Timeless

"I don't know if you have the Cyril Connelly/Jerome Zerbe book "Les Pavilions". The pavilion Gabriel designed for Mme. de Pompadour at Fontainebleau is one of the highlights. The point being that the library in the pavilion is a room that I believe you would appreciate. Light, balanced, airy and welcoming, beautifully proportioned. You take a look."

Well, I had a look at the book when we went for dinner at a friend's beautiful apartment last Friday. I wish I could show you photographs of her place – of course, if anyone is to publish photographs of her place it is for Jennifer to do so, not me. Nonetheless, I wish someone would, because it is as elegant, welcoming and personal as a home can be. Books, books, and more books, all very neatly arranged on shelves and tables – so many books, I became a tad jealous (and not for the first time). 

The room my friend in Washington meant is this one and he, not surprisingly, is right – it is a light, balanced, airy and welcoming. Who wouldn't want to spend a summer's evening here, scent from the garden drifting through the doors and moths flittering around the lamps? Or, better yet, a winter's night when apple logs burn in the grate, lamplight washes the gilt tooling of the book spines, and ice in whiskey, clinking as it melts, reflects the golden, shadowy, happy, and if I may say so, timeless, room. I wish, though, there were a better photograph of this library but is enough to see how wonderful a room it must be. 

The library is that of the Vicomte de Noailles in the pavilion, known as the Hermitage, built for Madame de Pompadour. 

"The great point of the Hermitage was its wonderful garden, all arrange for scent so that one heavenly smell led to another; it could be visited blindfold for the scent alone. Here she had fifty orange trees, lemons, oleanders single and double, myrtle, olives, yellow jasmine and lilac from Judea, and pomegranates, all in straight avenues with trellised palisades leading to a bower of roses surrounding a marble Apollo. Shrubs and flowers were brought to Madame de Pompadour from all parts of the French empire, chosen for scent; she especially loved myrtle, tuberoses, jasmine and gardenias. Labor was so cheap that flowers in the gardens were renewed every day, as we renew them now in a room; in the greenhouses at Trianon there were two million pots for bedding out. 

"The Hermitage was very simply decorated, the hangings were all of cotton and the furniture of painted wood; it was meant to be rustic, a farm house. It was such a success that she soon built two others, on at Compiègne designed by by Gabriel, which has utterly disappeared, pulled down nobody even knows when or by whose orders, and one at Fontainebleau. The Fontainebleau Hermitage belongs now to the Vicomte de Noailles and it is the only habitation of Madame de Pompadour's which she could visit today without grief. She never much liked her rooms in the palace there, and lived a great deal in this little house. The King would pretend he was going out hunting, leave the palace early in the morning booted and spurred, and spend the whole day with her, sometimes cooking their supper himself. People who liked to carp at her love of building used to say that she only had this Hermitage in order to offer the King a boiled egg from time to time. She had there one of the farmyards of which she was so fond, cows, goats, and hens, and a donkey, whose milk was supposed to be particularly good for her."

Quotation from Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford.  

For my other posts about libraries click here or on Library the sidebar.

Timelessly circling the same lightbulb

Last year I wrote about the difference between critique and criticism and since then I have hesitated to critique fearing it would be misconstrued as criticism – though, given my level of irritation when I read the OMG blogs, I wonder now why I've been diffident. Below is a comment on the previous post that coincided with thoughts I've had about a change of direction – more of a swerve, really – in the blog. It is a very interesting comment because the writer is quite clear in what he, or she, wants. I wrote a brief reply in the comments section of the last post and now would like to expand on that.

"Where do I begin? Another entertaining and informative piece, Blue. I adore the country home of Tony Childs and its timeless beauty. I have a request and a question. The request would be a post by you on what you believe makes a design timeless and give us as many examples as possible using a variety of design elements. As to the question, do you believe the so called "design blogs" are making design better or worse? I read many of them and come away with the impression that readers of these blogs often want to emulate the design aesthetic of the authors. There seems to be a herd mentality brewing in blogland and it's not good. What do you think?"

Dear Anonymous, thank you.

Regarding your request … the question of what makes a design timeless is something I think about a lot. I have provided examples of what I consider to be timeless rooms, but as to whether it is possible to extrapolate from these some rules, principles or guidelines – to codify, crystalize or pin down what exactly is timeless design - I'm not so sure. But it's an interesting challenge and one I shall make attempts to formulate in a future posts. If timelessness is explained as referring or restricted to no particular time then I wonder if it might be worth looking at both positive and negative aspects of an abiding aesthetic. A debate about the quality of design, or lack thereof, after the Industrial Revolution arose, in fact, after the Great Exhibition of 1851 – a debate that, for some of us, is not yet ended. I hope to continue it in future posts.

Regarding your question as to whether the plethora of design blogs is making things better or worse, that's both a tough one and a very interesting one. Personally, I cannot abide the how to style your bar cart, or the how to style your bookshelves like an interior designer blogs, or the uncritical let us now praise famous men blogs. On the other hand, it could be argued, any increase in awareness and discussion of design must be a good thing. If the result is a dumbing down of the discourse of design, then is the net result a positive or a negative? The answer to that question is very interesting and, having seen the results in the classroom, slightly scary.

And yet, and yet, maybe it's my age, but I can't help feeling that a Pinterest page full of images copied from other sources – however beautiful – is less valuable to the world than a new design idea, or a new analysis, however much I might disagree with the point being made. Only new ideas serve to move the debate forward. Repetition of existing ideas – the herd mentality of which you speak – keeps us all like moths circling the same lightbulb.

Yours, sincerely, Blue



I give an example above of an article from HG, July 1993, of what the decorator Robert Denning considered a timeless room.  Created in the mid-1970s by Denning and Vincent Fourcade, the reader, twenty years later, was asked to suspend all disbelief and consider this dining room with its uneasy mixture of pattern, color, caterer-style napery, floral centerpiece, cafe curtains, and blind-man's marbleizing to be "the finding of the ideal in something not ideal."

I shall return to this theme.

Timeless

A quality common to the decorators' work featured this week and last, is that of timelessness. Many of the rooms, in their own ways, have seemed as contemporary today as they were when first published. And so it is with these rooms from the mid-1980s designed for himself by Kalef Alaton.

Mr Alaton bought a five-apartment building in West Hollywood, gutted and remodeled it into these bewitching rooms, spacious, light-filled, simple in form and finish - unarticulated white stucco walls, concrete and terra-cotta tile floor - all connected by an elegant spiral staircase, and filled with a resplendent and personal collection of fine and decorative arts.

It is a truism to say that space is a luxury, and here space is used lavishly and luxuriously. Not for Alaton, the filling of every corner, the layering of surfaces with bric-a-brac: rather a considered placement of well-curated objects and furniture, allowing the eloquence of negative space, and combining elements of theatre, display, scholarship and hospitality.

The list of valued and valuable objects in the living room is long: a 17th century Flemish painting Battle of Ostend; cane-backed Régence fauteuil; Régence giltwood mirror; needlepointed Régence bergere; a pair of signed Louis XV fauteuils; gilt Louis XV table with faux-marbre top; 19th century Baccarat chandelier; Regency armchairs; a lacquer and gilt Chinese table; famille-verte vase; Japanese lacquer table; 2nd century marble bust; an Apulian volute Krater; Sino-Tibetan deer, and a Qing ginger jar on a Portuguese chest-on-stand.

Alaton's bedroom, with two tester beds is, in its own quieter way, as curated at the living room: a Turkish carpet; a modern leather-clad chaise longue; a limestone fragment of a horse head backed by a Indian brass door; book-filled bookcases and a mahogany Regency table with a gilded winged-seahorse base on which stand pre-Columbian objects and Cypriot vases.

The master bathroom, below, as spacious as the rest of the house, has a sitting-area with a Russian armchair and two tufted chairs, a 19th century Italian carved marble mirror, Italian bronzes, Asian and European ivories and Roman glass bottles.

Often where there are many objects of history and pedigree there's an atmosphere of dusty suffocation but here in Kalef Alaton's home because of uncluttered space and freely-admitted light, that feeling is lacking.

A year after these pictures were published, Kalef Alaton died of complications of AIDS died at the age of 49.

For no reason other than I fancy it, today's cocktail is a Negroni - my aperitif before dinner with friends tonight at Atlanta's latest bistro.

1 1/2 oz sweet vermouth

1 1/2 oz Campari

1 1/2 oz gin

Put all in an old-fashioned glass with ice and stir. Garnish, if you must with an orange slice.

Photographs by John Vaughn from Architectural Digest, May 1988.

List of furniture, etc., quoted from text by Michael Webb.