World of Interiors 14: Charles Eastlake

Doom scrolling

Hints on Household Taste, Charles L. Eastlake 

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.

(W.S. Gilbert)

Books of “hints” on all aspects of life were popular when furniture designer Charles Eastlake published his suggestions for creating a tasteful home, but if you were expecting “how to clean an oriental rug with tealeaves”, you’ll be disappointed.  

Eastlake's clear, simple prose makes his diatribes against “sentimental young ladies” and their love of ribbon decoration even more stinging. Hardly anything is good enough for him. Some Bavarian door-knockers he illustrates are “somewhat too late to exhibit quite the right spirit of design”. 

He bewails the baroque taste of the 1860s, derived from the era of French kings called Louis. Such tables, chairs, sideboards, beds: “There is not a straight line in their composition... this detestable system of ornamentation is called ‘shaping’.” He despises “scroll” ornament, suggesting that though it may be intended as foliage, it actually looks like a collection of the letter G (see picture). He dislikes imitations: “All articles of plate which represent in miniature objects of a different material – as barrels, tubs and baskets – are to be avoided.” Copies of oriental rugs won’t do because they are too perfect, but “I do not see exactly how veneering is to be rejected on ‘moral’ grounds.”

If people WILL prefer a bouquet of flowers or a group of spaniels worked upon their hearthrug to the conventional patterns which are adopted by the Indian and Turkish weavers, it is difficult to convince them of their error... The quasi-fidelity with which the forms of a rose or a bunch of ribbons, or a ruined castle, can be reproduced on carpets, crockery and wall-papers will always possess a certain kind of charm for the uneducated eye.

Modern wallpapers are “wretched specimens... gaudy and extravagant trash”. He recommends taupe, pale green, silver-grey and cream.  

It is a great pity that ladies who devote much of their time to the execution of the wretched [edging] patterns sold at ‘fancy-work shops’ do not exercise a little more discrimination in their choice... The so-called ‘ornamental’ leatherwork which a few years ago was so in vogue with young ladies... is utterly opposed to sound principles of taste.

He condemns light furniture (easy to rearrange as desired) as flimsy and feminine, and recommends high-backed settles to keep off draughts. “The drawing-room may be crowded with silly knick-knacks,” but libraries are to be a mancave. However, instead of a Grecian funerary urn, adorn the top of your bookcase with a miniature copy of a good Greek sculpture – the Gladiator, the Discobolos, Antinous.

When I look into the windows of some establishments devoted to decorative art, and see the monstrosities which are daily offered to the public in the name of taste – the fat gilt cupids, the coarse and clumsy mouldings, the heavy plaster cornices, and the lifeless types of leaves and flowers which pass for ornament in the nineteenth century – I cannot help thinking how much we might learn from those nations whose art it has long been our custom to despise – from the half-civilised craftsmen of Japan, and the rude barbarians of Feejee. (He got his wish – in the later 19th century there was a craze for all things Japanese.)

So, Eastlake, where are the positives? He shamelessly promotes his own furniture – blocky and heavy, lots of oak and strap hinges – and recommends an approach still followed by England’s upper-middle classes. Why not use an “honest” wooden bucket as a coal scuttle, instead of a cast-iron monstrosity with a view of Edinburgh Castle let into the lid? For knick-knacks, look either to the past (the Renaissance) or to current designers who copy good earlier models: Minton and de Morgan. He praises a type of curtain fabric whose stripes recycled actual horse-girths.

His ideas live on among the Upwards, who go for anything rustic (made by peasants from far, far away), or functional (French enamel coffee pots), or genuinely old (the kitsch of Eastlake’s day is now antique). What would Eastlake think of today’s “country” interior with artificially distressed (new) wood everywhere?

His ideas were taken up by the less cultured, and by the 1920s the Tudorbethan style was all over the suburbs, complete with heavy sideboards, Welsh dressers and appliquéd oak beams. The fashion was guyed at the Festival of Britain as “Gremlin Grange”, a warped cottage with twisted timbers and diamond-paned windows. What NOT to build, explained the designers, who were rehousing blitz victims in gleaming modernist estates and towers.

More here, and links to the rest.

Decor Crimes: Get the Look

country kitchen: wood units

Shaker kitchen: wood-effect units with fake tongue-and-groove panelling (Genuine Shaker furniture is pictured.)

It’s really, really dated. The kitchen’s from the 80s! (Your House Made Perfect)

I’d like to contemporize this kitchen. Those tiles aren’t really me. (Escape to the Country)

We want a contemporary country kitchen. (My Dream Derelict Home. It’s the same old island plus bright white units.)

I think what we’re looking for is "period modern", if that makes any sense. (Man on Escape to the Country. Alastair Appleton translated it as “period property with open-plan kitchen”.)

Modernish but not too modern, because this 60s bungalow has got a bit of a cottagey feel. (Homes under the Hammer)

I’m all about colour. (Contestant on The Great Interior Design Challenge. She painted everything grey.)

Martin Roberts: What are your plans for this house?
Buyer: To put back as many original features as possible.
(He probably means “Put in an inappropriate wooden regency-style fire surround and a wood-burning stove”. Does nobody know what the word "original" means? Homes under the Hammer)

Another Homes under the Hammer buyer thinks he’s “restored” his terraced house by stripping all the woodwork. The Girls’ Own Annual 1920 moans that if you buy an olde-worlde cottage the beams will be covered in layers of whitewash. And all the doors, window-sills etc will be painted cream. GOA advises you to strip it all.

“Victorian” restoration with fitted carpet, walls and wood painted navy, and a faux-Tudor fireplace.

So many people buy period homes and ‘love the character’, and then run scared and find it easier to buy everything new from a shop and decide period features are not ‘practical for modern life.’ (Via FB)

Why do so many people make a grand house look like a cottage? (Via FB)

Apparently big renovation projects get you lots of followers on Instagram. And I suppose a "restoration show" would not sell the furniture, fabric, wallpaper and paint colours that are currently on the market.

More here, and links to the rest.

Decor Crimes of 2020

Metro tiles – enough already!
White UPVC windows – they come in other colours, and you can paint them.
Chair cosies for your high-backed dining chairs.
An inglenook – in a bedroom. In a terraced house.
An inglenook with a faux chimney – for your Aga.

Olde oake beames that don’t support anything – above the fireplace, above windows, across the ceiling.
Flagstone floor in a Victorian house – on the first floor.
Every single piece of furniture, panelling or fitted cupboard made of “distressed” wood.
Exposed stone wall as an “original feature” in a Victorian farmhouse.
Sticking a repro Phoenix fire insurance plaque on your wall.

Multicoloured plastic cocktail sticks in the shape of sabres.
Carpet on any vertical surface.
Whole wall stick-on murals of autumnal woods. (Actually these are rather lovely.)
"Marriages" combining an old speaker and a spotlight.
Panelled door with fanlight on a 60s council flat.

“Library shelves” wallpaper.
Plug-in heated pot-pourri pot.
UPVC Greek portico on your ex-council house.
"Louis" furniture in a Cotswold cottage.
Faux hanging box balls.

A house that looks like a hotel.
Unusable fireplace with logs that are never lit.
Sliding doors.
Astroturf.

Painting of a sad clown playing the violin.
Dyed quartz of the type found in beach gift shops.
Colourful postmodern buildings painted dark grey.

An Irish cottage has been “metamorphosized” as follows:

Black Impala Polished Granite counter tops
Limestone finish to boundary walls and sills
Polished stainless steel staircase with Impala polished granite treads
Italian Carrara marble flooring to main area
Italian Creme Marfic Marble Bathroom finish
Timber double glazed Sash Windows
New Spanish Slate Roof
Wood burning stove
Limestone Feature wall
Original Oak Flooring

Shabby non-chic: dog hairs, grimy cushion covers, grimy loose covers that are always out of place and  adorned with biscuit crumbs.

Carol Midgley in the Times June 2018 reacts to a recent list. Crimes include "beaded curtains, living-room bars, TV cupboards, avocado bathrooms, Artex walls, toilet rugs, wicker furniture indoors and water beds. Have these judges stepped from a time machine?” She adds that the only up-to-date crimes were tribal carvings and inspirational quotations.

The Times has a long list, August 2018: Whatever the oldies have in their kitchens will be snubbed and dismissed. Young people like open-plan kitchens and one-room living. Get rid of the wine rack and pan stand. In the bathroom, Opt for metro-style tiling over mosaic to appeal to the Instagram generation.  Mottled terracotta wallpaper, any form of border, rag-rolling and nautical themes don’t impress the under-50s. “Modernised” houses with every original feature ripped out don’t appeal, but don’t try to put back the character with cheap imitations and mock fireplaces. In the garden, get rid of “water features, ponds and garden gnomes. Anything fussy, dangerous or easy to break is a turn-off.” Decks, too, are now terribly “noughties”, and tend to be slippery when wet. Rip them out!

On home makeover shows, there’s nothing more damning than “It reminds me of my nana”. Bone china mugs are a “nan thing”, as is eating dinner at 6pm.

Old house surrounded by a sea of tarmac or gravel with parking for 30 cars, separated from paddocks by Kentucky wooden palings.

Efforts in the 60s to modernise anything classical, with suspended ceilings, or mint/taupe colour schemes.

Helterskelters, minigolf, giant moons, kitsch sculptures, flights of paper birds cluttering up cathedrals – and the jargon-ridden justifications that go with them.

Wallpaper with a large bright pattern makes a room look smaller. (From a Victorian book of household tips)

Carving up a stately home into small flats and creating absurdly tall, narrow rooms with a kitchen stuck in a dark corner, or making a pokey layout even more cramped and dark by lowering the ceiling to hide chopped-up mouldings.

“Playful” buildings – usually plain shapes covered in brightly coloured graffiti-inspired murals. @CheapoCrappy calls them “bizarre and ugly”.

Street art consisting of trompe l’oeil paintings that take up the entire wall.

Building houses without coat cupboards. Hanging coats in a tiny hall. (It took the Brits years to get utility rooms.)

It’s quite dark because of the wraparound conservatory. (Escape to the Country)

All that's missing is an Audrey Hepburn stencil and some union jack cushions. (SC on a house with grey walls and floor, a mural of London, and tiger-print sofas in a knocked-through lounge.)

A custom-made blonde wood unit for your flat-screen TV on the end wall of your sitting room, with slots for ornaments, photos and books. The TV has at last become the wall-mounted “visiscreen” of George Orwell's 1984.

To Americans, the epitome of naff taste is not wall-mounted flying china ducks, but a goose with a ribbon round its neck on a blue background. Known as “Ribbon Geese”, the pattern was all over Walmart in the 80s on oven gloves and toasters, and “popular with people who liked country décor”, say American correspondents.

A buyer on Homes under the Hammer spends three weeks scraping woodchip wallpaper off the ceiling. The presenters always say “And there’s woodchip on all the walls! Of course you’d have to get rid of that!” Woodchip was standard in refurbishments of the 70s and 80s, and went with dull blue carpeting throughout. It's not so bad, really.

Open plan: turning the interior of a 30s semi into a huge white cave. Solution: Put back the walls separating the living/dining room, and between living/dining rooms and hall. Reinstall oak panelling. Paint the smaller rooms pale green with a dado rail under the ceiling, or a shelf for your china plates.

“Knocking through” while leaving parts of supporting walls, so that the ground floor resembles a maze with arches leading to other arches and you can just about work out where the hall/passage/dining room/sitting room once were.

Instagram has had a tremendous influence on interior design, creating a landscape of minimalist nowhere spaces. (Curbed.com. Sometimes these interiors are dressed up with anonymous "touches": a plant in an ethnic pot, a modern oak sideboard, colourful cushions.)

The upmarket beach hut look – all faded navy canvas, white tongue-and-groove, shells and pebbles everywhere – is hugely fashionable on social media as “cottagecore”. You create a still life of seersucker tablecloth, tasteful picnic-ware and food, in a picturesque orchard, snap it and put it on Instagram. Boden-wearers have dropped the style (and the bunting) – of course they have now it has clearly slid down the class ladder.

A common mistake people make with an open concept space is thinking that all the furniture should be against the walls. (Alyssa Kapito, Alyssa Kapito Interiors)

apartmenttherapy.com suggests turning an entrance hall back into an entrance hall with different lighting and wall colours and a contrasting rug, plus a table as a “barrier”.

Create intimate nooks, like a reading corner or small workspace. (Anjie Cho)

More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 13

PUBLIC SPACE
The venue currently called Harry Cockers had been through many identities in the previous decade, as various kinds of bars and restaurants became fashionable. Its latest manifestation was very thirties, with bright jagged lines along every surface, and wall-panels showing geometrically stylized silhouettes of dancing figures in evening dress. (Simon Brett, Dead Giveaway)

Alex Polizzi: Depersonalise! It’s not your house! 
Also Alex Polizzi: It’s so beige, darling. Add some personality! (@sleuthstress)

Translation:
a) Remove the naff knicknacks.
b) Add some more upmarket knicknacks.

Perhaps the attraction is “I am staying in an upmarket hotel therefore I am an upmarket person.” And then they can put the price up. By “beige”, Alex doesn’t mean “everything is the colour of straw, sand or digestive biscuits”, she means it’s “dull”.

Bed runners have reached Travelodge, reports an informant.

PRIVATE SPACE
An article points out that property programmes always recommend “knocking through”, and that the “void” has become bigger and bigger.

A recent (2018) study showed that American houses are getting bigger and bigger, but American families live in about a third of the space. Diagram shows an unused dining room, a barely used “reception room” and a lived-in “family room”.

The Nouveau-Richards have built a lovely new house with a light-filled atrium. It has all the usual rooms, but they’re quadruple the usual size, and the furniture looks a bit lost. Mrs NR has enough space for yoga exercises in her enormous bedroom, but she wonders what to do with the huge field that surrounds the house. She can’t even put a swimming pool out there – it’s in the basement. Caro suggests a croquet lawn and herbaceous borders, and Samantha offers to create a shrubbery with winding paths, and a pergola with vines.

Per the New Yorker, vast US McMansions have “lawyer foyers” and “garage mahals”. The lawyer, presumably, never gets further than the foyer. “Hall, please – only theatres and hotels have foyers,” says Caro. “And it doesn’t rhyme with lawyer, vous voyez?” “Or is it modelled on the office of a New York law firm?” asks Samantha.

Starting in the 1930s, modernist design brought indoor and outdoor spaces to flow together with greater ease. To seek out even more air and light, interior spaces became less distinguished from one another. A new moralism underwrote the opening of the house plan, too: that a house’s design should facilitate a lofty attitude in its occupants... The hope was that light and openness in the physical environment might elevate the social and creative virtues of the individuals who lived there. (Atlantic.com)

See the Victorians designing cemeteries as arboreta with winding paths, explicitly hoping that the “chastely designed” monuments would “elevate the taste” of those who strolled there. Betjeman’s “bright canteens” were intended to cheer up the workers. But remember what they were replacing: mid-century cemeteries were grim, and Edwardian workers’ facilities were dimly lit and painted cream, green and brown.

Rowena shocks her friends by rebuilding the knocked-through walls of her Victorian terraced house, and turning the back “space” into a kitchen instead of building a science lab over the garden. She remodels the 60s kitchen as a "scullery" with a sink and washing machine, and she has her eye on the old lavatory at the bottom of the garden. Why not restore it to it original function?

If stuck for ideas, try Kelly Hoppen's Design Masterclass.


More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 12

Arranging books on shelves with spines inwards is a ridiculous “trend” much touted in early 2018. (To achieve the same effect, cover your books in neutral-coloured paper, as people used to do.)

"I suppose we’ve always reused things", says Caro Stow-Crat, over lunch with Samantha Upward at a new eaterie accessorised with redundant kitchen equipment. "An old hot water can is splendid for watering the garden. But I get a bit depressed by all these empty cake stands and old fire buckets. It’s OK to reuse things, but as decoration? I suppose it’s the same as hanging up copper warming pans and carpet beaters, like they did in the 50s. Now, what can I do with granny's spill vases…?"

"Put pencils in them," suggests Samantha. "Oh, look, a lovely old wooden Camembert box. And a Horlicks mug... I must confess I stole a Fortnum's chocolate box from a girl at school. I used it as a pencil case and kept it for years. We call it "repurposing" now!"


Country Living Magazine shows a bedroom with a wooden four-poster bed (though the posts are too short to hold up a canopy). The floorboards are exposed but have been sanded and sealed too aggressively (they’re orange and look too new). The door is made of recycled wood and looks like a stable door (in a Georgian house). There are recycled planks stuck to the wall, forming a backdrop to a Victorian picture of some sheep in a gilt frame. The whole effect is of a titled family down on its luck that has been forced to camp in an outbuilding.

Though it's not quite as decadent as the “abandoned houses of the Hebrides” aesthetic, which shades into “servants’ quarters of derelict Irish country house”.

The School of Life’s perfect home is, again, Georgian. The floorboards are exposed, though they at least look antique. The Georgians would have put down drugget, and covered it with Turkish carpets. There’s a chest of drawers floating randomly in a corner, and an open trunk on the floor. A distressed leather pouffe is the crowning touch – or is it a Gladstone bag?

DECOR CRIMESIn a Victorian/Edwardian house, it's naff to expose the fireplace and put a copper hood inside, then add a wood mantelpiece of the wrong period. The fireplace would have had an inner “surround”, with a cast iron grate in the middle. The Edwardians and earlier would have been appalled at exposed brick in your living-room. A Victorian room would have had a wide mantelpiece (with drapery on the mantelshelf), and the Edwardians loved elaborate overmantels. (I've just seen a room in a house for sale painted entirely in peach – including the fireplace, mantelpiece and grate.)

In a Victorian house, don't strip the doors: paint them cream.

And don't knock through and extend so enthusiastically that you end up with odd bits of wall sticking into spaces. In this arrangement, the same dull fitted carpet “flows” through the entire ground floor. Everything is too new, but there’s one ye olde artefact in the wrong place (the potato weighing scales in the living room).

Think twice before adding a “glass box” extension to a standard semi. So you remove all downstairs dividing walls and build a huge glass-roofed extension into the garden, removing all character from because you need lots of space to... do what exactly?

The entrance hall, which was big enough to contain a large fireplace, had probably been designed to be used as a breakfast-room. The first thing seen on coming in was... a wood-carving of a helmeted guardsman with a shield and spear standing on a pediment carved with animal heads. (The Great Indoors, Ben Highmore on a Jacobethan castle – from the 30s.)


MORE NONOS
White walls and a large black-and-white photograph of pebbles .(The Great Indoors, Ben Highmore)

Dangling replica antique light bulbs (Edison bulbs). They give out a dim, cold light that you can’t read by.

Fake shuttered concrete internal cladding.

Garish carpets in public spaces.

Very dim lighting in public spaces and museums.
“Restoring” Victorian ghost signs.

Giant sculptures of human body parts in public places (a half-sunk visage in Cavendish Square, huge nudes outside St Pancras church blocking the view of the beautiful caryatids).

Terrible modern art in medieval cathedrals.
Frosted glass partitions.
Buildings in the shape of a giant human head. (Le Guetteur 2015)

Sentimental garden sculptures, “sculpture park” sculpture, memorial sculpture.

From The Times
Avoid:
carpet in bathrooms
armchairs ditto
TV in every room
Roman blind in kitchen
throws
pedestal mats in the loo
cat litter in kitchen (and cat food)
utensil rack above hob
bidets
Victorian pulley clothes drier (maiden)
Aga in the city "They’re used mainly for heating country houses.”

More here, and links to the rest.

Decor Crimes Again

Giant sculptures of human body parts in public places.
Dangling replica antique light bulbs.
Garish carpets in public spaces.
“Restoring” Victorian ghost signs.
Frosted glass partitions.
Restored floorboards that are too orange and shiny.
Wood-panelled interiors in a modern office block.
Sticking recycled planks to the walls.
A large black-and-white photograph of pebbles.

Buildings in the shape of a giant human head.

Sentimental garden sculptures, “sculpture park” sculpture, memorial sculpture...
Driftwood sculpture.
Chainsaw sculpture.

Everything too new, apart from one ye olde artefact in the wrong place (the potato weighing scales in the living room).

Knocking through and extending until there are meaningless bits of wall sticking into spaces (holding the roof up). The same dull fitted carpet “flows” through the entire ground floor. Adding a “glass box” extension to a standard semi. Removing all downstairs dividing walls and building a huge glass-roofed extension into the garden. Stripping all character from the interior of a period house because you really want to live in an airport lounge. And you need all that space to... do what exactly?

In a Victorian house
A fireplace with a copper hood.
Stripped wood throughout. (The Victorians would have painted it dark brown, or later in the century, cream.)
Exposed brick in your living room. (The Victorians would have had a fit. It's hardly "rustic", either.)
A stable door – to your bedroom.

Decadence
The “abandoned houses of the Hebrides” aesthetic.
The "servants’ quarters of derelict Irish country house” look.
Fake shuttered concrete internal cladding.

The bamboo table in the hall upstairs was only a small side shoot of the original bamboo forest that sprouted in the basement. Everything down here was of mottled, banana-coloured bamboo. There was a bamboo wardrobe… washstand… easy chair. And there was a bamboo-and-shell overmantel. (London Belongs to Me, Norman Collins)

From Elle Decoration
Don’t be afraid of colour “Some of my favourite rooms have been oxblood or grass green since before I was born.”
“Trends are not your friend. Decorating should be personal.” (I think they mean “Replace those 80s curtains.”)
Hang your art at eye level, where we can see it.
Avoid tiny “floating” rugs. (Also, have some rugs, like the Victorians and Georgians who installed those lovely floors you’ve just restored.)
Avoid open shelves in the kitchen – do you want everyone to see your naff mugs? Actually, why not throw them out?
Avoid stainless steel. “Don’t build a diner in your kitchen.”
Declutter, but keep out a few personal items. Avoid the hotel suite look.
Avoid matching everything, and furnishing a room from a single source.
Curtains should reach the floor.
An upmarket room needs classy light-switches. And how about brass finger-plates for the doors?

From The Times
Carpet in bathrooms.
Armchairs ditto.
TV in every room.
Roman blind in kitchen.
Throws.
Pedestal mats in the loo.
Cat litter in kitchen (and cat food).
Utensil rack above hob.
Bidets.
Victorian pulley clothes drier (maiden).
Aga in the city "They’re used mainly for heating country houses.”

The entrance hall, which was big enough to contain a large fireplace, had probably been designed to be used as a breakfast-room. The first thing seen on coming in was... a wood carving of a helmeted guardsman with a shield and spear standing on a pediment carved with animal heads. (The Great Indoors by Ben Highmore on a Jacobethan castle – from the 30s.)

More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 10

I admired a friend's house: she had a dish full of blue and white sherds which she had collected from the beach, and chandelier crystals hanging in the windows. I tried to copy, but the results always looked lame.

A childhood friend had a bedside light in the shape of a toadstool house with figures of elves. She also had a collection of glass swans and Wade china animals displayed on a shelf. I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let me have any of these beautiful things.

It was a shock when contemporaries moved from grubby student houses to grown-up flats with fitted carpets and proper furniture, and hoovered the carpets and kept the place tidy. I was also surprised that it had been their plan all along.

In Crouch End you are judged by the neatness of your log pile.

It was one of those little mid-Victorian corner tables — I believe they call them "what-nots" — which you will find in any boarding-house, littered up with photographs and coral and "Presents from Brighton." (The Power-House, John Buchan)

A new building is opened with great fanfare. Within a week, it is plastered with hand-written signs reading “EXIT”, “NO WAY OUT”, “DRAW BOLT AND TURN HANDLE”, “USE OTHER DOOR” and “FOR SOAP, PRESS BUTTON UNDER COUNTER”. Twenty years later, the notices are still there – tattered, torn and mended with yellowing sellotape.

Bournemouth's ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City's trail! (EM Forster, Howard’s End)

New buildings must be “in keeping” – but with what? Apparently it’s “the local”: a style that sprang straight from the earth, like Georgian and Victorian buildings in London stock brick.

The bar’s done up in a style called “Sheboygan rec room”: dark carpet; wood-panelled walls; plush, aging armchairs; smallish TVs. (catapult.com)

Someone has labelled Theresa May’s picture (with her husband, to show that she’s normal): “blousy curtains, floral footstool, showroom sofa, patterned cushions, spotless carpet”. The beige fitted carpet is clean, because she doesn’t have children, a fact she had to explain away in early July 2016. She also has a coolie-hat lampshade and some neat, pointed exposed bricks round the fireplace, a brass-mounted fire screen and a bunch of flowers in the grate.

Upgrade your home! 
Add recessed lighting
Reface your kitchen cabinets and add new handles
Buy a rug
Paint the walls
Install crown molding (a cornice), but remember it “looks best in traditional homes and can look out of place if you have an ultra-modern minimalistic home”.
(lifehack.org)

COUNTRY COTTAGESWhen Jilly Cooper wrote Class in the 70s, she noted that Upwards were struggling to afford second homes in the country. They were forced to buy “bolt-holes” so far out that they drove most of Friday evening to get there, and most of Sunday evening to get back to “town”. Poor loves! For most of us, country cottages are a thing of the past, but maybe Cooper moved in different circles.

I remember some friends at the time telling me about country cottages they had viewed – most of them were impossible due to improvements that weren’t, like woodchip wallpaper and carriage lamps outside. Easily removable, but what about the filled-in fireplaces? Another friend exposed the fireplace of his Cornish cottage: it had a massive stone lintel, and filled the room with smoke.

GET THE LOOK Tropicana Regency, Versailles Provençale (Great Interior Design Challenge)
Metallic, exotically printed fabrics scream Great Gatsby!
"My style is simple but very ornate..." (GIDC)

“Fits in with the whole country feel.” Money for Nothing on a sideboard made of a rusty feeding trough and some teak table-legs. “They have a lovely big rustic interior,” says Sarah Moores. Does “rustic” mean “living in a pigsty”, though?

“Aztec” is now applied to kilims and ikat – anything with blocks of colour with a jagged edge. I don’t know how the Aztecs would react to that, but it might involve sharp knives.


READERS, PLEASE COPY
In Babbacombe’s by “Susan Scarlett” (Noel Streatfeild), mother figure Mrs Carson is always doing up rooms on a shoestring with some “gay” or “dainty” cretonne curtains and bedcovers. Cretonne is stout cotton printed with a pattern, usually flowers, and Mrs C bought the fabric in a sale. Clearly readers were meant to follow her example. But what was Streatfeild warning against? Reusing old, dark curtains?

In a 70s Archers episode, Peggy talked of redecorating in earth colours (terracotta and peach). Would Peggy really do anything so hippy? (In the 70s everything suddenly became brown, cream or terracotta because we were worried about the environment.)

IT'S DECADENT TO...Decorate your pizzeria like a shipping warehouse.

Clad your tower block in brick panels. (I’ve even seen brick panels put on the wrong way up, with the bricks vertical.)

Paper your walls in a simulated concrete design.

Antic has taken over 45 venues and turned them into “granny chic” pubs. (Guardian June 2016) Clients may not realise that the “delightfully twee establishment... is owned by an aggressively expanding business”. They combine exposed brick walls with skip and boot sale furniture. Their designer says her job is about “taking risks. You might think, is that horrible or is that lovely? I’m not sure.” (So not “taking risks” as in kayaking up the Amazon?) They turned an old job centre in Deptford into a pub and called it The Job Centre. Local people were narked, and it closed. They’ve bought a concrete pub in Elephant. The designer says: “Yes, it’s carpark chic. Maybe that’s where I should be going with it.” (The Guardian writes as if “granny chic” was new, but it has been around in East London for about ten years like a blight.)

Ultra-cool Rowena Upward is building a new house modelled on ad hoc temporary dwellings, and filling it with orange plastic stacking chairs picked up from pavements. As she says, “It's no more patronising than doing up a thatched cottage that used to be a rural slum, or my ranch-style bungalow, modelled on the cabin of a settler in the Wild West”. Samantha is still wondering if Moroccan chic has gone out.

ANTIQUES
He had... a very large flat overlooking Marble Arch, impersonal and full of antiques which he paid a friend to choose for him. 'This is one of the biggest flats in London, and I can prove that', he said. 'It has ten rooms, three bathrooms and the furnishings are worth a fortune.' (Nik Cohn on the late Irvine Sellars of Mates boutique, a feature of Carnaby St in the 60s)

In the 50s, it was terribly grand to own a house which still had a powder closet – it showed that the house dated from the 18th century when the gentry needed a small room for powdering their hair or wig. But have we stopped trying to pretend we live at Chatsworth or Versailles at last?

Dining room tables and chairs, end tables and armoires (“brown” pieces) have become furniture non grata. (nextavenue.org)

Could hipsters save the antique furniture trade? (Apollo Magazine)

While the modern style has stayed the same forever - people still have Eames chairs and Bauhaus chairs or whatever - because it's all about functionality and use and iconicism, the 'traditional' goes through huge fads almost in cycles. (papermag.com)

See the 30s Tudoresque vision of Merrie England, with a lot of brass and oak. It was a debased form of the late 19th century Arts and Crafts, and the fad for vast refectory tables and carved wooden chests. Late 19th century Louis IV revival (baroque, rococo) ended up as flimsy reproduction furniture and would-be Aubusson carpets: pensioner chic.

More here, and links to the rest.

More Decor Crimes

A little too rustic

collecting and displaying objects that no longer have a use (bakelite telephones – it used to be copper warming pans)
fitted carpets printed with fleur-de-lys (in forest green, terracotta or midnight blue – looks like a pub)

nesting tables
motorized drinks cabinet
cork-tiled walls

upcycling (It often means “give distressed paint finish” or just “paint grey”.)
cutting the legs off a kitchen table to turn it into a coffee table
table made by cutting out the sides of an old water tank (a bit too industrial)
cutting a Georgian table in half to use as two console tables
the “table lamp made of an old lobster pot” school (It's nothing new.)

plaster mouldings in a modernist flat
flowery cottage wallpaper in a modernist flat or house
multi-coloured pebble effect lino combined with the above

spotlights above paintings (especially of the banker’s desk-lamp type)
glazing pictures with non-reflective glass

balcony railings all lined with bamboo slat screens
home fragrance reed diffusers – those little jars of sticks that are suddenly everywhere
admiring the patina on an old soil pipe (and turning it into a sun lounger)

pale green sculpted carpet (the beige cardigan of décor)
moulded tiles in imitation of green sculpted carpet
Turning your disused fireplace into a wine cellar (with a wine rack)

putting a plant pot directly on a Georgian marquetry table – for years
lampshades made of brass and glass panels (sometimes pink, brown or etched with a design), sometimes in a vague flower shape. (Available on Amazon of course.)

wrist rest in the shape of a stuffed dachshund (now we don’t need them as draught excluders any more thanks to central heating).

pulling up all the fitted carpets and stripping and sealing the floorboards – and then not putting down any rugs so that the place looks rather stark and everybody’s footsteps are deafening

louvred glass windows in a Victorian terrace
pelmet with Venetian blinds
garden sculpture brought inside, and shoved into a corner
a ye olde brass fireplace with fake coals in an Art Deco fire surround
a Regency fireplace in a Span house
Daggers and rapiers hung on the wall – in a Span house. A long way from the Scottish baronial hall bristling with weapons and suits of armour.
antique pieces used for a different purpose, or put in a different setting (It can work – a hot water can used as a vase or holder for wooden spoons – but sometimes it doesn’t, eg the classical capital on the mantelpiece.)

A High Gothic vault on a Romanesque cathedral.
High Gothic – so twee. And those sculpted leaves and flowers must be hell to dust.
church conversions – especially the kind where they build an entirely new pod-house inside

A restaurant in a modern block with a distressed brick interior finish and other “warehouse” accoutrements.

Those bamboo-slat blinds that everybody had in the 70s – they fell to bits and ceased to work immediately. If you’d ever figured out how they worked in the first place, that is.

Café lighting that is so dark that older patrons can’t read by it (I’m talking to you, Barbican and British Library. We aren’t all medieval manuscripts. And why are exhibitions of metalwork and stone objects as dimly lit as a show of fabric, watercolours and ancient frescos?)

A Modern Victorian terrace with East End charm (theartofbespoke.com A nice Victorian terrace house has been given a vast glass extension on the back, and the entire interior has been turned into a trendy, hard-edged “living space” with roof lights.)

Tenants move into a gleaming modernist tower block – and put up flowery net curtains. That go grimy.

Every door in your house – including cupboard doors – has long iron hinges like a stable door. (Very Voysey – but would he have put them in the living room?)

Insane “rustic” interiors where everything from the walls to the furniture is made of recycled wood. Designer suggests you “get some oak” to make a headboard and put “weaved rugs” on the floor.

Terrace house in Congleton on Homes under the Hammer done over with a pebble dash exterior, fake leaded lights, fibreglass olde beams everywhere, textured Artex, wooden plank doors and rusticated staircase (like a Tyrolean restaurant!). Interior painted apricot. Sadly the buyers “ripped” everything out.

Per the Daily Mail, avoid mixer taps, leather sofas, coloured loo paper and decanter tags.
Charlie Luxton makes TV programmes on architecture and design, hates big rooms with low ceilings and loads of downlighters and “Breakfast bars with those padded stools on sticks”.

Alex Polizzi hates "half-arsed theming".

From msn.com: What to avoid when selling your house
Exterior in a wacky colour.
“Updating” the fireplace (especially in a style or period that’s wrong for the house).
Blue walls and green woodwork – or any other clashing colour combo. (Davida Hogan, home stager at Edited Style, suggests painting woodwork the same colour as the walls.)
Cooker with unshiftable grime.
Grubby light switches, grubby anything.
Trend overload (those clashing colours again – keep it neutral).
Hard-to-clean surfaces (wooden worktops).
Small bathroom tiles – they make the space seem cramped.
Dull wooden floors.

From hgtv.com
Toilet rugs (that fit round the toilet base)
too many photos on every surface
spaghetti junctions of cables
“Decorating too much in the same print is overwhelming and tacky.”
décor styles that don’t match period or area (Don’t go Hawaiian in Runcorn, or Cotswolds in Hackney)
dated kitchen cabinets
sitting room over-full of formal furniture
clutter (build in some storage)
matchy matchy
fads like lava lamps and beanbag chairs (except they’re the antiques of the future)
cramming in oversized furniture
too many patterns (paisley, floral etc)
one tiny rug floating in the centre of the tile or stripped floor
plastic couch covers
furniture pushed back to the walls
too many neutrals
too many knick-knacks (edit, then rotate your display)
too many cushions

Gardens
too many lawn ornaments (especially concrete toads in hats)
too-short grass
plants that clash with the architecture

Le Corbusier wanted his tower blocks to be surrounded by park-like grounds a la Capability Brown. In practice this became unused stretches of grass, often fenced off so that tenants couldn’t walk there, sit there, play there or do anything but look at it. Even when not fenced off, people are shy about sunbathing or sitting out and prefer to go the park.

Buildings
A field full of identical McMansions too close together and all facing the same way – even when they’re perfect copies of an 18th century gentleman’s house. Especially when. New estates with buildings that are too big to be so close together, on tiny plots, at odd angles to each other. Especially with fake chimneys, and very tiny rustic details. And an ornate porch on the windowless side of a house, leading only to a tiny iron staircase to the road. 

Scattered houses at odd angles to each other might happen organically if each was on a small-holding and they were built at different times. But here there’s no historical reason for the plan and it just looks wrong, somehow. Terrace houses on a street line a road that’s going somewhere. But we can’t build those because they look so... working class.

In late Victorian times, and the early 20th century, the middle classes were very scathing about “villas”. New, too-small, too close together, but pretentious with it.

Buildllc.com wants to see the back of these architectural features:
half-timbering
decorative shutters too small to cover the windows
mansard roof on a two-storey house (They’re meant to go on the top of a vast chateau with several storeys.)
purely decorative stick-on quoins in a different colour

New-build houses are like rabbit hutches, have low ceilings, thin walls, small rooms and “zero charm”, says a survey quoted in the Daily Mail June 2015.

Brick veneers – panels of fake bricks. We aren’t fooled.

A door apparently out of a submarine – on a restrained 50s office block.

Brutalist shopping arcades that are so dark they need electric lighting all day. The overhead lights quickly become filthy and full of dead insects. And they’re too dim. (The one in Royal Oak has been disguised as a classical terrace and turned into an extension of Waitrose, sort of.)

Adding “fresh new colours” to a Brutalist building. Cladding same in coloured panels, especially in shades of blue.

Tiny windows imitating tiny Tudor cottage windows: they were that size because there was no plate glass, or in many cases any glass at all and they were “glazed” with horn or parchment. Please, we have plate glass now!

“Victorian” lamp posts in 60s shopping malls. They were put up in the nostalgic 70s and 80s when we really wanted a quaint ye olde market. It was still a 60s shopping mall – but now with inappropriate lighting. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

Lucy on Homes under the Hammer says a done-up house has a “hotel vibe”. She meant it as a compliment.

Those very dim overhead bulbs are “filament bulbs”: ugly, cold, and too dim to read by. Popular in cafés.

Industrial is so ovah now you can get a desk tidy made of a jamjar glued to a plank. And Why Not – use an old paperback as a business card holder? (You can now get a mass-produced jamjar with a handle to use as a coffee mug, too.)

More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 9

Impossibly Bohemian Rowena Upward wants a house that hasn’t been “modernised” throughout in a hard-edged loft living style (and all knocked through), so she buys an auction property which has been untouched for decades. It’s the only way to get Art Deco fireplaces, 70s Vymura wallpaper, banquette seating or Arts & Crafts panelling. Samantha complains that her cottage is plastered with woodchip wallpaper. She rips it all off and exposes the old inglenook but can never get the fire to burn without smoking.

Pyjama cases in the shape of animals were very Teale. Presumably during the day you were supposed to hide your nightclothes (if you didn’t have a pyjama or nightdress case you folded them and put them under your pillow). You were also supposed to hide your bed under a candlewick bedspread, “smooth as a millpond” and tucked under the pillows. The case went on the pillows, along with a few cushions (optional). Your handkerchiefs went in a handmade and hand-embroidered sachet, in a drawer. Your shoes went in a hand-embroidered bag. And then one day everybody went "What the hell?" and hung their nightie up in the bathroom, or left it over a chair.

In the 70s, Weybridges had spare rooms full of cupboards with long, narrow louvred doors, and pale blue curtains and carpets. They were perfect, and hardly ever used. Cleaned every week, but there was a line of dust between the pale blue carpet and the louvred cupboard where the hoover couldn’t reach. The only signs of life, taste or individuality were a few small, pale, shiny china ornaments on the window sill and dressing table or “vanity unit”. A globose pomander containing dry pot pourri, a Dalton figurine, a flower vase, a pearlised swan.

Everybody wants olde oake beames, but the original builders would have plastered most of them over and probably painted them white. They didn’t want to reveal how their house was built any more than we want to reveal pipework. And the Victorians would be outraged by exposed stone walls in the home.

My mother was always knocking herself out cleaning and polishing. She aspired to the country house style – I tried to convince her that real aristocratic houses are a bit shabby, with dog hair on the sofa. Peter York called Sloane Ranger décor “miniature country house”. Very elaborate curtain arrangements, flowery fabric (or plaid, à la Balmoral), potted palms, huge Chinese vases, dark wood furniture. Caro Stow-Crat doesn’t have to worry about arranging her furniture – it has all been in the same place for a hundred years or so, and it was placed where it could be used. Weybridges aiming for the country house look buy lovely old pieces, but shove them in corners. They can't actually sit at the writing desk, but it's just there for show. If your living-room is “the long gallery” all your furniture can be much bigger – the same goes for huge bedrooms. Our rooms are smaller, but “furniture for a stately home” has become the standard size. (Nobody wants big 30s wardrobes any more but they’re really useful.) And the aspirant Weybridges don’t use table-cloths, coasters or mats, so that their knickknacks and flower vases mark the lovely polished surface.

Jilly Cooper complained that TV set dressers ruined any drama – their taste was too downmarket. Now, per The Hotel Inspector, the décor villains are the retired couple who open a B&B and fill it with gnomes, teddy bears, miniature dragons and Tudor dados. The owners have not sought design advice, or even read a design magazine, and are convinced that they have made the place “beautiful”. (A bit like the retailers in Mary Queen of Shops trying to sell clothes without ever opening a fashion magazine.)

Sometimes young people get hold of a B&B, cover the walls with bright murals and paint the doors turquoise and purple. The Jacobethan curtains, odd assortment of grubby old furniture and 60s stained-glass panels are the archaeological remains of earlier décor and modernisations. Some furniture has been rather randomly upcycled in hideous colours and the wrong kind of paint that’s now peeling off. And in the kitchen someone has started to paint a Tolkeinesque mural all over the cupboards – oh Lord, was it me?

When film makers updated Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister to late 1960s Los Angeles, they got it: “Photographing sleazy late 60s LA in a way that emphasizes the thin veneer of ‘new’ that cosmetically covers the same old decay, it’s just Day-Glo painted now,” says an imdb.com commenter.


More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 8: Get the Look

The home-owner loved it!

It’s got that country feel but it’s got that contemporary thing we were talking about. (Escape to the Country on the usual hideous lab kitchen with a useless island)

“Why did you go for colour blocks?” (burgundy and brown)
“I wanted to be edgy! I was thinking Mark Rothko!”
(Great Interior Design Challenge Never “It’s an Arts & Crafts house so I studied Voysey and William Morris.”)

Mood boards “help the home-owner visualise the design” – but they don’t actually show how the design will look, which is why the home-owner is sometimes shocked and horrified by the result. (GIDC)

A modern Victorian terrace with East End charm (theartofbespoke.com A nice Victorian terrace house has been given a vast glass extension on the back, and the entire interior has been turned into a trendy, hard-edged “living space” with roof lights.)

Why is interior design so backward-looking without being properly revivalist? Americans go for “Colonial” or  “Mission” – it's kind of Arts and Crafts. They also have a “craftsman” style. Jacobethan furniture is still being made as Old Charm (brand) and "priory style".

Vintaged Bohemia (Joss & Main): Interiors stylist and author Emily Chalmers’ look was once described as “eclectic floral bohemian”... From the vintage dresses that adorn her walls, to artful arrangements of retro furniture, her space is breathtaking in its originality.

And why does furniture always default to Louis XIV? Why not 1800s Greek revival? Louis XIV may be what designers mean by “French”. If it’s been stripped, repainted and distressed it’s “French farmhouse”. Stripped, painted white and “antiqued”, it’s “French provincial”.

Or is “French provincial” really Provençal? (“You’re something with a French provincial office – or a book of press-cuttings – but you’re not a woman”, as Margo Channing says in All About Eve. I always wondered why an American businesswoman would have a satellite office in rural France.)

Ahoy there. This weekend in @TheSTHome the interiors feature is how to do coastal chic like a grown up. No beach hut cushions, no bunting. (Katrina Burroughs ‏@Kat_Burroughs)


Choose from the following:

beachside chic
seaside modern (tongue and groove, Farrow & Ball “stone”.)

1950s Chalton (Victoria Wood on a tea-planter’s bungalow)
80s lobby chic (Mirror80.com who wants a whole flat in that style)
Call it Dynasty chic! (mirror80.com)
bordello chic
alpine surgical (kitchen)
Hollywood Regency
hippie deluxe (What hippie fashion became in the 70s. A downmarket version – hippie deluxe cheap ripoff – quickly hit the high street. It was ghastly.)

"Rustic" is now a catch-all term that has drifted a long way from its roots in clothes and furniture actually made by genuine rustics.

le style shabby (shabby chic in French)
Pacific Northwest cheesy
institutional chic (wired glass panels, two-tone walls – pale green/dark green, beige/brown)
French farmhouse (As somebody said, French farmers wouldn’t recognise it.)
witch kitsch
industrial scrape’n’reveal vibe (Hugh Pearman)

More here and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 5

A Radio 4 Interviewee who grew up on a council state says that the built environment expresses the class system – you know which layer you are in by looking at your surroundings. (But of course “There’s no such thing as class any more”.)

Daily Mail always mentions how much someone’s house cost (to locate them socially).

The fashion for a collection of junk shop flower paintings leaning against the wall has reached adverts.

If Upwards want to sit at a kitchen table they have to go to a posh café. For about 100 years, they have felt that they ought to aspire to Bohemia rather than Suburbia. They wouldn’t like it really.

Upwards hate people to make money out of property – unless it’s them – and it has to happen by accident. In the 70s and 80s they would buy a “shell” – a ruin that they spent years doing up themselves. They babbled of high ceilings and “beautifully proportioned” rooms, and spent all their weekends chipping paint off the original ceiling roses. (They have laptops and cafes now, and outsource the plaster-chipping.)

Were the houses built with high ceilings to prove that you could waste the space? Or because of Victorian superstitions about “foul air” and the miasmatic theory? It’s why Victorian schools were huge, high halls. The hot, “exhausted” air rose to the ceiling and fresh air came in through the windows and the pupils froze. One plus is that you can have tall windows that let in a lot of light, but tall rooms are harder to heat.

Property programmes are always asking “Are you going to change the layout?” This still shocks Samantha Upward slightly – are you really allowed to turn a kitchen into a bedroom? Houses had drawing rooms, dining rooms and kitchens (and perhaps halls, snugs and booteries). The most she and friends would do was “knock through” and talk knowledgeably about “RSJs”.

Upwards and Weybridges aspire to a big house at the end of a long, long drive so that you’re cut off from other people – they call this “tranquillity”. The drive is gravel, not tarmac. The Middletons have a tarmac drive at their large house in Berkshire – and what’s wrong with that? Too like a road? Not eco-friendly? Upwards love to get together and complain about people who “concrete over their front gardens”. Nouveau-Richards have a sea of gravel right up to their front door, so that 30 guests can park at once. Upwards can’t actually afford to move to the kind of house that has a drive, and besides they secretly love living in cities.

In American sitcoms, a vivid crocheted Afghan over the back of the sofa is a sign we’re in a blue-collar home. Same goes for ceiling fans.

Nouveau-Richards have “hobby farms”.

Oscar Wilde said that a gentleman never stands at a window. In the 60s, council estates were given windows that you can’t lean out of and shout down to someone in the street. (Oh, OK, they didn’t want people to fall out either.)

More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 4

Why is it the super rich never seem to have any taste in curtains? (Feargus O'Sullivan)

Syrie Maugham started the trend of stripping and repainting French provincial antiques. (Wikipedia)

Poverty has its whims and shows of taste, as wealth has. Some of these cabins were turreted, some had false windows painted on their rotten walls; one had a mimic clock, upon a crazy tower of four feet high, which screened the chimney; each in its little patch of ground had a rude seat or arbour. (Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens)

Today your bedroom is the backstage area where you prepare for your performance in the theatre of the world... The living room... a sort of stage-set where homeowners acted out an idealised version of their lives for the benefit of guests... The inexpensive and slightly lowbrow connotations of gas meant that it was still shunned by the upper classes: they stayed loyal to candles. Lucy Orrinsmith, author of The Drawing Room, Its Decoration and Furniture (1878), suggested that one’s ambition ought to extend beyond a coal scuttle decorated with a picture of Warwick Castle and a screen showing ‘Melrose Abbey by Moonlight’. Instead, homeowners should look out for quirky, exotic flourishes for their best room: ‘a Persian tile, an Algerian flower-pot, an old Flemish cup, a piece of Nankin blue, an Icelandic spoon, a Japanese cabinet, a Chinese fan … each in its own way beautiful and interesting’. (If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, Lucy Worsley)

Middle-class Upwards are still following Orrinsmith's instructions almost to the letter. But Rowena Upward, the ultra-Bohemian, is collecting Jacobethan furniture, little brass animals – and anything decorated with Warwick Castle or Melrose Abbey. She has an eye on a bamboo Edwardian overmantel which she plans to fill with knicknacks. She even intends to crochet frills for all its brackets. It won’t quite go with the Jacobethan – but perhaps she’ll go all-out for 1880, with potted palms on stands and round tables with velvet covers to the ground.


DÉCOR CRIMES

Sofas from the 1950s often had plastic trays clipped onto their arms to hold food or drinks. (If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, Lucy Worsley)

The “random cladding” movement in architecture. (Adam Furman)

In a poncey club sitting on a sofa made from a slab of pumice with no back to it. They know how to make you feel welcome. (Mark Gatiss)

Bow windows with bottle-bottom glass, plus Georgian fanlights, on a 60s council house.

Hotel room en suite bathrooms with glass walls so you can watch TV in the bath. (What if you’re sharing the room???) And many hotel rooms have TVs in the bathroom, some disguised as mirrors or pictures.

“Classic” French provincial bathroom cabinets (including a basin on cabriole legs with faux drawers).

Buying a Georgian house and removing all the fireplaces so that there’s no obvious place to put the furniture and it stands around looking awkward.

Dummy chimneys on new houses.

Bars in Dalston with the “poverty look” - distressed wood and reused school chairs - which are too expensive for local people.

Crazy paving – on the wall.


GET THE LOOK

The Pig Hotel “all shabby-chic Georgian splendour, roll-top baths with views over parkland...” (Times magazine 2014-08-16) Nothing can be both shabby AND splendid. Unless you specifically mean “shabby splendour”. And if the Georgians had had roll-top baths they would not have sat in one looking out over parkland. Oscar Wilde used to say that a gentleman never stood at a window – or was it Lord Chesterfield?

Using a rumpled but neat look. (onekinddesign.com)

“Shaker style” now just means “wooden kitchen units”.

“Rustic” is now a catch-all term that has drifted a long way from its roots in clothes and furniture actually made by genuine rustics (You can have a rustic or “woodsy” wedding, according to Etsy.)

The Museum Selection catalogue name-drops frantically in an attempt to convince us that its style-free products are sprinkled with the fairy dust of famous writers and artists.

“Rackham Plaque, redolent of the dream-like paintings by Arthur Rackham” – but not based on any particular work.

“Petal Fairy Statue, recalling those depicted in tales by Andrew Lang...” It looks like a rip-off of the Flower Fairies series by Cicely Mary Barker, and looks utterly UN-like the illustrations to Lang by HJ Ford.

“English Tweed jacket, Beautiful wool tweed jacket evoking the silhouettes of 1940s originals” – but not modelled on them.

“Art Deco Mugs, inspired by the vibrant Art Deco ceramic designs of Clarice Cliff...” They’re a poor imitation. None of the “Art Deco” products look remotely Art Deco.

It continues through the ages, “echoing”, “capturing”, “evoking” – but never reproducing.

Housing crisis.

More here, and links to the rest.

Decor Crimes 3

So much stuff. Looking back the other way, we can see Betty Boop as Lady Liberty. And if we step back some more, we see a suit of armour in the dining room. (uglyhousephotos.com)

You can visit any historic building in Britain and find the same things: tea towels, mugs, 'local' biscuits, CDs of pseudo-Celtic music, small jars of preserves, a pewter replica of something, a book that's £5 cheaper on Amazon and some pencils. (Age of Uncertainty)

furniture in inappropriate places – an antique dressing table mirror on the landing

linenfold panelling – on kitchen cabinets, or the front door of your 80s cottage

classical Adam Regency fireplace in an Art Deco block, plus a classical Regency-style bed surround with a cupboard over the top

exposed beams in a Georgian house (The Georgians would have a fit.)

Flintstones fireplace copied from a 15th century stone cottage (slate surround, beam or stone lintel) – in a Victorian villa

feature wall with big bold wallpaper – it’s always the same black flowers, leaves and scrolls on magenta, teal or coffee. Makes small rooms look smaller.

block of flats with huge windows on the stairwell, and tiny windows in the flats

stone effect cladding that comes in panels, on a terrace or ex-council house

toxic levels of good taste: every room done up to look like an abandoned servants’ wing in an Irish country house. Peeling plaster, iron bedsteads, distressed furniture, bare untreated floorboards (or treated to look “untreated”), no clutter or personal belongings, no object later than 1910, everything plain and never-fashionable

Victorian lamp standards in 60s shopping precincts (it was an 80s thing)

After the fake stripped Victorian furniture varnished a bit too orange, comes the fake recycled wood furniture in a plain blocky style, looking too new and varnished a bit too orange.

furniture blocking windows

engraved mirrors (but I rather like them)

deeply buttoned, very shiny leather sofas

nests of very shiny, dark brown mock Sheraton occasional tables

leather sofas that have been distressed to look 50 years old

overambitious conversion of a small ordinary house (not just marble, granite and downlighters but an avant garde spiral staircase in an added turret

More here, and links to the rest.

Decor Crimes

“Total modernising, but trying to keep the character of the property back to the cottage style.” “60s is Victorian, isn’t it?” “All the doors have been dipped when they moved in 10 years ago.” “This is our Victorian-inspired room”.  “Artex – it’s a bit old-school.” “Corridor rooms.” “The Wow Factor - finished to a very high standard.”
(All from makeover shows and property programmes)

“The copying on show in Milan proves that not only do most designers not read history books, they also don't read magazines they are not in.” (Kieran Long)

“Cheltenham: Staying in the most incredibly middlebrow hotel. I've seen no colour but taupe in days. This is Britain's default genius loci.” (@tomdyckhoff)

“Glade plug-ins, square plates.” (@itsbadtaste)

In American sitcoms, a vivid crocheted Afghan over the back of the sofa is a sign we’re in a blue-collar home.

More here.

And some from lovemoney.com:

Worst interior design fads: Artex walls, avocado bathroom, woodchip walls, removal of original features, fake laminate wood flooring, exposed brickwork on interior walls, brightly coloured Formica kitchens, lino, spiral staircases, wood panelling

Worst furniture fads: built-in bar, mock fireplaces, animal print rugs, net curtains, MDF built-in cupboards, black ash furniture, futons, reproduction "antique" furniture, teak sideboards, multi-functional furniture

(Don’t they know that teak sideboards and lino are really hip?)

If you have a terrace house, please don’t install:
granite worktops
marble bathrooms
downlighters
ranch-style stone chimney
rustic white-painted door with black iron knocker, horseshoe, nail heads, letter slot
stone cladding, especially multi-coloured

(Of course, it’s your terrace house – do what you like.)

Looks to avoid:
3D plates hung on the wall
60s psychedelia (Instead of opening the doors of perception and ushering in the Age of Aquarius, it immediately became just another décor style or dress fabric.)

an island, with a tiny overhang, and bar stools for eating in the kitchen (So you can’t relax and there’s nowhere to put your knees.)

boutique hotel style
bright overhead lights
bunting made out of remnants
carpet in the bathroom (Especially pink. Especially when it goes up the side of the bath.)
carpets in pubs
chandeliers
converted mill with the machinery in the living room
copying your parents’ décor (your clothes and lifestyle won’t match)
corner bath
cosies for dining chairs
cottagey feel: same old bland interior, with one “rustic” detail
country house hotel style (gilt mirrors, lots of chintz)
country kitchen: science lab with rustic doors

diagonal wood cladding or wall tiles (80s)
divan beds (except they’re comfortable and can double as sofas)
Dralon (velvet-look material for sofas)
exposed stone wall – in your bathroom
exposed stone wall in an old cottage – especially not lacquered (The original inhabitants would have plastered and painted.)
extensions that create a long, narrow room and make the original rooms too dark

faux granite worktops
feature wall with very dark wallpaper
fitted carpet in churches
front and back rooms knocked through to make one long, thin room
furniture blocking a window

Georgian door with fanlight on a 60s council flat or 30s semi (architects call them “embellishments”)
gold Roman blinds

gravel everywhere: on your sitting out area, on a “membrane” with weeds poking through, as parking for 20 cars in front of your McMansion (It’s all over Prince Charles’s faux-old village of Poundbury, I hear.)

huge three-piece suite crammed into a small room
leather sofas or suites
matching curtains and wallpaper

modernist interiors in a Victorian/Edwardian/30s shell. Gutting a 30s house with small rooms, turning it all into one “space”, and filling it with lime-green sub-Eames furniture.

nested tables

new houses based on converted old houses (They’re being built with a long thin “open plan living kitchen dining area” with a window front and back modelled on two knocked-through rooms.)
ochre-toned art (if you want to sell a picture, use lots of red)

painting a decent Edwardian pub exterior in orange/cobalt, orange/jade or lilac/violet (Mid-noughties - they’ve all been repainted brown, black or grey. I wonder why.)

pebbledash
prominently placed family portraits
ragrolling, dados and stencils (80s)
removing all internal walls from a tiny cottage
removing all original features later than 1900
removing half-timbering from a 30s semi
reproduction antique furniture, patterned carpets and Chinese rugs in a modernist flat (pensioner style)
room with a nautical theme

shells in the bathroom (80s whimsical)
sofas and chairs jammed against the wall, miles apart
space wasted on hallways and corridors, especially in a studio
stripped-back inglenook containing a small wood-burning stove
tartan wallpaper/carpets/furniture
turning part of a room into a “kitchen area” instead of making the whole room into a kitchen you can live in
TVs in cupboards or covered with a cloth

varnishing floors, furniture and all exposed wood in pale orange
Victorian conservatory on modernist house
Victorian grate, Regency mantelpiece

Victorian lamp standards in 60s shopping malls
walls covered with clocks and decorative plates
whimsical bronze figurative garden statues (and sculptures of lions made out of chicken wire)

More decor here, and links to the rest.

Class in Angus Wilson

Hand-woven djibbah

In Such Darling Dodos, Angus Wilson writes about groups of people who are imprisoned together by money. Adult children get a small allowance. Even after the war (when most people had jobs), it’s acceptable for young women to live at home without studying or working. The idea is that they will meet a suitable young man and get married, but their parents have no spare money for the strenuous social life that would enable this. Things changed in the 60s. A bit.

The rock garden… looked so bare and pathetic in winter, but he anticipated with pleasure the masses of aubretia, crimson, lavender, blue, that would blaze there in May. (Only purple aubretia is permitted, and Upwards insist that it is “aubreta”.)

Here's the room that goes with this garden: “the Medici prints, the little silver bowls, the mauve net curtains, the shot-silk covers, the beaten copperware, the Chinese lanterns and Honesty in pewter mugs – it was all so pathetically genteel and arty.”

A spinster wears: “lucky charm bracelets and semi-precious necklaces”. Jingling or clanking jewellery was warned against by etiquette authorities.

“Dresses on Priscilla would always seem like hand-woven djibbahs.” A djibbah was what we’d call a kaftan (though the word was also used for a child’s overall). They became a uniform for progressive women like Priscilla who in the late 19th century refused on principle to wear corsets. They also became short-hand for a certain kind of woman: intellectual and fey. She might be a social reformer or a spiritualist.

Tony, an elderly conservative Catholic, visits his Oxford cousins: He entered that awful sitting-room with its Heal’s furniture, its depressingly sensible typewriter and long low bookcases… Hard little, bright-covered books full of facts, a dangerous array of so-called scientific knowledge that tried to treat man as a machine. Long, low bookcases were a marker for university lecturers. Penguin (orange) and Pelican (turquoise) paperbacks were full of the “illusory paradise of refrigerators for all”.

Priscilla has written to Tony to say that her husband is ill. Now she regrets it. The sort of wretched, hysterical outburst that one hopes so much will never happen, but which always does at these hateful, morbid times. According to her code, all expression of human emotion is hysterical or morbid.

Kitty visits her relative’s employers: “Kitty came downstairs to meet them, her fox fur and eye-veil resumed for the occasion.” The net eye-veil was part of her hat.

Margaret’s “dainty” room features: “Venetian glass swans and crocheted silk table mats”.

In another story, landlady Greta is out with her elderly boyfriend. He had told her so often that physical caresses in public were ‘just not done’… She no longer said ‘serviette’… She never went out now without gloves… but she also no longer blew into them when she took them off. She was jealous sometimes… but he told her not to be so suburban. Blowing into your tight leather gloves was a class marker: But did anybody really?

Here's poor Jacky Bast from Howard's End in the early 1900s: Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls – ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. (She also "sees to" her hat by blowing on it.)

World of Interiors 2

Dough-craft wall plaque

The most recent house a middle-class Upward can live in is Edwardian – they haven’t reached 30s Arts and Crafts yet. Chinese millionaires love Tudoresque houses – they think it’s the most upmarket style. For Upwards, this is just another reason for loathing all things Jacobethan. Upwards hate half-timbering because it is just stuck on, not "honest" – though they don't mind classical fireplaces modelled on Greek temples.

In a BBC poll (Sept 2013), “period properties” were ranked:
Georgian
Victorian
Edwardian
Inter-war
Post-war
Upwards, with their Edwardian terrace houses and genuine enamel colanders, like to live in the past (with central heating, broadband, digital TV and Macbooks, of course). The 20s and 30s are too recent for them. Hipster Rowena Upward is always trying to revive a moment that all her relatives will loathe. She’s buying up 80s jewellery, hoping for a boom. She's always ahead – back in the 80s she arranged broken bits of blue-and-white china on an old tin tray and hung a single chandelier luster in her window to reflect the light. When Samantha tried to copy her, it never really worked – the sherds and crystals got lost in the clutter of postcards, nicknacks, books and coffee mugs. However hard she dug, she couldn’t find enough blue-and-white fragments in the garden. She suspected Rowena of breaking plates on purpose.

An old-style millionaire built a many-gabled mansion in the 80s. “He added a 20-foot waterfall to the back of the house and installed an indoor shark tank and private burro zoo….” But ostentation is out. [Now] interiors are ripped out, to turn elegant collections of rooms into enormous voids.” (New York Times)

Upwards always call an eat-in kitchen a “kitchen/breakfast room” because they don’t want to imply that they’d eat dinner in their kitchen, even if they don’t have a separate dining room. And “diner” is American. Nor can they talk about “banquettes” or “breakfast nooks”.

The ever-wonderful Middle Class Handbook notes the way poshos mix old paperbacks, Cornishware mugs and Duralex glasses with expensive wine and looseleaf tea. “Their TVs are old and small.” This is real upper-class shabby chic. You have lived in the same house for decades (extra points if you’ve had the same holiday cottage for decades – preferably since the 20s). If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. You just add things, and the result is what “eclectic” café style is aiming at. You do the same with your clothes (and jewellery). And the holiday cottage is full of kilims and durries that have faded almost to extinction with age, also hardbacks with tattered dust jackets spotted with damp and mould.

Lower middle Jen Teale has spotless beige fitted carpets – she has them professionally steam cleaned. According to the Middle Class Handbook Brits buy 25% fewer carpets now than they did in 2006. Jen hangs a reproduction Renoir over the fireplace. Only Teales and working-class Definitelies have “wall plaques” (the Sun, the Green Man, the Virgin Mary). About 20 years ago actress Jane Asher started up a craft magazine which was damned by a reviewer just quoting the words “doughcraft wall plaque”. Doughcraft was an 80s Upward craft – they have moved on to making their own bunting.

Very posh people and the Nouveau-Richards have dining pavilions in the garden.

More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 1

One or two, maybe three decorative pillows can work, but after that a bed starts to look like a department store showroom… Understand the virtues of patina, faded fabric, peeling paint, and old chintz. (Guardian, May 11 2012 – make it look as if your family has lived there for centuries)

A friend reports that a posher acquaintance is bullying him to buy curtains at Curtain Exchange because at Homebase you can’t avoid contact with common people. At Curtain Exchange you get curtains pre-owned by People Like Us.

Middle-class Upwards used to buy a cheap Victorian or Georgian “shell” and live in it while they did it up. This took years, so their look was bare plaster, colourful ethnic textiles, bare boards and a lot of dust. Can we now say what hell this was, and how we hate chipping layers of paint off ceiling roses, and how wonderful it is to buy a house you can move straight into? And employ tradesmen to do the work?

Upwards could never never have a sofa with controls (to raise a footrest, rotate a section, turn on the telly…) Or an extractor fan that rose from a kitchen island at the touch of a button. They really didn’t like dimmer switches – what happened to them? Upward sofas are never comfortable enough or big enough. They like to tell you that in the olden days people sat on hard, upright chairs.

People with Farrow and Ball painted doors don’t have doorbells, notes architect Charles Holland. (Hungarian immigrant George Mikes observed that the British won’t paint a name or a number on their houses.)

In the 70s, Upwards bought a Victorian rocking horse, had it restored, and placed it in the front window of their living room so passers-by could see how tasteful they were. They don’t have net curtains, so their front room is an advert for themselves.

The middle classes buy real old cottages and rework the interior to make it more “cottagey”.

Old carriage lamps outside your front door used to be a class marker for the middle middle Weybridges, but they seem to have gone out anyway. (They went with painted carriage or wagon wheels in your garden, or propped against your front wall, and those stone mushrooms barns used to stand on.)

When the middle classes (and upper) say “dining table” they mean one that will seat 12 – or 20 if you add extra leaves. No wonder you need a separate “dining room” to put it in. Middle-class Sam Upward is a bit puzzled when lower middle-class Jen Teale says she’s going to put a “dining table” by the window in her kitchen – she means a small, light table with four chairs. Upwards never eat at a table pushed against a wall (though they might at a pinch put one in a bay window).

The Nouveau-Richards don't care:
Hedge fund trophy home. Besides the usual basket-ball court and wine cellar, it has an observatory, a carousel, a 150-seat theatre, a petting zoo, a trading floor, and a fully equipped laboratory. Doonesbury

Nouveau-Richards have a media room with leather sofas and the flat-screen telly rather high up and far away on a wall. Not cosy.

Elin Nordegren, the former Mrs Tiger Woods, has demolished her termite-ridden, 90-year-old mansion and is building a replica in its place with:

9 bedrooms
2 large living rooms
huge formal dining room
2 kitchens
large pool
grotto
pool cabana with huge living room
2 jacuzzis
detached guest house with 3 bedrooms
3 guest bungalows
wine cellar
vast master wing with walk-in closet
basement that runs the entire length of the house

More décor here. And more here. And here.