Decor Extremus:

I mentioned ‘leg love’ a while back. I have this passionate, almost uncontrollable fixation on the legs of tables and chairs. (I realise this sounds rather weird and even kooky.) I find unusual leg shapes utterly fascinating. I basically bought the big table in the studio because I found its chunky, dark coloured, segmented legs irresistible.

Like most extremists I have specialist tastes. I only like wooden legs. I don’t find marble legs, or cast iron legs at all interesting.

It is something to do with the warmth and richness of wood, which is wildly unfashionable at the moment.

You only have to drone the word ‘brown’ with a kind of nasal sneer in your voice to allude to the concept that wooden furniture has had its day.

Pooft! I say. Lemmings, take a jump.

I adore wooden furniture for its rich warmth. I actually love the fact it came from a tree – something real and living. I love the fact there are so many different woods in the world and as a lover of furniture you have to look at any piece carefully to note what kind of wood it is.

I come from a family of wood merchants, so that probably predisposed me to look at and appreciate the sheer colour variations, tonal complexities and lustrous beauty of wood.

One thing that really amuses me about the ‘brown’ brigade (people who sneer at wood furniture): you can almost guarantee they will be searching out organic food, drinking a certain sort of coffee and wine. Yet their interiors are peopled with, basically, the most inorganic crap by way of furniture.

If you look closely at those horrible uniform houses in so many contemporary ‘nesting’ magazines, you will see – maybe – some plywood, but the rest is a dreary mass of concrete with harsh looking furniture, basically created for stick-people. These stick insects drone on about their love of the organic, the environment, all things natural (usually incorporated into the ‘design’ of their incredibly expensive ‘holiday homes’) but they would feel distinctly uncomfortable being surrounded by furniture which comes from trees.

Funny that.

I love trees, I love wood, I love wood in furniture.

Now here’s a tip. Turn your back on expensive design stores. Go to an auction and feel up the furniture.

I can almost guarantee, money back, that in ten years time what you bought at a knockdown rate at the auction, given a little study, will be worth more than the fortune you paid at a design store.

This is from William Cottrell, the doyen of New Zealand colonial furniture:

‘For $50,000 – about what you pay for a quality contemporary work of art – you can still put together an absolutely first rate collection of New Zealand colonial period furniture – top level, almost museum quality.’

Makes you think.

So go on … go and feel up a bit of wooden furniture soon.

PNW

Regular readers of this blog might think that we are obsessed with curtains. It is true that while Peter has been opening up the eastern side of the house to sunlight (Summer Look) by removing curtains and filtering light to the north by closing curtains (Delicious Gloom), I have been perfecting total sun block curtains to the west (for the reason see Romanovs & Me and for the approach see Going Gock on David Hicks).

Well my new curtains have arrived and their greeny-yellowy, neo-David Hicks, Greek key pattern and my two tone (red and  brown) wallpaper – is one of those perfect matches that no interior decorator would ever recommend. They block both sun and heat and I love them and thus another curtain posting – well not quite.

The lady who made my curtains suggested I needed a few more rings to give them proper bulk and fall. Ever hopeful I asked where I could source extra brass curtain rings (other than the insanely expensive price of $7 each on the Recollections website). She suggested ‘imitation brass’ (gold painted plastic) as they were preferred by ‘most people’ as they made less noise.

As much as I might like to be, I am constantly reminded that, however hard I try, I am not most people. This new information regarding curtain rings provided what was just another piece of evidence in support of my weirdness. As it stands, in range of my noisy curtain rail I have a middle aged man with a Harley that he takes out of the garage and revs for hours on end but never rides, a neighbour who plays music, he’s thirty years too old for, until the stroke of midnight, a children’s toy that plays the Omm Papa song from Oliver in a harsh mechanical voice for days on end, a teenager that runs up and down on the wooden floor of a hallway that works just like a drum, and the thwack, thwack, thwack of a tennis court. Not all of these noises are annoying – but no one has ever apologised for those that are, or done anything to lessen their effect.

So, not being most people, I’d like to apologise in advance to any neighbour woken by the early morning rattle of my curtain rings – but gold painted plastic?

DLJ

These were the immortal words that Bette Davis spat out in her 1949 film – Beyond the Forest and that Liz Taylor later incanted as the opening lines of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

It was pretty much what was running through Douglas and my minds when we came to have a first look at the inside of the house we live in now.

I had always liked the outside – it is simple, almost gaunt.

But the inside turned out to be a rabbit warren of flats, with awkward dividing walls and horrible decor. Worse still, the land agent was a blabbermouth. His idea of good salesmanship was to keep up a rapid fire commentary on everything from rugby and the weather to any other crap subject his turgid brain could dredge up.

He never shut up for a second.

Meanwhile Douglas and I walked round the house in an advanced state of shock.

mind blowing decor

The purple room was …’mind blowing’ – but not in a way you might like.

We decided after this, that the house was a no go.

BUT

We got ambushed.

Down in the city council – remarkably, since most papers got burnt in the earthquake – was a plan for the interior which showed this remarkable space – a studio.

We ended up in a bidding war for the dump (the property cycle in 2005 was revving up, heading straight towards the 2007 cliff…)

I’ll let Douglas tell in another blog about how he discovered there was enough of the studio left for us to really really really want the house.

In the meantime, luxuriate in the sheer horribleness of the interiors of the house that we bought. And I guess the message is: there’s an awful lot of work in changing things, but it is worth it (just…)

PW

The Studio: as it became (an early incarnation)

David Hicks at home in the 1970s - not worrying about resale

A stylish friend with a small potentially chic apartment in Wellington is in the market for window coverings. She was advised that curtains needed to be floor to ceiling and of a plain neutral colour. This is both good and bad advice.

The good bit is the floor to ceiling part. Firstly mid-wall curtain drops look dopey in almost any setting and secondly the larger the expanse of curtain the more adaptable they are  – BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO TAKE THEM WITH YOU.

This is important.

New Zealanders seem set on the idea that chattels stay with the house but recognising from the beginning that you intend to take your curtains with you, will free you up to commit to a fabric you love or to rationalise buying a more expensive fabric (and let’s face it the new owner will probably thank you).

The bad (really bad) part of the initial curtain advice is of course the neutral bit and this is also connected to resale.  It seems that New Zealanders would rather get it wrong with a discreet neutral curtain than with a bold colorful pattern, as if this makes our mistakes less noticeable. Unfortunately bland-on-bland is the single biggest mistake made in contemporary home decorating and all because resale has come to govern decorating decisions. This reaches the point that it is not the pleasure we will get from living in a house that dominates its decoration but what might possibly offend someone on resale.

My advice to my curtain-less apartment-dwelling, friend – was “look at David Hicks – he knew what to do with curtains.”  No sooner were the words out of my mouth and I thought where did that come from?

David Hicks 'Hexagon' wallpaper

I’ve never been a huge Hicks fan – indeed in my modernist youth I used him as a symbol of … well let’s say I was less than complimentary. So why was I now promoting Mr Hicks? Was it that when looking for curtain fabric at our local Spotlight, I’d spied a number of geometric designs that were very like the fabrics on which David Hick’s early reputation had been based (I feel as if I’m channelling Gok Won, suggesting High Street versions of designer fashion)? Was it that he understood that in tackling the decoration of an old house you need to steer a path closer to sympathy than to authenticity?

Having gone and had another look at the classic Hicks on Decoration (1971) and the more recent David Hicks: A Life of Design (2009) – I’ve decided it was something all together different that made me suggest his approach.  I don’t think either Hicks’ or his clients thought even once about resale value and because of that lived in wonderful personalised and satisfying interiors – which is what we wish of any of our friends.

DLJ

After talking about giving a room a summer look a while back, a very knowledgeable friend told me (ex-blog-communicus) that no room had a summer look if it still had carpets on the floor. I stand corrected.

The idea is to generally denude a room and take it as far back to bare bones as you want. Anyone can do it with any kind of room. Just take something out (preferably quite a few things).

‘A change is as good as a rest’ has to be one of the better cliches (most truthful).

But what I want to write here is a paeon to gloom. There is nothing more delicious in high glaring summer than having curtains almost pulled across windows – especially bedroom windows.

Light in New Zealand is so fierce that it’s like going out into an incredibly unhealthy ultraviolet storm from about 2pm till evening.

Having half pulled curtains in a study, a bedroom automatically gives the room a sort of pleasing illicitness. Shadows multiply in depth. A headache is averted.

These are my favourite curtains. I bought the toile at the fabulous Ab Fab in Newmarket, Auckland (www.abfabrics.co.nz) who specialise in end of line fabrics at cheapish prices.

It is Robinson Crusoe a toile ‘from the Christopher Moore Toile Collection’. It is very delicate and pleasing. I have also pinned some over an ugly door into my study and even, believe it or not, made some covers for my completely utilitarian desk chair. (I’m aware you can ‘over-toile’. Next thing my kitten will be wearing a toile poke-bonnet and kick-skirt.)

So – if you don’t want to take your curtains down and have a ‘nude’ look, the alternative is to pull your curtains so they almost meet, so that light enters as if in a painting or a Scandinavian film.

(An alternative here is to hang some cheap light white gauzy fabric, which filters the light but doesn’t have the naïf quality of ‘nets’. A thin cotton does the trick. Hey presto, you’re in Sweden.)

I realize this all makes me sound like a decor obsessed queen. Maybe I am? Another way of looking at it is: how can you change your life easily? Well, let’s start by gently pulling the curtains on the high noon of a painfully bright summer’s day… at least it will get the neighbours talking.

PW