Gallery walls

There's something terribly bleak about pile upon pile of the ephemera of past lives – dead people's stuff – and so much of it, that with each step I feel increasingly forlorn, if not downright depressed. It's not that I'm creeped out by the modern equivalent of grave goods still awaiting decent burial or burning, it's more that the amount of crap (and there's no other word for it) that has been produced, is still being produced, and will continue to be produced. This is not to say that none of it is without value be it to poor families, young marrieds looking to impress the subdivision, pickers, the recyclers of 60s and 70s worst moments, the taste-bereft or the aesthetically unrestrained.

If I were still suffering from visual and moral dyspepsia after yesterday's tour of a flea antiques market I might take a jaundiced view and say that, occasionally, I feel restraint is long gone from interior design and with it also are gone the underpinnings of history, utility and balance. I might wish my view were not so jaundiced and there certainly are times when my negativity is denied but I am sure of one thing and it is that balance is not understood or, at least, not often apparent, or even appreciated in today's interior design as seen in magazines and books. It is very hard nowadays to get a balanced idea of how a room works – there's a wealth of visual information in the form of vignettes, partial views and close-ups but actually to see how a room functions in relation the people who use it is a rare treat.

So, you might ask, what has got me on this path. In a word, Pinterest. Don't get me wrong – I don't dislike Pinterest, but my ability as a twenty-first-century man living at this week's apex of technological advancement to use a lot of time looking at pretty pictures (dogs or rooms, it doesn't matter) is truly worrying. I cannot blame Pinterest for that. These photographs below and their ilk, from a Google search, have led me to rethink the placement of five drawings (they hang in a row) on our living room wall – remove them altogether or leave one.

It's not just the incoherence, absence of balance, or the seeming unconsidered nature of the relationship to the wall and the room itself that bothers me: it is that they are not contained (in my old-fashioned way, I prefer disparate images to be contained, grid-like, within an implied border and despite asymmetry have balance) and appear to disperse from more than one centre. Also, it looks as if someone spent a lot of time trawling flea-markets – in itself not a bad thing, unless you're me, that is.

I realize, also, these present day asymmetrical arrangements of images and objects, so-called gallery walls, are not just reactions to static, yawn-inducingly-traditional groupings, such as in the photograph below, but a definite but not extreme attempt in their beginnings to enliven a modern way of living in traditional interiors. Now these gallery walls are a fad and as to whether that is a bad thing the jury is still out.  What I do know is that asymmetry is hard to achieve without an eye educated about balance.

There are precedents of course, not few and far between: two literally gallery walls (Uffizi and Royal Academy) and they share a common purpose – display, both artistic and social - with the following two (Van Day Truex and William Pahlman).  I'm not sure if Pahlmann's is an in-store display or a residence but either way that display of artwork above the cabinet must have seemed wonderfully modern at the time. Pahlmann's work is a little hard to assess at this remove but that is a discussion for another day.

John Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772

William Powell Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881

Van Day Truex, 1944

William Pahlmann, 1950s

Behind this discussion (rant?) about placement of pictures on walls are thoughts I've been having about walls just being allowed to be themselves and not just supports for art or artifacts. Not revolutionary, this idea of having walls bare except for an applied finish, but it occupies me and I would like to discuss it in the near future.

Full circle

Van Day Truex is a man I've never written about. I've quoted him, referred to him, quoted other people about him but I've not written about this essential link in my circles within circles. I intend to, I keep telling myself, knowing as I do that he was more than a decorator, artist and teacher - designing for Tiffany, Hinson, Minton and Wedgwood as he did - but Van Day Truex's history* has already been written.

It seems to me that as the world turns and time passes, the more individual his later rooms become and the harder they are for modern clients, decorators, and, in my case, students, to understand. The interiors of his that I admire the most, and I think many would agree, are not those of 1940s New York, but those in his last house at Ménerbes - simple, unpretentious, symmetrically arranged distillation of stone-floored and plaster-walled spaces furnished with rattan and wood, softened with linen, cotton and African art.

I have shown these later rooms in lectures to students as part of a history of interior design and the reaction almost without exception has been one of wonderment that I find significance in them - that they are set apart from the work of his colleagues. They are so beguiled by fad and fashion, it makes me wonder if I am wrong in how I try to portray the man and his work. As I see it, the younger generation is increasingly swayed by the deepening relationship of celebrity and marketing, where few standards beyond cute and famous are relevant. With the dissolution in modern design of many precepts Truex might have recognized, I should perhaps not be surprised to find myself and what I value increasingly off-topic.

Truex's influence is undoubted, as his place in the history of interior design, but it seems he is too far removed from this present generation for them to care - he died over thirty years ago - and there are many newer names jostling for position. Unlike David Hicks, Angelo Donghia, Geoffrey Bennison and Michael Taylor, there is little that exists to carry his name - unless Tiffany reissues his designs.

Truex's name is still well-known, more so than that of his friend Roderick Cameron, but I wonder to whom. Is it a generational phenomenon - the Olympians of one generation fade into legend and new kids on the block with their own idols take their place?

A while back I bought The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera because it contained an essay with photographs of Roderick Cameron's last house, Les Quatres Sources, in Provence. The book was produced in the middle 1980s and has all the choppy, scattered arrangement of a page characterized by small images, floods of negative space and muddy photographic reproduction - a style of design that has not stood the test of time. However, the quality of 1980s book design is not what this post is about.

 

"I was luckily on my own when I first visited this garden. I discovered the garden of Les Quatre Sources shrouded in the morning mist, my steps accompanied by the light-hearted rhythm of the overture of Don Giovanni, faultlessly whistled by the music-loving gardener. From the underwood covered with dew to the terraces soaked in the morning sun, along paved paths, and up hidden stairways, I had the feeling of I was discovering a new universe, where each planet sent out its own perfume, its own message or myth; wild mind, lavender, rushleaved broom, and dead leaves combined their fragrances. One should know the language of scents to understand this garden."

So wrote the author of his visit to Les Quatre Sources, and whilst there is much more that could be quoted about how Roderick Cameron and his lover Gilbert Ocelli created their garden - a garden so personal as to hold a memorial to Cameron's mother that read Enid, his beloved mother, Countess of Kenmare, one of the beauties of her time - and, as the following paragraph tells, the ashes of Van Day Truex.

"Higher up on the last terrace, an obelisk flanked by two urns, interrupts the perspective. Under the obelisk lie the ashes of of the friend who showed this place to Roderick Cameron. Roderick Cameron wanted his garden to be inhabited by all those most dear to him. Unfortunately, this master landscaper has since died. 'I wanted to create a romantic garden,' he had confided to me."

Roderick Cameron's ashes were scattered in the garden he created around Truex's obelisk. Where Gilbert Ocelli's ashes lie I have no idea.

So there, scattered in a garden in Provence, the ashes of the two lynchpins of my circle within circle theme, lie close by a memorial to the woman of whom her daughter writes: "Mummy and Rory both had the same quality of innocence. The dark spots of life were discarded and not allowed to intrude on their existence. They saw the world through a golden haze and if you were lucky enough to be part of their magic circle they took you through into that fairyland where life was always fun and always filled with beauty. The reverse simply wasn't tolerated, or perhaps noticed." 

Quotation and photograph from The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera by Michel Racine, Ernest J-P Boursier-Mougenot and Françoise Binet. The MIT Press, 1987.

Photograph of Roderick Cameron and Van Day Truex in Ireland from *Van Day Truex, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, 2001.

Quotation about Roderick Cameron and his mother from A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney 2004.

Sugar bag blues

Dominique Browning's post today reminded me that for various reasons I had neither completed  nor posted this draft I began weeks ago. One day, it being time to begin the annual fruit cake making ritual  - an observance much followed in this house, for a Dundee cake with its preponderance of currants over raisins (etymology of currant: Corinth - currants were once known as raisins of Corinth) topped with concentric rings of almonds is a much appreciated accompaniment to the Celt's afternoon cup of tea - I went looking for bulk-buy dried fruit.

What I found, however, was that in the so-called bulk-buy section, my local foodie-foods supermarket's pride in its much-touted organic mission had been subsumed under a welter of small plastic packaging. The more the mission was touted, it seemed to me, the more plastic there was and bulk-buying had been reduced to small plastic packages of a few ounces.

I've been worried for a while about the increasingly larger role plastic packaging plays in my life. I find it virtually impossible to buy food previously packed in glass not packed or shipped in plastic. Even many of the corks of the wine I buy, and I admit it is not that grand a wine, are plastic and seemingly becoming the norm.

It is not just nostalgia that makes me remember the food retailing during my youth - the local, within-walking-distance, butcher, baker, greengrocer, grocer, and I might as well say it, chip shop. My grandmother always kept a separate shopping bag - cloth, homemade and washable, if I remember well - for potatoes which were not today's perfectly washed and processed specimens and usually came with the black earth clinging to the skins. Other vegetables, carrots and parsnips went straight from the weigh-scale to another cloth bag without being wrapped. Brussels sprouts required a paper bag, usually brown. Summer tomatoes (not a redundancy, that word summer, for there were no tomatoes except for a few short weeks in summer) were bagged in paper after weighing and soft fruits came, magically to this child, in mini wooden crates, or punnets we called them. Bread, baked behind the shop, as were the pies, both sweet and savory, was wrapped in paper when sold. Delicate cakes, individual pies - pork, Scotch, nutmeg sprinkled custard, bilberry, and apple and, in season, mince pies, jam sponges, fancies, fairy cakes, Battenbergs, and meringues, were placed carefully, reverently even, in thin card lidded boxes, for they were an expensive and much-planned-for treat to a cotton worker working, as she would have said, "all the hours God sends." Sugar, and this really is years ago, came ready packed in blue paper bags. Milk was, and still is in some parts of Britain, delivered in glass bottles to the doorstep each day, meat from the butcher - and he was a real butcher - was wrapped in "grease-proof" paper, as was cheese, usually locally-made Crumbly or Tasty Lancashire - the best cheese you'll ever find for Welsh Rarebits or to be eaten with a slice of well-fed and matured fruitcake. Crumbly described the soft granularity of the immature cheese and Tasty the sharpness of the firmer matured variety. Of course there was canned food, tinned as we would have said, and the odd thing is, despite finding most not worth her notice, my grandmother bought cream and fruit in a tin.

There was a brief period that Lancashire cheese, much to my delight, was available at the cheese counter, but the problem was, I understood, when eventually it disappeared, it quickly molded under its plastic wrap and there was too much wastage. As well it might, I thought, for cheese if is to be wrapped should be wrapped with paper only. Of course, as far as retailers are concerned paper is not transparent, and if the product, sliced, packaged and visible, sits in an open case, then for hygiene's sake plastic seems to be the obvious choice.  Why then, I wonder, are some cheeses, not plastic-wrapped, sitting glamorously, like jewels from the dairy, in closed vitrines? Why then, I wonder, in my cynical way, is "cheese paper" available in its own display atop that vitrine - a display with its tagline suggesting that cheese needs to be treated with respect?

So, in a way, my no-longer-available hometown cheese is to me emblematic of the ills of food packaging in general. The most worrisome aspects of packaging are the chemicals that leech from plastic into food, and the gross amounts of plastic disposed of every day.

What I also went looking for that day, coincidentally, was mayonnaise. As far as I could discover, and this came as such a shock, for it seemed to happen overnight or, at least, between the buying of one jar and the next, mayonnaise, even the kind emblazoned with claims of organic rectitude and imparting this or that, yet-to-be-determined-by-the-FDA, health benefit, is hardly available anymore in glass. I have the impression that despite any qualms consumers might have about transference of harmful chemicals from plastic to fatty foods, nut butter manufacturers also went from using glass to packaging in plastic - a big change that happened, in my experience, this year. I cannot quantify it, but I really have a strong impression that plastic packaging has increased exponentially this year.

I can make some changes and am doing so - fruit and vegetables go straight into the trolley, admittedly on top of my shopping bag, without first going into a plastic bag. I buy the last packed in glass mayonnaise, at least the one I can stand eating. Increasingly I am not buying ready-made foods or other types of prepackaged food, such as frozen vegetables if packaged in plastic, or prewrapped cheese for more reasons than the leaching of chemicals. If peanut or other nut butters are eventually only available in plastic jars then I shall no longer buy them.

That it's all a question of convenience, is undoubted, though whether the convenience of the consumer as is usually suggested, or of the manufacturer, I question. I cannot say I'm totally convinced by the truism or, perhaps, the marketing ploy that convinces us we work harder than our ancestors or that we have less time to enjoy life than they and that convenience packaging is a palliative for our stressful lives.

By the by, anyone ever wonder what the carbon footprint of a blueberry from Peru at this time of year must be? 

The photo of a vermeil fruit basket, designed for Tiffany & Co by Van Day Truex, from Tiffany's 20th Century: a portrait of American Style, John Loring, Harry N Abrams. 1997. The small black and white photograph is of the designer and for which I have no photographer's attribution. That will change.   

Authenticity

A few days ago in a post based on a comment I made to Mr Victoria and to some extent lamenting the lack of discrimination in modern design, I used phrases such as "inspired by...," "in the manner of... " and "an homage to..." which to me are all euphemisms for that well-known to-the-trade-over-a-drink phrase – not that anyone would impolitic enough to tell the emperor he's nekkid – "knock-off." I concluded by saying that authenticity is almost as slippery a notion as chic, and to my mind all the more interesting in a society where furniture designs cannot be copyrighted.

Friday was a reading day – beginning about six-ish with The Private World of Yves Saint Laurent  & Pierre Bergé, Elizabethan Architecture, and Mark Hampton: American Decorator. Van Day Truex and I landed together on the library sofa sometime in the afternoon.  

In Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style it is mentioned that Truex had written an article about Jean-Michel Frank for Architectural Digest in 1976. I remembered that amongst my stack there were some issues, two in the event, that had essays by Truex but neither turned out to be the one I was looking for. What I did find was an essay Van Day Truex on Design subtitled Reproduction Furniture: The Pros and Cons - an essay definitely grist to my mill.


"There is no question that those of us who are interested in our own times in design prefer the contemporary solutions. We usually prefer to possess a contemporary design and, if we select from the past, we prefer the original, not the reproduction.

"There are certain situations that justify reproduction. I quote William Gaylord in Architectural Digest, May/June 1977, concerning the four Louis XVI armchairs in the living room of his San Francisco apartment: 'The only reason I have Louis XVI armchairs is that I have never sat in a chair more comfortable.' He possessed two signed original examples and he has expertly reproduced two more to fill the need of a dominating group of four in his eclectic apartment. I wish he had added to his reasons: 'and because they are subtly designed, so excellent in their restrained use of moldings and other architectural motifs.' In other words, so successful in function, form and embellishment."

Van Day Truex also mentions a David Adler house the dining room that contained eleven reproductions of one original Chippendale chair and that for him, "The original possessed such bold style and comfort, I did not question the urge to reproduce, because the reproductions gave a strong rhythmic emphasis to the room."

Further, he opines, "I wonder if our dislike of a copy in furniture, when we cannot possess the original, stems from the sorry state of too much reproducing and too many inferior examples - a choice not determined by a designer's eye but one that is mainly and plainly promotional in character."

"I would like to see a list of furniture designs from the earliest production to the present moment, selected by a top-ranking designer - the choice determined by a highly sensitive objective eye choosing models of lasting, timeless merit. Herein would appear examples that are purely functional, such as an Egyptian folding X-stool, an early Chinese console, simple chairs and tables from the eighteenth-century - excellent in proportion and function, with the minimum of superficial decoration; certain Shaker designs, some Thonet models. There has been too little production of such expertly selected examples and far too much of badly selected designs."

Towards the end of his essay, Truex asks why we should be deprived of good furniture design from the past just because we can't have the original. "We use beautiful Edwardian chintz patterns, we continue to enjoy Morris wallpapers, we copy from primitive African fabric patterns."

He continues with what I think the most interesting thought of all in light of the growth of interior design marketing since the 1980s: "As furniture becomes more edited, as we use more built-in storage space and more upholstered pieces, we are eliminating more and more unnecessary furniture. This means there is all the more need for the remainder to be well-designed. The criterion should really be quality of design."

Perhaps one aspect of design that Truex did not foresee was the alliance between manufacturing, marketing, morality and mindset - the you deserve it approach, for example. That he foresaw modern America "eliminating more and more unnecessary furniture" is of the greatest irony – for nowhere in contemporary design is that to be seen, either in fact or as an idea for discussion.

On reading Truex's very polite biography, it becomes clear his aesthetic and by extension that of his friends, Billy Baldwin and Roderick Cameron, is as straightforward as his food and clothing – the one simple, fresh and moderate, served on restrained, but not necessarily undecorated, china; the second lucid, elegant and well-tailored. To put it another way, there should be neither physical gluttony nor aesthetic greed. Somewhere along the line, the phrase the elegance of refusal has become attached to my memory. It is a concept with which we no doubt all would agree – provided we do not have to practice it.

I'm not writing a polemic here, but surely to discriminate is to have learned, to have trained not only the eye but also the wallet; to have understood basic principles of proportion, space and even time. To chose is to not uncritically accept brand as signifier of quality. To distinguish is to think. To think, to know, to discern, to be critical, is to be educated. I do not believe in innate taste; however, I do think a predilection for exercising critical faculties is both innate and something that can be enhanced by practice and training. Education is all.

So what is authenticity? If a chair is made using the same methods and materials as its antique prototype, is it any less authentic for being a copy? Of course, pedigree plays an important role, especially when one draws near to the border between authentic and counterfeit. In that word authentic lies a whole world of assurance of quality yet I wonder if that very assurance is in itself a mere counterfeit.


Quotations from an essay entitled Van Day Truex on Design, subtitled Reproduction Furniture: The Pros and Cons published in Architectural Digest October 1977.


Photo by Russell MacMasters from Architectural Digest, May/June 1977.


Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, Penguin Group 2001.

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.

A man of most remarkable taste

One of the pleasures of being given lots of old magazines, as I was last week by friends who are moving house and needed to downsize a magazine collection, is renewing acquaintance with rooms long buried in files which for the life of me I cannot find. Gone, no doubt, the way of the family bible ...

So it was with great delight I found Billy Baldwin's salon for Mr and Mrs Harding Lawrence at La Fiorentina - which of us doesn't know it, especially to those of us who own Billy Baldwin Decorates? Of course, it was the blue that caught my eye way back in 1999 when the room was already nearly thirty years old, and it has become a treasure image lodged at the back of my mind since. Once I had a clipping and now I have the whole article again.

Since I began blogging it has occurred to me a number of times that one's collection of magazines should never be disposed of – squirreled away if necessary in a dry basement or stored on bookshelves, but never thrown away. Of course, that presupposes that there is room for more bookshelves, and in my case the increasing number of shelves has not kept pace with the books or magazines coming into this house. My collection of The World of Interiors, begun in the early 1980s, takes a remarkable 112 linear feet to shelve. I ask you, who begins a collection of magazines? Like husbands, they just mount up. The number of other design publications arriving in the mailbox has dwindled without really causing torment, and will dwindle further if Elle Decor doesn't try, even a little, to be interesting.

We are both readers and that means that we have a never-decreasing library that ranges from the obvious interior design and architecture, thru Western art both fine and decorative, to cookery books, books on genetics, history, novels both trashy and inner-landscape, biographies, to curiosities such as Our King and Queen and the Royal Princesses, and Hill's Manual on Social and Business Forms: A Guide to Correct Writing, Showing how to express Written Thought Plainly, Rapidly, Elegantly and Correctly.

And it was such a correctly, if not terrifically plainly written, biography Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography, picked over again during the deepest pout of my weeks-long bloggers block last weekend, that led me to remember the name of someone I'd wanted to write about for a while - the man described by Baldwin as "a man of most remarkable taste" - Roderick Cameron. Son of Lady Kenmare and friend of Van Day Truex who apparently also "was absolutely smothered with taste."

A subject quite absorbing, Taste, and I shall return to it in a subsequent post.

Roderick Cameron began as the subject of this post but has almost been demoted to a footnote, so I'll try to remedy that by quoting Billy Baldwin one more time and by saying I intend to write more about Cameron later this week.

"His mother, Lady Kenmare, was an Australian beauty and twice a widow when I first met him. Lady Kenmare and Rory with a combination of American and Australian money had bought a property on the Riviera which was a wreck due to damages done to it during the war. This remarkable building was known as "La Fiorentina," and it certainly did have, for one thing, the most beautiful views and sights on all the Riviera. It was clinging on to the tip of Cap Ferrat, and surrounded by the perfectly fantastic gardens, terrace upon terrace, most of which had remained in pretty good condition in spite of the war.

"The restoration began and it was lucky for everybody because Rory was a young man of enormous taste, great enthusiasm, and plenty of money. Together with his mother, they bought a great deal of the furniture for the house and turned it into the most beautiful house on the entire Reviera. The restoration was by no means an exact copy of what it had been before the war and before the bombing; instead, Rory brought the whole thing into the present time with a remarkable clarity, a great feeling for textured materials of the day, a lovely absence of color in that most of it was rather bony or very pale, and the introduction of contemporary French furniture, most notably tables by Jean-Michel Frank, who was the last great cabinetmaker in Paris."

Photos by Durston Saylor for an article written by Aileen Mehle for Architectural Digest, January 1999.