magnaverde's Profile

I like the handsome combination of dead white walls & plain fabrics with antique & vintage pieces--pieces that a lot of people would pass by without a thought if they saw them in a shop. And the art wall is proof that if salon-style arrangements could work when a place was new, they'll still work today. Congratulations.

The only red-&-black 195Os that I know of was the one people thought they remembered in the 198Os. The real 5Os--Coca Cola excluded--were less like any of those pictures at the top than they were a box of Jordan Almonds: pink, coral, aqua, mint, buttercup yellow, that whole range, and the designated neutral for the decade was charcoal gray, not black. Black was only the skinny metal legs on Skylark-patterned Formica coffee tables. Anyway, I don't pay any attention to current trends--either following them or reacting against them--but done right, red-&-black can be great.

Offhand, I can think of a great 193Os red lacquer room with sandlasted black Vitrolite murals in the Cloud Club of NY's Chrysler Building, a Streamlined Deco red-black-brass-&-mirror coffee shop in the basement of the Field Building in the Chicago Loop (both unfortunately lost) and, only a mile from my place, the Orange Garden rstaurant, a late Deco landmark with a red enameled-metal front & a black-dadoed interior, all wonderfully intact. It's like an Edward Hopper painting come to life on a busy Chicago street, and as one of the few Chinese restaurants left in town that features Cantonese food, the Orange Garden is my go-to-place. Red-&-black is cool.

And don't forget the gorgeous gardens in Barry Lyndon & Last Year at Marienbad, both of which used the immaculate geometry of perfectly clipped parterres as a visual metaphor for society's constrictive rules of behaviour: "Look, but don't touch!"

With such neutral pieces, white woodwork & lots of light, there are, as you say, endless options. Somewhere I read that the human eye can distinguish 23 million different colors. I'm not sure about that. I mean, I'm a decorator, and I can see maybe 8 or 9 million colors, max. Of course, that's still a lot of colors.

But asking us to suggest the single "perfect" color that will fit all your moods in all seasons? Well, that seems to be expecting an awful lot out of a can of paint. We don't even know you, let alone all your moods.

The good news, though, is that A) with your givens, no matter what you choose, you can hardly go wrong and B) people can adapt to about anything, so even if it's not, you know, THE ONE "perfect" color, you can probably get used to it.

Magnaverde Rule No. 30: Contentment comes easily to those who set their standards low.

For a while, Marshall Field's (R.I.P.) used the same kind of massively scaled frames around its State Street windows. One year, they were black lacquer & gold, one year they were Field's green, one Christmas, shiny red. Those were good, but this is memorable.

And what totally makes this is the wonderful contrast, not only the obvious external contrast between the style & color of the frame and that of its gritty urban context, but also--and more importantly--the internal contrast: the sumptous fake ornament ready to fall off like rotted zombie flesh, revealing the deathly pallor of the white fiberglass below.

Maybe it's just that the people who are drawn to the calm confidence of Eileen Joyce's window are less likely to get into the whole rah-rah, Go-team-go! multiple voting aspect of the whole thing. If, say, a non-blogging designer like John Saladino & Albert Hadley were in the running, he'd probably be trailing, too.

Like you, P2, I was in an AT contest a while back, and although I got an Honorable Mention, I was way back in the actual vote total & never even made it into the playoffs. A few weeks after it was over and they'd announced the winner, I mentioned it to one of my pals--none of whom read decorating blogs--who then jumped all over me because I hadn't said anything while the contest was still going. "Geez, why didn't you tell anybody you were in a contest? We all would have voted for you!" I just asked him what that would have proved.

Maybe Eileen's in the same boat. Maybe begging her friends--and her friends' friends--to vote for her window twice a day just isn't her style.

As a left brained decorator, I don't pay much attention to the alleged romance of evocative or seductive color names (oh yeah, baby, gimme some of that Elephant's Breath...) and prefer to just look at the actual color itself without any mental filter going on, but I have to say I really like the Farrow & ball range of murky tones. When you have as much antique furniture--OK, junk--as I do, clean pastels can make everything look really dingy, but F&B's dulled-down palette makes my stuff look really historic, even if it's not.

Having said that, I don't think much of the silly & self-contradictory sound-bite color recommendations. Let's see, if I want to make my dark hallway "open up" I should either use a single color on everything (No.9) or on everything BUT the ceiling, which should be darker (No.6) or everything should be light except the TRIM, which should be darker (No.3), since that will make the space "open up." OK, each of those three different approaches may work in certain circumstances but they can't all produce the same effect.

And in a room with no natural light, the recommendations are to use either white walls (No.3) or a dark, dramatic color. And how exactly is that different from no real advice at all?

Loufromlou, I probably should have added the little eye-rolling avatar just to be sure everyone realized I was joking, although I figured the Rudoph allusion made that pretty clear. Not clear enough, I guess. Oh, well.

Anyway, whatever my opinion of the use of animal heads & antlers & pelts as decor in contemporary rooms, let me assure you that I think it's wrong to rewrite history after-the-fact by making a historic room like this conform to the moral/ethical standards of today, and that I find it downright silly to make them conform to today's aesthetic standards, since, these days, those have a shelf-life of no more than a year or so.

In other words, in "objecting" to Rudolph, I was neither making a PETA-like condemnation of taxidermy in general, nor was I making fun of PETA people, who are at least sincere in their beliefs.

No, in referring to deer heads as being "over"--in a historic room, no less--I was making fun of silly people who follow ephemeral trends, since it was only a season or so ago that deer heads--even blue plastic deer heads--were the trendy crowd's objets du jour. Now, of course, ya can't even give the da*n things away. They're soooo 2007.

If that's still too confusing, let me just put it like this: I'd love to have a room like that green room at the top, Rudolph & all.

OK, let's do this the easy way: everyone hates whatever they loved a year ago. Got it.

By the time I got a videocamera, both my grandfathers, one grandmother & my mother were dead and my other grandmother was in such ill health that I couldn't bear to film her, knowing that if I did, her great-grandchildren--my nieces & nephews--would forever remember her as nothing more than a frail old lady, which, by then, the certainly looked to be. But that was her body, not her mind, and certainly not her spirit. But how to capture that on tape? And only that?

So one time when I went to see her, I spent a whole day going through the huge trunk of photos in the guest bedroom closet, pulling out for review any that were either important, typical, funny or just plain odd I ended up with several hundred. Then I went through her desk, her closet, her jewelry cases, the kitchen cabinets & any junk drawers in any of her rooms, which there were a lot of--looking for things, anything, that might have an interesting story behind it.

I stacked all the photos in chronolgical order on the coffee table in the living room and got the props laid out: her droopy flapper hat with the fabric roses & speckled bird wings; her silver fox wrap with the heads with hinged jaws that still had their teeth, with which I used to terrorize my little brother, chasing him around the house with the heads snapping at his butt & growling; an unfamilar prototype Pepsi bottle from the 195Os when my uncle was a VP of marketing in NY; her 193Os red plaid Filson jacket she wore on fishing trips to Canada; the toddler's t-shirt with a muddy tire track across the chest, a cringe-inducing souvenir of the time she didn't look before she threw her huge Cadillac into reverse & backed up over my youngest brother who was playing in the driveway (fortunately, all he got was some bruises); the dress she had sewed herself when she was a Campfire girl; The Tostwich machine my grandfather helped invent before they were married; and a ton more stuff besides.

Then I sat her in her comy chair, hooked up the Camcorder to her TV & started sticking photos in front of the lens. Her eyes weren't good enough anymore to see tiny, 70-year-old photos from the cardboard Brownie cameras of her childhood or the badly exposed Polaroids of later years, but blown up on the TV, she could see everything clearly, and what's more, she could remember every invisible detail about them all: who it was ("That's Aunt Edith & the landscape man that everybody always said was my cousin Victor's real father. Just look at that man's ears & then look at Vicctor, and tell me that Victor is a Chapman in anything but name!") where they were ("That was a funny little town that disappeared after they built the new dam & it got flooded by lake vermilion. One time we were at a park there for a picnic day and I lost the opal ring that my boyfriend in elementary school gave me, and I guess told your grandfather that story once too often because one day he came home & handed me a beautiful gold opal ring and said 'Look what I found washed up on shore! It's that damn ring that Barney gave you that you lost and talk about all the time. So next time you see Barney'--he owned the town bakery, and everybody knew him--'you show it to him & tell him that I found it. So I guess now you can stop telling that story.' Except that it wasn't really the same ring, of course, but I pretended that I thought it was. That was your grandfather's his way of telling me he was still a little bit jealous of Barney, even though that was years before, before I even met your grandfather. And it was only because of Barney's looks. When he was little, he was funny looking but by the time your grandfather met him, Barney looked like Warren Harding, who everybody loved because he was so handsome. That was the only reason he got to be president, because once women got the vote, every woman I knew voted for Warren Harding, but all the men hated him").

She also remembered what color all her dresses were. (" I picked that one out myself because it was so pretty but one time I overheard my teacher ask my mother "Why on earth would you dress such a sallow little girl in a terrible color like that?' while I was standing right there in front of them. I thought I would cry right there because even though I didn't know what sallow meant, I knew it must be bad. I pretended I hadn't heard her, but I didn't want to wear that dress anymore, so I wiped some grease from the car on it to spoil it so I wouldn't have to wear it anymore but the finger marks were so plain that my mother could see it wasn't really an accident so she spanked me & said I was a horrid little girl & sent me to bed without supper. I never forgave my teacher for making me so ashamed of the way I looked. And I didn't even know what sallow meant." She told me why her father l had a napkin draped over his head ("No, he wasn't drunk, he was trying to keep from getting a sunburn on his bald head, because your naughty mother had thrown his cap over the side of the boat"). She explianed why my mother was throwing a tantrum and tearing the big bows out of her hair("because I told her that she had to wear boots to play in the snow"); why the tall, flashily dressed stranger in the gazebo at Mudlavia was hiding his face from the camera ("He was probably a gangster from Chicago. They were thick as thieves down there").

Anyway, like Thefarmersdaughter said, I already knew the basics of many of these stories, but the versions that I knew had all been sanitized for my protection, leaving them as smooth and boring as river stones. Now, though, I was hearing once-familiar stories with all their fascinating, messy-- and sometimes, heartbreaking--details still attached, and best of all, they were now preserved for posterity--in my grandmother's own voice--along with the fading images that had triggered her memories in the first place.

My grandmother died before her great-grandchildren were old enough to really know her in person, but thanks to what amounts to a one-woman show stretched out over a course of three hours, they now--just out of college--know her a lot better than I ever did at their age. What's more, having, through pictures, seen grow her from a sad-faced little girl in a weathered old farm house into a confident, laughing 193Os glamour girl--or, at least, the Danville version thereof--and thence into an active & well-loved community presence well into her seventies & eighties, and having heard her laughing as she tells funny family stories in her still-strong voice, they've grown to love her, as well.

So pack up those cameras, everybody, and do this the next time you get the chance. My grandmother lived to be 94, but not everybody gets that chance, and any of us could get run over by a bus--or a rogue Cadillac--at any time, so capture your family's history while you can.