"You're not old, you're a classic!"

So said the text of one of my birthday cards this morning.

I suppose a sixty-fifth birthday is significant – certainly it's an excuse for splashing out a bit, throwing a party, bringing in a piano player for the evening, having valets at the door, waiters, bar staff, buffet, flowers, candles, invitations to three thousand of one's BFFs, etc. (Well, maybe I exaggerate a little, but it's my birthday. So there.)

The invitation to my party had photos of me from age six to sixty-four, all of them – well, almost all –not-quite-smiling images. Seemingly, I rarely smile for the camera and there are countless grumpy-looking photographs, detested by me, that have landed over the years in trash cans on two continents. Comments about my photographic impairment have followed me through my life and I know they are true. I rarely smile. But I love to laugh.

The image of the six-year-old me has become more significant the older I've become – the grumpiness exhibited there I now read as bewilderment at the news that I would never again live with my mother from that day forward, and perhaps that image explains why I cannot look at a camera pointed in my direction with any equanimity. Each photo op brings with it a feeling of panic – a feeling that has never lessened through all the years.

Nonetheless, those photos have marked each milestone, each distance travelled, each companionable moment, and most important of all each loving glance – and isn't a loving glance one of the most important things in the world?

There's a photo of me looking quite shyly at the man I didn't know I was to spend next thirty-plus years of my life with. Another, I'm wearing the only solid green shirt and certainly the last shirt with a visible logo I have ever worn – well, it was Halloween in Philadelphia years before we moved here. A third, perhaps better for being partially hidden, is a passport photo from my thirties and then two from two family weddings. Only one has me actually laughing and there I am mid-guffaw at a comment the Celt made as we sat at lunch overlooking the Louvre. The last... ah that last photo... that is the one that shows how shy a person can still be after all this time together and how fatuous an expression a loving look can bring to a face crumpling into maturity.

That not all photos are harbingers of disaster is a theory I'm examining very gingerly, crabwise even, and despite the fact there are many, many photos of me on the Celt's iPhone, the world has not come crashing down around me. Even here, it is quite a step for me to show you who I am – in the form of photos, that is.

And that is what birthdays such as mine today are all about – opportunities to understand where one has been and to take stock of what one actually has, and the reasons to be happy. These birthdays are thresholds, vestibules or consummations, depending on your point of view – all perhaps, depending on how you use them.

So, today, what do I have that is so valuable, so joyous? Well, I have flowers sent by a friend who besides this gift traveled four-and-a-half hours to attend my birthday party; and there are the friends who helped me celebrate the fact that I'm finally reaching maturity; the friends who stayed till two in the morning laughing, remembering, laughing, planning and laughing. I have a loving partner – he whom I call the Celt, and who has over the years been a model of patience. I also have a sterling silver water pitcher that neither of us expected to own, having gone looking for a modern, sleek pitcher but coming home instead with an Edwardian piece of nonsense that we both love and which, for today only, sits proudly next to the Directoire clock we bought as a souvenir of our life in Amsterdam, which itself stands over a small enamel peanut-shaped box holding two peanuts – the two of us living in Georgia – which was brought home one day as a surprise present for me.

There are memories, too. Memories that come to mind when I use the pottery colander bought years ago for pennies in the market at Avila in Spain, where we ate figs, melting, honeyed and fly-blown – the best we've ever tasted. And I think that's what our house has become and I hope many of your houses are – reliquaries of our lives, comfortable, timely albums holding treasured shards of experience, memory, love and laughter. There are many, many more memories.

I said above that in one sense important birthdays are vestibules, and so they are – waiting rooms for the next stage, itself only a second away, places to be passed through, hopefully holding the hand of a loved one – the one who's just come home from work early and poured us both a glass of champagne from a wonderful case of a very fine vintage that was sent to me by his sister and husband at the previous threshold.

Where to go from here? Retirement slips further away but not for negative reasons and I continue to work with some of the best students I've ever had, yet work begins to feel like a leash. A wish to travel is growing on me, as is the desire for a cabin somewhere in Vermont, Maine, or the Gaspe. The blog, my occasional diary, has taken on a life of its own but it's not quite sure where to go from here. At heart I am a lover of history, of processes and of the good things that make us what we are, and of flowers. I adore flowers, so thank you, Will for these.

God knows they need some taste

In his autobiography, Billy Baldwin tells of the occasion when, before lunch with the Spencer family, he sat next to Amelia Nettleship, the not-quite-yet step-grandmother of the-not-quite yet Princess of Wales, and the author of a seemingly unending series of bodice-rippers. Never having read one of her novels, I remember her more as a gaudily beruffled and brocaded television personality wheeled in front of the camera whenever an opinion was required to further deepen the class divide.

Mr Baldwin relates his conversation with this lady, the writer of this book of etiquette - here quoted in part.

"You are what?" she said.

"I am a decorator."

"Well," she said, "I've just come from your California, and I hope to God you're not a decorator from California, are you?"

I said "I have done some work there."

"Well, you'd better go back again," she said. "God knows they need some taste. Another thing you might do while you are at it is to tell the airlines to have a little manners. When I travel on this side of the Atlantic I've been accustomed to having at least two full seats because I am not a young lady and I get tired and it is very necessary for me to stretch out. So, naturally, out of politeness and courtesy, I am given at least two seats and sometimes three. To my great disgust, the last time I came back from your country, on your airlines they wouldn't let me have two seats, and I wanted three."

Arthur Smith, Baldwin's associate, and the decorator of the rooms below, was with him on the visit to the Spencers and clearly had a better time of it for he sat next to "an absolutely charming, very pretty girl called Lady Diana, who was full of charm, full of wit, and full of humor."

One of the reasons why I like looking backwards is I can see so much of what I miss in modern decorating - color. The modern pallid palette, a range of bloodless tones that began to have currency in the late 1980s still holds sway and though this is an opportunity to rail against the way color is not taught in design schools, at least judging by what I see in the magazines, I shall resist that temptation.

Recently I renewed my department's subscription to Architectural Digest - for home I subscribe to Elle Decor and The World of Interiors. I hesitated about renewing Architectural Digest but I can use it as a teaching aid about celebrity, marketing, and aspiration. What strikes me about both Architectural Digest and Elle Decor is, in the editorial sections at least, how boringly lacking in color they are.

Elle Decor is a magazine with which I've had a difficult relationship over the years - I find the editorial emphasis on bedraggled and rather wan interiors increasingly disappointing - and am probably not renewing the subscription. When I think that I have kept up a subscription to The World of Interiors since 1983 it is clear that the magazine has far more to offer me than any other on the market. It may be invidious to compare other magazines to The World of Interiors, because the writing, photography, printing, paper – what insiders call its "production values" – are so high, and it remains consistently inventive. But the fact remains, these magazines are all competing, for both my dollars and my attention, so comparison is inevitable.

Photos by Peter Vitale, accompanying two short paragraphs of text written by Elaine Green for Architectural Digest, October 1983.

A rash of lace

A couple of months ago a number of Atlanta bloggers were asked by the editor of Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles to write a paragraph or two on the subject of "What's Modern Now?" for the June issue. I posted my contribution last Saturday and I find, having made my statement, I'm still thinking about it and the cliches that hover around the subject.

Coincidentally, I've been reading the charming and insightful Good Taste Costs No More, written by Richard Gump and published in 1951. The book is of its time – beautifully so –especially in its idioms, anecdotes, admonishments, bons mots, and slightly heavy-handed jocularity. The author does a good job of skewering pretension, both traditional and modern.

"If a friend dropped over one evening wearing knee breeches and a rash of lace at the throat and cuffs, we would hasten to summon the happy wagon. 'Poor old Jim,' we'd say, 'slipped his trolley.' But if he invites us into a room dressed entirely in the same period, no one raises an eyebrow. The detailed period habitat is no more wacky today that wearing the habit. It's playing Napoleon with the environment."

"Someone else may declare, 'I only like modern. Antiques, you can have 'em.' And we pay little attention. But if he said, 'When I travel, I only go to Oslo,' we'd think he was a little soft in the filbert. Yet entirely modern interiors reflect the same sort of limited viewpoint."

"The unyielding sticklers for the modern and functional are as pretentious and ridiculous as someone with a one-track period complex who is Queen Anne queer. Those who insist that everything before the Bauhaus is bunk, in getting back to what they call "fundamentals," would ignore or toss out three quarters of the beauty of the past. Their enemies, a fence apart, who are no less sure that design stopped with the Biedermeier, would pooh-pooh the progress and development of the world of wonderful things. Small-pasture jackasses, both of them."

So, in a round-about way I come to Frank Lloyd Wright - an architect whose glamour I've never really understood or whose buildings – and I have been in quite a few – have never struck me as the most comfortable to inhabit. Oh, I know the stuff about compression and release but seeing that formula in action in the house, Kentuck Knob, seen below, led me to wonder, as I have over the years, how much of what we read and hear is really The Emperor's New Clothes Redux.

That perhaps is a discussion for another day but I can say that the house we visited after Kentuck Knob, Fallingwater, began to change my perceptions of Frank Lloyd Wright - so much so, I realized many of my ideas about him had just been prejudice. I too had been a victim, if that is the word, of the FLW industry... but in the sense that it had put me off.

Kentuck Knob is beautifully situated in a forest planted, in the main, by the Hagans, friends of the Kaufmanns of Fallingwater, who commissioned the house from Wright. The day we were there the exterior of the house was raked with dappled light through trees that marched right up to the walls and overhung the roof. The motor court, because of that dappled shade, though humid and hot was the perfect place to listen to the introductory spiel from a balletic and breathless docent, to muse and sop views of the radiant and fully-leafed forest. America the beautiful, indeed!

Photographing the surprisingly diminutive and cramped interior wasn't permitted, which is a shame, for the house felt as if it were still lived in - bric-a-brac, photos of the late Princess of Wales and of the present owners, Lord and Lady Palumbo, helped to strengthen that impression, though that apparently is not the case. What I did see, to my delight, was a collection of what I think was Bernard Leach pottery. In my youth I once visited Leach's home in Cornwall overlooking the sea and just down the road from Barbara Hepworth's studio. I digress.

Coming back to what modern is today. When I mention the Frank Lloyd Wright industry I'm really talking about how celebrity, advertising and aspiration create our perceptions of what our world, our modern world, is like - in other words, what's modern today.

Within the two broad categories of traditional and contemporary, many attitudes in the name of style are struck - think of minimal, white walled contemporary architecture furnished with low-lying furniture bereft of curve and color, and consider too of the other end of the continuum, a draped, shadowy, befringed and buttoned evocation of the Second Empire. What lies in between, a varied mix of contemporary and traditional, high and low, is where the majority of the population live.

Modern, then, is what one is persuaded to need, nothing more.

These romantic steps off one of the paths weaving through the sculpture garden led to yet another sculpture and what I named Frankie's barbie.

Photographs courtesy my iPhone.

Totally forgot

to mention this.

“Modern means living in the now and looking forward, but also being aware of what the past has given us. Modern is the freedom, and the chutzpah, to combine the best of everything that’s ever been thought of—or, perhaps, the best that you can afford—into something that’s unique and beautiful. Modern isn’t afraid to take a stance, declines to be neutral, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

Will be back soon when the rounds of my psyche are completed.

Pink

The third in an occasional series about necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, cloakrooms, restrooms, thrones, washrooms, and bathrooms.

Answering a comment from JCB on Friday's post I had one of those paralyzing moments when the eye turns inwards, reality is berthed, and the topography of the past is the byway one takes - the kind of situation when on a too-familiar journey in the automobile there's little recollection of how one arrived at the destination - the body on one journey, the mind on another.

JCB had written that she was comforted to know someone else's reading list is just as randomly diverse as her own, and in reply I was going to mention how I'd grown up in a house devoid of books and there I was, back in my grandparent's living room seeing my grandfather, a fag between his lips, reading the local newspaper - "the pink" as it was known. And pink it was, the paper of that daily with its list of football league scores - vital information in a Lancashire cotton and coal town where winning the pools was an undying hope - a town, deep in a valley, where "thee" and "thou" were still used in its dialect, as were Norwegian words left over from the Viking raids of the 8th century. A town where working men's clubs, nonconformist chapels, darts and dominos, whippet racing, pigeon fancying, growing sweetpeas, joining brass bands and coal miner's choirs that sent Jerusalem, the Hallelujah Chorus and Abide With Me thundering out over the cobblestones, enriched the lives of those staunchly socialist men and women - lives that had been portrayed a generation earlier in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, and in my youth in the films of the 1960s.

In this slide down the valley slopes of memory I have come a long way from my original intention of post about bathrooms so let me give you one more memory. My grandfather had cousins in the next town, who lived in a terraced (row) house without an internal bathroom. In the paved, walled area - the backyard - behind the house were two stone-built outhouses. One held coal, the other, the long-drop, or privy. I had never seen a water closet without a flushing mechanism and was totally charmed by the idea that not only was there a slate slab where wood should have been (hell-on-earth to sit on in winter, I would think), but also that the only way to flush it was to wait for the kitchen sink to be drained into it. I say I was charmed, but I waited till I got home, I seem to remember!

So via the flushing mechanism of my mind, I offer you the bathroom belonging to this house - I'm not necessarily continuing my theme of blue in decorating but I couldn't not show it.

Photographs by James Mortimer from article written by Elspeth Thompson for The World of Interiors, March 1994.

Fettucini, fava beans, tomatoes and licensing

This morning I'll be at ADAC listening to a presentation by Barclay Butera that is being sponsored by Kravet. I attend many of these presentations but this one, having had dinner last night with Mr Butera, (as did other Atlanta decorator/bloggers Decor Demon and 64 in a box) I'm really looking forward to.

It is rare for me with my background in advertising to be able to discuss interior design business - I'm not talking about establishing a firm as that's pretty specific given the jurisdiction, or even the whys and wherefores of contract versus residential - just the nitty-gritty of designing, for design it is, interior design licensing, a subject of great moment in this economy.

It was a pleasure to dine with and listen to a successful man who together with the owners of Kravet is modifying for me the many negative implications created by the licensing excesses of the 1970s and 1980s - Famous Names attached to the most outré of products - it was refreshing, given the cynicism I once felt, to learn about the depth of a designer's involvement in fascinatingly complex design, production and quality processes.

I'm always engaged by processes and have never lost the impatience I feel when I have to listen to a procedure that begins at the beginning then interminably, to me, meanders to a conclusion. First tell me the result then let's really discuss what happened on the journey to that conclusion, and last night was interesting to me from that point of view. I already know the result - Barclay Butera licenses - and was delighted by listening to what is involved.

My entree at Ecco after shared hors d'oeuvres was fettucini with fava beans and cherry tomatoes. Ecco is a great space, well designed, comfortable, good waiters, good wine list, good food, and if you were so inclined, good people-watching.

Thanks to Peggy Flanagan, a friend to both me and to many a student I've steered her way, and Matt Hare, owner of the Atlanta Kravet and Lee Jofa showrooms, I had a very interesting, entertaining and fun evening.

Hope or hype? Video killed the radio star...

What might well be photos of the last of Kalef Alaton's work caused in a roundabout way an over-a-glass-of-wine conversation about the role of blogging and its possible consequences for print. I wondered – and I realize I might be coming late to this discussion – if blogs are contributing to the decline of magazines.

So, if one compares a blog to a magazine it is clear that there are similarities: each has a distinct personality... generally speaking there is something to be seen or read not available elsewhere... expectations in terms of subject and style are fulfilled and, with luck, the envelope is pushed – but not too far... there is consistency from issue to issue yet there is something new each time... an editor picks good stuff that appeals and presents it, along with some analysis, critique or background... and there is reliability in terms of frequency (be it monthly or weekly).

In short, a well-curated balance of the expected and the novel: in this way is a loyal following created.

So what about this is distinct from what a blog does? (I'm not even talking about those blogs that are so commercialized they are nothing but advertorial.) Are blogs competition for magazines?

To some extent I think they are, but do not expect this competition to be deadly. If one looks at past predictions of the imminent demise of this or that industry, it's clear that whatever was hoped or hyped did not come to pass. The movies did not kill live theatre. TV did not kill the movies. And neither has YouTube killed TV - we still watch them all.

There are two distinct differences between blogs and magazines, which encourage me to believe that both can co-exist. One is that most magazines are graphically better designed than the average blog – though there are notable exceptions. The second is that magazines look good on the coffee table and even the best-designed blog has a hard time doing that.

Talking about graphic design reminds me of another example of the overnight demise of a vast part of that industry caused by technology and software advances. A generation ago, it became possible to be one's own graphic designer. (Some of you may not be old enough to remember that it was ever any other way!) The problem is, it ain't that easy to be a graphic designer without the training - look at any locally produced magazine - Photoshop might make it easy to create but it does not teach one about communication or aesthetics. Today, the same is happening to video - look at YouTube – and when you do look at YouTube, you'll notice that although it's fun and all, actually making a compelling video is not that easy. So it is with blogging - templates enable but do not guarantee clarity of communication or compelling content.

The foregoing notwithstanding, many dearly loved magazines have bitten the dust recently – and the same has happened to newspapers. The causes are different, though both have to do with economics and advertising. Producing and distributing a glossy magazine or a newspaper are both expensive endeavors. In the case of magazines, advertising dollars vaporized with the drastic shrinking of the luxury market – but this is at least in part reversible as the economy revives. Newspapers, on the other hand, are imploding because the advertising they rely on has moved to the internet - to eBay and Craigslist, for example – and because the internet provides timely news updates better than a printed newspaper can. And those are changes which are not reversible. Where newspapers remain valuable is in their synopses, opinion and analysis... although these roles, too, are increasingly being taken over by online media. In fact, one might contend that, in this aspect, blogs are a greater threat to newspapers than to magazines.

Blogs may have given magazines some degree of competition by allowing anyone to become a writer, publisher and editor. But still, most magazines do it better in terms of aesthetics, content, advertorial and advertising than even the commercialized blogs I've seen. In the same way, YouTube does a brilliant job of showing that good video is actually hard (and usually expensive) to make, thereby proving it is no competition for TV. However engaging the umpteenth cute kitten video or Lady Gaga lip-sync, at a certain point one just wants to sit back and luxuriate in the professional production values of, say, True Blood.* And let's not forget that blogs also provide a proving ground for new talent that magazines are now beginning to cultivate.

Photos by Tim Street-Porter to accompany text written by Pilar Viladas for House and Garden, August 1989.

* June 13th, people!