Design

Richard Gere strikes the right cord

Written on October 4, 2011 at 12:34 pm
By Doris Athineos

 

Actor Richard Gere is selling off his vintage guitar collection for charity. Rock on, Richard. Guitars once owned by blues legend Albert King, Jamaican reggae musician Peter Tosh and American guitar maker James D’Aquisto all hit the auction block at Christie’s October 11. “I’ve had a love affair with guitars since I was a kid,” says Gere, who is donating the proceeds from 83 guitars and 24 amps ($1 million estimate) to humanitarian causes. “They’ve been my true friends through the best and worst of times. Some are very special. Although it’s more than a little painful to let them go, each one has been played, loved and appreciated–and will
be again.”

 

Acres of antiques at Brimfield

Written on August 22, 2011 at 11:07 am
By Doris Athineos

Brimfield Antique Show strikes the tiny town of Brimfield, Mass, three times a year– May, July and September.  Brimfield gave birth to the Keno brothers (both parents were dealers here) and the first place the twins offered antiques (stoneware) for sale. But with more than 5,000 dealers setting up shop along Route 20, where to begin? Our favorite stretch of field is J & J, the original Brimfield show founded by Gordon Reid in 1959 and still managed by Reid’s two daughters Judy and Jill. It was the J & J show that spawned all the rest and turned Brimfield into a destination for hard-core fans of vintage and antique furnishings.  Most of the 20 shows have their own start times and dates (roughly September 6 through 11), but J & J opens September 9th @ 8 am.  Antiques junkies begin lining up at dark to be among the first to enter the gates (see above). To find the J & J field, set your GPS on 35 Main Street. For a map of different fields, see Brimfield.

Crazy for Color (and Floral Designer Jane Packer’s yummy new book)

Written on August 19, 2011 at 4:47 pm
By Rebecca Christian

I love color — I have bright red patent leather ankle strap shoes, a baby blue bicycle that makes me think of Nancy Drew’s little blue coupe, and cobalt art glass displayed on the moss green “table”  behind my couch (it’s actually a worn frosted-glass door mounted on a couple of plant stands from good old Hobby Lobby) . Oh, and at the moment my toenails are painted Mattel pink. So you can see why I swooned over British floral designer Jane Packer’s new book, Color, with such deeply saturated photographs by Georgia Glynn Smith that they’ll knock your tie-dyed socks off.

available at Amazon.com for $14.84

(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=jane+packer+color&x=0&y=0

Packer, who has designed flowers for clients from rock stars to royalty, approaches floral design with the imagination and assured eye of a fashion or interior designer, using color to evoke mood and  intuitively understanding how fashion color trends affect the world of flowers. She notes, “Green has singlehandedly reinvented the chrysanthemum and the much-maligned carnation, reinstating them as desirable fashion flowers. Roses, anthurium and ranunculus have benefited from this infusion of green, too.” (She’s right, I think. At my son’s wedding a couple years ago, the flowers were entirely green and white, and the effect was striking.)

Working her way through the rainbow, Packer offers gorgeous floral takes on red, white, green, yellow, pink, and blue, and gives step-by-step directions for ten eye-popping projects, including a three-tiered “cake” made of scarlet roses. Here’s a topiary tree project from the Green section:

It doesn’t sound too difficult. You’ll need a container, florist foam and tape, a bamboo post, sunflowers, hydrangea flowers, and some snake grass or glossy leaves. There are simpler suggestions in the book, too, like presenting a breakfast tray with egg cups into which you’ve put not eggs, but half eggshells, filled with enough water to hydrate a tiny bloom. In other vignettes, cherry blossoms burst out of a rubber rain boot, and in a ruby vase full of brilliant parrot tulips, Packer has nestled crystal brooches among the blooms to reflect the jewel colors of the flowers and the vase. For the project below, Packer painted tree branches pink and hung them with jars of pink flowers. She’s used alstromenia in the higher jar and nerines in the lower ones, but you could use almost any pink flowers, she says. Wouldn’t the pink branches make a pretty arrangement for Easter or a bridal or baby shower?

Packer has flower shops and floral design schools in London, Tokyo, and New York, as well as a flower shop in Korea  (jane-packer.co.uk).  You can also buy her designs from janepackerdelivered.com. I especially love this arrangement of roses in a turquoise hatbox, a variation of red roses for a blue lady.

a fun arrangement from janepackerdelivered.com

I, for one, can’t wait to try her autumn wreath with oak leaves and perry pears from her book. I’m already jonesing for toasty palettes, and I know the project will put me in the mood for fall.

Decorator Maverick Billy Haines at Christie’s

Written on July 15, 2011 at 2:16 pm
By Doris Athineos

Back when interior design was just emerging as a serious, wide-spread profession in the United States, some of the top decorators in the country were creating furnishings that have stood the test of time. Think low-slung slipper chairs by movie-star-turned decorator Billy Haines (1900-1973).  Traditional Home writer Ted Loos calls these first-wave  designers “decorator mavericks” and describes the style as both neo and classical in the upcoming October issue of Traditional Home.

Now Christie’s auction house in Manhattan is offering vintage furnishings by Haines custom designed for the late Los-Angeles-based art collector Mrs. Sidney Brody.  The auction begins at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries this Tuesday afternoon, July 19, at 2:00 pm.  Here’s our wish list:

For close-up views of all the vintage Haines, flip through Christie’s online catalog, but don’t miss the live auction Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 pm eastern time. Read Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines by William J. Mann (Penguin) to learn more about the Virginia-born designer who was the country’s biggest movie star by 1930.  For reissues of theclassical Haines tufted sofa, tap into williamhaines.com. And don’t miss the upcoming Decorator Mavericks story in Traditional Home which features Haines, Tony Duquette, Milwaukee-born Frances Elkins (1888-1953), Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Mississippi-born Samuel Marx (1884-1964).

A paint chip by any other name would look as good

Written on July 5, 2011 at 3:07 pm
By Rebecca Christian

Not since Juliet has the psychology behind naming been questioned as intriguingly as in a recent piece about the small, and sometimes odd, little world of naming paint colors http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30paint.html. The article has a nifty interactive multiple choice quiz where you are shown a color and guess its name.

Who woulda thunk that Weekend in the Country would be brown, Hey There would be yellow, Dead Salmon would be taupe and Arsenic would be green?

Farrow & Ball’s Arsenic

The fact that some of the names don’t sound all that attractive doesn’t matter, marketers say, as long as they capture people’s imaginations. I suppose the same could be said for book and movie titles, like Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes and the kid movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Dorothy Parker, who got sick of reading about heroines with russet curls or ebony manes, used to refer to her hair as hair-colored hair.

I once bought moody blue-gray carpet that really didn’t work very well in my house and stained like a son of a gun because of its beautifully melancholic name, “October Storm.” Last year, when I had the exterior of my twenties-era Arts and Crafts house repainted, I chose from Valspar’s historically accurate Craftsman palette, with much better results.

Valspar Craftsman Colors

(alas, not my house)

Like many women, I’m a sucker for nail polish and lipstick with pretty names. Even though it’s a little dark for me, especially in warm weather, I can’t resist the Revlon lipstick  “Cherries in the Snow.” There’s a dessert by the same name. I wonder which came first.

Today’s cosmetic colors are whimsical and sometimes a little weird. Essie Nail Colors has Starter Wife (pastel pink) Jamaica Me Crazy (spirited magenta), Pillow Talk (nude), Tart Deco (Coral), Damsel in a Dress (deep purple) and Trophy Wife (teal). A comic blog, Shoebox, suggests lipstick names Stubborn Bloodstain, There’s Something on Your Lip, and my fave, Old-Lady-Scalp Pink.

Essie’s Starter Wife Nail Color

For the Goth girl, Urban Decay has a line of lip products with downright scary names: Envious, Greedy, Trainwreck, Buzzkill, and Paranoid. I guess wearing Trainwreck is no worse painting your house Tornado. If you’re going to tempt fate that way, better keep a bottle of polish and a fistful of paint decks handy in the southwest corner of the basement so you have something to do while waiting out the storm.

Curtains for Cursive?

Written on June 23, 2011 at 4:57 pm
By Rebecca Christian

Is the keyboard mightier than the pen? Apparently so. Forty-two states  no longer require cursive writing in their curriculum, though many schools still introduce cursive in a manner that’s well, cursory.

Perfect Palmer Penmanship

Good riddance, say those for whom poor penmanship was the bane of their grade school years (especially boys). It was for them that a method called Handwriting Without Tears was developed. When even little kids learn to write on a keyboards, briskly practical people say, it’s maudlin to mourn the demise of cursive, which is going the way of the fountain pen, cuneiform and hieroglyphics. As Douglas Adams once wrote, “Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

Cuneiform, written on clay with a reed for a stylus

Traditionalists fear, though, that when the death bell tolls for cursive, more than loops and flourishes (and the dotting of Is with hearts by the young female of the species) is lost. It can be argued that cursive hones fine motor skills, improves ideation and expression, teaches letters and shapes, enhances memory, reveals personality (remember the dubious “science” of  handwriting analysis?) and links us to the past.

How I quaked in my white pleather go-go boots in 8th grade when Miss Ryerson, she of the hot dragon breath and dandruff collar, picked up one of my papers with its curlicued capitals,  exaggerated slant, floaters (letters that drifted above the line) and sinkers (below). Her mission was to stamp out all evidence of individuality in handwriting, and it was really rather thrilling when her beady eyes bored into yours – at least in the unrelieved tedium of school, your abject, scalp-tingling terror reminded you that you were still alive. She believed that sloppy handwriting indicates sloppy thinking, and I hate to admit it, but I’ve come to agree. At the beginning of the semester you were allowed three erasures per paper, and at the end, “Zero!,” as she proclaimed with fanatical zeal.

Today, many teens and twentysomethings have a hard time deciphering cursive, which means that reading historic documents – or even their grandparents’ letters – is difficult. If you’re like me, you treasure the instant intimacy conferred by coming upon a recipe, letter, or receipt with your late loved ones’ script on it. Letters from my dad on onion skin paper have writing as gangly as he was, its controlled haste evidence of twin inclinations toward perfectionism and speed.

When I want to put soul into writing, my first draft is longhand in black ink on yellow legal paper rather than keyboarded, and I swear the difference in the result is as marked as that between instant coffee and brewed. Yet, I envy writers who can compose brilliantly on a laptop.  And I still chuckle at Truman Capote’s snotty dismissal of showboater Jack Kerouac’s legendary feat of typing his stream-of-consciousness travelogue On the Road on paper that he taped into a 120-foot scroll. “That’s not writing,” Capote sneered. “That’s typing.”

Of course, everything was new once, and cursive itself was developed to make handwriting faster by connecting letters to make a word all at once, avoiding blots because the quill didn’t have to be lifted from the page as often. Like many objects invention has rendered inefficient, the fountain pen and the typewriter have achieved what typewriter collector Richard Polt calls “the allure of the archaic.” Hence the popularity of Mont Blanc’s John Lennon Special Edition Fountain Pen, retailing for $1,000 (imagine!).

The Mont Blanc John Lennon Fountain Pen

Meanwhile hipsters have begun collecting and using typewriters. I love them, too, along with Anne Sexton’s poem in which she calls her typewriter “my church with an altar of keys always waiting.”

Poet Anne Sexton

In a clever infusion of the old into the new, there’s even an app through which you can handwrite words with a finger or stylus and see them transformed into the magic of print to be emailed or tweeted.

Do you think it should be curtains for cursive?

This post originally appeared in the Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, Iowa.

Trash or treasure?

Written on June 14, 2011 at 12:45 pm
By Doris Athineos

The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

Written on June 10, 2011 at 3:16 pm
By Rebecca Christian

Are you wearing a dress today? Maybe you remember the sing-along-able Burt Bacharach hit, “I Say a Little Prayer for You”,  in which Dionne Warwick sings in that warm, rich, bouncy voice of hers,  “While combing my hair now, and wonderin’ which dress to wear now, I say a little prayer for you…”

Dionne in a Fab Getup

I’ve been singing it nearly every one of these late spring mornings lately, because the unseasonably hot weather is a grand excuse to wear frocks, liberating the pasty legs of winter and — following the example of our fearlessly fashionable First Lady — exercising the right to bare arms. (Actually it would be a good idea to exercise before exercising the right to bare arms, like Michelle does, but when it’s hot, I let my schoolteacher arms wave gloriously in the breeze like the flag on the fourth. Who cares?)

Michelle, Pretty in Pink

I love dresses for their unabashed ease and femininity! (Sorry, but when I’m wearing a dress I can’t stop using exclamation points!)  Women feel as pretty in them as Maria did, twirling in her white dress before the fateful dance. Plus they’re easy. None of that tiresome worrying about whether your vest looks funny with your blouse or your jacket is too boxy for your pants. Slip a dress over your head and ask your beloved to zip it up (just like Nora in the “Nick and Nora” forties movies, dahling). A necklace, a spritz of Chanel, maybe a cardigan or shrug in case of a summer breeze, and you’re done.

Designers and fashion mavens keep predicting the demise of the dress, but women love them, and so do men, unless they’re those sackcloth-and-ashes numbers that women find both sophisticated and forgiving of our lumps and bumps (think Eileen Fisher), but that prompt men to ask, “Where’s the belt?”  At any rate, we’re not about to forsake dresses for pants wide enough for both you and your Aunt Mabel to climb into together, which are predicted to be in for fall. Back in April of 2008, fashion editor Anna Slowey proclaimed, “The eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche. The dress has been done to death.” Boo, hiss!

Read more

The Great Estate

Written on May 9, 2011 at 3:05 pm
By Amy Bleier Long

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

Bespoke Elegance Finds its Way into a Pop-Up Shop

Written on May 5, 2011 at 4:11 pm
By Tori Mellott

Usually attributed to trendy stores and hipster subculture, “pop-up shops” conjure images of impossibly long-lines, cooler-than-thou gadgets, and frenetic teenagers swooning over the latest iPhone case. One certainly doesn’t equate that kind of tchotchke-filled hut with the elegance of bespoke furniture and a venerable name. Check your preconceived notions at the door as the father-son duo that make up the legendary establishment F.P. Victoria & Son have turned that idea on its head and done just that–married the pop-up shop and handcrafted, classically inspired furniture for a first-rate, luxury shopping experience, to be sure.

What began in 1933 as an antique shop specializing in museum-quality English and Continental furniture, F.P. Victoria & Son quickly expanded into a full-fledged custom furniture manufacturing business when high-profile decorators and clients commissioned bespoke pieces based on the antiques they admired in Mr. Victoria’s inventory. Instead of red they wanted blue, instead of wood they wanted plaster, instead of tooled leather they wanted honed marble.  Serge Roche, Syrie Maugham, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Elsie de Wolfe, are just a few of the dazzling names that top the roster of clients who requested custom pieces.  Mr. Victoria quietly grew both arms of the business and eventually his son, Tony Victoria, took the reins.

When the youngest of the Victoria men, Freddie Victoria, segued into the family business, there were warehouses full of rendering, drawings, sketches, and prototypes. The father-son team knew they were sitting atop a gold mine of beautifully imagined pieces and decided to curate what is now The F.P. Victoria & Son Collection.

Elegant grandeur reigns supreme with everything from life-size Maccassar wood and beveled mirror obelisks to shocking blue lacquer Pagoda-shaped etageres. Subtle beauty abounds when contemporary mirrors are treated with a dose of the age-old Venetian glass-cutting techniques historically employed on girly-girl dressing mirrors (think Marie Antoinette meets Jean Michel Frank). Customization continues as their specialty. Been longing for one of Billy Baldwin’s iconic brass étagères but want it with an oxidized nickel-plated finish?  No problem. Dreaming about a 19th-century hairdresser’s chair with a heart-shaped back? Too easy. This line of bespoke furniture was intended for the designer and the consumer who won’t settle for off-the-rack pedestrian pieces but yearn for special and one-of-a-kind show-stoppers.  They’ve even expanded their line to include more contemporary silhouettes like ebonized maple stacking chairs that are reminiscent of the 50’s Danish modern aesthetic.

And while this esteemed 3-generation business will be around as they have for the past 78 years, their tasteful version of a pop-up shop will only be in action for a hot, New York minute. If you’re lucky enough to be in NYC from May 3 through May 15, stop by The Silver Peacock on Park Avenue and 90th Street for a peek inside a treasure chest of exquisitely crafted furniture and bespoke finery.