Chickendale, light-filled, gentlemanly rooms, and being combed out

"I've told you about Miss Louise, haven't I?" asked my old prof over lunch. "Not yet," I replied, "but I'd love to hear about her."

"There isn't much to say other than she was a Southern lady of stately aspect – a decorator ... a marvelous decorator, who knew her furniture ...  no Chickendale for her, it was all good stuff ... at Rich's when Rich's was something in Atlanta. Did I ever explain what the five pieces of Southern furniture are?"

"Yes," I said, "but I've forgotten. Tell me again." "We're off!" thought I and settled into my Manhattan – it wasn't really a bourbon on the rocks kind of day: a bit grey, a bit dull, a bit overcast – and that was me, not the weather.

"Well..." she said, "I talk too much ... do you have time?"

"We're here for the afternoon, if we like – remember, they know us."

"Well. the five pieces of Southern furniture are the slab or the huntboard; the cellarette ... oh, those Baptists loved their cellarettes ... hid a multitude of sins, of course ... the sugar chest; the lazy susan and the biscuit board. I should perhaps say that they are the five pieces of furniture that were once considered Southern, and Miss Louise certainly knew what they were. She sold enough of them, and the real thing, too."

"Ah, yes, Miss Louise. What's so memorable about her?"

"She was a good decorator, a real lady who could laugh at herself. Stopped for speeding ... windows wide open, it was summer ... she told the tale that when the policeman came to her car, she patted her bosom as only a Southern lady could, crying 'a bee, officer, a bee. Can you help me?' He left very quickly – no ticket – and she sped on. But, it wasn't the way she lived, necessarily, that made her famous... more the way she went."

"Went?"

"Died. She died under the hairdryer at Rich's salon and ... well the phrase is – and if it's not on her gravestone, it should be – permed at Rich's and combed out at Patterson's [funeral home]."

I admired it then, and I love it still, the Virginia countryside home of Antony Childs. Two years ago I wrote about Childs' Georgetown house:

"There are what used to be called 'important antiques' dotted around, but in this room and the rest of the house a good balance between display and hospitality has been achieved. It's unlikely anyone entering the front door got the feeling they first should have checked their personal liability insurance.

"The most pleasing thing about these charming rooms is that they were created over twenty years ago yet are as fresh and classic as they were then. Nothing has dated – well, maybe the skirted dining table a little, though I must say I've always been partial to a good skirted table. The grand dining room curtains are pretty restrained in comparison to many a drapery from the same time, and would not look out of place today. Other windows in the house, judging by photos of the living room and bedroom, are simply furnished with Roman shades, that most classic of window covering. The wooden furniture is grand but not repellant in its pomposity and the upholstery is sane and welcome. I could go on about the contents of these rooms but they are visible in the photos. Unusual for the time there is no name-dropping provenance for any of the furniture.

"I didn't know this man, but I like his light-filled, gentlemanly rooms. These are spaces to be alone it, kiss a lover or two, listen to Roy Orbison, read (the phrase curl up with a good book comes to mind, but I shall eschew it), trip a light fantastic, play with a Game Boy, wax poetical, opine on how the world's gone mad today, good's bad today, black's white today, and day's night today when most guys today ... "

Though I wrote then about other rooms with other furniture, the qualities I admired in Georgetown I found and still find in the Virginia hunt country house: light-filled; gentlemanly; restrained; pleasing; fresh; classic and simple.

There isn't anything that does not continue to delight my eye – from Sanderson's Willow Minor bathroom wallpaper, a 17th-century Dutch ebony frame above Dana Westring's trompe l'oeil finely-painted chimney board, William IV leather-covered armchairs, Régence chair, 18th-century four-poster bed and French desk at its foot – there are none of the five pieces of Southern furniture. Perhaps, more important than any individual piece of furniture or decoration, is the sense of airy, sunlit space. As far as I can see there are only two concessions to "spirit of place" as it was often expressed in the 80s and 90s, the homages to imagined histories – the horn trophies on the dining room walls and the twig chair beneath the bathroom window. For the rest, it is an evocation of the real spirit of place – peace, quiet, comfort and hospitality of a weekend in the country.

Antony Childs, who died of AIDS in June 1994 at the age of 57, one year after the article was published – the last one about him – called the house, in comparison to what he did for his clients, "undressed." 

The Five Pieces of Southern Furniture

A Huntboard or slab as it is also known is, according to Merriam-Webster.com, similar to a sideboard but frequently simpler, smaller and taller. Allegedly used at hunt breakfasts.

A Cellarette is a small, portable wine storage chest, frequently made of mahogany, but without a water-proof lining that could hold ice. From Pinterest.

A Sugar Chest is a piece of furniture in the late 18th-century and the early 19th-century. Used to store large quantities of sugar for longer periods of time. From Pinterest.

A Lazy Susan is a revolving platform set into the top of a "self-waiting" table. From here.

A Biscuit Board is tautologous to say it's a board on which biscuits are prepared. From here, the most explanatory example I could find on the web. 

Patterson's Funeral Home designed by Philip Shutze circa 1928

When we first came to Atlanta twenty years ago the Spring Hill Mortuary, as it is also known, was covered in ivy and looked like a house on a hill. Since, as you see, it has been stripped of greenery and repainted white.


Photographs of Patterson's and its chapel by Timothy Hursley from American Classicist: The Architecture of Philip Trammell Shutze, Elizabeth Meredith Dowling, Rizzoli, 1989.

Photographs of Antony Childs' house by William Waldren from and article by Amy Fine Collins in HG House and Garden, July 1993.

To what end?

Recently, I was asked to recommend interior design books for a beginner's library. I rattled off a list of the names we all have on the tips of our tongues – Elsie de Wolfe, Syrie Maugham, Frances Elkins, Nancy Lancaster, Sister Parish, Jean-Michel Frank, Billy Baldwin, John Fowler, David Hicks, Albert Hadley and Mark Hampton. Eventually I wandered off, texting the bartender for another manhattan as I did so, and it occurred to me as I headed to the bar that, though a good list of names, I'd missed the point. Someone else that evening in our library during one of our cocktail parties had remarked how lucky I was to own all these books. Two manhattans in, the point I'd missed, whatever it was, eluded me momentarily – until my mind snagged on that word "lucky".

Indeed, but to what end? thought I, surprising myself with the force of it. I own each of the books on my quick list (and many more such monographs) and, irritated as I am to find it so, it took someone else's perfectly normal question to set me wondering why I actually do own and want to own so many books. To what end, precisely? Or, to be precise, what happens to them if, in the end, I no longer need them? How does one dismantle a lifetime's collection of books? Is it just so much paper that few, if anyone, would want?

I've mentioned before how the new president of a local for-profit university decided the modern student no longer needed books as "everything necessary is available online." He closed the library, deaccessioned everything, and at the time it seemed self-evident that it was to my benefit to have, at least, the books I'd ordered for the school library come into mine. After all, I was still teaching, would do so for the foreseeable future and I could use them for the blog. When, a few years later, I retire, that seemed yet another opportunity – I could spend golden years reading them all – visions of velvet smoking jacket-clad days spent in a paneled library, books piling (neatly) all over the place, creaking shelves reaching to the ceiling, the scents of leather and pot-pouri, the literary equivalent of new car smell, suffusing the room, all played in my head.

And, alas, it was almost to be, this bastion against the increasing tide of philistinism.

Despite illusion and delusion I continue to buy interior design books – though in fewer number than previously. Conversely, I delve into my shelves and stacks far more than ever I did for, perhaps not so surprisingly, they prove to be more satisfactory than what is available in stores.

If there is anything missing from my collection of books it is a coherent history of 20th-century and 21st-century decorating and design. A history of residential decoration could be cobbled together from the books I own, but if anyone were interested in design rather than decoration he would have slim pickings. Interior decoration, still a massive if shrunken industry, is but a tiny part of the national market – contract or commercial design taking the largest segment.

Thus, if I were asked again to suggest a beginner's library for an aspiring student of interior design I would recommend first reading Becoming an Interior Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design by Christine Piotrowski – an expensive and rather dry introduction to the business of design and the difference between decoration and design. Beyond that, I'd suggest books about architecture and historical styles – the golden oldie by Sir Bannister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. For furniture styles and the history thereof, I suggest John Moreley's The History of Furniture: Twenty-Five Centuries of Style and Design in the Western Tradition, and because its just fascinating, Geoffrey Beard's Upholsterers & Interior Furnishings in England, 1530 -1840.

For my neighbour who asked me for recommendations I would amend my original list to include both Morley's and Beard's books with the further addition of The Inspiration of the Past and The Search for a Style by John Cornforth to provide historical context for all the practitioners, both of yesterday and today, of traditional design.

Regarding residential design the following photograph will show you where my tastes lie and I can heartily recommend each of the books shown.

The photographs by Richard Felber of John Richardson's library/writing room are from the last issue of HG published in July 1993. I still miss House and Garden – besides The World of Interiors, still the best interiors magazine there was. It was replaced by Domino, of all things.

I kept that last issue for years but where it now is I've no idea. My friend Will Merril mailed me his copy for the article about John Richardson's library and to my joy I found also the last published article about one my circles-within-circles decorators, Antony Childs. More about him next time.

Times change

"Blue, prepare to have your socks knocked off at Kips Bay ..." wrote a commenter last week about my misgivings after visiting the Atlanta Symphony Show House, and I must admit I went to the Kips Bay 41st Annual Decorator Show House with a certain anticipation which was, to a degree, repaid. 

There always is, or should be, excitement about seeing who is doing what in show houses, and from that point of view Kips Bay did not disappoint, though my socks were not, as threatened blown off. The kitchen was superb, but show house kitchens always are, and the dining room a marvel of art, decoration, atmosphere, and practicality. In place of an actual sideboard a deconstructing bronze sculpture based on the form of a sideboard, that made me wish it was a sideboard – a superb piece that I wish I could have photographed. Above the table hung a tree branch and writhing neon pendant that was the best of its kind. I'm not really sure how the room would work for a few old fogies who need more than atmosphere to light their ways to the cognac, but I'll forgive that.

High-gloss, saturated color was much in evidence, as was the ongoing love-affair with 50's and 60's Italian furniture, and the strained-thru-SoCal 70's flea-market upgrades, though there was, that I saw, thankfully nary a rumor of Eames. Yet the neutral room persists: white on cream, white on beige, white on white, white on wood, white on tedium. Really? Still? 

Photography was not permitted so in writing this I am working on what I remember four days afterwards. Robert Brown's room, the first (I am told) at Kips Bay by an Atlanta decorator and literally the first room which one saw – or rather could have seen had it not been used for ticket sales and queueing – sadly as a result doesn't stand out, as it should, in my memory. Brown is a excellent decorator who, in my opinion, was underserved by the show house for, clearly, if a decorator earns a place that place should be respected and not be screened from view by a queue of ticket buyers.

Two adjoining rooms upstairs, the connecting doors carefully kept closed, were, for me, the yin and yang of the show house – one, a bedroom, an anachronism, a throw-back even, (remember, personal opinions here) by the West coast decorator presently masquerading as Ingres' Grande Odalisque in a Bath Towel in advertisements for Scalamandré, and the other an appreciation of the cool, friends–with–benefits sophistication of modern life. This is not to say I disliked either room – quite the contrary, in fact – but their juxtaposition set me thinking about the modern producers of mass-taste, those connections between decorating, TV and licensing.

At the top of the house, opening on to a beautiful roof terrace and with carp-filled pool, a luminously spacious family room with its lavender and grey coloration, silver blown-glass logs in a steel and mirror firebox below a big-assed TV, was the favorite despite that most repellant of furnishing textiles, a hair-on-hide rug.

Licensing is a topic of significance that I shall wait to tackle more fully in another post – when I'm not sitting here, thoroughly bad-tempered, impatient, woozy, and hacking and wheezing from the worst airplane cold I've ever had. I will say, however, that a few years back I saw, and I wish I'd kept it, on the back of a very old Architectural Digest, a pattern that was at the time being marketed as a design, recolored for modern times, by a well-known interior decorator. Call me naive if you wish, but I was shocked at it. I remain shocked when I think of how fabric houses and furniture manufacturers are pushing out collections of quite ordinary and derivative collections distinguished only by the celebrity name on the label. How we got here is worth considering – some other time.  

No, I didn't come away de-socked from Kips Bay, was never breathless from excitement – from the stairs, yes, certainly – and to be candid was underwhelmed by a couple of big names. Subtlety to the point of tedium or invisibility is not for me. I thought, though, as also a friend texted me to say, that these are not the grand old days of Buatta, Hampton and Parish-Hadley. Perhaps that is not a bad thing. Times change. 

But not always for the good. Though it happened months ago, it was only this weekend that I learned, heartbreakingly, that Archivia Books has closed. It occurred to me as I stood there, amazed that this beautiful shop has gone, that I am part of the problem. How proud I have been of saving money by going to Amazon to buy books when clearly if I have the money to buy such books I could afford to pay full price. Why would I? Look at the desolation above and wonder if keeping a local business going is worth it. 

Times change, indeed.


For photographs of some of the rooms go here. 

Why do we bother?

Every year I say that it was not worth the schlep (driving to a designated parking location, waiting for a shuttle to take us to the house and, after feeling immensely let down by what we have seen, reversing the journey and arriving home in a bad mood and out of pocket). Nonetheless, each year we go back and I must say it was with some trepidation because of the negative rumors surrounding it, that Sunday afternoon, together with three friends, we visited the Atlanta Symphony Decorators' Show House again.

I know in the world of decorating one is supposed never to be critical – amazing really when one considers the ever-churning rumor mill – so let me say only that there were highlights. Nothing OMG or I'm Loving This though I did hear a nostalgic Remember when? remark about when decorators used to learn their trade as assistants to the big names.

One such highlight was a basement room done entirely in its own products by IKEA – actually, an eyeopener for here was a room stylish, low-budget, livable, contemporary, and completely in the wrong place or, if not in the wrong place, it was being viewed by the wrong clientele (which I suppose is the same thing). I heard many a snobbish comment but I tell you honestly if I were starting out with little money I would seriously consider, after seeing that room, using IKEA products for my first flat. The disconnect is that most of the people visiting the show house are not just starting out and, frankly, stressing the inexpensiveness of it all, as the docents did, is not what thrills the oh, my dear lord! crowd avidly reeling in faux ticket shock. A highlight, if a strangely misplaced one.

"I do," said our friend, when I quipped "every A-list gay in Atlanta will want a version of this room. "As do I," I replied. We were looking at the brightest highlight of them all: on the lower level, a moody masculine, bodice-ripper of a room by Michael Habachy.

It is clear to me that Mr Habachy is one of Atlanta's most original designers and one who, with nightclubs, spas and restaurants on his resume, brings a completely different understanding of atmosphere and sociability to residential design – not for him the pallid prettiness that suffuses Atlanta decorating. A room where two men in tuxedos might sit, manhattan and negroni to hand, on their long-awaited wedding night, laughing about their first honeymoon thirty-five years before.

It was thanks to Uber we drove up the torrent that was the driveway to the suburban faux chateau hosting the show house (not for us, this time, the drive to the designated parking spot and then the shuttle). I feel I've seen more than my share of these houses, thus I cannot tell you I was impressed by the architecture inside or out. I'm just bored stiff with sheet-rocked grandeur. As to authenticity ... well, a tired joke at the best of times.

I do ask myself why we bother with show houses and I strongly feel that, year in, year out, its always the same. But it could be I just need to get out more – and we are, for in a couple of weeks time we're going to visit the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club forty-first annual Decorator Show House – neither of us has done it before though we have tried a few times to get their schedule matched with ours and the one time previous to this we did so, they had to cancel at the last minute. Let's hope it isn't another "why did we bother?"


Photos of Michael Habachy's room unattributed on the card I picked up so if anyone can tell me the name of the photographer I would be grateful and certainly would add it to this post.

Standing stitch stark naked on the corner of Hollywood and Vine

"Have I ever told you about Boom-Boom?" She had of course, a while back, but I said would love to hear it again. The drinks were ordered – for her a gin and tonic, Tanqueray of course, and for me a Woodford on the rocks – we sat, my erstwhile professor and I, near the window in the bar in the sun undisturbed by the lunchtime murmur from the dining room and the also by the barman who, once he's got our drinks sorted, knows now to let us be whilst we catch up, toast each other, and settle down to a good old natter. We'll eat eventually, conversation being the point not food, and we'll eat very slowly.

"Years ago," she began, "I was den mother to a crowd of students visiting Rome ... it's odd how after all these years they remember you ... completely at a loss ...  all their faces, hundreds of 'em over the years, have blended and, and ... when that twenty-something-year-old is now a grandmother ... but one or two stand out and you cannot but wonder what happened to them."

A bowl of soup – surprisingly, for the time of year, split-pea – half a Cobb salad, and veal in lemon butter caper sauce made their way between our glasses, the bread basket, the butter, and our cutlery, silently brought by the barman, who also, when we asked after her, delight and pride written all over his face, showed us photos on his phone of his months-old daughter. There she was, smiling, blue eyes like her dad's crinkling with happiness and, with a swipe of his finger, laughing and looking straight out at the happy man taking her photograph. There is something entrancing about a baby's laugh, even one unheard – the sound of heaven on earth.

"Well, Miss Kate" said Boom-Boom on her return to the lodging at end of the afternoon, "I could stand stitch-stark naked on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and no-one would give me a second glance, but here in Rome ... " It seems she – curious as any nice Jewish girl well might be in St Peter's Basilica – had spotted an empty confessional and had dropped in for a chat with the priest. Such a meeting of minds was it that the young man had whisked her out of the church and spent the afternoon showing her around Rome, after first taking her for a drink at the bar in the Basilica. "Note," said my prof, "not in the Vatican but in the Basilica. Not many people believe that, but it's true and I've seen it and it's right there on the left as you go into St Peter's – and you need a priest to take you there."

As I say, the first time I heard the story, a while back, the Celt and I went looking for the bar – curious as you might imagine and fully prepared to be as thirsty for a warming spirit as a cold wet day in a gloomy basilica can make one. It's not that we pushed open every door we came across – for most were locked or behind a barrier – but there was one that seemed to be in the right place and, if I remember rightly, had grapes and vines carved into its lintel. But alas it was a door that did not open to us, nor has it yet. It stands near Antonio Canova's Monument to the Stuarts.

As my prof used to say to many an unwilling student "you can check if you wish, I might be lying to you."

Photo of the Monument to the Stuarts in St Peter's, Rome, from Wikipedia Commons

Reading on the rug

The Emperor's New Clothes, illustration for Hans Christian Anderson's Fairy Tales, 1935

Being intellectually lazy, I've never been able, with any patience, to take part in the discussion that has marched on since at least the nineteenth-century, about the distinction between fine arts and the decorative arts – with fine artists claiming for themselves not only the Olympian heights, but also the right to be considered philosophers, sociologists, psychiatrists and priests. I do not agree with assessments that give fine artists a special place in society, other than recognizing their status as producers of commercial artifacts that might or might not either do well as investments or, at the other end of the continuum, look good above a sofa or on the coffee table. As to the product itself, abstract art bores me silly and conceptual art leaves me wondering which of us – the artist or myself – is demented.

In other words, to me it's all "Emperor's New Clothes" and prejudiced as I am, I'm fully prepared to condemn that which I don't understand. (I may of course, like a modern pundit or politician, apologize for it later.)

Two days ago, I opened a new Amazon box and found the most thrilling book of my year so far, In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and Work. Hitherto easily dismissed as a decorative painter, Whistler's status in twentieth-century art can, thanks to this excellent book, be reassessed and, finally, understood. I'm not going to write about the hi-jacking of twentieth-century art by the likes of Clement Greenberg and the nationalistic assumptions therein – I could, but I'll leave it for another day. Rex Whistler sits firmly in my personal pantheon of those who draw and can explain an idea in clear visual language with imagination, wit, and without gobbledygook. I cannot recommend this biography of one of my favorite artists more highly, but with a publication date of 2012, I suspect I'm preaching to the quire and y'all probably have your copies already. I keep being pulled from the excellent text by the superb illustrations, one of which is a double-page fold-out of the Plas Newydd mural – an absolute delight.

The Triumph of Neptune, a carpet design by Rex Whistler for Edward James, 1934

A friend who is remodeling his place asked me if I would have wooden floors again and I immediately said I would not – at least, I qualified, not in the form of planks that just go from here to there. My preference for floors, be they of wood or stone, is that they should have more than a length of shoe-mold or baseboard to relate them to the architecture that surrounds them and I feel also that nowadays most floors, carpets and rugs do not relate, other than superficially. That said, there are times when it is a blessing not to draw attention to the shape of rooms and camouflage is called for – despite Rose Cumming's put-down of "'ere to 'ere," it is sometimes the best option and occasionally that choice is not solely aesthetic. Sometimes it's about acoustics or perhaps, more usually, what you can afford. 

An expanse of floor, be it wood, stone, or both, is very satisfying when, for my taste, it is not broken up with too many rugs. In fact, space, illusory or real, is a modern luxury and one too easily ignored given the pressures to be good consumers. That said, two few soft surfaces and there will be problems with noise. I tried to keep away from what one should do and make sure our friend understood that I was talking about my preferences not rules. So, there are no rules, he said, making me realize I'd rattled on a bit too much. I had to say that there are rules and most of them are not to be broken but, to get into that discussion was going to require another Bloody Mary (it was brunch) and likely he'd end up even more confused. I really should have just said yes in the first place or had a Virgin Mary (I know, I know... ). 

I like floors, carpets and rugs to have borders – I like borders, both personal and aesthetical. Our hall rug (not shown to advantage in the photograph below, I confess) – a faded palimpsest when lit from above, with the faintest of arabesques ghosting through each part – is a total treasure both in its beauty and its associations of bright sunlight on the Silk Road to Samarkand. It should, I feel sometimes, be on a wall, but rugs are made for the floor and it goes so well with the Turgeot map and the 1950s bench.

The living room carpet, on the other hand, could be a length of broadloom cut to a standard size. I bought it as a wool-and-silk-hand-knotted-in-Tibet carpet and though without a border, it is equally subtle, though simpler in design. And while it might at first glance be a length of broadloom, the pattern ends at each edge equally, with is no slicing through a motif. (I know in the photograph it looks like a ploughed field, and I've tried to explain to "the help" what I want, but neither of us, it seems, feels we can spend our days smoothing the pile with a silk scarf.)

Seeing again the image of Whistler's The Triumph of Neptune carpet set me thinking about the occasion a week or so ago when I attended a showroom presentation about new rug and carpet lines. Sitting there, I got to wondering why viscose – not the best fibre for high-traffic areas – is so prevalent in decorative textiles. Further, I wondered why one would specify a fibre the production of which is allegedly very polluting, and also who is designing carpets nowadays?

What I should wonder about is not who, but how carpets are designed – a subject I'd like to return to in the near future given that most carpet and rugs (beyond the time-honored orientals) designs look remarkably alike to me, even those from the branded collections of celebrity interior designers.

As I looked, apropos something else, through Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier's excellent book about Jean-Michel Frank, I came across four rug designs that seem to me to be the antithesis of modern carpet and rug design – original artworks for the floor, they show how – in the hands of an artist (in this case trained in theatre) – how delightful, original, frivolous even, rugs or carpets can be.

The Emperor's New Clothes, illustration for Hans Christian Anderson's Fairy Tales, and The Triumph of Neptune, a carpet design by Rex Whistler for Edward James from In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and Work, Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, Frances Lincoln, 2012.

Rug designs by Christian Bérard from Jean-Michel Frank: The Strange and Subtle Luxury of the Parisian Haute-Monde in the Art Deco Period, Pierre-Emmanuel Martin-Vivier, Rizzoli, 2008.

A legendary house

It is facile to use the word "legendary" about Villa Fiorentina, but it definitely fits this house that has become part of design-bloggers' collective consciousness – and one that for many is the last word in elegance and discretion. Well, elegant it was, discrete too, if only in decoration and furnishing, and it may still be, but, judging by the photograph below, the discretion and elegance of today is not that of yesterday. I make no judgements.

After and before

Now and then

Before and after

Over the past couple of years I have written quite a bit about Villa Fiorentina and its owner so I shall not bore you with repetition here. If you wish to read my essays on this subject look in the Labels list on the right and click on "Roderick Cameron" and "Villa Fiorentina".

To see what the inside of Fiorentina was like go here, here, and for a more comprehensive look at Fiorentina and its owners, here in the Labels list to the right. 

A correspondent sent me the first photograph and link to the architect's site yesterday and you can imagine how grateful I am. Thank you TT.

The new photographs from here (Bruno Bolzoni Architecte D.P.L.G.) Attributions for other photographs where known will be found in the Labels list.