Camera Ready

Summer is officially upon us, so it’s time to remember what to pack for the season’s travels. In addition to the usual sunscreens, road atlases, and iPods, might I suggest that you bring a camera and use it for more than snapping images of friends and family posed against landmarks?

Being camera ready is especially critical travel advice if you are a design junkie like me. After all, I managed to visit Paris a half-dozen times before I ever set foot in the Louvre or ascended the elevator in the Eiffel Tower. What was I doing with my time in the French capital? Visiting antiques shops and flea markets and photographing whatever caught my eye: neoclassical-style balconies whose pattern might look good as the embroidery on a dinner napkin, a medieval window whose quatrefoil shape inspired me to plan a similarly-shaped planting bed at the center of a courtyard garden. I have baskets and files full of photographs like this, disembodied bits of architecture and gardens that often serve as launching pads for home improvement projects, snapped everywhere from Jeffersonville, New York to the bustling streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Recently, I spent four days in Madrid, crisscrossing the city with my digital camera, an Olympus D-630 Zoom, at the ready. Though I had a few critical shopping goals (such as my daughter’s request that I buy her “a pretty dress and tapping shoes,” i.e. black patent leather shoes like those Shirley Temple wore in her movies) and as well as some magazine business to attend to (you can read all about the best Madrid antiques shop in Traditional Home’s international-theme issue next spring), most of my days were spent in aimless but eagle-eyed pursuit of details that eventually could spark anything from a curtain design to a styling tip that might make its way, subtly, into the pages of Traditional Home.

In Madrid, this meant, for me, photographing the pagoda-like rooftops of the charming brick outbuildings amid the gardens of Parque del Bueno Retiro; the whimsical silhouettes might one day be replicated in a pair of small storage sheds that I would like to build at the end of my kitchen garden. I snapped a zebra-striped ottoman, a white Spanish fan trimmed with black lace, and a curiously beautiful piece of Biedermeier furniture whose sinuous mahogany frame held aloft a galvanized metal tray that was designed to hold flowers or potted plants. Also in the camera’s memory is a bewildering array of JPGs of store and street signs with interesting fonts. What I will do with these is anybody’s guess.

Particularly inspiring were the window displays of fashion shops in the Salamanca neighborhood. This upscale, tree-shaded area is home to blue-chip stores like CH Carolina Herrera (a boutique that is home to the American designer’s diffusion line of clothing and accessories) as well as innumerable shops that cater to antiques lovers, parents of the very young (Madrid has terrific baby and children’s clothes, especially in the department store El Corte Inglés ) and well-heeled brides-to-be. (If you’re in the market for a distinguished but romantic nuptial ensemble, I highly recommend the ivory- and tea-stain-colored dresses at Mi Querida Señorita at Calle Claudio Coello 83.) After a quick lunch at the standing-room-only counter of the old-guard delicatessen/bakery La Mallorquina on Calle Mayor, where you wash down tea-party-size sandwiches with a pint-size glass of beer, I marched out into the heart of Salamanca’s shopping district, ready to aim and shoot.

Since fashion design frequently influences interior design, the windows of dress shops are a particularly good place to put your decorative mind into gear. A dotted-swiss petticoat peeping several inches below the hem of a printed-cotton skirt in one shop provided me with the solution for a pair of flea-market curtains I have never used because they stop about six inches from the floor. Why lengthen them with a contrasting hem when I could install a window treatment made of two pairs of curtains hung on back-to-back rods, with the undercurtain exposed in the manner of an errant slip? A white cotton skirt decorated with widely spaced horizontal rows of crocheted ribbons made me think about adding similar rows of lacy decoration along the bottom half of the plain, readymade cotton or linen curtains you can find at Country Curtains, Silk Trading Co., and Pottery Barn. Equally attractive would be a curtain trimmed with bands of grosgrain ribbon, in a variety of widths and colors.

At Zara, the Spanish fashion chain that deftly churns out reasonably accurate and highly affordable versions of the latest styles within weeks of their appearance on the world’s runways, I got on my knees to photograph a voluminous New Look-style skirt composed of what looked like multiple flounces of artfully shredded tulle and vintage lace. Imagine how romantic-but-rugged that would look translated in to a full-length tablecloth; impractical, yes, but worth remembering. Spanish fashion designers also were using enough eyelet-style cotton to make me wonder why one doesn’t see more of this material in everyday decoration, turned into tailored window blinds or bedskirts or pillow covers slipped over contrasting linings.

Madrid’s antiques shops and interior-design boutiques were full of ideas to steal or adapt for domestic use, too. The proprietor of one shop had filled a tall, wide, cylindrical glass vase with a bouquet of antlers. (Conservationists, stay calm: They were naturally shed.) The effect was startling but simple, like something the late, great 1960s decorator Billy Baldwin would have done if he had been commissioned to refurbish a ski chalet in Gstaad. At another shop, this one around the corner from the elegantly hip five-star Urban Hotel, I was impressed by the sight of four large chunks of white coral that had been stacked on small wood pedestals atop a 19th-century plateau. That’s a kind of long, low, mirrored platform, an old-fashioned accessory that was typically used as a stage for candles and flower arrangements on a dining table.

That plateau arrangement is going to be recreated, somewhat more humbly, on my porch this summer, as a dining table centerpiece. A rectangular sheet of mirrored glass from the hardware store will stand in for that costly silver-and-mirror antique, and I’ll round up some artificial white branch, cluster, and corduroy coral from Seashell World and march them down the middle of the mirror. Tuck in a few votives here and there, and voila–a memorable summer centerpiece.

Next stop on my agenda? Munich. And, yes, I’ll be keeping my eyes open and the Olympus fully charged.