photo by Eric Boman.

Lamentations

Grading, grading, grading. I have a little grading ....

The peonies we bought last week are at their most lavishly wonderful peak and their diminutive scent seems to hand around the room in bubbles that one walks through in most unexpected places, one of the pleasures of finals week - grading is upon me and lamentations and bitter weeping are heard in the hallways.

What is occupying my spare time is the brilliant book about Mark Hampton written by his widow. Mr Hampton really was one of my favourite decorators and I'm so pleased to have this compilation of his work. I awoke this morning at 4:30 and my first thought on creaking out of bed was to sit in the living room, read this book and wait for it to get light.

Last week I mentioned the New York Times bad-boy review of this book as part of a post about kindness in blogging and now I have this book I wonder again why anyone might be begrudging about Mr Hampton or his widow. Let me recommend this book if you don't yet have it, for in it are some pretty staggering interiors by this admirable decorator - a man whose work I have held in high regard for longer than I would care to admit at this fragile time of day.

Photo of book from Amazon.com as is the book itself. Slightly unfocussed photo of peony courtesy my iPhone. Coffee, WholeFoods' Morning Buzz has yet to be made as Rory is still abed. A glass of water and a niceness pill suffices.

Groovy

After my placeholder yesterday, I'm continuing my theme, with a variation, about those decorators who died early in their careers and who as a consequence never found a place in the canon of interior design history. Mark Hampton died relatively young at the age of 58 and most certainly cannot be described as forgotten.

These two rooms from the same apartment were designed in the early 1970s by Mark Hampton, when working for McMillen, Inc. The first, a living room, redolent of his association with David Hicks and the second, a drawing room, points to his own mature style - in fact, the room could have been created by him, and in many ways was, in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I turned the page expecting more of the groovy Hicksian mode and it was a surprise to see that drawing room, beautiful though it is. The rooms were on separate floors, so there was no question of a clash of styles, or lack of flow, as might be said nowadays, and clearly there's a difference in function. I know that the client was ultimately the arbiter, and these rooms were created in the early 1970s, but a suggestion of schizophrenia, stylistically speaking, is inescapable.

It could be the two photos embody the transition from one period to another, and maybe they do.

Mr Hampton's story is too well-known to need reiteration but his obituary summed it up in the following words.

"More a distiller than an innovator, Mr Hampton built his career on giving the public exactly the style it wanted at precisely the time it realized it wanted it. In the 1960s and 70s that meant discotheque modernism in primary colors, inspired by the work of his mentor, David Hicks, the flamboyant British decorator who died on March 29. It was crisp but comfortable traditionalism, however, that became Mr. Hampton's hallmark in the early 1980s, and that made him an icon of American style and one of the nation's most sought-after decorators."

Photos by Feliciano, from Architectural Digest, May/June 1974.

Quote from here.