As the rest of the nation sheds homes with bad mortgages, pools gone fetid, dogs for whom they have no place in their much smaller condos, and House and Garden has ceased publication, I have acquired a small apartment.
I always liked being part of the counterculture but this, you might suggest, is folly.
Virginia Woolf famously touted the concept of having a room of one's own and I have taken her at her word as I seem finally to have negotiated a semi empty nest. The thing she did not discuss was decorating the room and this has almost caused me to topple from my newly-found perch overlooking fewer upward-facing beaks.
An exhibition on Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco showed that some people do not worry about the economy or their loved ones when they take on new digs. Besides, having those levees and couchees which were in full view of the public, including their most personal ablutions, she had no privacy. Those of us who wish for temporary respite from our families should admire the ambition of of Marie A: she built an entire village, the Hameau (Hamlet), just so she could get away from it all!
Madame de Pompadour who had preceded her as mistress to Louis XV had another reason for construction: to counteract her frigidity, she threw herself into fantastical design projects -- Louis XV loved the applied arts and she knew he would get bored of her and eventually stray. To stave off being booted out of Versailles, she engaged him in countless schemes and let this be a lesson to you coquettes: if you want to keep the ear of your man, build a private stairway.
But every time I have to decorate, I have a meltdown: more than anything, decorating brings out my inner child, the one who cannot make up her mind who she is.
Yet when I was a child, I knew exactly what I wanted. I was so clear that the heavy Spanish furniture and the black and white rug which was so different from everyone else's pink, and which defied the word "preteen" was the right thing to do.
The world can be divided into two groups: those who like testing twenty Benjamin Moore whites with a mini roller (it was between Atrium White and Antique White for a long time and then I saw Cloud) and custom blending Miniwax wood floor stains (1/3 driftwood, 2/3 Special Walnut) and those who get weak-kneed just contemplating the fumes.
One friend who loves to shop for stuff routinely calls me with an invitation as she's about to make an excursion into "town". It's all I can do to mumble an excuse before I start hyperventilating and get off the phone, fast.
Everyone thinks being married to an architect will solve all these problems, but he's not a decorator and like the shoemaker with kids who have no soles, architects tend to keep their eyes on the larger prizes for which they will indeed be paid. The thing is, I am not allowed to hire one either. So left to my own devices I am perpetually indecisive.
Another friend who told me her husband thinks of her as negative cash flow came to mind recently as the upholsterer gave me an estimate for recovering two chairs.
A couple of years ago this would have funded a semester in college. But as I refuse to buy anything new, I am forced to pay a premium. Antique dealers have been green forever.
Some people manage to make decorating into a high art. Dawnridge, the splendiferous Beverly Hills manse of Tony Duquette, now immortalized by his heir, Hutton Wilkinson in a ravishing new book is a perfect example. My post-its which studded the copy I brought for him to sign this week told the truer tale: I was hoping to emulate some of the over-the-top chandeliers and sconces in my new apartment. It may be the most magical place I have ever been, a compendium of his theater and decorating projects, a testament to that vision thing and not something one can do in dribs and drabs, if at all. I hadn't realized that Duquette was also a scavenger, a kind of pre-Gehry recycler of chain link and hubcabs though he disguised his thriftiness and bricolage with diamante and mother of pearl. Hutton is still happily tinkering so it just proves that some people are not intimidated by mucking around with perfection.
I gave him a copy of a book, The Decoration of Homes, (recently reissued in a pretty facsimilie edition) that Edith Wharton wrote with her architect, Ogden Codman Jr.on the subject of perfection after she had worked with him on The Mount, http://www.edithwharton.org/ her stately home in the Berkshires. Though the Mount may be a walk in the park, Edith was most emphatically not and had very strict, continental rules on which she based her counsel.
The families in Vogue Living's new compendium of the dwellings of the rich and famous Houses, Gardens People clearly did not consult Edith for many of them flaunt her rules of decoration.
When I was single, economic expediency trumped a discerning decorative eye:
There was the year I convinced my three roommates to help me make forty lime green pillows and set them on the floor in slavish, but hopeless imitation of the Ettore Stottas seating pods I had seen at MoMA's Italian design show and which I conflated with the sex appeal of Monica Vitti or Claudia Cardinale. Each time someone sat on them they naturally moved apart and most of our gentlemen callers finally sat on the floor after having been unceremoniously dumped there anyway. ( It did not seem to diminish their ardor, however.)
The first building I lived in on my own was an art deco jewel distinguished by its location across from the Frick Museum and so I channeled Marlene Deitrich and re-covered all my grandmother's old stuff in navy blue velvet well before the noirish David Lynch film but well after the Bobby Vinton rendition of the song which inspired it from the sixties. Mainly, I liked it because it was neither green (see above) nor orange (my mother's favorite color).
Then there was the suite of green embossed French velvet that I had used in a desperate attempt to bring back some of the Anouk Aimee or Jeanne Moreau devil-may-care Parisian panache that had entirely evaporated from life once the children were born but which only served to highlight the baby spittle and greasy handprints.
Once in LA there was the cavernous room filled with white shag rug and mirrors leftover from a fading pop star's brief stay in the renta-house before us; I felt like an imposter. We never had enough furniture to fill it up so we forged a living room out of the hallway and the kids played baseball on the shag instead. Now even in NY your dwelling pedigree is very important (for example, indicted Wall Street tycoon, actor who overdosed) but at the time LA had the jump on this type of provenance (e.g. OJ-or-Nicole adjacent) Mainly though, I could not get adjusted to everybody, not just the super, knowing about our plumbing-- Marie A and Louis would have done just fine here.
Then there was the Spanish revival habitacion of a famous expatriate pianist where I imagined I was Alma Mahler and could make my sons into musical geniuses but where instead the charming indoor-outdoor plan merely led to increased opportunity for their tossing wrought iron through the loggia windows.
And still, there is the mid-century modern ranch house which has gouged walls and doors due to over-the-top sibling rivalries and where the side lawn we painstakingly terraced proved ideal for chucking lemons in lieu of pitching practice. Here I have been Millicent Rogers with her silver bangles and southwest flair.
Now there is this Boheme-ish walkup with torn carpet and a dusty balustrade. I seem to be channeling Mimi, (not having the resources of Marie A) awaiting Rodolfo with his candle to light the way, but a few years have intervened.
Just recently I found the black and white rug from my bedroom down in my mother's storeroom. This is one of the few items that escaped the giant tag sale she had at our house and I'm not sure why.
Maybe it reminded her, too, of a time when we both were more sure who we were.
I had it cleaned and delivered to my new address. Unrolling it was like unrolling my life--like an email with a tag that you can follow on its way to places you never dreamed it would be forwarded: it's vintage, but it's vintage to me! For the moment, it's the only thing in the living room except a genius pair of French stools from a store Buck House, which happens to have a basement full of divine things right next door to me. When I sat down on the rug to read the paper last Sunday I kept running the back of my hand over it: it's not right for the room, but for now, it's right, reminding me wordlessly that I once had the convictions to match my ambition.
If I could see into my crystal ball (oh, I bought one of those too recently at my vintage iron shop, Liz's, where I got vertigo over the bins I had combed through for each previous scheme)--I would try to determine what my next decorative incarnation would be so that I could avoid another creative collapse.
My horoscope recently did say: Remember that life is cyclical. There's a time to strive for self improvement and a time to accept yourself, faults and all. You can actually foul up yourself by trying to fix yourself.
Do you think that extends over to my cabinet pulls?