Decor Extremus:

The guest bedroom, once the front parlour

The guest bedroom here remains little changed. Used for a while as our bedroom and then a study, it is square in plan with two double sash windows and high ceilings. In the original house it was the front parlour and it still retains a stately sense of occasion and proportion. Soon after we took over we painted the ubiquitous Softboard linings a light grey and filled the room with a selection of furniture, most of which had Biedermeier leanings. It is a lovely room and because of this it has always passed muster.

Most guests have been too kind to mention that the curtains were rather inadequate when it came to blocking out the nearby street lights but having experienced the room myself recently, new window treatments have become the first evidence of a plan to tackle this room. That I had a plan for these windows all ready to go, was because I’ve been thinking about it for a while, allowing the design to percolate away in the back of my mind.

The first room that really went through a lengthy design process like this was the little bathroom (see Building the Titanic, June 3 2011) with its panelled walls and ornate ceiling. The second was the library where every space was carefully designed on paper. These are to me the two most successfully ‘decorated’ spaces in the house.

The guest room is the last real décor project in the house. After this there is the rather mundane task of painting the small laundry – really no bigger than a cupboard and perhaps the conversion of the old tool shed into an additional guest space or office – but after that we’re looking at rather boring maintenance. At the same time guest rooms are very easy to ignore and to make dull because you don’t occupy them yourself. However I want the room to be memorable, an experience that a visitor remembers and not one replicated in their own homes or any other guest room they might encounter.

There is also one more thing I want to tick off my decorating bucket list – a tent room.

Parkier & Fontaine, Napoleon’s Bed Chamber Chateau Malmaison (see http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/in-tents )

Tent rooms date from Napoleon Bonaparte but like most of his ideas the origins of the form are in Ancient Rome. However as far as the modern world is concerned it all starts when Empress Josephine commissioned architects Charles Perkier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine to design rooms for  Château Malmaison a house redecorated to celebrate Napoleon’s military victories. The two architects, considered to be among the earliest interior decorators, created “tented rooms for Napoleon’s Council Room, his bedroom, and even for the château’s entrance.” The idea caught on particularly amongst the class of people whose exposure to a military tent in the field came with Empire furniture and rich fabrics.

King Freidrich Wilhelm’s spare room in tented form, Charlottenholf Summer Palace, Potsdam (1824-1826)

One of the greatest tent rooms of all time is that created for Crown Prince, later King Freidrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, in 1824 by architect Karl Freidrich Schinkel at the summer palace of Charlottenhof in Potsdam. This was very much in the fashion of rooms that Josephine had established and which had spread through the palaces and aristocratic residences of Europe. The room, still extant, is a lovely room, simple, bright and graphically strong and something we made sure we saw on a visit to the many, many palaces of Potsdam about ten years back – which made me determined to have my own one day.

Two facts about the ‘tented room’ at Charlottenhof resonate with my current project. It too was designed as a guest room, primarily for Alexander von Humbolt a naturalist and friend of the prince (who had the room designed to remind Humbolt of his trips up the Orinoco river) and it was lined in ticking. Readers of this blog will know that ticking is a favourite material here. Not only for its strong graphic characteristics and its natural fibre (cotton) but because, unlike other traditional upholstery fabrics it is little changed, widely available and inexpensive.

So in many ways Freidrich Wilhelm’s occassional guest crash pad, is my model. Part military, part journey up the Orinocco, part guest room in a palace. I say that also because tent rooms made a comeback in the 1980s – in a blousy overblown version which will be avoided. When I approached the maker of my new curtains to ask whether she had ever sewn a tent ceiling – she said ‘yes once for a wedding’ not the look to which I aspire better, I think, to go with Schinkel.

There are a couple of challenges in a room of this sort. I have been asked, perhaps not irrationally, that the ceiling should be designed so that it can be lowered for the occasional clean to remove dust. Then as this is the last room in the house I don’t want to introduce either new elements but to repeat some of the previously used motifs so that this last room acts to bind the house together. This means using a dado rail (which protects the fabric from abrasion, reduces cost and links to the design on the adjacent hall) and the use of black and white ticking seen elsewhere will help.

Sketches to determine yardage and hanging method

As it stands my concept, still in sketch form, is beginning to look a little like a foldout/flat pack tent. Imagine Napoleon travelling with a sort of flat pack wainscoting that he folded out against the fabric walls of the striped tent to give the lower half stability. This lets me tick another thing off the décor bucket list – boiseries – those simply moldings that provide rectangular frames for wall panelling. This should also moderate the extreme stripes of the ticking with a good base of off-white paint.

For now planning is moving into the technical realm with thinking concentrating on just how one might create a pattern for the ceiling and how it might all go together. I have enlisted the help of a couple of friends with experience of similar projects and the sketches are underway. This one will take a while but really it’s a great thing to have a décor project – all be it a tent – floating around in the back of your mind.

DLJ

A short video – depicting the table setting for our midwinter Christmas – seating for 10 our largest yet – requiring two tables.

Hallway mid-demolition.

Almost a year ago I posted that we were about to get back on the tools and start work renovating the hall. That turned out to be a little optimistic.

What I didn’t know then was that within a matter of weeks I’d leave my job at the Museum and Art Gallery in Napier to take up life as a full-time writer, based 400 kilometres away in Auckland. This meant reclaiming our Auckland house – long rented out – and facing up to a great deal of postponed maintenance. Then came the more pleasant task of refurnishing the Auckland house (robinsimpsonhouse.wordpress.com ) in a very different style, which (no surprises here) I did from the local auction house.

Auckland home – a very different style

So Peter and I now live between two cities, occupying two different houses in a complicated relay, which see us spending different periods of time in different zones and relying on house sitters and cat minders to ensure we spend some time together in the same house.

Somewhere in this the hallway project got a little lost.

That was until the other day when sitting at my desk in Napier, having deposited Peter at the airport for Auckland, I decided that the struggle I was having with a particular piece of writing could be attributed to the influence of the depressing water stained wallboard in the hall and that the time had come to do something about it.

It took three days to strip the hallway of its softboard linings (using a garden spade) and then to remove the numerous nails small tacks and left over bits of hessian still attached from the old scrim wallpaper underneath.

The result was a rather severe hallway lined only with the sarking boards – rough sawn horizontal boards of native Rimu – to be found in most older New Zealand houses.

Rimu was always considered the second choice in building after Kauri (NZ Pine) and was therefore used for construction only after Kauri ran out – which it had done by 1906 when Finnis house was built. It is a hard timber that gets harder with age. The heart timber goes a dark red-brown while the outer timber can be almost pale. Sarking boards, cut from Rimu logs, contain both heart and outer board timber.

I am always impressed by the appearance of sarking. Its rich brown tones are warm and its surface pleasantly rough. When contrasted with white painted ceilings it looks rather smart. What I find is that you are usually tempted to consider a brown and white colour scheme for the finished space. However the truth is the flatness of paint means you won’t achieve the same feel as exposed timber. Then there is the option of leaving the sarking? The problem is you can almost see the breezes blowing through the hall now. If only there was some middle ground?

We will line and paint the hall as planned but for the moment it has been furnished in the starkest manner suiting its new severity.

On Peter’s return he took some photographs that reminded us both of those delightfully woody Russian or Scandinavian interiors in country houses or fishing lodges.  So just for a moment as I write at my desk in Auckland I’m happy to think of Napier as our little winter Dacha.

DLJ

One day I saw a chair that intrigued me at Maiden & Fosters’ weekly auction. It was a good quality copy of a Chippendale-style chair. By the state of its varnish – yellowy and shiny – I would have dated the chair to the 1940s to the 1950s, though this is difficult to corroborate. I looked at closely – its seat was made of leatherette, but the carving was crisp. The chair stood on its own like a giraffe among all the other chairs about to be auctioned that week.

I had always wanted to paint a chair like this either green or Chinese red, treating it as a ‘decorator item’. Obviously I would not do this with an original 18th century chair, nor would I do it with a good 19th century copy. This one answered my needs. I doubted whether anyone would want it, but since I could not attend the auction I left a relatively high bid of $100.

These days it is possible to luck on an 18th century chair for not much more in an antique auction but I decided I wanted this chair, even though Douglas was slightly incredulous.

When I returned to Napier I got the news I had ‘won the bid’. It had gone for the relatively high price of $93, alas. But I felt really excited to be doing something I’ve wanted to do all my life.

Douglas was away, so I was free to enjoy myself with what, after all, was neither a valuable antique nor even a particularly notable chair in itself.

I needed to strip the chair of varnish before I could do anything else. I went to Mitre 10 and cruised their varnish-removal shelves, fixing on an American solution called        Dad’s Easy Spray Varnish and Paint Remover. It was many years – many decades in fact – since I had stripped furniture. In the 1970s my brother Russell and I had a long period of stripping colonial kauri furniture of the painted surfaces that today we would think were quite lovely. In those days, wood was king. I remembered well that stinging sensation of stripper on bare skin, the way you started off quite carefully but inevitably, in your enthusiasm, you got it on you somewhere. I remembered the smell and the mess.

I was dubious about stripping the chair because of its intricate carving. I bought all the associated gear – mask for fumes, gloves, several types of scraper including a plastic one at the last minute. I also bought grade 2 steel wool for the final removal and turps. 

I decided to work in the back shed. The weather was still fine – in fact it was hot – but by working by the open door I would be ok for fumes. I set to work. I painted on the stripper in copious quantities, beginning with the intricate back of the chair (not a good idea.) The solution had to be left 10-15 minutes then removed. Removal was messy but the varnish seemed relatively easy to shift. I moved on to another part of the chair. (Later I decided to concentrate on one side of the chair at a time, including those parts furtherest away from me. By rotating the chair I would cover all parts of it. Of course I made a mistake by starting with the most visible part of the chair. If it had gone wrong in some way I would have stymied the whole operation.)

Within two days I had stripped away the unattractive yellowy varnish. The cheap plastic scraper I bought was the best implement even though it collapsed in the end. The most exciting part was removing the final remnants of the varnish with steel wool and copious amounts of turps. This revealed the native wood – the mahogany underneath.

For a moment I debated with myself if I should try and ‘pickle’ the wood a la Syrie Maugham in the 1920s. Besides not knowing how to do this, I decided mahogany was too red a wood to pickle. So I allowed the chair to dry overnight.

This is when I began to have qualms, as the chair in an unstripped state actually looked quite attractive. Its cheap varnish had vanished and the mahogany just on its own had a certain…well, dignity.

I looked at this wood a lot, ran my hands over its smooth velvety surface and wondered what would happen if I waxed it with a good old wax. Would it start looking like a ‘proper antique’?

But this was not my endgame. I wanted to shamelessly produce a ‘decorator item’. I had always liked alarmingly false looking furniture in both Chinese green and Chinese red.

I got some oil based primer and set to work giving the chair a proper undercoat. As I did this I felt the shade of my grandfather become very agitated. My maternal grandfather was a wood merchant. He had carefully chosen all the wood for the hallway and doors of the house he had built when he was married. My mother had told me how unhappy he was when my grandmother – inevitably, as fashions changed – decided to paint all over the wood with a cream or white paint. Painting mahogany did seem sacrilegious. Mahogany in my childhood – especially highly finished mahogany – was meant to be the sine qua non of quality. Nevertheless I pressed on. Two days later I had a rather appealing white chair.

It occurred to me I should, or at least could, stop here. It looked after all like so much French/Scandinavian furniture today, sort of ‘antique’ and sort of ‘contemporary’. I juggled with the green option for a while then decided if I was going to press on I would go with red.

This is where a new set of problems appeared. What red? Douglas had gone to enormous trouble to get a lovely deep saturated red for the library walls. But locating a good red, with blues in it rather than yellow, became problematic. There was a further problem. Obtaining an oil based red in a small quantity (less than a litre) in an isolated place like Hawke’s Bay was difficult.

In the end I had to swap to a water-based red which the assistant told me was quite suitable for an oil-based foundation (but not vice versa.) I began the heretical business of painting the chair bright red.

This was fun. I changed the red for the second coat, hoping to obtain a ‘bluer’ red. (I still think the current colour is too red-yellow.)  But the chair does have a rather dazzling presence (to the degree it makes all our old colours look a bit drab.) The next step is some contemporary fabric for the seat. Altogether it will have cost me probably $250 for this essentially valueless item.

Perhaps I should have saved up another $100 and actually bought….a real 18th century chair?

But then I would not have had such good…sacrilegious fun.

PW