Décor Crimes Again

Flock wallpaper. Once common in Indian restaurants in the 60s and 70s, via Georgian design based on Indian textiles. Probably coming back – in fact it is now extremely upmarket.

Covers for anything that doesn’t need a cover: matchboxes, tissue boxes, toilet rolls, telephones. (Tissue box covers were made of furnishing fabric with passementerie edging to match your bedroom. Phones and toilet rolls were camouflaged by crinoline ladies.)

In bathrooms, themes are out, eclectic is in. If you want to sell your house, put away personal items and cleaning products. Get rid of shells, and soap in the shape of fish. Nobody will buy a house with a medicine cabinet in the bathroom – replace it with a mirror. Have hooks for your towels, not a bar or towel rail. Stick to one bathmat – and hang it up. (Getpocket.com)

White-painted, vaguely 18th century furniture, especially the wardrobe/night table combo that goes over the head of a double bed. Likewise the stick-on white “regency” fire surround framing nothing but a faux marble slab.

Themes: Interior decorators (and customers) use them rather than reconstructions of past styles (about which they know nothing). If not themes they’re concepts as in “contemporary living concept”. Amanda Lamb gives a room “the Scottish retreat feel”. She also gives a room “New England style”, which seems to mean pale blue paint and wallpaper of weathered planks. The house has dark 70s doors with bumpy glass that now look all wrong.

Age it up: In the 50s, it was naff to make your genuine cottage look more “ye olde” than it really was. Painted horseshoes nailed to the door, a porch made of trellis with a climbing rose trained over it, coach lamps with electric bulbs, brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Wrought-iron house sign with a figure of a person ploughing with a team of shire horses.

In the 70s, Upwards bought country cottages and opened up the fireplaces, restored the old bread ovens and bragged about retaining the copper (copper basin with a fire under it for washing clothes). They lit huge logs and filled the room with smoke.

Modernise a 30s house: Remove the pebbledash (and the decorative pebbledash/brick contrast), paint the exterior white, replace the window frames, stick on a porch in the wrong style and tarmac over the front garden. Rip out interior panelling. Replace Crittall windows. (Are those features "dated" – rip'em out – or "original" and worth preserving?)



Thebackstore.com explains popular home décor themes.

Traditional: white tongue-and-groove, a pot full of wooden spoons, an enamel coffee pot. Inspired by 18th century French and English, colours from country flowers. Oil paintings and matching furniture sets.

Mid-century modern: neutral colours plus olive and orange. (Add sculptures of Siamese cats.)

Industrial: Minimalist, exposed brick, copper, rusty steel. Reused stools, workbenches, filing cabinets, hanging lights – anything metal. (Old school furniture fits in here.)

Bohemian: Hippie and Moroccan, embroidery, different patterns, macramé, cushions, house plants. (Hasn’t changed much since the days of Oscar Wilde – try adding pampas grass in a Ming vase and gold-tooled hardbacks for a fin de siecle look.)

Coastal/cottage: Navy, white, off-white. Shells, pebbles, jute mats, rope, stripes, driftwood. (Bunting! Lifebelts! Deck-chair canvas! Paintings of sailing boats!)

Zen/Asian: Minimal, colourful accents: red, purple, gold. Main palette is “natural”. Potted bamboo, indoor water feature. (Add paper lanterns, low tables and sliding room dividers – and a sliding door to your Zen garden.)

Contemporary: Very minimal, no frills, no ruffles, no embellishments. Light colours. White sofa, a few bright cushions. (No art, no sculpture, no character.)

Vintage/Shabby chic: “distressed” furniture, pastel colours, recycled fabric. (Fraying quilts, seersucker tablecloths, faded chintz loose covers.)

Rustic/country: recycled wood, leather, plaid, darker colours. (Copper pans fit in here.)

Here’s another: fresh-traditional with a Florida twist (Looks more late 19th century Aesthetic movement to me, lots of blue and white ginger gars)

More here, and links to the rest.

Class and Moray Dalton: There's Death in the Cup

Moray Dalton (Katherine Renoir) wrote several mystery-thrillers that deserve more fans. They are very revealing about attitudes of the time. Other books include acrobats and failing private zoos, but this one is firmly placed in a stuffy little seaside town. The Armour family are beyond the pale of society. Though they have a big house and servants, the other middle class residents do not mix with them. The patriarch's second wife ran off with a French teacher, you see.

“What’s their social status?”
“Oh, middle class, I suppose. The father was a retired manufacturer from the Midlands. But they weren’t visited."
"One does not want to be censorious and Pharisaical, but they weren’t the sort of people we’re used to."

Mark Armour, our hero, is under a cloud for forging a cheque at school. He joined up and had a good war, but when peace broke out couldn't find a job. So he parlayed his startling good looks into a career as a gigolo. We get just a glimpse of this life in the first chapter.

He is forced to return home, where his bossy older sister Bertha inherited all the money. His half-siblings need looking after. George is clearly autistic, sympathetically portrayed, who is happy cutting pictures out of magazines. Winnie is "man mad". She was never very stable and is now about 40. As we've seen from other novels of the same vintage, there was a general idea that if a woman didn't get married she would start to go barmy by the age of about 30.

"One of the sisters is odd. Peculiar in her dress and so forth."
“There’s a taint of insanity then?”

As well as sewing finery out of old clothes, Winnie stalks the local doctor, sitting and crying on the kerb outside his house.

Yes, this is an other stiflingly inturned family, where everyone is forced to dance to Bertha's tune. If she dies, the inheritance is split between Winnie, Mark, George and Claire - the other child of the absconding French wife.

Mark has somehow met and fallen in love with Lucy, only child of what could be another repressive family unit. "I suppose you’ve seen to it that she met any eligibles that happen to be about?” asks her uncle, one of the subsidiary detectives. Oh no, woofles her father, coming up with some feeble excuse. "Lucy is a home bird" – the same phrase used by Joanna Cannan about the pathetic Nancy in They Rang Up the Police.

More about class: a servant going to give "evidence" to the police "was rather too smartly dressed in a bright blue coat lavishly trimmed with cheap fur, opening over a blue silk frock and ropes of pearls." And someone puts on "her high, affected company voice".
     
Though we barely leave the snobbish little resort, and nothing very dramatic happens (there isn't even a dispute about the will), it is a gripping read. Dalton is a good writer:

It was pitch dark in the drive and silent but for the crunching of the loose gravel under their feet and the steady drip drip of the rain on the laurels.
                
The car roared through the darkness. The hedgerows streamed by, every twig and blade of grass flashing out in the white glare of the headlights for a fraction of time to sink back again into the peaceful obscurity of the November night when they had passed.

I guessed the killer, mainly because they are the last person standing.

More Golden Age snobbery here, and links to the rest.