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	Sunday, September 26, 2004

Plaid? PLAID?

TBogg ("A Daily Dose of Snark") on this designer disaster:

To be fair -- not that O'Beirne (sort-of-famous conservative commentator) is -- I think the curtains are black and pink taffeta. Like a Fifties ballgown.

And what a low ceiling! The house is probably one of those excruciatingly expensive and incredibly inconvenient antiques that litter the Virginia landscape. They're snapped up by trendoid Washington plutocrats who claim to want to breathe in their history (and two-century-old molds). But, oddly, Ms. O'Beirne hasn't elected to decorate it in period. Unless the house is Thirties Faux Federal. They built rooms low and "cozy" in those days, too, and you could make the case that this is the kind of drawing room they showed in Depression-era movies set in the Main Line.

If you have a low-ceilinged room with stunted windows, you don't leave them half-uncovered (especially at night when the white-edged grid of black panes will look even smaller and more awkward), you don't put a stark, bare, attention-getting line of curtain rod at the level of the crown molding, and you SURE as hell don't hang lumberjack plaid on it. Everybody knows that plaid, especially large-scale plaid, will make any room look shorter and fatter.

Too few people know how to handle a fireplace and mantel these days, which is weird given their ubiquity in the last two decades. Here the mirror is too short and wide, the clock is too green, the candles and figurine are awkward overkill, and I should probably just draw a decent veil over that trite brass fan firescreen as it fights with all the angles and squares in the room -- but you know me. Embarrassing details are what I live for, and this one fairly screams "Bourgeois Climber Who Refuses To Discard The $450 Firescreen She Bought In 1984 Because There Was One Just Like It In House Beautiful Last Month." Never mind that the House Beautiful room was a well-designed period masterpiece, while this room is merely -- I THINK -- a stab at retro chic. Orange County 60s or 30s Hollywood, it's hard to tell.

Then again, I suppose a hackneyed brass firescreen is better than a board shaped into a basket of flowers with "Welcome to My Home" tole-painted above it in pastel ribbon lettering. But that would really have to have sandpaper distressing along the edges and picturesque hammered dents in the crackled surface, so even a decorator as clueless as O'Beirne's would realize it wasn't right with those shiny curtains.

Update: Here is my extremely crude and dirty hack at showing what different proportions and patterns could do in this room. I turned the curtain fabric so that the dominant line was vertical and reduced the scale. Of course in real life I'd never just hang a flat hank like this, but I did want to demonstrate what hanging proper curtains from a built out cornice rather than a bare rod could do for this room's sense of height.

1:32:58 PM    comments [] trackback []

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