Julia Grey: Portico

Christmas Frugality

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:46:49 GMT

There are a lot of reasons for cutting back on Christmas spending, and not all of them are financial. If you're like me and think that the seasonal frenzy for buying piles and piles of new things is getting way out of hand, spiritually if not necessarily economically, perhaps you'll join us in a "Buy-Less" Christmas this year. "Buy-Less" can mean either buy fewer new things (so that thrift shops, white elephant exchanges and other "recycling" dodges are okay), or, if you want to really challenge yourself, you can make it literally "buyless," not spending any money at all on Christmas things and making merry only with what you already have on hand.

We are, I'm somewhat ashamed to say, well ahead of the Christmas game when it comes to that "already have on hand" bit. So having to make do with that storage closet full of Christmas crap we've accumulated over 26 years really won't be much of a hardship. And since I hate to shop, especially in Christmas crowds, I have little problem staying out of stores where I'd be tempted to pile up the shiny bags. Keeping my mitts off the mountains of CATALOGS that come whooshing into the house every day is another matter entirely.

In the spirit of the concept, I whisked through some of the magazine pages I've scanned for posterity and came up with these three ideas for recycled Christmas decorations. I don't know which magazine (or catalog) they came from originally. I admit they're a bit banal, but they're only here as inspiration anyway.

This one is just a store-bought wire vine trellis set up to showcase Christmas cards and ornaments. My thought was that even if you didn't have the trellis itself, you might be able reshape wire hangers to do something similar. A bit of leftover garden lattice might work the same way.

This one is a Christmas tree decorated with chandelier crystals. Now, it's true that most people don't have spare crystals just lying around the house, but it illustrates the idea that you can re-purpose things like old costume jewelry and strings of second-hand beads to decorate a small tree. You can sometimes get insanely fun costume jewelry full of rhinestones, "gold" brass and colored paste gems at thrift stores. I like the bucket-style tree stand here, too. It lifts the tree from the surface of the table so you can put buffet dishes (or presents) under it. You could achieve a similar effect with an ordinary bucket and some aluminum foil or a scrap of embossed wallpaper. Be sure it's heavy enough to keep the tree from toppling over.

We are getting so we like having a smaller tabletop tree in preference to the ridiculously huge evergreens we used to haul into the house (and out again, dropping debris like Pigpen every every inch of the way). In order to get a tree to look right under our high ceilings we always had to get a tall and therefore wide monster that cut down on floor space in the living room, right when we needed it for more people to mill around in.

Although an enormous tree was practically required by law when we had younger kids and Santa came on Christmas Eve to pile the gifts up hip-deep around it, in these latter days, a well-dressed tree -- artificial, no less! -- on the sideboard in the dining room window nook is enough. As a bonus, the family presents that gradually appear around it in the leadup to Christmas Day don't look as lonely and dwarfed (and kind of silly) as they used to.

These (below) are candlesticks made out of staircase balusters, 2 of them, each cut into 2 different length pieces, with short candle spikes made from double-ended screws. I'm not a fan of distressed or crackled paint finishes, so I'd dress them up differently, with gold spray paint or something else more elegant if I was making them. But some people enjoy the old-fashioned look because it seems more Warm and Genuine and Homey (even if you have to purposely mess something up to make it look authentically old).

You can do any damn thing you please with the raw materials of this idea. Glue some of that thrift store jewelry's loose gems to your pieces of wood. Squeeze aluminum foil around them. And again, you don't actually have to have spare unfinished wood turnings around the house. You could use a couple of ancient chair legs or even a couple of plain waste blocks of 2X2 lumber (or 4X4 for pedestal candles) in a similar way.

Plaid? PLAID?

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 17:32:58 GMT

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

The only thing I can think of that is worse than putting on a suit to go to a party on a Saturday night would be....well, those curtains for a start. Who is Kate O'Beirne's decorator and why hasn't he been beheaded yet? The pink walls...the black and white curtains.

So that's what it's like to live in a Good N' Plenty box.

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.

Decorating Don'ts

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:56:41 GMT

The art over the fireplace is the first mistake here: sucky brassy modernist frame, a huge isolated splash of Chinese red with no relationship to the color scheme, Oriental concept fighting the style of the rest of the room. It's also too big/hung too low: the (blah) vases on the mantelpiece are set so precariously on either side they'd make anyone in the room subliminally nervous over time.

The FAKE "glowing fire" in the white plaster niche under the FAKE "carved marble" mantelpiece is bad enough, but it is surrounded with that horrific FAKE malachite in an eye-hooking GREEEEEEN. Which is so awful and unnatural that it even manages to clash with the real flower arrangement in the foreground

The balloon shades were a mistake, not just because their frou-frou interferes with the french doors' linear elegance, but because their contrast with the white woodwork and walls is the visual equivalent of blunt trauma to the head. Whack! Contre-coup!

That ferocious purple (the color of a subdural hematoma, interestingly enough) would be bearable -- even chic -- if it was taken less seriously. But here it seems to be barging into the room saying, "Aren't I an IMPORTANT color? Admire me!" You can't help feeling contemptuous of its heavy and humorless hand.

And that caramel marble coffee table? The escapee from Versailles? Those silver-gilt knees just make me giggle.

How 'bout you?

UPDATE:

Here's my very crude, "don't move anything" revision of this living room. I took inspiration for the more casual and lighthearted color scheme from the flowers on the coffee table.

I also (very clumsily) added mass to the lamp to help balance the room a bit. Maybe a ginger-jar concept would look good there. I wanted to darken the walls and the frame, but my extremely slapdash Photoshop skills are not up to that.

Giving New Meaning to "Environmental Health"

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 15:31:16 GMT

Where the Healing Touch Starts With the Hospital Design. A sprinkling of architects and designers around the world are working to greatly change hospitals by humanizing their design. By LIZETTE ALVAREZ. [The New York Times > Health]

A new category: Portico

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 15:52:43 GMT

Here's an attempt to make the softShadow macro work.

<%softShadow("http://blogs.salon.com/0003935/images/2004/09/06/HumblePortico.jpg")%>

Hmm. No luck yet.