Jennifer Flanders

I was pleased to discover that at our Classic Woman awards program a couple of years ago, Jennifer became so inspired by Classic Woman honoree Susan Fredman’s Designs for Dignity organization in Chicago that she decided to establish the same organization in New York. Designs for Dignity uses pro bono designer services, materials and finishes donated by manufacturers, vendors, clients and showrooms to create beautiful, healing spaces for nonprofits and residences that serve people in need (http://bit.ly/w1l6uS ). Its philosophy is that everyone has the right to live in a home they can be proud of, regardless of financial or social status.

For the New York branch’s project, Jennifer had the clever idea of challenging ten top designers to find old pieces of furniture to redesign, with the idea of auctioning them off at a charity event in New York December 1. (You don’t have to be there to bid on an item; in fact, you can do it online: http://bit.ly/rM2RJC). Here is a chair Jennifer herself redesigned with Amy Statuto.

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Jennifer says, “We felt this was an apropos way to raise funds because part of what Designs for Dignity does is take advantage of all the waste and excess in the design industry. We are using the fundraiser to show ways in which old pieces of furniture can be given new life and re-used rather than thrown away.  We have a wonderful group of designers donating both their time and resources to this event, and we are hopeful that not only will this effort raise funds to help our NY chapter get off the ground, but it will also raise awareness in the NY design community.”

Laura Bohn Associates designed the two-drawer chest below:

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The event, a cocktail reception and auction where the upcycled items can be viewed, is Thursday evening, December 1, from 6 to 9 p.m at Newel’s new showroom at 425 E. 53rd St. Tickets are available online for $75 and at the door for $90.  It’s sponsored by VandM, which sells vintage furniture, antiques,  fine art and jewelry from around the world online (vandm.com). Designers represented are Bradley Stephens, Kevin Walz, Laura Bohn Design Associates, Drew McGukin, Christopher Coleman, Etienne Coffinier and Ed Ku of Coffinier Ku Design, Jim Aman and John Meeks, Jennifer Flanders and Amy Statuto, and Doug and Gene Meyer.

Last week, the Stately Homes by the Sea Designer Show House opened at Holly Hill, a Georgian colonial estate built in 1934 and located near Red Bank, New Jersey. All proceeds from the house benefit the Visiting Nurse Association of Central Jersey’s home care, hospice and community-based programs and services. Traditional Home is honored to sponsor this show house, where the talent of 42 designers and landscapers from New York and New Jersey is on display until June 12, 2011.

Visit hollyhillestate.com for a little more history behind the house and images of the house as it looked before the show house designers came in and worked their magic. And visit statelyhomesbythesea.com for ticket prices, dates and times of operation, and directions to the house.

And now, for a sneak peek of just some of the rooms on display at this year’s show house:

*all photographs by Stacy Kunstel

The new house marks the 38th year of the event and fundraiser, which garners about $1 million each year for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, and receives 20,000 visitors over a four-week period. The non-profit Boys & Girls Club serves more than 13,000 children by providing after-school and enrichment programs at 10 locations in the Bronx.

A recently-renovated 17-room mansion at 106 E. 71st St in Manhattan was selected and will feature the work of designers such as Vicente Wolf, Katie Ridder, and Sherrill Canet (a full list of designers is at the Show House’s website). I can’t wait to tour it and see each designer’s inspiring ideas and applications.

The house is open to the public starting October 14 and remains open until November 11. Tickets are $30 and include the journal and sourcebook.
 
Here are a few highlights from recent past Kips Bay houses:

For those of you who said you like mixing modern art into your decor, this room from Jed Johnson Home (2007, photo: John M. Hall Photography) is one of my all-time favorites.

A beautiful feminine bedroom from Charlotte Moss, 2008 (photo: Francis Smith)

In Philip Gorrivan‘s tailored bedroom, art doubles as a compelling headboard (2008)

Looking from the living room into the dining room, both designed by Stephen Miller Siegel (2008)

A dramatic chandelier captures attention in this 2006 room by Larry Laslo. (photo: Evan Joseph/Alex Barrymore)

Another example of Jamie Drake‘s phenomenal command of color (2007, photo: Nick Johnson).

So far I haven’t come across a service that is as much of a bargain as Designer at Home. And if you haven’t yet used an interior designer—or are on a budget—this might be for you.

Designer at Home (DAH) is the brainchild of LA-based British designer James Charles. He began his career at Roche Bobois, is a two-time winner of HGTV’s Designers’ Challenge, and past clients include Sean Connery, and members of Duran Duran and A-Ha (a detail I loved- I ♥ the 80s). The idea surfaced when Charles repeatedly received comments from people who wanted to hire him but couldn’t afford to.

“I wanted to provide good quality advice for little money, and give people a chance to be involved in the process,” he says. The process is fairly simple, broken into 3 parts: “your part, [their] part, and the fun part.”

Your part: The first step involves you thoroughly measuring and drawing the room you want help with, including the furniture and fixtures currently in it, and then you fill out a questionnaire. You’ll also provide a few photos so they get a proper understanding of the room.

DAH does offer written and video instructions for the more complicated tasks—such as drawing a scale image of your room with all the appropriate measurements included—necessary to receive a personalized room plan.

Their part: Working off all the information provided, a designer will formulate a solution for your room, keeping you apprised as they go.

The fun part: Redecorate and shop! Within three weeks of receiving your information, DAH provides (via FedEx):

1. an annotated floor plan describing where furniture and accents should be placed,

2. a color board complete with images of all the pieces and swatches of suggested fabrics, and

3. the instruction document which outlines exactly what goes where, how much the pieces cost, and where you can purchase them.

Furniture and accents chosen for your room are sourced from online retailers, as well as local and national stores. DAH will look up stores in your town to make the purchase stage as easy as possible. Another feature of DAH is that they provide access to over 12,000 to-the-trade fabrics including those from JAB Stroheim and Kravet, and is a source for rugs as well.

But how much does it cost? Only $299 per room. That’s hundreds cheaper than what some of the other companies are offering. DAH’s menu of services also includes two cheaper, less involved options.

Additionally, Charles has future plans to add a paint consultation option, and a white-glove service where he will offer help with art placement, lighting, and suggest higher-end décor items and furniture. Input from guest experts is also in the works.

Pierced copper mantel

Copper is one of those good things I only came around to later in life. As a kid, it was my favorite crayon in the jumbo box (so sparkly!), but the metal itself was something better left on the wrists of arthritic grandmas. Even as a young home design editor, I didn’t quite get it as a decorative element outside the context of an Arts and Crafts house. But after neighbors installed copper gutters, I had to do the same. What previously had been bland conduits for channeling water away from the house suddenly weren’t so boring. They were jewelry. New, they glinted in the sunlight, but without any brashness, as though rose petals had softened their complexion. Then they weathered to that subtle verdigris patina that suggests the character of a house well-lived. I was smitten. A recent project of Des Moines interior designer Kabira Cadogan (www.iN2iTDesignStudio.com) reminded me that copper’s possibilities as a pick-me-up for the home aren’t limited to exteriors. In her vibrant design of a new house for a young family in an historic neighborhood, she turned to copper as an accent material and instant gratification for warmth, color, and character.

The copper mantel's piercings imbue the living room with a whimsical character.

In the context of the living room's Sticks handpainted furniture and exuberant palette, the pierced copper mantel is more idiosyncratic and edgy than it is old-fashioned.

The designer’s use of copper becomes a transitional tool, weaving the rooms together. She decorated the dining room with a copper chandelier, then repeated copper in the kitchen.

Dining room's copper chandelier

Copper trim creates a grid on the stone backsplash.

That’s what so great about how the Old World embraces color. They have no problem upholstering an 18th-century French settee in an up-to-the-minute fuchsia or grape.

New "Kavana" from Spanish fabric house, Alhambra

The color you just saw was all over Paris showrooms and booths at Maison. What’s interesting to me is that such a bold hue is too often mistaken as brash in America. Quick, whistle for the design police. Good taste has been violated and all that.

I think it’s time Americans started flexing our color muscles. Beige can be beautiful, but there’s so much more out there awaiting us.

This warm bright citrine, also from Alhambra, appeared in various shades and tones across Paris showrooms:

Look for wonderful, evocative colors from Manuel Canovas—”absinthe” and “mandarine” speak for themselves, while “petale” is a pink-tinged lavender and “pensee” is a lavender with more of a purple-plum cast. “Nattier” is Canovas’s new green-blue—the color of Angelina Jolie’s jade at last year’s Oscars.

New this season from Manuel Canovas Collection 2010

I was born without the grouping gene. My criteria is whether my dog can see out the window and whether I can read without squinting. Once it’s settled, I leave objects in their places as if by decree. When Karen suggested turning my long dining room table sideways, I gaped at her as his fellow astronomers must have when Copernicus hinted that the Earth might not be the center of the universe.

Now that the winter doldrums have set in, though, my dried flowers are looking tacky and it strikes me that the stiff antique loveseat I was once so proud of is not bottom-friendly at all. There is a fine line, dear reader, between comfort and a rut. I crossed it during the Bush administation. Time to call Karen!

Readers, how often do you rearrange the furniture? How do you go about it? Diagrams, trial and error, instinct? Please share your photos, websites and tips.

First, I want to show you the coolest thing I saw OUTSIDE the showrooms. It’s art displayed in the window of an antiquarian book shop in the St. Germaine area, near our hotel.

Sculpture by Danielle Marie Chanut, mother of shop owner, Valerie Chanut, Librairie F. Chanut, 41, rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris. Phone: 01-43-54-04-70. Price: E1,500+; Photos: Julie Maris Semel

I passed the shop on my way to the cash machine and had to get more info on what I saw in the window. What appeared to be a vintage shrine constructed of seashells (my passion—both the shells and  the vintage shell art made from them) actually turned out to be a new sculpture not only utilizing old shells but old books (my other and equal interest). My first thought was: Desecration! My second was: Way cool.

The shop is Librairie F. CHANUT, 41, rue Mazazine. Owner Valerie Chanut oversees the voluptuous leather-bound and gilt-edged antiquarian books (most are in French, but she has a fair number of illustrated children’s books in English). Her mother, Danielle Marie Chanut, is the artist. Because French culture has more antiquarian books than buyers (so I rationalize), it’s okay for Madame Chanut to put surfeit pages to creative use in her sculptures. At least this way, they get the attention they deserve. Beautifully marbleized end papers are scrolled into columns; illustrated pages become architecture. Some of her sculptures include entire books, cached away in a special niche—sort of an updated, arty version of a medieval book casket—for these literary gems.

This is another of Madame Chanut's pieces displayed at the shop.

But the fact is, I love them. The old black-and-white family photographs in Victorian seashell frames or in smaller micro-mosaic frames collected from travels in Italy (first trip, first frame, trip to Rome with Mother when I was 14; Mother’s been gone 9 years, I still have that first frame) and to antiques shops and flea markets everywhere else; all my books—antiquarian full-leather-bound and otherwise (just short of trade  fiction), that  started as gifts from both grandmothers and have grown to a houseful since—every room book-lined,  each with a different category of books: poetry in entry, family room, and master bedroom; history and art in living room; crime novels, first upstairs bedroom; and so on); my father-the-painter’s brilliant art; turn-of-the-19th-century whimseys (I’m like an ostrich: anything that glistens, sold!); seashells, especially cowries; Victorian seashell boxes and art; Staffordshire; ironstone; etc.

Here’s how bad  the book collecting alone has gotten. My BFF, neighbor, and fellow collector Andi Kunert once had a nightmare about me. Books had so overtaken my home in her dream that my sofa literally was reduced to nothing but stacks of them. No fill, no fabric, just books as form. Quite uncomfortable, she assured me the next Saturday, as we were out antiquing together, me scouring the shelves for more great old books I would enjoy both reading and treasuring as objets d’art. Andi suggested that, based on her nightmare, maybe it was time I backed off the book collecting. I knew I was in trouble hearing any such heed from her. When we watched  GRAY GARDENS (the made-for-TV movie about Jackie O’s increasingly eccentric aunt and cousin whose Long Island home ended up a collector’s and cat owner’s nightmare), separately, in our own homes, and later discussed it, we each pointed fingers at the other and said, “I thought of you!”  (I’m eccentric, she’s a crazy cat woman. We’re both collectors. Maybe that’s why we get along. But, truth told, she’s the one tottering on that slippery hoarder slope far more precariously than I.)

All of which is to say, you can imagine how relieved I was when I was at my TRAD HOME desk one day and flipped through an unproofed copy of a new book, OBJECTS OF OUR AFFECTION, by Lisa Tracy ($25, hardcover, 2010, Random House’s Bantam Books). I haven’t had a chance to read it all the way through, but I was immediately intrigued. It’s a vindication for all of us pack rats.

The book is Tracy’s account of her and her sister’s task of emptying their mother’s brimming-with-objects house after her death. Tracy writes: “Even as we know we should be winnowing, we’re wallowing.” She and her sister ran across an inventory that included silver gewgaws, dueling pistols of Aaron Burr’s, a Chinese chest, a chair G. Washington perhaps sat in. All in all, good stuff.

Here’s what the dust jacket has to say: “Tracy chronicles the wondrous interior life of those possessions and discovers that the roots of our passion for acquisition often lie not in shallow materialism but in our desire to possess the most treasured commodity of all: a connection to the past.”

That’s good enough for me. I would love to know what you think of the book—and about your own collecting experiences.