Archives: Get Inspired — David Hicks

Space: Master bedroom, Boyesen Road, Southampton, New York. 

Year: 1967-68 

Client: Lydia Buhl Melhado Farr (later Mrs William H Mann, died 1997), third wife of Francis Bartow Farr, one of Wall Street's richest salesmen, according to The New York Times. Heiress to a Detroit industrial fortune, Lydia Farr—then in her early 30s and the mother of two young sons—had an 18-room apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue and a fabled collection of Verdura jewels. And the good sense to hire David Hicks when she and Farr built a modern house in Southampton, shortly after they married in 1966.  

Elements: Next to nothing, really. A wall-to-wall field of white-glazed hexagonal Provençal tiles. A 19th-century French armoire, stripped to the raw pine. Sleek white-lacquered side tables topped by dead-plain modern lamps. A director's chair of polished steel and white leather. The bed, however, is the piece de résistance, a towering shelter hung with white-linen curtains printed with an overscale damask pattern and lined with crisp glazed white cotton. It is opulently penitential, like something a world-weary marquise of a certain age might have commissioned after being named abbess of a deluxe convent. 

Image: From David Hicks: Designer by Ashley Hicks (Scriptum Editions, 2003).

Originally published: An Aesthete's Lament, 20 November 2008

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.

 

Get Inspired: Millicent Rogers

Space: The living room of Millicent Rogers, 21 Sutton Place, New York City, New York.

Year: Circa 1935

Occupant: Rogers (1902 — 1953) was arguably the most glamorous of all the Standard Oil heiresses. Adventuresome too. She identified the genius of American couturier Charles James early on his career and acquired his clothes with the eye of a curator. She learned to forge gold so she could design and make barbarically chic jewelry, including a pair of gold-nugget-like cufflinks she created for Clark Gable, one of a string of lovers that included the future author Roald Dahl. She collected, with discernment, Biedermeier furniture, Navajo turquoise jewelry, Native American artifacts, and terrific paintings (Renoir, Corot, Fragonard). Rogers also had an astoundingly good eye for interior decoration, creating extraordinarily personal decors for her residences in Austria; Washington, D. C.; New Mexico; New York; Jamaica, and Virginia.

Elements: Located in the famous riverside tenements smartly renovated by Dorothy Draper during the Depression and decorated for Rogers by McMillen & Co. — Billy Baldwin gives some credit to Van Day Truex too, though surely the photograph records Rogers's exacting taste and no one else's — the room looks overstuffed at first glance. Especially to modern eyes, what with the exuberant Victorian needlework rose garden rolled out underfoot and the walls dressed with deep red satin cascading from cloak pins in early-nineteenth-century European fashion. (Note the cast-iron steam pipe in the left corner of the photograph, disguised to blend in with the fabric.) The space is actually quite minimally furnished, however, with about ten pieces of furniture, none of which takes up much room or is at all superfluous. Two tailored modern love seats with down-stuffed cushions. A pair of Chinese Chippendale tables holding Victorian glass lamps converted to electricity. A brace of papier-mâché side chairs glimmering with gilt and mother of pearl, which could be pressed into service in the adjoining dining room. A couple of Régence fauteuils covered in velvet (surely silk, given Rogers's superlative taste and bottomless pocketbook). Oh, and a low black-lacquer cocktail table set with crystal ashtrays. That's about it.

Lessons Learned: Even if the sumptuousness of the setting is out of your financial league, the takeaway is texture. It's all about juxtaposition. Sleek satin played against lustrous velvet. Crisp modern upholstery relieved by a double dose of old-fashioned button tufting. Smooth lacquer alongside nubby needlework. Don't forget the animating qualities of gilt frames and crystal candelabra either. Every room needs a bit of dazzle to keep its spirits up, even if it's just a trail of golden nail heads tracing the curves of a chair. As for the Victorian table lamps, they are pure camp — and the room is all the better for their quirky presence.

Details Count: No-Nail Pictures

Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers at home with one of her several dachshunds. Photograph by Richard Rutledge for American "Vogue," 15 March 1945.

Most people simply pound a nail into a wall when they decide to display a photograph or a painting. Sadly, however, that's where those framed treasures usually stay for time immemorial, often losing their power to attract the eye through daily familiarity. But leaning a work of art against a wall rather than displaying it conventionally on the wall is always more interesting. (And I'm not talking about utilizing those narrow picture shelves popularized by mail-order catalogues.) Casual placement on tabletops, mantles, even the floor, is curiously potent. It implies a certain dégagé attitude toward the treatment of one's possessions as well as, conversely, a sense of deep attention to the intended effect. Even if the work of art in question isn't particularly compelling or valuable, propping gives it more gravitas. Plus, this kind of deployment allows works to be moved around at will without resorting to a hammer.

The impossibly stylish Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, shown above, propped several giltwood-framed paintings on a Greek-key-ornamented desk in her living room in the 1940s. Curiously the table lamps partially obscure the art, tempting one to step forward and take a closer look. (Sometimes great design is about seducing others to experience the world way you do.) The leaned pictures also break up the formality of the installation, loosening the stays, as it were, of the matching lamps and the symmetrical display of nineteenth-century paintings on the wall above.

Tastemaker Pauline de Rothschild, another charter member of the propped-art school, often displayed a small Bonnard painting on a chair carefully placed at her bedside, so it was the first thing the American-born baroness saw when she woke. Precious, but why not? Real style embodies a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.

A great friend of mine, a lady of highly evolved aesthetics, has set a beautiful representation of a flower — I'm sure it's an antique, a Redouté perhaps? — on the floor of her spare but perfectly decorated sitting room overlooking the East River in New York City. The rather small artwork, no bigger than a standard magazine cover, is beautifully framed and placed so low and with such modesty that coming upon it is a delightful surprise. Seeing it out of the corner of one's eye, leaning against the baseboard, is like a gift.

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.

Well Said: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." ("It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.")


So wrote aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 — 1944) in his 1939 memoir Terre des Hommes.