Vignettes in decorating

The first time I was confronted by vignetting in decorating was thirty years ago with an article in The World of Interiors and I did not react well. Living in Amsterdam at the time, these photographs reminded me of nothing more than the Metz & Co furniture showrooms diagonally across the Keizersgracht from our house and, still, all these years later, I find it hard to let go the idea of showroom vignetting – ironic, perhaps, given what I quote below from the original magazine text. I still wonder where those people actually lived.

"With all the architectural details, including the floor, painted white, the drawing-room becomes an intriguing limbo for a graphic collection of furniture. The colours are limited to black, bright red and a small amount of pale grey, so with this visual discipline the choice of objects in the room has to be precise and unerring. Some people might imagine that this is a very elemental solution to the problem of decoration and against the drama of a plain white background almost any object will be enhanced. In fact the reverse is true. Any flaw in design or proportion will show up immediately. The great pitfall to be avoided when placing things in a space like this is temptation to make small 'groups'. Although charming in themselves, if unrelated they give that restless showroom-like atmosphere, with every precious object pleading to be looked at. It is far more difficult to compose a balanced room so that the gaze can move about unmolested, taking in everything. Selecting the right pieces and putting them in just the right place to achieve this takes a great deal of skill." 

Undeniably beautiful, and equally beyond doubt designed to be photographed, these rooms have such an intense cerebral quality that makes one think they may well be haunted by the ghosts of brainstorms past.  Indeed, it is precisely that cerebral vignetted quality that pervades the rest of the oevre of the husband and wife team René and Barbara Stoeltie – where their own residences are concerned, that is. Shortly after this article was published the Stoelties took control of their own image, as it were, and she wrote the text to his photographs. For years I have disliked everything they have done even to the point of not buying books on which they have collaborated – so strong has been my prejudice (I can call it nothing else).

Having said that, yesterday afternoon I watched a video on youtube in which Barbara and René Stoeltie were interviewed and I began to understand not only their point of view but something I thought I already knew – the quicksands lying in wait for us all within our own language.  The video is in Dutch but for those you who might be able to understand the link is below. The Stoelties are not unsympathetic people and I was both glad and nonplussed to find that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bxFo0T41Mg

I'm not beyond appreciating a decent vignette or two but, nonetheless, given what I see in the blogs et al, I feel we are on a downward slope – like once-chic macarons on sale in a cart at the mall,  vignetting has become a tool for anyone with a rainy afternoon, a pile of junk, some books, an iPhone and internet access to hand.

Previous generations deforested whole continents, captured Sabines, established cities on hills, conquered a colony or two, swaggered across oceans and planted vines in new lands ... but what do we do? We arrange our books according to color, we style our shelves, arrange pretty objects on tabletops, and then, not knowing our arses from our elbows meanders from our Chinese frets, we write whole blogs about them. There's civilization for you!

More of that next week.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, democracy is a good thing but it ain't for everyone.

Quotation from text by John Vaughan and photographs by same, The World of Interiors, June 1984.

The decorator and the writer

Twenty-eight years ago I bought my first issue of The World of Interiors and was immediately captivated, especially by an article about Grange House, the redecoration of which was done by David Hicks for a London businessman and his family. Grange House seemed to me to be the most comfortable and stylish of English country houses - not too grand, nothing pompous and actually great fun.

Imagine, then, my surprise when - and I don't remember precisely how much later - I discovered that the name of the house and its owners were completely fictitious. I've never found the explanation for the subterfuge and it could be there is an official one somewhere, but I missed it.

The story is this, and I quote the writer of the article:

"David Hicks' most recent, and coincidentally one of his favourite, commissions was to redesign Grange House - a pretty, rather small farm-house in Oxfordshire - for a London businessman, Peter Westbury, his American wife, Louise, and their two children. He confesses that the reason he enjoyed the job so much was due mainly to the Westbury's sense of style and taste - a style so much attuned to his own that he became involved in redesigning their garden as well.....

"The Hicks' maxim - that he sees himself merely as an interpreter of his client's taste - never once presented a difference of opinion in the case of Grange House. He was dealing, too, with a family who had formerly lived in a much grander house and who had quite a collection of possessions; so they were able to chose the best of these, which give the house its distinct personal style."

By now you're probably saying "but, I thought that house was ..." and you'd be right. Grange House was, in fact, The Grove, and Peter and Louise Westbury were David and Pamela Hicks - their former "much grander house" being Britwell House.

The story as presented is quite cohesive, with lots of telling, or misleading, details - for example:

"Although Grange House is fairly old - early 18th century - with a double-height drawing-room added on in 1825, it clearly couldn't be too grand, except for the drawing-room, where David Hicks felt justified in adding a stately touch or two. But, because Peter and Louise were used to living in more generous surroundings, he felt that he had to give them a sense of scale to get away, as much as possible, from the existing cottagey atmosphere.....

"Granting that, in this instance, David Hicks had a great deal of possessions to chose from, he finds that on the whole (especially in the United States) his clients have none, or don't wish to use what they do have, preferring to start afresh. They want to be told what to collect and his advice often extends to buying antiques too. 'I think it is terribly nice, and flattering, and I suppose it's better than making mistakes ... but it does seem odd to me......'

"The pale-blue dining room, is a tribute to Hicks' skill, as the most dominating feature, and extremely attractive and decorative mural en grisaille with silver and pale-blue, executed for the Westburys' previous house, had to be included. The original beamed ceiling was obviously unsuitable for anything so sophisticated, and the room wasn't tall enough, so the floor had to be dug out to fit it in. The dining-table is, surprisingly, a plywood top on a circular drum base, covered in a Hicks-designed print. 'I can't see the point of spending a lot of money on a table and then covering it up with a table-cloth - and I happen to like table-cloths....'

"David Hicks and Peter Westbury designed Peter's dressing-room as an audacious combination of bedroom, bathroom, and library to take Peter's collection of books which go over, around and under the window. A 19th century chintz with a black ground and autumn colors was used for the bedspread and roman-blind, whilst the bath alcove is lined with Gothic engravings. ...

"As David Hicks was nearing the end of resdesigning Grange House, the garden began, increasingly, to take up more of everyone's thoughts. He hadn't been asked to help with garden-design in the past, although, having just written a book on the subject, it is obviously a consuming interest of his, and, in this case, he was able to design it from scratch. 'Of course you can see it is still a young, new garden which needs to a good ten years to mature.' "

As I say, a cohesive tale with lots of telling details, and they really must have enjoyed, the writer and the decorator, constructing this quite entertaining work of fiction! And, while on the subject of fiction, I can't help but notice that there isn't an abundance of tablescaping in these early photographs of Hicks' house, and I wonder if perhaps, on occasion, they too were fiction, those tablescapes - stories invented for the moment and the camera lens.

There is another way, of course, of looking at the dearth of objets on Hicks' tables. Until quite recently, rooms were not photographed in a state of freewheeling clutter, beset with the risible detritus of lives lived untidily in rooms created for the camera lens - the ficionalization of interiors, about which, months ago, I wrote a small essay. It was an essay in which I also expressed the belief that there is a tendency to write adoringly about aristocracy, royalty and celebrity as icons of style, their deplorable behavior and affiliations being ignored. But, that is a story, or non sequitur if you will, for another day.

"It is easy, in elegant diction
To call it an innocent fiction;
But it comes in the same category
As telling a regular story."

W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

Photographs by James Mortimer to accompany text by Annabel von Hoffmannsthal for The World of Interiors, December/January 1983.

Quotations are from Annabel von Hoffmannsthal's text.

My first bathroom

The fourth in an occasional series about necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, cloakrooms, restrooms, thrones, washrooms, and bathrooms.

Occasionally one hears of bathrooms being described as retreats or sanctuaries, as they may well be for many people. Such descriptions suggest a room spacious enough to include a bathtub larger than the white enameled puddle that is standard in many a bathroom across this land.

I was raised in a house with a bathroom that had the usual appointments for the time - a capacious, claw-footed cast iron tub, a high tank, pull chain toilet pot and a white stoneware sink with chrome taps, no shower and no heating, the only ventilation being an open window. Lighting was an unshaded bulb hanging overhead. Times change, but what the experience of my childhood bathroom has left me with, besides a dislike of unheated bathrooms, with walls running with condensation, is a desire for the (relative) austere and forthright ablution.

In the 1970s, in a mild fit of DIY, I bought some brightly colored wallpaper, an orange plastic bogroll holder to match, peach gloss for the door, and a kerosene heater. I'd had enough of the damned, damp, marrow-sapping chill that very closely matched the dour climate of Lancashire.

There were two coal-burning fireplaces in that house - one in the living room and one, in its never-used-black-leaded purity, in my grandparents bedroom. A situation unimaginable to many in this day and age - the only heating came from one coal fire. The rest of the house went without heat.

Hot water, of which there was plenty in winter, came from a tank that sat behind the back wall of the fireplace. This arrangement had two disadvantages. First, a lot of hot water had to be drained when the thunderous noise made by boiling water came from the fireplace; second, in winter, if the fire was not banked overnight, the water in the tank froze – only to burst when a fire was lit. One advantage was that the hot water storage tank was kept in a closet in my grandparents' bedroom and, being uninsulated, warmed the closet, actually called the "airing cupboard," the place to let newly ironed linens "air" - that is, dry off completely.

Luckily for me, my grandmother loved to wash and iron, and there was plenty of hot water for washing.  Water from the kitchen tap was transferred by bucket to the washing machine, if machine is what one could call it. The first washing machine I ever saw my grandmother use – and if my memory serves me right it was the first she ever owned – was basically a copper kettle, heated by a gas ring underneath, with a lid incorporating a hand-turned agitator, a wringer for squeezing out the water, and a tap low down for draining the water into the bucket that had filled it. My grandmother kept that washer for years.

What I didn't realize then was that I was watching a method of washing that was pure nineteenth-century – if not earlier. It is not easy to imagine nowadays, but washday could last effectively all week, especially if the household was large. My grandmother's washday was Monday, the traditional day for beginning the wash, and seemed to take a whole day. First, as I say, the copper was filled, clothes washed and wrung, the copper emptied of suds, clean water put in at least twice for rinsing, then filled a third time for "bluing" the whites. All went to hang in the garden on a clothes line that always had to be wiped clean of soot (these were the days before any clean-air legislation) before anything was hung. Freezing weather did not diminish the need for washing and hanging out - I remember being charmed by my grandfather's shirt being so stiff from the cold I could hold it in front of me like a board.

Ironing, before she bought an electric iron in the 1960s, was with one made of iron, heated on the stove, tested with a wet finger and – though I don't know why – smoothed on a bar of soap.

As I say, times change, for many years later the Celt and I have a Miele automatic, front-loading washing machine and dryer (still in the kitchen, but that is a story for another day.) Ironing? We both can iron a shirt better than any laundry and even sheets and pillowcases have been known to be dashed with a smoothing iron.

Oh yes... back to the bathroom. I don't need my bathroom to be a sanctuary, retreat or gallery for family photos. What I need is functional, clean and handsome: good light to shave by, a powerful shower, a warm-when-needed floor, and good fresh towels. Pots, potions and other talismans against the evil eye of aging, out of sight in drawers, towels stacked on shelves and other surfaces clear as can be. Get in, get done, get out, get on with the day.

Clean and handsome in our case means travertine floor, largish shower, frameless glass shower doors, Venetian plaster walls that live well with travertine and are sympathetic to early-morning skin, a simple large mirror, two plain sconces and a really big, framed 1970s poster by Rene Gruau advertising Dior's Au Sauvage. Oh, and no tub!

Photo of Charles de Beistegui's bathroom at the Villa Labia, Venice, by Gianni Berengo-Gardin for an essay published in The World of Interiors, April 1987.

Luminous

Lady Kenmare died, according to Billy Baldwin, "at a very ripe old age, and Rory suddenly felt bored with all of France, including Paris. He just somehow wanted to get out. He also didn't know what kind of place he wanted to go to, and he made a quick and unfortunate decision to go to Ireland, only because there was a lovely house there that he wanted. It was one of the best examples in the world: never buy a house somewhere just because of the house - you must as well buy the place, the people, and everything about it. Rory took all his furniture with him to Ireland and his house there was a distinct failure. I never ever saw the house, and very few did because he got bored with it and eventually moved back to the south of France where he built himself a great edifice very near Van Day Truex's."

In 1984, Roderick Cameron wrote text to accompany photos of his house in Provence - a gentle, appreciative account of a house he clearly loved. In fact, he wrote an essay about aesthetics, refinement and restraint that is as interesting to read more than twenty-five years later as it was so long ago.

".... I decided to move inland - to Provence. A proud country saturated in its Roman past, part French and part Mediterranean, its inhabitants are a people of very mixed blood: Phoenician, Greek and even a smattering of Saracen - a combination I felt would surely moderate the national traits and make me feel less of a foreigner.

"Finding a ruin eased the situation still further - a heap of rubble gives one infinite scope. Alexandre Favre - a clever, young, local architect - and I worked on the plans which in the end turned out to be an interpretation of the local building styles: drystone walls, old Roman tiles, but not those small window-openings so popular in Provence. Large openings are frowned upon where the whole aim has always been to avoid the sun but, personally, I must have light, with the result that the whole ground floor is plated in glass; great windows which slide into the thicknesses of the walls, the sun kept at bay by handsome, projecting, roofed-over piers. Only upstairs is the sun allowed in, but still it is controlled by sliding shutters.

"With the clarity of light down here one is apt to play down colours. The drawing room is the silver-green of the back of an olive leaf and the stairwell which curves like the volutes of a shell - indeed what inspired its formation - is painted the luminous beige found on the inside of a nautilus. Faded mustard-yellow, moss-green and the soft blues of Ming porcelain seem to be the dominant colours. The white stone floors throughout the house are spread with raffia-matting from Cogolin, the only place I know that makes this particular floor-covering."

I remember on first reading the color palette that Cameron talks about - faded yellow, silvery olive, moss, blue, white stone, blanched grass, how excited I became at the idea of seeing those colors - which of course I did not too long thereafter, in Provence.

Surely anyone who has been to Provence cannot forget the bright light of lavender, the many shades of ochre-rich earth, the umber and sienna crags, an exhilarating amalgam under the most arrant of blue skies. Also, who could not be touched by the soft, shadowily absorbed interiors glimpsed from a passing yellow-dust-laden car, or not be thankful for the rosy wine -one of the most thirst-slaking emollients known to man?

That apart – if my reading of Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth Century Taste is correct – then one omission from Cameron's essay on Les Quatre Sources is the name of Van Day Truex.

"Following Truex's design, Cameron broke ground for Les Quatre Sources in the valley between the villages of Ménerbes and Les Baumettes. Almost as soon as it was completed, Les Quatre Sources became a much-photographed and much-publicized house. Its location on a hillside facing Ménerbes, the oversized scale of its rooms (an unusual feature in Provençal architecture), and its remarkable staircase were all Truex's designs. While Truex himself thought his [own] house in Ménerbes was his finest work, since the discovery of his original plans for Cameron's house, in 1987, most designers have considered Les Quatre Sources his masterpiece."

Photographs by John Vere Brown for an essay written by Roderick Cameron published in The World of Interiors, April 1984.

Pink

The third in an occasional series about necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, cloakrooms, restrooms, thrones, washrooms, and bathrooms.

Answering a comment from JCB on Friday's post I had one of those paralyzing moments when the eye turns inwards, reality is berthed, and the topography of the past is the byway one takes - the kind of situation when on a too-familiar journey in the automobile there's little recollection of how one arrived at the destination - the body on one journey, the mind on another.

JCB had written that she was comforted to know someone else's reading list is just as randomly diverse as her own, and in reply I was going to mention how I'd grown up in a house devoid of books and there I was, back in my grandparent's living room seeing my grandfather, a fag between his lips, reading the local newspaper - "the pink" as it was known. And pink it was, the paper of that daily with its list of football league scores - vital information in a Lancashire cotton and coal town where winning the pools was an undying hope - a town, deep in a valley, where "thee" and "thou" were still used in its dialect, as were Norwegian words left over from the Viking raids of the 8th century. A town where working men's clubs, nonconformist chapels, darts and dominos, whippet racing, pigeon fancying, growing sweetpeas, joining brass bands and coal miner's choirs that sent Jerusalem, the Hallelujah Chorus and Abide With Me thundering out over the cobblestones, enriched the lives of those staunchly socialist men and women - lives that had been portrayed a generation earlier in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, and in my youth in the films of the 1960s.

In this slide down the valley slopes of memory I have come a long way from my original intention of post about bathrooms so let me give you one more memory. My grandfather had cousins in the next town, who lived in a terraced (row) house without an internal bathroom. In the paved, walled area - the backyard - behind the house were two stone-built outhouses. One held coal, the other, the long-drop, or privy. I had never seen a water closet without a flushing mechanism and was totally charmed by the idea that not only was there a slate slab where wood should have been (hell-on-earth to sit on in winter, I would think), but also that the only way to flush it was to wait for the kitchen sink to be drained into it. I say I was charmed, but I waited till I got home, I seem to remember!

So via the flushing mechanism of my mind, I offer you the bathroom belonging to this house - I'm not necessarily continuing my theme of blue in decorating but I couldn't not show it.

Photographs by James Mortimer from article written by Elspeth Thompson for The World of Interiors, March 1994.

The great wide blue yonder

I end my week of blue with this beautiful photo of the hydrangea horseshoe outside Groote Schuur, the house of Cecil Rhodes. Between blue heaven and blue earth, the blue haze of Table Mountain and Devil's Peak.

Photo by Alain Proust to accompany text written by Graham Viney for The World of Interiors, June 1986.

Sweet peas, honeysuckle, climbing geranium and a bridge too far

I cannot say that these are the photos that began it all, this love of mine for blue, but I remember coming back time and time again to look at them during what must have been the typically wet grey short days of winter, and on many a day since, winter or not.

We'd moved recently to Amsterdam after a sojourn in Eindhoven, then a town singularly lacking in charm and interest - it had been bombed flat during Operation Market Garden and the town liberated from the occupying forces by the US 101st Airborne Division a year before the War ended - uninteresting to me, but yet a town that gratefully remembered its liberation each 18th of September with a parade frequently attended by US and Canadian veterans. Dour brick, what we would call today mixed-use, buildings lined the pedestrian-only streets heaving with crowds, most of whom seemed to be on bikes, and the minute the sun shone, whatever the temperature out came the sidewalk cafes, many heated by infra-red lamps, further narrowing what were reasonably wide pathways.

I cannot say those were the happiest days of my life but looking back it was the beginning of the path that led me, via Amsterdam, to where I am today, my love of blue intact, and more importantly the new adventure then being forged with my partner also still intact - and for this I am immensely grateful. Those were the days before cell phones, CDs had just been marketed and word-processors ruled.

Apropos word-processors we watched Julie and Julia yesterday evening, after pizza and salad by the pool, in a friend's home theatre - and this was a 24-seat (about as many as can fit around his dining table) theatre with an HD screen the size of a wall - in which Julia Child types chapters of Mastering the Art of French Cooking with carbon paper and onion-skin copy paper. Those were the days ...

Climbing Geranium, the Colefax and Fowler chintz on the chair in front of the blue-painted cupboard, remains one of my favorites though I'm not even sure if it is still sold. My only regret is that there never was a blue version - unimaginable to me despite the fact there aren't any actual blue geraniums - and had there been a blue colorway I would probably have ignored the ban on floral fabrics (our bridge too far) in our house. That blue geranium, real or not, shines in my mind's eye with all the glamour of a sprite.

Tomorrow we're going to New York for a long weekend of family, theatre, museums, lots of walking and lots of blue skies.

Photos by James Mortimer to accompany text by Jane Lott for an article in The World of Interiors, February 1985.

Don't it make my brown eyes blue

To continue my theme this week of blue in decoration, and also to continue the occasional series of favorites begun in June last year, here are photos of a room Chester Jones designed in the mid-nineties in London. Jones is definitely a decorator able to blend traditional furniture, tribal forms, contemporary art, color, space and light (see here and here) into rooms with a completely modern point of view. This interior is twenty years old, has not to my eyes dated, and could have been created either side of the pond. In other hands such a mix would drift into being a hodgepodge.

In most of the rooms I choose to write about, even the historic ones from the 1980s and 1990s, I see a similarity - not of style, necessarily, but a regard for architecture, history, affability and idiosyncrasy. Some are grand, some apparently simpler, some more tailored and polished than others, but all are courteous, approachable and urbane. I could look forward to coming home to any of them.

I don't know if anyone else would say the same, and maybe it's my imagination but there are so few birds. I sit now at my dining table looking out to the tops of trees and see hardly a bird. A hawk wheeled by and there are a couple of swallows swooping around. I don't want to give the impression that the sky has exactly been a maelstrom of wings, but what I don't see is worrisome enough to make me wonder if it's just this city, a wider manifestation or, as I say, I'm fantasizing.

Photos by Andreas von Einsiedel for an article written by Elfreda Pownall in The World of Interiors, October 1996.

Blue

The second day of a self-indulgent indulgent week when I post about the color blue in decoration and, coincidentally, the third in an occasional series about bathrooms. I don't have a lot to say about it - my enthusiasm for blue has already been declared - but, as with the room yesterday by Mark Hampton, I could roost very comfortably here.

Let me give you a taste of Christopher Gibbs' text about the owner of the house, Piers von Westenholz.

"Piers and his friends looked back before the baleful blanching-out of Syrie Maughm, the thoughtless dragging, stippling and obliterating of architectural framework, the revolt against historicism, the ghastly chic of Evelyn Waugh's Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust, the litter of tawdry gewgaws and 'antiques' restored beyond any interest, quality or atmosphere.

"It was time to return to old England, England before the Industrial Revolution and mass manufacturing spawned that nadir of designed depravity, belle époque. They searched out, dusted down, revived and refreshed the true orthodoxy, anchored firmly this side of the Channel, grounded in ancient harmonies, preserved in our architectural traditions, and in the use of materials felled or mined in our islands.

"What was despised by the taste-makers of the past decades - oaky gothick, Tudorbethan, the sternly architectural and archaeological - is cherished by Westenholz. These foundations are garnished by often earlier, more familiar pieces - painted, or in mahogany, walnut, even satinwood - and by drawings, paintings and sculptures by his friends and contemporaries such as Book Bantock, Rory McEwan and Nigel Waymouth .... "

A fine piece of writing that, despite the patriotism, is full of heartfelt detestation of modern manufacturing and it's consequences.

Photo by Jonathan Pilkington for an article written by Christopher Gibbs for The World of Interiors, October 1997.

Kilroy was here

The second in an occasional series.

There are a few times in a day, moments of repose, when, subdued by the animal but not in any way diminished - more doing what is necessary - one can really focus. Not, I mean, focus on the ramparts to be scaled, the bewitching hussy down the the hall, or even the astringent rejoinder that now will never be made, but simply on the task in hand.

So it was, in a moment of relaxation, when I first saw the mosaic decoration on the walls of this Folies Bergère gents, the inner eye fixed and kinships convened on eggshell inlay lacquer. Pretty obvious connection, you might think - and you'd be right. It's at this point I could bang on about these internal correspondences being the graffiti on our stele, our trophies, our Kilroy was here moments, but that'd wouldn't be any fun at all. Now, would it?

Photo above by Ivan Terestchenko from an article written by Marie-France Boyer for The World of Interiors, December 1993.

Image below Portrait of Madame Agnès by Jean Dunand (polychrome lacquer, eggshell) from The Decorative Arts in France: La Société des Artistes Décorateurs, 1900-1942, by Yvonne Brunhammer and Suzanne Tise, published by Rizzoli New York, 1990.

Color

Occasionally I remark how it seems to me there are not many modern decorators who know how to use color and in many ways it is the pot calling the kettle black.

Our flat is pretty low-key in color and tone. The bedroom is gray - gray suede upholstered wall behind the bed, gray silk curtains and Farrow and Ball Cornforth White on the other walls - with an accent or two of orange. What I name an accent is a large, orange-lacquered six-drawer chest that stands opposite the dressed-in-gray-and-white bed, and under a silver-framed Hermès scarf in shades of orange. The only other color in the room comes from two gray-green celadon lamps, an ancient gray-green linen velvet armchair, and two pillows made from slices of kimonos - one, blues and greens, that prefers my side of the bed and the other, oranges and purples, his. The gray/celadon combination is mine and the orange/purple is his and after the compromise all couples have to reach for their place to be personal and loved, all is ours. Purely and unequivocally ours.

The living room is really an exercise in tints and tones that wander between uninflected whites, blancs de chine, creams, beiges, lavenders, stones, silvers, blues and purples. There's woodiness, the off-black of old japanning, the crew-cut warmth of dark mohair, soft graphite-flecked paper, mushroomy hard-nosed lacquer, dusty ormolu, green-edged glass, the swank of crystal, and a small flaunt of orange silk velvet.

Two days ago what must be the last hyacinths were brought home and quickly opened into the most glorious of pinks, a color as intense and transitory as the scent filling the room. The kind of beauty that is heartbreaking.

This resplendent room behind its equally triumphant facade is something I'd forgotten but when I turned the page after reading an essay about the Folies Bergère the force of it hit me. I wonder now how I forgot this room, this masterpiece of brilliant color. When first I saw it seventeen years ago I think I might have been intimidated and probably thought I couldn't have lived in it. Now, I really rather think I could. I have grown more accepting of my role of recessive background to a loving partner whose personality could quite clearly be expressed in such an interior as this. It's pretty much as he tried to leave the house this morning though the removal of a madras-of-many-colors bow tie toned it down a notch or two - just.

Photos by Tim Street-Porter from an article written in 1993 for The World of Interiors by Ann Barr about Michael Davis and Andrew Logan's Bermondsey house

Rant @ 45 rpm

If you've ever wondered when precisely it was the world changed and you became an old fogey then you'll know what I mean when I say that one of the most irritating things in the world is to find, for the second time, doddering-old-fool-like, you'd forgotten that you need a bloody iPod to play music through the dinner-plate sized speakers you discovered in the living room ceiling one late night after a long drive through another rainy georgia night.

I drove home late this sodden afternoon listening to Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine - this being what I wanted to listen to again at home - and wondering, crossly, what it is about rain that makes Georgia drivers throw on the brakes when the first drop hits the windshield. Answer comes there not.

The rhubarb pie I'd discovered at the back of the freezer went into oven, the CD - I still call 'em LPs in moments of inattention to the great amusement of the my other half - went into what I'd forgotten was the DVD player and would not play music. Simply-would-not-play-the-damned-music! One tantrum later - not quite throwing myself kicking and screaming to the floor but could have at a moment's further provocation - the Celt arrived home in a stinking mood (clients) to find the rhubarb pie lovingly thrown into the Miele had fossilized - if rubber can be said to fossilize - me clutching a glass of whine trying to write about the connection between Monteverdi and our library, a photo which you will not find below.

The room you see here is a library, dearth of books notwithstanding, and one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever had the pleasure to be aspirational about - the perfect room in which to listen to a scratchy vinyl 45 of Brook Benton singing A Rainy Night in Georgia.

Photographs by Henry Bourne for an article written by Carol Prisant about an interior by William Diamond and Anthony Baratta published in The World of Interiors, January 1994.

P. S. Just learned I could have used my iPhone to connect to the sound system (are they still called that?)

Conviviality

The first in an occasional series of necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, gentlemen's powder rooms, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, privies, restrooms, thrones, and washrooms.

Each time I lecture on architecture and interiors of ancient Rome and a slide of communal latrinae comes up on screen, a loud and conjoint eeuw goes around the room - as well it might, you may think. Hard as it is for anyone in modern times to imagine sharing one of life's more intimate moments with anyone else, it was apparently not so for our ancestors. Arguably, it is also not so for ourselves given the flimsy partitions separating toilet facilities in many a contemporary building.

This communal lieu begs a question I shall leave you to contemplate.

Photos by Peter Woloszynski from an article authored by Leslie Geddes-Brown in The World of Interiors, March 1994.

I'll show you mine ...

.... the latest in an occasional series about libraries.

A good old fashioned bookroom is something one sees rarely nowadays - there are books all over the place as decorative accents - supporting lamps, assisting as flotation devices for scented candles and pinned down by cache-pot, but a room of books? Who has one?

To digress a little, today I listened to two bloggers - I didn't get involved in the conversation -discuss marketing potential and the commercial benefits they are enjoying from them. This got me thinking about my blog - this ramble through my enthusiasms, delusions and obsessions - on which I allow no advertising, overt or covert, and ended up wondering if this makes me perhaps a bit old-fashioned ... as old fashioned as a collector of books these days.

So, to relieve my unsettled mind, I post photos from 1994 of an extraordinary and impressively blue gothick library. I have a library in the senses of a bookroom and a large and growing collection of books. None of them is used as decoration, as props in themselves or for other objects, and none is so decrepit it is refused succor.

Who else has bookrooms? I've shown you mine, now show me yours.

Photographs by James Mortimer from article written by Elspeth Thompson for The World of Interiors, March 1994.

Light the corners of my mind

I couldn't or, perhaps, wouldn't believe it when I saw that these photos had been published fifteen years ago. I'd remembered them, gone looking for them in the 21st century stack of magazines and kept going back and back and back. 1995! Misty, water-colored memories, indeed.

The mix from Chester Jones, 1995 - as fresh a melange as ever could be.

Photos by Andreas von Einsiedel from an article written by Chester Jones, The World of Interiors, December 1995.

Saturday last, attended a wedding, which is decidedly not my most favorite activity, but was able to catch up with friends. Sunday we did the Buckhead in Bloom Home and Garden Tour. Atlanta is beautiful in Spring, but so is anywhere I think. Had to cancel a trip next weekend because of work.

Road rage

I'm cannot pinpoint when this day began to go sour but it sure as hell did. There I was, merrily going about my own business and eventually it came upon me that other people were having really bad days and for some reason it seemed to be my fault or, at least, I was in the neighbourhood, therefore .... In the end I slipped out the office early, dueled trucks on the interstate for an hour or so, and my phone rang - a very sweet woman informed me in the most reasonable, almost jocular, manner that the field trip she'd arranged for one of my classes had been cancelled by her manager because she felt there were sufficient private tours that day and mine was simply one too many!

Navigating a freeway and trying to control a disproportionate amount of anger, rage actually, and railing at the pertness of some people, ain't easy, let me tell you.



So, one glass of sherry, one aggressively stirred but perfectly turned-out asparagus risotto, a hug and a kiss from my beloved who'd breezed in the front door like one of Jesus' little sunbeams, I'm feeling a little calmer and wondering what it is that makes simple quotidian events of no actual importance take on such monstrous proportions.


The sherry I drank – and I must tell you I have no pretensions to knowing anything about sherry except that I like what I like and I like it usually after dinner instead of dessert – is a Deluxe Cream Capataz Andrés by Lustau. Going straight to the bottle after a bad day is not quite the way one should begin the evening but the sweetness of the sherry had its way with me and reminded me in a round about way of the wonderful rooms you see posted here.



Jaime Parlade's house at the foot of the Sierra de Alcuzcuz seems to me such a welcoming place to arrive at when feelings or feet are bruised, when the need to be loved but left alone for a while is paramount, too have a drink or cup of tea placed by one's hand, a newspaper and a footstool proffered, then to hear the door gratifyingly clicking closed as one is left to sip of the geniality of the host and his house.


Being hospitable is such an important aspect of life, not only in the way of invitations to dinner, to cocktails, for tea, but more the feeling that guests are, however temporarily, welcomed, loved, valued and really rather interesting.

I think again, as I have thought these past weeks when writing about decorators from the 1980s, that my preference is for the lucid but not the facile, for the uncluttered but not the austere, the simple but not the simplistic and the tactful rather than the maladroit. Consequently I write about decorators whose work, generally speaking, seems to embody my own predilections. Some of those decorators have created suffocatingly ostentatious spaces but others, like Mr Parlade, are able to beget houses and rooms worthy of simple human qualities like love and friendship, rage even.


Photos by James Mortimer from an article written by Frances Partridge for The World of Interiors, May 1988.

Hang your knickers on the line

Saturday morning it was, the clock had just struck the half hour when from the other side of the living room came the refrain What's the time? Half past nine, hang your knickers on the line. If a policeman comes along, take them off and put them on. There is not much to say in reply to the rhyme known to every British child and from whom that word knickers will always raise a titter.

Not really anything to do with decorating you might think, but hearing the rhyme made me think again of the kind of ballooning shades, immensely popular in the 1980s, resembling tart's knickers. That tarts ever wore such voluminous undergarments is debatable and unrecorded in any history of tartdom I have ever read but, nonetheless, they have lent their nomenclature to a kind of window dressing. Some can be seen in the de la Renta living room.

I was going to write about one of the more fascinating aspects of 1980s decoration - the democratization of an aristocratic style of curtaining and drapery, a trickle down (to use a term popular at the time) or rather a torrent of expensive stuffs down the economic scale. It occurred to me, too, that I might discuss the books written by English ladies showing how to contrive dainty trappings for windows large and small. Also, I would have liked to have talked about the affectation of spuriously aging chintz by dipping in baths of strong tea (no sugar or milk, thank you) or liquid plant food, but it will not happen, because today, (I wrote this yesterday, Sunday), we went to a big Greek Easter celebration - lamb, goat and pork spit-roasting, the bishop blessing the assembly, kids being loved all over the place, never-ending pouring of wine, music, and food, food, food, and more food - so after the most generously hospitable event I've been to in a long time, I'm a little in my cups, thoroughly tired out, have heartburn up to my earlobes, and am far too happy to discuss any curtains I may have lost, loved or hated.

Instead, I would like to show you photos of a place I wish I could have seen, rooms that had such an effect on me when I first saw them in 1984 - I found them utterly beautiful. These rooms belonged to Mr Gep Durenburger, an antiques dealer, whose home was in San Juan Capistrano, California. I look through them again nearly thirty years later and still they are a source of wonder to me. The rooms speak for themselves.

Photos by Tim Street-Porter for an article written by Mr Durenburger, from The World of Interiors, September 1984.