ART BY THE YARD: A FABULOUS EXHIBIT AT THE TEXTILE MUSEUM THIS SUMMER

Through September 12th, I encourage anyone who loves modern cultural history, stories of female empowerment or just beautiful design to check out this exhibit. Here are the highlights, but seeing the textiles in person is a real treat. Focusing on the contributions of female designers to Britain’s textile industry in the years following World War II, the exhibit provides a window onto the cultural landscape in that era. After years of privation due to the war and economic hardship, England entered into the 1950s with a great deal of optimism and was fortunate that in the realm of design, a new generation of innovators waited for the opportunity to express fresh perspectives. On display are the works of Lucienne Day, Marian Mahler and Jacqueline Groag, all women whose careers coincided with and defined style in the mid-century. Greeting visitors at the entrance is ’Calyx’, the first textile design that was to bring Day real recognition in 1951. An abstract piece in unique colors, suggesting anything from tulip blooms to martini glasses, at once grounded and weightless, this is clearly at the heart of graphic design to follow. Drawing their inspirations from painters and sculptures of the era, these women created a bridge through fabrics that linked contemporary art and architecture to home design. To get a glimpse online, visit www.textilemuseum.org/exhibitions/current/Art-by-the-Yard.htm

A Sense of History

A fellow blogger asked me to make some suggestions on how to bring an 18th century sensibility to her sun room. Having worked with a client whose goal seemed to be to create spaces that might pass the rigid inspection of a museum curator, and finding the result both impractical and stuffy, I have learned to put an emphasis on creating a sense of history rather than a carbon copy of it.
The best way to achieve this is to do a little research, figuring out how people lived in the period you are motivated to recreate. Try to draw meaningful parallels to our lives so that these commonalities can be the foundation for your functional and aesthetic decisions. An instance of modern and historic design having consistencies would be the media room and the music conservatory. As much as some people try to hide televisions from sight, they are to modern entertainment what a piano forte might have been to 18th century families.
In a sun room that is trying to have the glamour and elegance of a bygone era, for our purposes the late 1700's, one ought to know that emerging interest in the botanical sciences would have been the most likely reason for such a room to have existed. Larger houses prior to that period still drew influence from earlier keeps that were designed for defense, so that windows were narrow and used minimally. With the era of greater domestic peace and cross influences within Europe, many ducal homes saw the addition of conservatories that had a more decorative, French and Italian flavor than the the boxy architecture that came before. There might have been decorative plaster and murals on the ceiling, specifically of classical Greek images, softly rendered a la Fragonard, and loads of natural light through large windows. Likely the space would have sported a fountain to provide melodious sound and consistent humidity for forcing exotic blooms, while in the Italian style, furnishings might have been richly carved and gilded.
In our times, we might appreciate a touch of this finery for the delight of it, possibly even administered with a touch of humor, but our preferences are generally dominated by the desire for comfort. In the early 20th century, old photos from glamour homes show us homes where stiff settees were eschewed for deep, vastly more comfortable sofas, while mixing in antiques that lent some of the grace of the past to the rooms. Knowing where to depart from history is invaluable and we were obviously well on that course by the 1920s.
In a sun room of today, one might choose to give the 18th century aesthetic a lighter hand, coffering the ceiling with simple moldings and painting the panels a gentle sky blue. In this way, one adds character to the space and captures the love of nature from that period, without creating a fussy museum that feels out of date and even pretentious. To show the opulence of the past, browse thrift shops in search of a variety of gaudily carved old mirrors that need only have their frames painted and lightly distressed to become hip and relevant. When choosing the frames know that leaves, arabesques, even cupids and roses, were all motifs that capture the extravagance of the 18th Century.
The soft treatments in this room, such as drapery and pillows, ought to bring to mind the pomp of the past through the use of dressmaker details like short ruffles and even tapestry. I recommend being brazen with fabrics so that the choice to depart from a strictly period interpretation appears deliberate and informed. Putting a contemporary material on a traditional frame, for instance, shows a confident mixing of old with new, while causing one to appreciate the antique anew. 18th century style was omnipresent from the 1950's through the 1980's and there is a glut of pieces on the market, so one can pick up reproduction chairs of the right style, or right enough, for a song. Most are finished in a dated pecan tone with fly specking, but one can simply paint the frame before recovering. Don't be afraid to be cheeky with your color selection. Shooting for that sense of history without being beholden to the museum mentality allows the room to be both beautiful and livable.

In Praise of Small Houses

With the shift towards saving vs. spending that our economic times has inspired in so many people, one can only hope that the real estate and building markets will seize the day and begin promoting smaller scaled homes. The benefits are many. Less energy use, and thus smaller bills, and lighter mortgages are only a few of the perks. From a designer's perspective, the intimate scale of the modest home lends itself to more complex decorative work.

For the homeowner with a larger budget, fewer square feet translates into dollars that are better spent on custom details such as non-standard moldings and finely crafted cabinetry. And for the nester who has a more confined budget, but still values quality, the more tailored the size of the home to the functions of good living, the more funds can be allocated to finer furniture and appointments. Often in the last decade, houses with a grand footprint have been tricked out shoddily in over-shopped furnishings. This greed for excess has lead to a consumer base that wants the lowest price possible to purchase the maximum amount of things. Not only has this impacted the world of craftsmen and stateside suppliers, it has taken design into a more overtly homogenized direction. For a large corporation to sell the greatest number of sofas, for instance, the design must have the fewest stylistic objections to the masses, so the characteristics become more bland.

This design consultant lives in under a thousand square feet and has tried with mixed results, numerous times, to lend a sense of character and warmth to homes as much as ten times that size. When it has been possible it has been through a host of ploys: texture and tone to draw down the ceilings, layers of textile in front of over-scaled windows to lend grace or alterations in the proportion of openings to create more anticipation of the next space. When all is said and done, very often the client has wound the process to a close long before the desired level of interest has been accomplished.

When the Victorian barons of industry began building their American castles, they employed hundreds of craftspeople. Even when the results were ostentatious, the rooms felt rich and interesting aesthetically. Rarely does one see such commitment to detail in the modern home, but if one were to narrow the scope to something workable and honest, than with thought and time, one could accomplish a personal masterpiece. It ought to be a point of pride for thinking people of large social ethics and normal-sized egos to live in only the space they need for a comfortable existence, be it simple or grand in its appointments.

Between You, Me and the Lamp...Post

Returning to a thought from earlier in the year, here is a primer on portable lighting, that which is not fixed, or hardwired, by an electrician. In considering the right choice, pay attention to the personality of the space. You aren't looking to match your lamp preciously to other elements, but merely to avoid selecting an inconsolable loner. Lamps can be made of many materials and come in motifs of every cultural persuasion. Some are ghastly, many are works of art, but all tastes being individual, this post is only about getting scale and purpose right. Remember when placing lamps that thoughtfully chosen accents soften the aesthetic and often right slight errors of scale.
The lamp that iconically etches its silhouette in the mind when the word is uttered, is the work horse of lighting, the good egg of tabletop and dresser alike. When tall and slender, they are called 'buffet lamps' because they are ideal on a server, taking little of the space required for tureens and platters, while casting light from a lofty height to make the food clearly discernible. When stoutly built, like the matronly if not exotic ginger jar, for instance, a lamp can fill a table with the authority of a duchess presiding over a house party. The large everyday table lamp can add a good height and shape to its setting, while broadcasting a nice even lighting both above and below the shade. These grandees have their small siblings, which too often are not employed to their advantage. Usually no taller than eighteen to twenty-two inches, lamps of delicate stature are pitiably lonesome on a grandly scaled piece of furniture. Practically speaking, most small lamps do not accommodate more than about twenty-five watts, so they are poorly purposed for tasking. They are best suited as counter top lamps in a kitchen or placed on a high chest.

The torchier is a wonderful form of light, broadcasting its gift upward onto art and, depending on the substance of its globe, offering a glowing shape, usually somewhat conical, to study with no affront to the sensitive iris. Pierced metal, swirled glass, mica: all of these materials make wonderful globes for torchiees, which usually have a modest footprint and come, also, in the form of floor lamps. The table top version can be short and stemless, or held aloft by a shaft much as would elevate the globe on the taller floor lamp. A pair of low torchiers flanking a good piece of art or a nicely framed mirror can make a striking focal point to a room that lacks an obvious architectural one, while the doubling of the lights illuminates the art evenly. Avoid placing a torchier at the crook of an ascending stairwell, as the up lighting will glare on the eyes when descending.

For all its good points, the torchier floor lamp is not the best task lamp, as the light is often directed too far away from the reader or crafter of blogger. Possibly the best suited to tasking or reading is the pharmacy floor lamp. These are usually made entirely of metal. They have a narrow visor, which hovers over the bulb like a cupped hand, and an articulated arm that allows the light source to be adjusted. These work wonderfully next to a chair, where they seem to politely stand just behind, holding their illumination out toward the shoulder, so that no shadow can diminish the light. These are the loyal Ganymede of lamps, never failing, always true. On the subject of floor lamps, those with a slender shaft and a traditional, flared shade, often bring to mind a large hat on a preposterously slender figure. These are best used in company with upholstery so that the rounded fullness of chair or sofa back fits visually into the vacant space below the shade. Not only is this the way in which this kind of lamp is intended to be used, broadcasting its light on the spot where it is likely wanted, but aesthetically it makes up for the inadequacies of the spindly base.

The Immmortal Dorothy Draper

Shown in this stunning photograph, the lobby of the Greenbrier Resort, in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, is without a doubt an eye-popping, drop-dead gorgeous space. Originally designed by decorating maverick Dorothy Draper and later renovated faithfully by her protege and heir to her business, Carlton Varney, the Greenbrier is a testament to the fact that the best designs happen outside the box. Here we also see how good taste, whether conventional in its time or not, does not die.
Draper's style is oft called Modern Baroque, largely due to the fact that key ingredients to her designs were elaborate plaster moldings juxtaposed against simpler furniture forms. Her use of color was flamboyant and she was a great proponent of employing vivid graphic design to articulate space and provide a more robust overall aesthetic. Black and white checkered floors, shown above, were one of her staples, but she also was fond of crisp polka dots, often in exaggerated scale, and riotous floral textiles. A closer inspection of the photo above reveals the cabbage rose chintz that was her signature, used here on the treatments of the Palladium windows. While not this designers favorite material, one admires Draper's confidence in pairing it with the cleaner and more refined fabrics of her upholstery.
After decades of dusty and predictable interiors, one can only imagine how exhilarating Dorothy Draper's interiors must have been to the first eyes to behold them. Here was a style that really spoke to the new energy and optimism of the twentieth century. Her aesthetic is so integral a part of today's concept of cheerful good taste that one sees the bastardly offspring of it in all areas of design, but still the original cannot be beat. Here's to a bit of Draper's ageless confidence in every life!

Movie Homage: Rebecca 1940

Almost as much a character as any populating the pages of Daphne du Maurier's deftly rendered novel, the lovely seaside estate of Manderley is the epitome of British grandeur. Under the confident hand of its former chatelaine and story namesake, Rebecca, until her death before the story opens, the vast manor house was the setting of the most celebrated soirees of 1930's high society. As the tale unfolds, the audience follows a shy and inexperienced new mistress as she tries to navigate the trappings of her new life with wealthy and handsome widower, Maxim de Winter, all the while being reminded in countless ways of how short she seems to fall of his first wife's success.
The setting of the film had to meet the expectations set by the novel and the standards of its director, Alfred Hitchcock, who was familiar with the kind of real homes Manderley was based upon. The decoration needed to be both opulent and believable, not one of the Hollywood fantasies of the era that usually caused the affluent to exchange glances of a mild surmise. Fabrics, while rich, could not be ostentatious. The spaces and furnishings needed to be large enough to seem to dwarf the young female protagonist. The plaster moldings had to be hefty, but not Italian or French in character, and all of the wood needed to look hundreds of years old. The smooth and slow roving camera of photographer, George Barnes, garnered the film an Oscar, but also showed lovingly the fine work that set decorator, Howard Bristol, brought to the production.

The sumptuous morning room the new Mrs. de Winter is expected to use, as it is titled, is a space of deep window seats below diamond mullioned windows and is tucked away from the fray. The vast hearth seems it might gobble up the timid young lady, but due to the intimate scale of the room and the reassuring heft of its appointments, one understands that while she may not use the room to craft lofty correspondences, as her predecessor did, she still feels more at home here than in the grander rooms beyond. [In these scenes look for the stout drapery with the brush fringe edge. This treatment in contemporary design creates a level of luxury that is unbeatable when coupled with the use of English bump lining.]

Across the house, in a wing that overlooks the sea, the suite of rooms where Rebecca slept helps to underscore the stature and the details of the dead woman. Here the ceilings are higher, the architecture more contemporary and the textiles are as supple and transparent as a fine peignoir. That the fabrics suggest a seductive garment is no accident, for the story that unfolds reveals that Rebecca was as confident and theatrical in her sexuality as she was as a doyenne of the haute ton. The modern treatment here separates Rebecca from the moorings of the past, indicating that here lived a woman free of all passe expectations. Furthermore, the design shows that Rebecca felt enough ownership of Manderley to transpose her tastes unapologetically over the antique preferences of her husband's ancesters. [In this space watch as housekeeper Mrs. Danvers whisks open the drapery with a pull of the traverse rod cord. It may be the most dramatic opening of a window treatment in film history. The material swings so liquidly it likely was made of a careful blend of wool and silk. How wonderful to have picked Bristol's brain on that count and so many others.]

Watching this 1940 film is a pleasure on many levels, as the story adaptation, production values and performances are all stellar. Yet in creating a character out of a house, Howard Bristol certainly deserved his own portion of the praise.

Let There Be Light: A Primer on Lamps

In the first installment of Birdsong, the quarterly journal from MakeNest Interiors, I mentioned the importance of thoughtful lighting. This is a subject I can go on and on about because I think it is so vital to creating atmosphere. And because poor lighting can make a space feel anything from gloomy to accusatory, the outcome of your efforts should not be left to chance. As the blog evolves, I hope to be more specific about how to understand the proper scale of lamps, as well as every other component of a room.