The days grow long

Driving around Atlanta this weekend, a beautiful Fall weekend, it wasn't hard to be charmed by the colors of the leaves, particularly the acid yellow-green of the ginkgo and ... well, I don't need to list 'em all.

A cliche I know, but who at this time of year doesn't think of Jacques Prevert's Autumn Leaves - Nat King Cole's version, perhaps - I did, and with that memory came an image of a room I'd seen recently whilst idling through an Architectural Digest from 1976. I hadn't marked the page though the article was about a Geoffrey Bennison design for a young bachelor, a nephew of the Queen's Equerry.

The remarkable thing - let me state a certain partiality about Mr Bennison's talent - see here, here and here - is the way that his interiors are as fresh today as they were more than thirty years ago. Admittedly, David Hicks' carpet is fashionable again, the upholstery silhouettes are lean and taught, some walls are mirrored, as is a screen, and the lamps are classic blue-and-white jars with big card shades. It is a room that could have been designed today except in two ways and I'm not talking about the over-vignetted photography or the use of red as a leit-motif.

I cannot think of any modern decorator except perhaps Steven Gambrel who could match Geoffrey Bennison with such subtly Wagnerian use of color. Albert Hadley as well springs to mind but he, arguably, is of the same generation as Bennison. This is not to say that there are no decorators today using color but, judging by what is published in the surviving shelter magazines, today's decor is pretty pallid and riddled with nervous neutrals. What this says about the teaching of color in design schools is left to another discussion maybe later in the week.

So, if it's not the color what dates the photo? The plants, is the answer. Sometime in the 1970s photographers and stylists went for "tropicals" in a very big way and they were used as foreground, middle-ground and background, therewith recreating that most Victorian of rooms, the conservatory. Furniture lurked in forests of green from which the only thing missing was Tarzan. Magazine readers had to push aside curtains of green to see what was going on, often nothing was, which was maybe why these plants became such space-fillers.

This framing/filling device is no longer used so on the subject of leaves let me leave you with ...

The falling leaves drift by my window
The falling leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands I used to hold

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

Photography by Derry Moore from Architectural Digest November/December 1976 $2:95.