Here's to Anonymous

A comment on Tuesday's post from Anonymous (see italics below) sent me back to my small store of 1970s magazines, (all thrown away when my previous school divested itself of its library) to find these photos. To my great pleasure I saw that I had on the first go-through flagged the article and only today did I see it was William Gaylord's own apartment that as Anonymous said made a "star" of him.

I lived in NYC, but got to know Billy and he was truly a charming, good looking, and very talented designer. He learned a lot from his friends, Tony Hail and Michael Taylor, but his "look" was totally individual. One of his best, and most unique, interiors was his own Knob Hill apartment that was photographed by Architectural Digest, and made a "star" of him! His early death was a great loss. Will.

So, tonight, over dinner I shall raise a glass filled with Malbec and gratitude to Anonymous.

The writer of the AD article, curiously weight conscious (perhaps afraid that all including himself could have crashed through the floor) stressed that the coffee table of stacked white-painted flagstone weighed one ton and the large cactus by the 18th century African thrones weighed in at 800-pounds.

It isn't hard to see why the decoration of this apartment set William Gaylord apart from his peers and mentors - it must have been quite a challenge - gobsmacking as the Brits would say. This is not traditional with modern thrown in as accents: this is a fully-fledged contemporary challenge top-dressed, as it were, with exotic tradition. Gaylord, 25 years old, had been an independent decorator for only two years when his apartment was published.

"I didn't want anything definable. My apartment could be 1930 or 2001. I designed the furniture and used really unusual antiques. Not just a French or an English chair. Instead I found the 18th century African throne chairs for the living room. In my office-dining room, I used Chinese ceremonial chairs. By the way, they are much more comfortable than they look."

Asked if his apartment was livable, Gaylord replied:

"It's livable for me. I usually work till all hours. When I come home I work at the table or read in bed. The living room is for entertaining, a white oval background for people with art and plants .... But when I first saw the apartment, I knew it needed a lot of help. It looked like an Americanized version of a 1930 French hotel suite. The tall French doors and parquet floors are nice, but the molding is plastic and the owners wouldn't allow me to remove it. It would have been absurd to treat it as a real French room."

Quite brilliant and truly a tragedy Mr Gaylord died young. This has been swanning around my head since I found the article:

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago.

Photos by Charles Ashley from Architectural Digest, May/June 1972.

Verse quoted from Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger.

Between traditional and modern

At least, in 1977 that was the assessment Jay Spectre made of his design for a New York residence.

"Integrity - now there's the keystone. If you simply respect the innateness of places and objects, you can hardly go wrong. Let's take this project. The ground rules were simple enough. It was to be a New York residence for Californian clients, Mr and Mrs H. R .... v of Beverly Hills. The building has much to recommend it: a Fifth Avenue location, Stanford White as architect and that indefinable patina of age."

"Now I challenge you to place this room geographically. Isn't this the sort of ultimate metropolitan space? It could be in any capital: Paris, London or New York."

"Do you know, I feel a little self-conscious talking about this apartment. It all seems so simple. I mean, I really wasn't attempting any sensational statement. What I was really trying to create here is an honestly luxurious, but unostentatious, way of life. Of course, it is carefully detailed, but in a very real way the luxury is taken for granted."

So far this week I've been interested in that area "between traditional and modern" or, rather, the combination of both, as perceived by 1970s decorators. This marriage of hard-edged contemporary design grafted onto a late 19th century neoclassical building is interesting to say the least. In fact, it has echoes of the previous decade's English modernist architects, usually young, who took great pride in the elimination of all period details in classical architecture and replacing it with proto-minimalist interiors.

Besides displaying its roots in the 1960s this design by Jay Spectre prefigures the of much of the succeeding decade's interior design. During the 1980s, the counterpoint to the mania for English country house decorating, was a brittle and heart-stoppingly chilly and gleaming form of marble-floored modernism, austerely furnished with iconic furniture, usually Biedermeier, and with all the atmosphere and ostentation of the tomb.

The designer, in a naughty-boy way, referred to the powder room (below) as "a moment of madness." In this case his aim was not uncertain.

The apartment shown here is definitely of its time: dramatic, virtually lampless, luxurious, curated, showy and probably awe-inspiring to its owners. Spectre's mature design from the 1980s is very interesting and the pity of it is, he is another of that wonderful generation of designers lost to the plague. So many of them were gone so quickly and in many cases these were the men who worked for the very people who denied the existence of the plague and displayed not on speck of interest in helping save that generation or the one that came after.

An aspect of design I find fascinating, and this is why on occasion I like the designers to speak for themselves, is the language of interior design, the gobbledygook, the jargon, call it what you will, in actuality the language of branding.

Photography by Jaime Ardiles-Arce from Architectural Digest, September 1977.

We interrupt this broadcast ...

... to bring you this message

An interior dramatist

Rooms designed nearly forty years ago for a couple, a psychiatrist and a writer, by William Gaylord, seem to my eye as contemporary today as when they were first created. My trawl through the 1970s is unearthing some real treasures like Mr Gaylord and the people mentioned in this and last week's posts. People I knew of, some merely blips on the collective printed mind and others who've simply fallen out of favor and their place in history is undecided. Some became very famous in the following decade only to fall victim to AIDS. There was a lot of dross too, and it might be interesting to cover that in the coming weeks.

William Gaylord's name is not well-known today or at least not as well known as it should be. Assuming there were not two San Francisco decorators of the same name, perhaps the reason he is not well-known is that he died young. According to his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle he died of cancer at age forty. As I say, assuming the person of the obituary is the same person I'm writing about.

William Gaylord designed these rooms in an old Victorian, more properly known as a Queen Anne Revival, house that had survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. The choice was made not to furnish it as it might have been in the 1880s but as a contemporary space within old walls - "a contradiction and a delight."

William Gaylord made no architectural changes - no walls were removed to open the small if tall spaces, in fact it was spruced up, had its more excessive moldings removed, and a couple of fireplaces updated with modern materials. He painted out the background, furnished the rooms with contemporary pieces - pieces that still look contemporary to eyes used to seeing vintage furniture in decorating schemes - and gave it what must have been one of the first instances of the "lampless look" so popular in the decade to follow.

Lighting was from spot lights and was used to create a dramatic punctuation of the room suitable for whatever activity took place there. There were no lamps because there were no lamp tables for them to go on, and there were no end tables because "the small rooms could not be burdened with furniture whose function would be only to hold up lamps."

The simplified but dramatic background was solely a foil for well-chosen objects such as Joe Colombo's Elda chair from 1964, Rothko, Newman and Stella paintings, plants, flowers, and the owners.

"Were he not called a decorator, Mr Gaylord would like to be known as an interior dramatist."

Quotes from San Francisco Victorian by William Moore

Photography by Russell MacMasters

All from Architectural Digest, November/December 1975.

The consummate gentleman ...

"... with excruciatingly correct manners and impeccable attire." Said of Anthony Hail by his obituary writer in the San Francisco Chronicle, the characterization comes pretty close to describing this interior designed by him for a 24-year old bachelor in 1976.

The client's aspiration for the apartment which overlooked Lafayette Park in Pacific Heights, was "something like the tones of Billy Baldwin's apartment in New York, I suppose. Well, I went to Anthony Hail, here in San Francisco, because I really like neutrals, and I had heard about his excellent use of them."

Certainly, Anthony Hail's use of neutrals is excellent but in this case not a narrow range of beige: yellow for the entry hall; aubergine for the kitchen, breakfast room and bar; camel in the bedroom and living room, light cocoa and white for the upholstery; the pale golden brown of cane; natural wool tones in the Moroccan Berber rug; natural linen. Plants are used as green accents and to connect inside with the view of the park through the windows. The other accent is found in tortoiseshell, red pillows, a lacquered leather chest standing in front of the sofa, and the painting above it.

Anthony Hail said of his design "We wanted to keep the tradition of the building and still have a clean-cut modern living space. There were no budget limitations; everything is of excellent quality. But it is economical. The material is durable; the lacquered nest of tables would fit anywhere, as would the eighteenth-century blanc de chine lamp. And its not dated. If Mr F.... should move, everything could be moved directly into a library, or any other room, for that matter."

His client's reaction - "I wanted a place where I could entertain my friends comfortably. I'm pleased, very pleased. The apartment's everything I wanted it to be."

What is most apparent more than 30 years later is that Mr Hail created a classic masculine aesthetic that looks as current today as it did then.

Photography by Russell MacMasters from Architectural Digest, December 1976.

By the waters of ....

... Babylon - well, the East River - I sat down and smiled.

Joseph Braswell's own apartment overlooking Sutton Place in Manhattan photographed in April 1974 for Architectural Digest is very different from what I expected, though that says more about me than Mr Braswell, for if you remember he was the designer of the Helena Rubinstein richly colored and immensely stylish corporate offices shown in Wednesday's post.

I realized, and this is the smile of the title, is that not only could I in a figurative sense have lived in this apartment with very few changes, details really, and what I really like about 1970s interior design I still seek today - the combination of clean-lined modern architecture, logical floor plans, historical reference, color, comfort, meaningful chotchkes, if any, securely corralled.

Mr Braswell's interior is all of this except that it is completely neutral in palette, "non-colors" as the designer said "In our work at Braswell-Willoughby we are steeped in strong patterns and colors all day, and it's easy to become surfeited. Here at home I wanted to restore myself in a tranquil palette of earth tones."

Color, such that it is, is intrinsic to the materials: sisal, rattan, lacquer, chrome, leather, suede, hopsack, mirror. This is 1977 and those materials in intrinsic colors and textures have never really gone out of fashion since. Emphasis has changed somewhat over the years: sisal had its heyday during the 1980s, but it's still around and been joined by seagrass; hopsacking is still in use as an upholstery material now called "Belgian" linen; suede, whether from the tanner or the oil refinery, comes and goes ; mirror, antiqued or not, a couple of years ago was applied to every unsuitable piece of furniture within reach and now its permissible again to clad walls with it; chrome momentarily was supplanted by nickel; lacquer, the real thing, is as fashionable as ever but that other lacquer comprising four coats high-gloss paint is beginning to be considered bad for the environment. Rattan? Least said the better.

The palm frond console in the foyer is 1930s Serge Roche for Emilio Terry. The paper sculpture (you cannot imagine the throb of nostalgia I felt at reading those words) above the desk is by Nancy Miller. Printed fabrics by Allen Campbell, I think.

Photographs by Peter Vitale from Architectural Digest, April 1977.

Title of post refers to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart and by extension to Psalm 137.

Down the hall

Down this forbiddingly bland hall in the General Motors building lay a feast of color unsurpassed in the corporate world then or since. The office suite had been designed in a curious blend of styles for the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics company by Joseph Braswell, a name that one comes across in older issues of Architectural Digest, and judging by these interiors a hellishly good decorator.

Color as part of a corporate identity was not a new concept in 1971 when these photos were published but this degree of individual identity expressed in the design of offices was rare, if not unique. That a corporate office was located in a Modernist building was to be expected by this time (it could be argued that by the seventies Modernism had taken over from Neo-classicism and become the preferred architectural style of authority) and also to be expected was a rigorous furnishing scheme based on a pared-down industrial aesthetic, in a relatively neutral palette.

What is so refreshing about this almost forty-year old design is the mix of style - Modernism, Baroque, Colonial and Park Avenue Traditional. I describe it a curious mix but if one considers the previous decade's upheavals and the resultant solidifying of traditional attitudes it should not be too surprising.

Here is the traditional corporation allying itself with the old guard, indeed stating by its choice of location, architecture, furnishings and art that it is part of the establishment, yet feeling the need to soften the totalitarian message with a reception room masquerading as a Park Avenue drawing room in full fig, flushed through with the bright colors of the 1960s, and by the use of Baroque and Colonial furniture from both sides of the Atlantic.

She moved down the hall

So I paid her a call

She flashed a smile

I stayed awhile ...

Photos uncredited as far as I can ascertain, but are from Architectural Digest, March/April 1971

Quote from She Moved Down the Hall by The Four Seasons.