Classy Quotes 23

As a family we did not number doctors, dentists, bank managers or similar worthies in our circle. No one in the immediate family had been to university. But my father was a naval officer, and while Mum’s father had started out as a travelling salesman, he ended up with his own canning factory and a small country estate in North Yorkshire. (Jeremy Paxman)

Middle class values include loving privacy and self determination then criticising working class communities for not being communal enough. (Matthew Whitfield ‏@mwhitfield80)

Residents of Kensington Palace Gardens feared being swamped by “the masses” if their street joined a cycling network, newly released letters reveal. Transport for London’s plans for a “Quietway” through one of the capital’s most expensive roads were shelved last month after residents complained that it would ruin their “tranquillity” and pose security risks. (Evening Standard)

If the requirement was [for schools] to take 80% disadvantaged, middle-class parents would avoid because what is most desired is social selection. (Ros McMullen ‏@RosMcM)

Doesn't 'toff' translate as 'someone who sounds posher than me'? (And the unmentionable 'p' word as 'someone who sounds more common than me'?) (AG)

She learned about being nice in her two years at college... Her fellow students were “the nicest and most reasonable individuals I had ever met... That’s what being middle-class-in-the-world is about. Darkness is managed or hidden.” “It's about being sensible... You can’t let yourself go... except when you do.” (Carolyn Steedman reviews Respectable by Lynsey Hanley in the LRB 2016)

A parlourmaid giving evidence to the government inquiry (into the “servant crisis” in the 20s) explained that she had suffered ‘untold misery’ because invitations to parties warned her not to admit what she did for a living. Her friends didn’t want their friends to ‘mix with servants’. (She left Belvoir Castle and went to work for Agatha Christie, who was very fond of her. LRB July 2016. Christie herself sometimes joked that if the writing didn't pan out she could always get a job as a parlourmaid.)

Leadsom deciding to spend more time with her National Trust oven gloves. (FB)

The publication had been a home for people who valued culinary expertise, wrote Kimball—a place with “respect for those who had earned the chops, as it were, who had a lifetime of good breeding and experience in order to stand at the cultural helm.” (Cooks Illustrated on the demise of Gourmet magazine)

It is well known that height is correlated with economic power. (LRB May 2016)

When I joined The Bookseller, I'd be asked 'which college' I went to. Took a while before realised it was Oxbridge college. (Danuta Kean ‏@Danoosha)

British middle-class Hell is a permanent signal failure, with the stalled train's passengers tutting quietly at the futility of it all. (Musa Okwonga ‏@Okwonga)

It never occurred to me to think I wasn’t a gentleman until Lady Burghclere pointed it out. (Evelyn Waugh)

Interview with Viscount Linley, Times June 2016-06-05

I ask what TV he watched growing up.
“There wasn’t any.”
No telly?
“My father put tinfoil over the front of it.”
So it looked like a jacket potato?
“So it mirrored our image. He said, ‘Now you can see how idiotic you look.’”
That’s so wonderfully snobby. Were you allowed tomato ketchup?
“No.”

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Childcare

Poor little mites

Upwards think they are excused having children who behave like children.

Middle classes of all stripes despise babies’ dummies.

If children are “resilient” we can be as cruel as we like to them and it won’t matter. And there's always some reason why we should be cruel to them:

Thomas Mann justified spoiling his eldest child over his 5 others with the line, "One should get the children used to injustice early." (AdamNathanielFurman @Furmadamadam)

The Fortean Times ran a piece on the abusive way the Greeks and Romans raised their children. Someone commented: “No wonder the Romans were cold, callous, sexually precocious and impulsive.” (Paraphrase.)

Middle class parents have a strange impulse to teach very very small children “how to grow their own crops” (and try unfamiliar foods, know where food comes from, eat with a knife and fork, manage risk, say please and thank you, understand money, and generally behave like a middle-aged adult). They really do wring their hands over the fact that “children today don’t know where food comes from”. It comes from the supermarket, you noodle. But they have to reinvent children + food x angst = guilt every few months so that they can keep ahead of the other parents. Turning up at parties with boxes of unsweetened vegan food which are all that poor little Milo is allowed to eat is sooooo five minutes ago.

David Cameron said we need “tiger mothers” to encourage children to study, and “character” modules to teach children “resilience” and “perseverance”.

Letter to Times Jan 2016-01-14
Sir, Whatever happened to having supportive parents? Mine were supportive and encouraging, and I seemed to turn out all right. Tiger parenting does not help children as adults: it usually results in low self-esteem, failure to cope when life doesn’t go right and an inability to be independent. What happens when children fail to meet David Cameron’s “high expectations”? Tiger parenting is a short-term solution to the long-term raising of a child. Bronwyn Molony, Dublin

Even during the holidays I saw very little of them: They would be in another part of the house while I would stay upstairs... My mother hardly ever came to my attic floor, but I could hear her running her bath... my world was the staff. They were my only friends. (Redeeming Features, Nicky Haslam on his “privileged” childhood in a stately home)

As a new biography of Evelyn Waugh is published (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited), a former Times theatre critic tells the story of the novelist’s first wife, his mother, Evelyn Nightingale (Times June 2016)

Her troubles began with her birth in Charles Street, Mayfair, in 1903, since she was meant to be a boy and heir to a new title in danger of becoming extinct... She was the last of four daughters.

As she always said, it was a different era with different ideas about upbringing, yet seldom can a girl have been so neglected. Evelyn never went to school but was semi-educated by a series of mostly German governesses, one of whom, she recalled, stuck pins in her arms if she rested them on the table. And she seldom saw her father, who died when she was 17, remembering a benignly aloof figure...

But then she was kept away from him by a mother she found terrifying. “One could never explain one’s presumed misdemeanours because the words froze in one’s mouth or didn’t get as far as freezing,” she wrote in an informal memoir many years later, adding that Lady Winifred never came into the nursery or schoolroom. “There were no goodnights, loving or otherwise, or prayers being heard at bedtime.”

Her greatest friends, she wrote, were the servants, who were “kindly and understanding”, though she was forbidden to play with their children. And her greatest love was for her nanny, a tiny, gentle woman who was sacked when Evelyn was seven...

[In her own words:] I felt “as it were in a cage with no knowledge of the world or the real behaviour of others.”

[She became a Bright Young Thing – no wonder they were so aimless and self-destructive and amoral. After her two divorces, her sister cut her off almost entirely.]

The four Johnson children mostly just had each other. They read constantly. Rachel can’t remember any playdates. It sounds as if the parenting regime was one of benign neglect, which is perhaps why all the Johnsons so crave attention now. “Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives,” is how she puts it. (Times on Rachel Johnson, June 2015)

Middle class neglect is always called “benign neglect”. There’s nothing benign about it.

It’s a Tory trope at the moment that children must be taught to “take responsibility”, otherwise they’ll grow up to be “victims”. Apparently there are no perpetrators, only people who think they are victims, when actually their plight is ENTIRELY their own fault. (If this is true, why aren’t assault victims prosecuted and sent to jail, while their attackers go free? And when someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff, why don’t you just turn yourself in?)


More here.

Transports of Delight

On many modes of mass transit, people have long been divided into classes based on how much they can afford to pay.

The 1930s, when trams were looked down on as transport for hoi polloi. (Roger Nuttall)

People are thinking of driving less. (according to Twitter)

I once shared a flat in East London with some snobs who would only get fish and chips from the Seashell in Lisson Grove (several miles away). They looked down on me for getting local takeaways. They hadn’t worked out – or refused to see – that I hadn’t got a car and couldn't drive across London just to get some chips.

I can’t drive. This bothers some people.

I was also asked to bring a suitcase back to London (that someone had left behind), when I’d arrived by train and would presumably be leaving the same way, carrying my own luggage. One Christmas I was given a huge set of terracotta serving dishes – I never returned to Wiltshire for them.

Other friends were mortified that I travelled by bus, bullied me to learn to drive, and urged me to get a bicycle. The tube (hot, crowded) is somehow OK. Buses on the other hand are full of common people, and you have a lovely view of places middle class people are not allowed to know about.

When you’re underground, you can’t see the places you’re travelling through. So you can get the tube somewhere acceptable and familiar, and get out somewhere acceptable and familiar. And you have somehow not gone through the places in between.

How dared I live somewhere not near a tube station? How else could they place me on the class map?

Also if I had a car I wouldn’t have to live near a bus stop, which would be on a high street full of Costcutters – I could live in a Victorian conversion down a leafy avenue (dark and scary at night).

They were so sure they knew what was best for me – why was that? They also thought I ought to be married to a barrister and living in Fulham. Single women can’t help letting the class side down: we can't afford the lifestyle, the address or the dinner parties.

Actually Mayor Ken Livingstone vastly improved transport to North London – more 73s, and hopper buses that cross East to West. No wonder the middle classes  are moving in… Night buses and the new revived overground have made a difference too.

Bicycles
Beloved of hipsters and people in Stokey (with pod/trailer for the baby). Stokey dads also like baby buggies that look like lawnmowers. And their kids ride wooden tricycles. Or “dandy horses” – like a bike but with no pedals.

Definitelys ride the latest shape and style – they steal them from Weybridges. Upwards ride either a) the latest shape, style, fashion and technology or b) a deliberately old fashioned sit up and beg bike with a basket for your shopping, lecture notes or dog.

Cars
I suspect there are different kinds of car, and the one you buy speaks volumes about you to someone who knows the language. I can just about tell apart a people carrier, a Chelsea tractor, a limo and a bubble car. There must be some kind that looks cool but really brands you as a vulgarian…

But of course if you move to the country (the dream of all London-dwelling Upwards) you have to be able to drive. Just don’t forget that one day you might have to give up driving… Upwards think that they ought to live in the country – in a village, not a country town. And definitely not in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool or Birmingham.

Nouveau Richards drive bespoke Rollses with built-in champagne sets and cigar humidors.
Upwards could never drive something called a “minivan”.

Some men have long discussions about the amount of space you should leave between you and the car in front and how every other driver gets it wrong and why.

Posh people don’t clean their cars – outside or in. Teales and Weybridges have car hoovers.

In the 60s, stout middle-aged ladies rode motor scooters, wearing a grim expression, a tweed skirt and a special very uncool peaked scooter helmet that buttoned under the chin.

Horses
I was waiting for hipsters to bring back the horse and cart (I’m sure there are some who commute up and down the Lea by kayak). But horses are terminally unhip, thanks to their popularity with Stow Crats and Weybridges. Nouveau Richards buy a big place in the country with stables, paddock and indoor riding school (manege). Which everybody calls a “menage” now.

Trains
Are full of teenagers, old people, families with small children, and tourists with too much luggage who get on at Gatwick and have a loud conversation about what fun it is to ride on a train for a change. Would be great if they weren’t full of people. Used to have first, second and third class. Punch ran jokes about common people getting into first by mistake (I say Bert, we’re all among the toffs!) or featuring a timid middle class traveller abroad finding himself among peasant women with chickens. In wartime morale-raiser movies everybody travels together in crowded carriages where you may be handed a baby or a beer bottle. Quiet carriages and family carriages are the new second and third class.

Choose Your Words Carefully 5

Lindsey Chapman

Today at Hull Journalism Day a student asked if she needed to change her accent to get on. No, no, no, no, no! (@DrMatthewSweet)

Trainee teachers with northern accents are being pressured to speak "the Queen's English" in southern classrooms. According to a new study, accents most associated with the Home Counties are favoured by the teacher training profession... Experts say teachers with northern accents are discriminated against in a profession that would not tolerate prejudice based on race and religion. They dubbed it the "last form of acceptable prejudice" in our society. (Sun May 2016)

At Bar school “I felt unwelcome from the get-go because of my accent. I sound northern.... but that was constantly pointed out in conversation, particularly when I was first introduced to someone. Anywhere past Watford Junction is apparently northern... Then people automatically think you are from a working-class background.” (Charlotte Proudman)

Clare Foges reveals in The Times that employers filter applicants on accents. Bring back elocution lessons! If you have a marked regional or Cockney accent it probably makes sense to damp it down a bit, but don’t imagine that the posher, the better. (She warns against copying Brian Sewell.) A strongly marked “posh” accent can also lose you the job. Whatever anyone tells you, it’s best to blend in and be as neutral as possible. “Earlier this year the Social Mobility Commission found that law and accountancy firms were applying a ‘poshness test’ to job applicants, which favoured middle class mannerisms and accents... When recruiters talk about the need for ‘polished’ candidates they mean not just the dry-cleaned M&S suit but the way they speak... It is time to revive the tweedy old concept of elocution.” (2015-10-27. And how can elocution be “tweedy”?)

One employer spoke of the importance of “holidays that you’ve been on, places you’ve visited”. Another employer said: “Accents make a difference, the things people talk about.” “Elite firms define ‘talent’ according to a number of factors, such as drive, resilience, strong communication skills and above all confidence and ‘polish’, which participants in the research acknowledged can be mapped on to middle-class status and socialisation.” Times, June 2015

This is great! All I have to do is affect a slightly plummier accent than my own and people will give me free stuff! (in America) (@AlexPaknadel)

This hotel I'm staying at is too posh for me. I just hope I can maintain my cover long enough before they realise I'm not One Of Them. What are the signs? Everyone is pronouncing their Ts. (Twitter exchange)


GENTEELISMS
Howard Weybridge pens his memoirs, which he hopes a publisher will peruse. It will be quite a weighty tome! Bryan Teale puts up a sign in the foyer warning visitors not to consume beverages on the premises. Samantha Upward shudders at lunch when Jen Teale talks about sides, mains and Yorkshires and asks for a toasted sandwich instead of a sani or toastie. Only Weybridges and Teales say “prior to” for “before”. And Howard still uses a “fount pen” and says things are "well-nigh impossible" of "of paramount importance". Jen aks “Is this an opportune moment?”

Modern genteelisms, according to the Lady magazine: cleaner (daily), posh (smart), nana (granny), expecting (pregnant) and passed (dead). (2016)

The fogeys who hang on to kyeneemar for cinema also use “superpose” for “superimpose”.


PRONUNCIATION
Someone on the radio just said "dr-arse-tically" without actually being the Queen. (Mr Clungetrumpet ‏@StiffPigeon)

A teacher on Radio 4 talked about “skaws, cricklum, ashoom” when she meant “schools, curriculum, assume”. Or, as Samantha would say, “skooooools, kew-rick-you-lum, ass-yewm”.

When they quit work, Stow-Crats call it "retahment"; Upwards: retyerment; Teales and Weybridges: retyement.

Upwards eat samwiches or samwidges; Teales and Weybridges munch sand-witches.

Upwards call the nuts “ahmonds”, Teales and Weybridges call them “allmonds”. Spaniards call them “almendros”. Where did “ahmond” come from?

Weybridges have trouble with words like Tata and Lady Gaga (Tar-tar Steel), though they can probably say “mama” without thinking. (Likewise they have no trouble with Loch Ness, but claim there is a composer called “Bark”.)

Caro Stow Crat calls the upmarket jeweller Asprey “Aspry” (and the bird of prey an ospry); Eileen and Jen call it “Ass-pray’s” and would love to spot an “oss-pray” through binoculars.

Caro’s mother still calls the country OR-stria. Caro calls it a “plahstic” tablecloth (so practical), but Jen and manufacturers call them PVC or vinyl tablecloths. “Plastic” sounds so tacky.

Jen and Sharon prefer short vowels (rhyming sloth with cloth etc), and never quite grasped the rule that only a doubled consonant makes a short vowel – they just put them in everywhere. Sam is trying to train herself to do the same. She doesn’t want to drawl like Caro. But it is terribly Teale/Weybridge to talk about “larther” instead of “lather” with a short A. Upwards avoid the word altogether – and even the thing. They don’t like soap that lathers, it makes washing too easy and enjoyable. (Did people ever “garther” in the church hall in real life?) And it’s Jen and Eileen who bake batches of scones to rhyme with “owns” rather than “dons”.

Sam cringes when Jen says “lenth” for “length”, and Eileen wails when people drop the Gs off gerunds (goin’ and comin’).

Matthew Parris thinks we should say Herford for Hertford and Cuventry for Coventry. He says his lower-middle-class grandparents insisted on it, but these pronunciations would have been old-fashioned in his grandparents’ day. I don’t think anyone calls Lamb’s Conduit street “Lamb’s Cundit Street” any more, either. And De Beauvoir Town is usually said the French way, not as “De Beaver”. (I’ve never heard anyone say Cuventry.)


ARCHNESS
Very posh people are arch – this does not translate, in fact it probably comes across as camp.

“...with nervous whimsicality... She said, smiling coyly, ‘I’m afraid I am the bearer of ill tidings.” (Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear)

In the 30s, a certain kind of Upward girl used to talk in old-fashioned clichés, with great emphasis. She couldn’t say “I cut my finger and it bled really badly” she had to say “I was simply STEEPED in GORE!” Ngaio Marsh sends up this kind of girl in Colour Scheme (she’s always saying things like “WELCOME to the HUMBLE ABODE” or “I was living in a HOLLOW MOCKERY”, until an admirer tells her off), and there’s one in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (“Oh, are you a Frinton expert?”). If any Upward women still do this (they wrote like this until quite recently), Weybridges and Teales are baffled. Modern readers are also mystified when they come across this style in old books – think it is “twee” or “bright”. The poor girls had probably been told to be original.

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.