Décor Crimes Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Thebackstore.com explains popular home décor themes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here, and links to the rest.

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.

Decor Crimes in Quotes

 

Why do all regenerated harbourside spaces, anywhere in the world, feel and look exactly the same? Same paving, same glass office blocks, same bit of street art... same preserved crane, same selection of chain bars. (Guy Moore via Facebook)

Architects and planners the world over have bought the same "regenerated harbourside spaces" kit. (Tom Bourgeois)

My wife has painted a "feature wall" in our kitchen, using a cheery bright orange. My older son says that he now feels as if he's in a children's home, waiting to be fostered. (@Lord_Steerforth)

Victorian furniture, grave and heavy, appeared at variance with rose-coloured Axminster on the floor and rose-coloured damask at the windows... There was some kind of flowered paper on the walls, but almost every inch of it was covered by innumerable sketches, photographs, and engravings of famous pictures... the furniture vied with the walls in supporting photographs of every relation and friend she had ever had. (Patricia Wentworth’s The Chinese Shawl, 1941)

If ‘St Just’ had been pebble-dashed, with a circular recess for the door and an enormous gable... ‘St Anthony’ must be purple brick, with a portico supported on pillars like Tudor chimneys. (Mary Renault The Friendly Young Ladies)

The sort of man whose taste might run to a cocktail bar in the living-room. (Judge at the trial of a nightclub owner and fruit machine salesman)

Urban motorway philosophy. Knock down half the city to be able to drive in quicker but then have no city worth visiting. See Birmingham. (Martin Battle via Facebook)

McMansions... are thrown together from a mishmash of signifier features (ie “Palladian” windows, “impressive” facades, fake stone, fake brick, fake stucco, columns, multi-storey foyers, at least two garage bays, multiple surface materials, “cook’s” kitchens - read as oversized, master suites - read as oversized, master baths as part of master suites - read as oversized, etc.) (Zach Woods on FB)

The Art Journal in the mid-19th century deprecated “landscapes and pictures” on pottery, 3D naturalistic patterns on 2D surfaces (especially cabbage roses on your carpet), and they loathed the imitation of ribbons on fabrics. They moaned about a “perspective representation of a railway station” as a repeating pattern on wallpaper. They were not keen on cut-glass tableware. They were horrified by a popular blue jug in the form of a tree trunk. There was a special Chamber of Horrors at the nascent V&A to display these solecisms. Dickens wrote about an unhappy Mr Crumpet who realises he is living among these “horrors”. “The paper in my parlour contains four kinds of bird of paradise, besides bridges and pagodas.” So what were we supposed to have on our walls? “Sober, conventional treatments of foliage, exhibiting considerable skill in design and arrangement,” wrote The Builder in 1855.

Candid snaps ... show how the couple have transformed the crumbling period property into a polished country pile complete with marble floors, indoor pool and a walk-in wardrobe to house the designer clothing collection... Personal touches - including an antique chandelier that once hung in a Northampton theatre, and a giant family portrait hung in the bathroom - lend the home a classical feel... The boys' bedrooms are decked out like a castle and an airport. (Daily Mail. The ground floor is marble-tiled throughout, with waist-height panelling in a dark colour and “metro tile” shaped panels. There's a fireplace with logs but no fire irons, and stone surround so narrow that you could never safely light a fire in it.

Usually what happens is that buildings usually get a wildly unsuccessful makeover as they go out of fashion and are then left in such a bastardised state that they aren't worth preserving. You used to see a lot of weak attempts to postmodernise modernist buildings in the 80s. Now we see attempts to modernise postmodern buildings. (Austen Redman via FB)

More here, and links to the rest.

The Diary of a Nobody

I’ve just reread George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1888-89). Paul Bailey calls its hero, Charles Pooter, “majestically uninteresting”. The chapters were originally serialised in the humorous magazine Punch.

Pooter is a clerk in a City firm, and when the story starts he has just rented a house in Holloway that backs onto the railway. It’s a “suburban villa with a stucco-column portico, resembling a four-post bedstead,” as their friend Mr Huttle later describes it. Charles and his wife Carrie live there with one servant until they are joined by their son, Lupin.

The big joke is that Pooter thinks that everything happens to him is worth recording. He also considers that he’s doing pretty well, and is a cut above the tradesmen he employs. Punch’s middle-class readers were supposed to find it a perfect scream that a clerk should think himself as good as themselves. There's a solecism on every page.

The Pooters invite friends to “meat tea”, and Carrie frequently cooks party food (jam puffs) herself. Carrie’s clothes are both frumpy and vulgar: a pink Garibaldi jacket and blue-serge skirt, an olive outfit with pink bows, and a sky-blue party frock.

Most of the Pooters' friends are either bounders (Gowing), boring (Cummings) or pretentious (Mrs James) – the only exceptions are the colourless Mr Franching of Peckham, and Pooter’s kindly but old-fashioned employer, Mr Perkupp.

Pooter has some puritanical attitudes – he disapproves of amateur dramatics and spiritualism – but his household seem to drink rather a lot, even swigging champagne out of tumblers. Pooter’s inability to recognise a hangover is a running gag.

Lupin is a trial – he makes a lot of friends at a local theatrical society, and they constantly turn up at the house, take advantage of the older Pooters, and baffle them by spouting meaningless catchphrases. However, the Pooters love a good laugh, and are constantly in stitches over Charles’s puns.

Charles and Carrie do up the house themselves. He attacks everything that doesn’t move with cheap enamel paint. Carrie attaches silk bows to the corners of “our new enlarged and tinted photographs”, and arranges “some fans very prettily on the top and on each side” of a new mirror. She’s catching on to Japonaiserie, a bit late. She decorates her buffet table with “fairy lamps”: small coloured glass nightlight holders.

Pooter admires a friend’s house: “It was full of knick-knacks, and some plates hung up on the wall. There were several little wooden milk-stools with paintings on them; also a white wooden banjo, painted by one of Mr Paul Finsworth’s nieces.” Arts and Crafts style had reached the suburbs.

Mr Perkupp takes Lupin on as a clerk, but the boy drops a brick by recommending a rival firm to a valued client. Mr Perkupp is forced to let Lupin go, but the lad falls on his feet. He seems to have a knack for making money, and gets engaged to an heiress (sister of “Posh’s three-shilling hats”). So what if she bleaches her hair, smokes, is several years older than him, and has an annoying laugh?

Mr Perkupp rewards Pooter with a rise in salary, and after Charles manages to acquire an even wealthier client for the firm, buys the freehold of the Pooters’ house.

“You’re a good man, Mr Perkupp,” stammers Pooter. “No, you’re the good man,” responds Perkupp, and he’s right. Apart from his copper-bottomed dullness, Pooter’s only fault is snobbery. And so we leave them to live happily ever after.

Middlesex by John Betjeman references some of these characters.

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.

World of Interiors 11

We’re buying wallpaper again, apparently.

This ladder will make a perfect towel rail in a big farmhouse kitchen. (Philip Serrell) Perhaps this is what they mean by “Modern Victorian”.

Only the Nouveau-Richards have the courage to set the TV IN the fireplace.

Even-more-bohemian Rowena Upward has moved again – she’s found a big Victorian house that was turned into government offices in the 50s. She’s keeping all the original features: cream paint, frosted glass partitions, steel filing cabinets and green baize noticeboards.

It’s said that when people got colour TVs, they drew their net curtains back to display them to the street. In North London, the absence of net curtains shows off your front room with its piano, bookcases, antique globe and restored rocking horse. The last two serve no function apart from expressing your status. (There’s a company somewhere re-distressing over-restored rocking horses.)

"Get the industrial loft look!" says Vinterior. With “rustic club chairs”, ie very distressed leather armchairs. What are they doing in an “industrial” loft? Worry not, you can also get vintage industrial stools that look like the real thing.

Samantha Cameron, wife of the ex-prime minister, who has a clothes line to promote, invites us into her lovely home in the Cotswolds. (Lucy Halfhead in Harpers Bazaar, Aug 2017, paraphrase)

She has an antique red lacquer cabinet – but it's shoved in a corner with a row of straw hats arranged jokily on the top. There's a lot of stripped, reclaimed wood (mirror, table, boxes). Walls, ceiling and floor are shades of beige. In the living room there are beige sofas and, as someone cattily pointed out, a “faux-fur throw”. Fairy lights are draped above the mantelpiece, but she should move that nice painting of roses before it gets smoke-damaged. Anyone who thinks they have a touch of class themselves is mortified that Sam Cam could splash her interiors over the pages of an American magazine that calls the place where she lives a “home”. And didn’t she get that wicker log basket and throw from her mother’s tat shop? Mrs Cameron has a poster in the kitchen reading “Calm down dear, it’s only a recession”. As somebody said recently, words should never be used as décor. Unless it’s a neon by Tracey Emin reading Every Part of Me Is Bleeding.

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 7 (in Quotes)

The Times recently ran a whole spread on the “new snobbery”. Here’s a paraphrase.

Avoid:
a Buddha head from Homebase in your garden
scented candles that aren’t Diptyque
mirrored furniture
modular sofas
pot plants unless they’re orchids
trailing plants indoors
“One of those disturbingly American professional family portraits”
“Anything that is over-complicated, over-designed or oversized” – they’re all “intrinsically vulgar”
Overfinch Range Rovers (apparently the company adds luxury customisation to the utility vehicle)

Hilary Rose agrees that wide-screen TVs are “common”. Also scatter cushions, and giving your child crisps in public (has to be rice cakes).

Style guru Peter York says he’s going to get a wide-screen TV “whether it’s couth or uncouth”. But he’s tired of Scandinavian knock-off interiors. He has a good word for Eames chairs “They were meant for the masses”. Don’t be too immaculate, he admonishes, but avoid the opposite “exposed brick walls and bashed floors”.

Designer Sophie Rogerson regrets that surface-mounted sinks and mosaic tiles have gone downmarket “Now it’s about more characterful, artisanal styles” (what can she mean?). And avoid fake shagreen: “It’s one small step from generic to vulgar.” She doesn’t like “high-gloss” kitchens with “subway” tiles. (I think she means the ones that make your kitchen look like a prison or public lavatory.)

Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders. (subtoptian.blogspot.co.uk)

They had smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants... There was in the elder lady’s [bedroom] a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a family genius, and in the younger’s a souvenir from some centennial or other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch’s conviction that the application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days. (Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton describes two middle-class ladies visiting a nouveau riche family)

People aren’t buying ornaments as much as they were. (Christina Trevanion)

Rubbishing modern architecture is a default setting for much of the British bourgeoisie. (Jeremy Paxman)

You can immediately spot the newcomers’ houses. They are the ones who have done away with the turquoise striped curtains and hung up the rattan blinds instead. They have removed the fringed lampshades and put up Habitat fixtures. They have ripped out the neon-patterned carpet and polished up the wooden floorboards. They have painted the orange geometric wallpaper white. They have moved out the lime green Dralon armchairs and put in the bent cane. They have replaced the black Naugahyde sofa with a pine framed double convertible bed and the tin bath with a stainless steel sink... They have left enough room to walk round the tables and chairs rather than trip over them. (Hackney in the early 80s, Glenys Roberts, Metropolitan Myths. She goes on to say that the Hackney residents wait for the incomers to bring in the ”furry lilac pouffes, plastic chandeliers, maroon and gilded china knick-knacks” and paint the front door “the regulation savage purple, hot pink or chrome yellow”. Working-class décor has changed more in 25 years than the middle-class variety.)

Very rich people have panic rooms, according to the Times 28 March 2015. “There were vaults as well... with marble floors, sliding walls for paintings, a piano, wine storage and an area to relax in.”

There can be something absurd or even melancholy about the open-plan minipalaces some middle-class Britons consider essential for civilised living. (Guardian Nov 2015-11-10)
Why do people put their pots [saucepans] on display, especially when they collect dust? (uglyhousephotos.com)

Hideous solidity was the characteristic of the Podsnap plate. Everything was made to look as heavy as it could, and to take up as much room as possible... (Our Mutual Friend (The “plate”, is silver-plate – the knives and forks.)

Display domes are a massive trend – the silhouette and paper-cutting look is really on-trend. (House Gift July 2012)

My sisters used to do that candle-in-a-wine-bottle wax dripping thing in the early 1970s. (Ugly House Photos blog)

They all went into a room full of antimacassars and lunched off boiled mutton and caper sauce... She remembered suddenly the horsehair sofa and the antimacassars in the furnished rooms at Wiltsbury. (Giant’s Bread, Agatha Christie, 1930. Antimacassars are embroidered linen cloths placed on the backs of chairs to protect their upholstery from the macassar oil in mens’ hair. They only disappeared from British Rail seating – reduced to strips of orange acrylic – around the 80s. Caper sauce is melted butter mixed with chopped capers.)

A teenager’s bedroom in the 30s: “They saw a looking-glass draped with clouds of pink... the meagre furniture was in white painted wood – plain, cheap stuff, but sound. It had tawdry decorations of drapery. On the walls were pinned a number of newspaper photographs of beauties, male and female – film stars, stars of society.” (Clue for Mr Fortune by HC Bailey)

Her decorating mantra, “something pink, and something ugly, in every room”—riots of roses and hideous tooled leather covers for the Radio Times. (Redeeming Features, Nicky Haslam)

I think the tiny windows might be the product of regulation. I hate them!... What's annoying about this sort of thing and the mock-Georgian of the 70s is that it shows such a poor eye. The architect seems to have had no sense of proportion and no real ability to look at the buildings whose style he is copying. But it can work well. "Post Office Georgian" is usually very good. (JP)

This sort of thing has got a following in Brighton and London. It’s very much a studenty sort of look. (Bargain Hunt auctioneer discussing a purple cubist cocktail set)

Artex swirled across the ceilings as if it were a Cypriot taverna, embossed wallpaper peeled away from the dried-up paste hiding dodgy plaster, the nubs of the old gas mantels poked through the walls and the chimney breast still jutted out into the kitchen. (Linda Grant in The Guardian on a Crouch End maisonette in the 90s. That’s gas “mantles”.)

It had front and back gardens with a swing, rose bushes, a rockery of glittery stone and alpine plants, a garage, and an outside coal-shed. A row of Toby jugs grinned and grimaced from an ornament rail in the hall. (ditto on the Liverpool house she grew up in)

The room is an embarrassing mash-up of contemporary design clichés, from bare utilities to patches of brickwork exposed by “torn” plaster, folksy wooden dressers and “vintage” lampshades. (Giles Coren Times 2015-01-24)

 I saw what had been a simple bungalow and had been almost entirely rebuilt into something much bigger: a massive through kitchen (all granite surfaces and all the latest gizmos) to dining area (dining table with removable top revealing a working pool table) to TV area (with massive projection screen), small  nursery, small office, small bedroom, marble bathroom, master bedroom with big ensuite marble bathroom and dressing area, etc. – and then upstairs had a big bedroom, two small bedrooms, another bathroom, and a large low-ceilinged area for storage or playing with trains. Also a double-garage which had been turned into a very comfortable workshop, complete with electricity, water, and gas, also with an upstairs suitable for the biggest train set you've ever seen. And throughout, every room had the latest gadgets and gizmos, all carefully thought out. For example, not just the garage door but also the gate in the fence were electrically-operated, so you could drive straight off and close everything up by remote control without stopping. (A house-hunting friend writes)


More here, and links to the rest.

World of Interiors 6 (in Quotes)

My parents replaced the old 50s stuff with a refained sort of repro Queen Anne with cabriole legs. (Blog commenter)

The flat above the café... was furnished in a style which seemed to have been copied from a Mae West film; the bedspread was of ruched orange silk, Spanish shawls and ostrich-feather fans copiously collected the dust on the walls, and pierrot dolls sprawled drunkenly on every horizontal surface. There was also a framed sampler, embroidered in cross-stitch and depicting a girl in a poke-bonnet and crinoline watering some hollyhocks. (West End People, Peter Wildeblood)

A throwback to the Celtic Tiger style, it looks like a car showroom. (New house near Dublin, Times March 2015)

Julian Fellowes confesses that he often thinks class is a hideous practical joke. ''For instance, the bathroom thing. There are people with comfortable bathrooms off their bedrooms, with carpets and things, and we always considered them rather middle class.” (NYT)

However rich the Astors, however grand and gilded the Cliveden salons, however luxe the food served in them, the upstairs arrangements were curiously spartan. Single gentlemen’s quarters were narrow bedrooms off school-like corridors, not very near a huge communal washroom. (Redeeming Features, Nicky Haslam)

Wicker chairs, a square of art carpet... On a bamboo table was an old vase which had been clumsily filled with golden chrysanthemums. (An arty interior from Edgar Wallace)

I don’t like modern design. I want something cosy and homely. Woodburner. That sort of thing. (Homes Under the Hammer)

Architectural fads are like pizza toppings, there's always a new one. (Maria Smith)

If something’s out of fashion, it’s probably about to come back. (James Lewis, Flog It!)

Everybody wanted to live in a Victorian cottage – and now everybody wants to live in a loft. (Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is)

Ebony elephants - there were also brass ash-trays, embroidered match-cases... a complete set of Dickens cigarette-cards, an electro-plated egg-boiler, a long pink cigarette-holder, several embossed boxes for pins from Benares... (the contents of a White Elephant stall from The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene)

A water-colour of the Bay of Naples at sunset and several steel engravings and a photograph of the former Mr Purvis in the odd dated uniform of 1914. The ugly arm-chair, the table covered with a thick woollen cloth, the fern in the window. (Also from The Ministry of Fear, describing a furnished sitting-room that hasn’t been updated for 50 years – not since the 1890s. Note the framed photo as a class marker.)

In Georgette Heyer's No Wind of Blame, written in the 30s, a second husband grumbles about the first, a big-game hunter, leaving the house full of elephant’s foot umbrella stands and a gong made out of hippo’s tusks.

The living room was smartly furnished in an up to date style – a good deal of chromium and some large, square-looking easy chairs upholstered in a pale fawn geometric fabric. (In Agatha Christie's One Two Buckle My Shoe, the flat’s inhabitant is trying to give the impression of middle-income conventional 30s taste.)

In the early 50s, American Muriel Beadle spent a year in Oxford – her husband was a professor. In These Ruins Are Inhabited, she is shocked to find that Oxford isn’t a theme park – Anglo Saxon towers are mixed in with department stores and supermarkets. She is also surprised by the many Victorian buildings, and confesses that England is marketed to Americans as cathedrals and thatched cottages, with everything else cropped out.

Nor did our new house... look quite as much like Anne Hathaway’s as I had thought it might... The room was so little. So full of things. Samplers under glass. Della Robbia plaques. Venetian watercolours in heavy gilt frames. Corner cupboards stuffed with porcelain... Lamps with lace shades and velvet bows. A ship’s clock. Ceiling lights with crystal drops... I let my thoughts drift back to the big living-room in our Spanish-style house, with its unadorned white plaster walls and its wide open spaces of rug.

I once worked at an American firm whose offices were laid out like urban sprawl. We were all so far apart that if you set off with a message you’d forgotten it by the time you reached your destination. In the open-plan areas everyone had too much space, and was just too far away to talk to easily. The US staff found raises voices vulgar, and all business was conducted in a murmur. It was such a relief to get back to a cramped British office where you could talk to the person next to you and yell across the room.

More here.

More here, and links to the rest.