Of Taxidermy and Such

One of Rachel Denny's "Domestic Trophies" series, whimsical riffs on hunting trophies that the Oregon-based artist crafts out of wool, foam, and wood. For information see the artist's website.

Over Christmas I accomplished two feats: rearranging my brother's house and reading the final installment in Edmund Morris's stirring trilogy about the 26th president of the United States, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, 2010). The two actions are not entirely unrelated, I must point out.

Like the pince-nezed Teddy, my younger brother is a vigorous sort — military man, wearer of spectacles, given to enthusiastic bursts of optimism and patriotism. More importantly for this blog, however, is an aesthetic characteristic he and Roosevelt have in common. My brother has no sense of interior design at all, other than "the hunter's desire to surround himself with disjecta membra." That's one of Morris's insights into his subject, and it means, basically, animal parts. My brother doesn't hunt much and what he kills, he eats, so while I was at his new residence in South Carolina — a sprawling and surprisingly untouched 1950s house long owned by the founder of a local institution of higher learning —  he regaled me with the venison he put away in the freezer as well as the sausage he made from the meat of a wild boar.

Evidence of those hunting expeditions sat on the floor of his library: a glassy-eyed four-point buck and a bristly black boar's head with a malevolent grin. There was a fish of some sort too, affixed to what appears to be a large piece of driftwood. My sister-in-law dislikes these objects greatly; ditto my mother. But my brother clings to them as evidence of his prowess as a modern-day hunter-gatherer, in the same way Theodore Roosevelt scattered the rooms of Sagamore Hill with bear rugs and such. So I scooped up the trophies and declared the heads perfect for displaying above the copper hood of the fireplace in the family room, which is precisely where they are now, flanking a signed and numbered James Bama print depicting a Shoshone chief. The fish went into the family room too. Where else was it going to go?

My only sibling doesn't have a precious bone in his body or much appreciation for beauty for beauty's sake. Neither does his wife. And they would both agree with me. The furnishings they have accumulated over the years are a bit of his, a bit of hers, as well as a great deal of furniture purchased with the house, meaning suburbiana from the 1950s and early 1960s, most of it, well, not my style. Expressing that opinion, however, was not my place, though I rolled my eyes plenty of times. What was important was to work over the house top to bottom and make it more welcoming — putting tables alongside chairs, moving a spinet piano to a better location, rearranging bookshelves, transferring lamps from one room to another, arranging pictures. (They recently moved into the house and seemed a bit overwhelmed when I arrived.) The end result, I hope, is a house whose furniture placement makes more sense, where collections are more orderly, and where, at the end of the day, my brother has, for the first time, a proper room of his own, where he can relax, play his guitars, and read, if he will ever sit still long enough to crack open a book.

Reworking the library was the hardest part of the holiday makeover. As a room it is nothing special: it a conventionally dark space, about 12 feet wide by 20 feet long, fully lined with mahogany-stained wood divided into panels by applied moldings. The fireplace is framed by slabs of spinach-green marble flecked with veins of white. The wall-to-wall carpeting is beige. If the room was mine I'd paint every inch of wood a Chinese green, the kind of green that's so dark it's almost black; rip up the carpeting and brashly spatter-paint the underlying concrete floor; and haul in a couple of English-club-style chairs, a glimmering giltwood console, some blue-and-white-porcelain lamps, and call it a stylish day. But it isn't my library. Though my brother knows nothing about interior design, he is nonetheless quite stubborn about what he'll live with, which meant that my mother and I could change relatively nothing. Still there's a lot one can accomplish within those narrow confines.

We dragged in a wing chair from the living room, where it didn't look especially happy, and placed it beside the fireplace, facing my brother's partners' desk. The moment that happened he began to envision, for the very first time, how the library could be used, such as hosting an affable father-and-son chat straight out of "Leave It to Beaver." (His observation, not mine.) A Mission-oak-style chair was nearly carried out to the garage, because my brother thought it looked severe and sort of boring. But when I pointed out that its firmness and height made it good for sitting and strumming his guitar with a music stand by his side, he agreed that it could stay. Ditto an old brass table lamp he deemed too retro; it serves a purpose, I told him, and you can always get a more pleasing fixture in the future — so the lamp stayed put. This sort of push-me, pull-you went on for three days straight. He was especially concerned (nay, alarmed) when he came home to find my mother and I removing the shelves from some bookcases, turning them into display cases, and arranging his framed medals and citations against six-foot lengths of wide green-and-white ribbon à la Mario Buatta. The displays weren't perfect, I agreed, but even he admitted that the cascades of carefully arranged frames looked far better than shelves half full of worn books and scattered objects. Plus the documents in the frames reflect who he is and what he has accomplished, professionally, in his life thus far.

So with this experience in mind, I exhort you all: open the curtains, move the furniture, and edit the clutter. All it takes a little effort to create a room worth inhabiting. It might not be as beautiful as one in a magazine but it can be comfortable and inviting. Just ask my brother.

DIY: Faux Paneling

A dining room in a house decorated by Asheton Langdon.

Genius is in the eye of the beholder. One man's bright idea is another's been-there-done-that. That being said I continue to be impressed by the do-it-yourself gusto of New York interior decorator Asheton Langdon, who died earlier this year, aged 82.

The dining room of the New York house, which has a countrified Regency flavor, is lined with pickled-wood wainscot. The upper sections of the walls has been stretched with a nubby fabric divided into panels with woven-jute upholstery webbing.

Recently I visited a house Langdon decorated and came back elated, my digital camera loaded with snaps of inspiring details. Several of them record the Brooklyn-born designer's creativity with, of all things, upholstery webbing. You know what I mean: the woven jute strips that keep one from falling through the seat of a chair. Typically this humble material is hidden beneath fabric, stuffing, and springs. Langdon, however, recognized that webbing could be a decorative element, particularly when deployed as trim and utilized in the creation of trompe l'oeil paneling, as shown in the dining room shown at the head of today's post.

A close-up of one of interior decorator Asheton Langdon's do-it-yourself boiserie, as seen at a house he decorated in New York. Measured and mitered, common upholstery webbing has been applied to a nubby fabric to create panels.

In the same house, Langdon transformed upholstery webbing into smartly tailored passementerie, trimming portières in a book-lined corridor that connects the public areas of the house to several spare rooms (see below). The red-black-and-buff color scheme was taken from ancient Greek ceramics, examples of which are displayed on brackets, along with related antique engravings.

Upholstery webbing trims the curtains that flank an interior door. The panels of the wainscot were created with gaffer's tape.

DIY: Gaffer's Tape

Several months ago a meeting took me to visit a gentleman with whom I serve on a board of trustees. Mutual friends said he possessed an incredible library of books about architectural and design dating back to the eighteenth century, hundreds of volumes on subjects ranging from the houses of Vanbrugh to Southern plantations to New England saltboxes. Consequently I was looking forward to cozying up with those precious volumes, pen and paper in hand: perusing, jotting, scribbling, even, perhaps, borrowing, if that would be allowed. After I arrived, however, my camera got a workout too, because to my surprise, the books were housed in a 1970s three-car garage that had been converted into a black, grey, and white pleasure dome inside, straight from the pages of Percier and Fontaine. And the primary decorating medium was matte-grey gaffer’s tape.

Yes, gaffer’s tape, the kind that costs about $3 a roll.

The pedimented plaque, one of a pair, is actually a church hymnal board.

The gentleman in question modestly took none of the credit for this trompe l'oeil transformation. Instead, he explained, as we talked late into the night, glasses of red wine in hand, it is the work of a longtime friend, Asheton Langdon (née Jay Langdon Gaiser, 1928—2010), a Brooklyn-born, Harvard-educated decorator who specialized in interiors of astonishing grandeur. Langdon, a designer I had never heard of and about whom I long to know more, also could create extraordinary special effects with common burlap upholstery webbing too, though more on that skill another day.

My host’s multitude of books needed a proper home, and since the garage wasn’t being used to its full credit, a major decorating project was born. Masses of grey gaffer's tape in two widths were purchased, and sometimes mitered, most times not, were deftly deployed, creating simple panels on walls, ceilings, and doors. The success of this stage-set paneling is furthered by the addition of pilasters made of planks of wood fastened into place against the Sheetrock walls and painted black.

Over all this have been hung mirrors, etchings, paintings, watercolors, and busts on brackets, all the components of a country-house library. Antiques and vintage furnishings in a variety of styles — Victorian, Louis XVI, Moroccan, Empire, even a boldly flowered Bessarabian rug — give the effect of having been gathered together over generations.

 

The Tale of a Table (Part 1)

A detail of a tabletop I marbleized last week. Unfortunately it looks more like a map of America, as seen from the air, during a record winter freeze. My next DIY attempt at faux-finishing the table will be far better, I assure you.

It's just one project after another up at our house. For the past several months my husband and I have been making lists of improvements we intend to make in our six small rooms, from hanging wallpaper in our daughter's bedchamber to having battleship linoleum laid in the galley kitchen to boxing in our clawfoot tub so it looks more refined and less like an Appalachian set piece. Needless to say, most of these projects require significant outlays of money, so we've been approaching them slowly, one by one, as cash is saved and economy-minded workmen are interviewed.

Getting the dining room into order is at the top of the list, mainly because we'd like to start entertaining again in a finished space rather than one that is forever in flux. The plans for the winter of 2010-2011 involve the installation of wainscot; lining the walls with hand-blocked West St. Mary's wallpaper from Adelphi Paper Hangings; repainting the badly worn wood floor (a task now completed); repainting the doors and trim; having new curtains made, et cetera.

Standing about five-and-a-half feet high, the 19th-century German cast-iron stove we found on eBay was recently installed for us by Top Hat Chimney Sweeps of Fort Plain, New York. The base is an old grindstone we found on our property, a former farm. That protective metal heat-shield has to be painted into submission soon.

Recently we installed a 19th-century German wood-burning stove in the form of a Doric column; it was one of my husband's numerous eBay finds. The space is quite cold in winter — our Federal Style residence, the surviving 1801 wing of a house that was begun in the 1760s, is utterly uninsulated — so the cast-iron stove is a welcome addition when the Fahrenheit drops and lake-effect snow blankets our property. As for the round pedestal table, it is usually hidden beneath a series of tablecloths, but when those linens are off being cleaned, its circa-1900 golden-oak ugliness is all too apparent. And, to my mind, it is entirely unacceptable.

I neglected to snap a photograph of our dining table before its recent transformation, but found this representative image on the website of Prices4antiques. Made of golden oak by Kershan Bros., an Ohio manufacturer, between 1880 and 1920, it is a near-match for our dining table, though minus the casters.

A view of our dining table after it was painted; the base was finished in satin black.

Last week-end, armed with directions I adapted from the Better Homes & Gardens website, I marbleized the top of the table as an experiment. A couple of days' exertions with three shades of latex enamel applied to the wood surface with an 18-inch-by-24-inch rectangle of thin plastic sheeting resulted in flamboyant amateur excess — grey faux marble with veins so thick they resemble mortar joints. (I didn't have a sumi brush, as the directions suggested for fine veining, so pressed one of my daughter's watercolour brushes into service.) Not long after the table was completed, I had the chance to visit the regal apartment of one of my idols, interior decorator Howard S. Slatkin, and realized my mistake once I laid eyes on the pair of obelisks displayed in his dressing room. The tabletop should have been painted a deep shade of terra cotta and speckled to resemble porphyry rather than boldly smudged and veined to look like mottled grey marble. That way it would have a quieter, more sophisticated presence, would show off our china better, and live more happily with the intended wallpaper.

Red Chinese porphyry, the actual stone, as seen on the website of Xiamen Orient Rising Imports.

Looks like I know what I'll be repainting in the near future. Simple directions for executing faux porphyry can be found in George D. Armstrong's Painter's Cyclopedia (Frederick J. Drake, 1908), and I'll be following them closely. And, one hopes, with more success and subtlety.

Another view of the dining table.