The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Billy Baldwin

In sharp contrast to advice literature of the nineteenth century, Billy Baldwin's designs freely play with history, form and finish, each in service to the comfort and expression of living. To this extent he breaks with a tradition that promoted homogeneity, but advances on those seeking individuality and personality so that all aspects of interior decoration are used for effect. In these two excerpts, he rallies against the tyranny of perfection and questions those who advocate rules for interior decoration. His own signature interiors for New York's wealthy and famous demonstrate this thinking, and are recognisable for his flare to mix and match period styles in an effort to charge their individual characteristics and create a uniquely decorated room. This text reveals Baldwin's attitudes and values against pretentious design and demonstrates his commitment to reconcile his clients' needs with lifestyle.

The Sterility of Perfection

I know a magnificent French apartment in New York that someone has brilliantly described as 'a series of foyers leading to nothing.' How sad to see rooms so beautiful, yet so cold. You must walk through the austere living room and out again in search of a small haven of comfort to sit in. Even the master bedroom looks like an unwelcoming guest room.

A young client of mine expressed the same feelings another way. We were discussing his library, where he works during the evening while his wife reads or does needlepoint. They had just returned from visiting a newly decorated house with a library that had made them cringe with horror – shiny walnut paneling, yards and yards of brand-new untouched books, a new desk without a trace of evidence that it had ever been used. The young man said, 'I hope you understand that we do not want our house to be perfect.' This young couple had glimpsed the awful sterility of perfection, and realized at once what I have always maintained: Nothing is interesting unless it is personal. So their library has a superb Louis XVI desk, and sitting unashamedly beside it, an efficient filing cabinet.

Everyone has his own needs, his own preferences, his own ways of using space. When a decorator disregards these needs, or tries to superimpose an alien personality, he cannot bring off that wonderful warm atmosphere of a private, personal place.

I, for one, cannot imagine a fireplace without a fire burning whenever there is the slightest excuse for it. I cannot conceive of a house in the country without dogs, or of any house without books – the greatest decoration of all. These give a room heart – along with lighted candles and the smell of fresh flowers, or bowls of potpourri in open windows.

There is nothing quite so boring as false refinement, or so vulgar as misplaced elegance. I have often quoted Cole Porter, who said to me: 'Please don't try to hide my television, or make slipcovers for my piano.' I had a client once who was infuriated when I put flowers on her grand piano. 'Do you know who plays that piano?' she said. 'Rubinstein! Get those flowers off.' 'Well,' I replied, 'does he play it every night?' It wasn't as if I had put a Spanish shawl on it, or a crowd of photographs. How pretentious to object to movable blossoms!

A woman whose house Elsie de Wolfe had decorated years ago always kept twelve red roses on her hall console. Elsie had probably said, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have some red roses there,' and the woman had taken it as an unalterable dictum. But the roses never looked as if she had fallen in love with them in the florist's window. They were just furniture.

One of the greatest sterilizers of the would-be perfectionist is fashion. There's no reason for rooms and houses to change as often as hairdos and skirt lengths. All rooms should begin as outgrowths of the owner's personality, then become lovelier, more personal, and more welcoming with every year. I haven't much interest in a client who asks me what I have just done in someone else's living room, or worse yet, what the 'latest trends' are. If I find that something I am doing is becoming a trend, I run from it like the plague.

A client has no one but herself to blame for a sterile, uninteresting house if she hasn't the gumption or self-assurance to assert herself. Ruby Ross Wood once took me to visit one of her clients who lived in a beautiful house with superb furniture and lots of lovely little objects and flowers around. But the woman was frantic. 'I'm going out of my mind,' she said. 'Someone has given me this little box, and I don't know where to put it.' Ruby snatched the box from her and thumped it on the first table she came to. 'Put it there,' she said. The woman had become so afraid of her own room, she felt everything in it had to be an arrangement.

Some people add enormously to a room in a way that no decorator ever could. They can move into a newly decorated house and make it look as if they have lived there for

thirty years. And a year later, you see still more wonderful growth. I know several people with this precious knack – I work out the colors and fabric and furniture arrangement, and when everything is in place I say, 'All right. Now go ahead and mess it up,' Then they buy and arrange the paintings and objects, make needlepoint pillows, fix flowers, move a chair to a place where it really is more comfortable. They break up the hardness of the perfect look, and make the room their own.

The way people accumulate and display objects can add immeasurably to a room's vitality. For a decorator to go out and buy a whole collection at one fell swoop is almost an invasion of privacy. To display it formally in some ghostly lighted cabinet, as the French often do, makes me shudder. I love to see collections that have been gathered over the years kept right out in the open as the English keep them – on tables and commodes where you can see them and touch them.

A touch of wit can help a great deal to ward off the sterile look. I don't mean that a room should make you roar with laughter, but as you sit in it, you might be struck suddenly by some unexpected object, an entertaining picture, some little eccentricity of the owner. In my window there sits a foolish little wooden monkey holding a globe covered with chips of mirror that shoot sparks of sunlight all over the room. It is a very silly thing, but a good friend gave it to me and I like it. The Duke di Verdura found a little fieldstone, split it in half, and polished the insides. When you open the two halves, you discover a little green-enamel lizard that he tucked between them. It is a shock every time! Things like that are fun to collect for your own house, and delightful to come upon in someone else's. But I would never go out and buy something 'funny' for a room. No object should 'wink' at us.

A good friend of mine served Chinese fortune cookies at her husband's sixtieth birthday party. The wife laughed when she read her own fortune: 'Your marriage will be prosperous.' Next time I visited them, I happened to notice quite by accident something that struck me as the essence of making a room warm and alive. On a table sat a little glass box – a French box with gold edges, probably of great value. And there in the box, like a jewel, was that crinkled message from the fortune cookie.

The Rule Breaker's Success

The first rule of decoration is that you can break almost all the other rules. A room arranged absolutely according to the book, with little i's dotted and big t's crossed, is all very well in its impersonal way. But the rooms that are really successful declare the owner's independence, carry the owner's signature, his very private scrawl.

It's a rule that pattern should not be played against pattern, that figured curtains need a plain wall. But nothing is more enchanting than the indoor garden that grows from

flowering chintz, flowered walls, flowery needlework rugs. One of the pleasantest drawing rooms on Long Island has a flowered Bessarabian rug, all muted reds and faded greens, with furniture slipcovered in pale-green and cream flower chintz, and a flourish of books, pictures, bunches of flowers. Another handsome room, this one in town, spreads a soft ancient Oriental rug across the floor, and surprises it by overlaying another, much smaller and higher in key, in front of the little French mantel.

It's a rule that one chintz is a charmer – two's a crowd. But maybe you want to cover two chairs in chintz, and can find only enough of a fabric to cover one. Well, use it – and for the second chair use another chintz, of equal caliber but different design. No one hesitates to hang two flower paintings in the same room, so why not allow two flower chairs, like distinct and lovely bouquets?

There's a great distinction in no pattern at all. Consider a room all the dark fresh green of gardenia leaves. The walls might be highly lacquered; the curtains dull, roughly woven; the sofas and chairs covered in damask and needlework – all wearing the green, but with their own textures giving their own value to it. The variety would be subtle, but very real. And don't forget that one person puts pattern and movement into a room, and the intricacy of the design grows with the size of the party.

There's chic in repetition – a splurge of the same fabric for curtains, sofas, chairs. Don't be timid about making this an all-out effort, or your friends will suspect that you undercalculated your yardage. In Connecticut, there's a wonderful salon, its style a kind of Norwegian Louis XVI. On a polished Fontainebleau floor is ranged a levee of chairs and sofas, all painted chalk white, all covered with a pale-blue, gray, and white checked fabric. The curtains are of the same fabric, the walls are a misty gray-blue, and the effect is fabulous.

There's chic in not repeating. One very grand drawing room has walls of glowing red flock-paper, gold satin curtains, gold and white furniture – nowhere another flicker of red. And one chair in a high clear tone makes its point more conclusively if its color is not echoed. In a gray monochrome room, a chair covered in poison-green satin will lose its fine sting if the green is recalled in a pillow or two on the little gray sofa. It's superfluous to repeat the green at all, but if you must, do it in an off-shade and another medium – perhaps an emerald-green chandelier.

A few decorating principles seem safe from contradiction. When you are arranging furniture, it's always wise to put pieces of equal value together. Don't hang a contemporary painted mirror over an elegant old commode. The mirror may have its decoration virtue, but in that false position it will insult the antique, and show itself for an upstart. If you are looking for a mantel garniture, choose something that has the same

quality as the mantel itself, and the picture or mirror over it. (There's a seeming exception to this rule – one lovely mantel arrangement involves a beige marble Louis XV mantel, and on it a row of purple violets in modest clay pots, reflected in a superb gilt mirror. But this makes sense, because the pots don't pretend to be more than they are; they are, in their own way, just as authentic).

If you spend most of your decorating money on a Chippendale table or a Chinese lacquer screen, don't fill in the gaps with mediocrity. Forget the gaps for a while; just have simple slipcovers in one pretty color. Then, as you can, acquire other good pieces that are compatible with your first extravagance. Let the room grow slowly to maturity. There is 'costume' decoration as well as 'costume' jewelry – in itself, it may have charm, but it tends to destroy the charm of the Real Thing, if used with it.

No one object should dominate a room. A great work of art is the richest endowment a room can have, and it should be given a dominating position – but if it is really great, it will have the grace of all great things, and won't be too obtrusive. Today we don't want to be too conscious of the mise en scène; don't want to have curtains, chairs, paintings thrust themselves forward as topics of conversation.

It's far more important to have three rooms that are beautifully done and beautifully run than to have ten or twenty that are dreary and neglected. Some of the most distinguished buildings in the world are the little villas, pavilions, orangeries. If we live in small-scale rooms, we needn't be limited to small-style decoration. A tiny library – with boiserie and double doors – can have as much style as a ballroom, and can offer more stimulus to conversation. (… p 27)

Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Decorates, Chartwell Books (Secaucus, NJ), 1972. (Excerpt pp 24–7)