I am fascinated by decorating books. They always push the same two ideas: that you should celebrate your unique style, and that you should follow certain exact, precise rules laid out between Chapters 2 and 30 for doing so. Presumably, one can only achieve unique style through study, perseverance, money, and a furniture layout as blueprinted on the book’s endpapers. It’s just not enough, these books hint, to be born with your own decision-making ability.
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It’s my theory that most people tend to live in the spaces where they feel most comfortable. For me, this means ratty furniture and lots of books, but who’s to say my unique sense of style is better or worse than the guy who has extra rooms for his Star Trek collection, or the woman who wants her apartment to look like a CSI: Miami set (without the murder victim), or the people who live among tall, tottery stacks of newspapers, accompanied by generations of inbred feral cats? We are all capable of taking responsibility for the spaces we live in, and the profession of interior design is really only useful for helping people with large houses get rid of the extra money they have lying around. But there’s not as much money as you’d think in that, so interior designers are also good for writing joke books, many of which can be found in the Design section of the library. Look for titles like, “Six Easy Ways To Do Zen On A Budget” or “DIY Exotic Ethnic Curtains” or “Transforming The House To The Home Through The Magic Of Paint”.
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My new favorite is Alexandra Stoddard’s “Creating a Beautiful Home”, which I found in the back room and read cover-to-cover in one evening. The standard format is followed religiously – the story of how Stoddard, a professional interior designer, renovated her Colonial mansion, is interspersed with helpful hints on how you, the reader, may achieve design excellence in your own renovated Colonial mansion. It’s pretty much as pretentious, tasteless, and overbearing as any interior design book:
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This spiritless room might well have remained an attic surrogate had I not received a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show…We began by stripping the doors to reveal the natural eighteenth-century pine underneath…Next, we painted the ceiling Atmosphere Blue, like the sky, on which we lightly sponged tones of yellows, pinks, whites and blues, like delicate clouds. Then we stenciled some ribbons and flowers around the top of the walls in periwinkle blue, and created the feeling of Delft tiles around the raised-brick fireplace facing by stenciling small, stylized tulips in blue.
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What lifts “Creating a Beautiful Home” into the realm of the awesome are the “Design Notes”, helpfully annotated at the end of each chapter. These are bullet-point diktats, some of which are so aggressively bizarre they should be in a Dada manifesto:
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Never use wall sconces, unless they are beautiful.
Select something amusing to put in your hall: a hat rack, a boot holder, a child’s wooden rocking horse, a bin of old walking canes, or a group of old duck decoys.
Put small pictures on easels. Use velvet or marbleized decorative paper to cover the ugly back of the frame.
Under the coffee table, place a large basket brimming with potpourri.
You can never have enough candles.
Your beautiful silver will add elegance to any meal.
Have your appliances spray-painted the same color as the cabinets.
Place some colorful bottles on the window sill. Toss in a daisy or two!
Find an old wet bar the children can enjoy as a soda fountain.
Keep a dozen or so old books that have had the greatest impact on you. What kind of books will they be? Are many of them by the same author? Are they contemporary or classic?
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It may be the finest design book I’ve ever read, and I liked it so much that I am currently trying to convince my mom to let me donate it to the library book sale, so that it may go forth and shed its light on all those poor souls out there who have never considered the Monet-themed kitchen, or all the wonderful things you can do with duck decoys.
