Decor Extremus:

I have a lovely little office – decorated on a theme of imperial naval superiority. It is carved from what was once the house’s original dining room. It is full of bits and pieces. However I spend most of my time at my desk looking out of my window – such is the life of a writer.

Never fear I have, until recently, had an excellent view, one carefully composed to make use of a classic example of borrowed landscape. The foreground view, through a double set of Edwardian sash windows, is taken up with Souvenir de la Malmaison a climbing rose strung across the window on wires. This works as a security device and provides a briefly splendid array of pink roses.

Souvenir de la Malmaison

The middle ground is centered on a lovely Maya lemon. This was on the property when we arrived but has been nursed back to health and clipped into a good strong form. This is one of two lemon trees and as it borders the lane it is the one that supplies of the lane dwellers more than it does us.

This is all backed with a tall wall of clipped leaves – made up of Titoki trees, a Prunus cerasfera Nigra and other assorted hedge materials – all of which lie on the neighbours side of the lane. Although it can get a bit shaggy, this wall of trees blocks their house from my view and provides a backdrop to my composition. I am as they say ‘well pleased.’

The other day, for no apparent reason, the neighbor decided to cut a big whole in this wall of leaves crudely exposing a corrugated iron fence of which I had no previous consciousness. It might be an attempt to let light into the space surrounding their front door – futile though it will be due to the orientation of the house. Although I’d like to think that this sudden hole in my composition is to do with a broadly considered plan on the neighbour’s behalf – but I suspect it is a result of angry gardening.

Hitherto unseen splendours

Angry Gardening comes in 3 Categories – all very popular among New Zealand men.

Category 1: occurs when they first take possession of a new property and usually involves a chainsaw, with which they angrily remove all planted presence of the previous owner.

Category 2: occurs when men are sent out into the garden against their will usually during televised sports events. This usually involves angry use of a lawn mower or leaf blower to drown out the person who evicted them.

Category 3: occurs in those small parcels of land that while on their property sit outside the zone on habitation – aka the little spaces on the other side of the fence, the back of a shed or the unseen side of a garage – these spaces are resented and get angrilly attacked about once every six months.

Although all categories come with a big dose of resentment, Category 3 is the worst – because it seems such a waste of time – gardening you can’t see. Confronted with this realization – massacre is usually considered the best approach.

It is the approach my neighbor has taken to this part of his strip before – a mature flax disappeared one day for no obvious reason – weeds now grow in its place.

Another example of borrowed landscape – this vine originates two houses away in an overgrown back yard – but for how long?

Borrowed landscape is a tricky proposition because you rely on the owner of the landscape in question – and most times you are totally in their hands. You need to know that they have the ability to see a wider view – to see landscape and gardening holistically as part of a series of interlinked properties – such relationships are rare.

The strange thing is should the neighbor come to me and ask me to take over this strip he can’t see but I look at daily,  I’d be glad do it.

DLJ

Some time back I blogged about a small collection of artworks I have accumulated relating to Oscar Wilde – https://decorextremus.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/in-oscars-corner/ – and which hang in the library here.

Today the collection was joined by a Mortimer Menpes etching of Cairo acquired – again locally – some years back but which first had to under go a clean and has only today returned from the framers  – installed in a nice old black lacquer frame of some age.

Menpes (1885-1938) was an Australian born artist who went to London where he became a student and close friend and assistant of Whistler’s. Menpes was an excellent etcher and his views of Venice are stunning and accordingly famous in etching circles.

However he and the American painter fell out (most people did with Whistler) after Menpes decided to travel to Japan and see Japanese art firsthand – something Whistler had essentially forbidden him to do. When he returned he had a large and successful exhibition but refused Whistler insistence that he sign his work – ‘pupil of Whistler.’

Another version of the falling out (favored by Wikipedia) is that ‘Whistler and Menpes quarreled over the interior design of Menpes new house, which Whistler felt was a brazen copying of his own ideas – nice vision two straight men falling out over décor.

I’ve always liked the Menpes works encountered in Australian galleries and so when this turned up in Napier I nabbed it. A second nice discovery was to find a Menpes oil in the collection of Andrew McIntosh Patrick a collector and decorator of consummately infallible taste whom I admire immensely (note to self: a Andrew McIntosh Patrick posting is required).

It wasn’t until later that I discovered that Wilde and Menpes were friends and that the Australian was godfather to Oscar’s second son Vyvyan.  Vyvyan later wrote ‘I still possess some of his etchings which he bestowed upon me in lieu of a christening mug’ sadly (the ungrateful wretch) continued ‘the etchings are not very good.’

Having seen many Victorian christening mugs – I think Vyvyan did rather well.

DLJ

We have for some time been looking to add extra storage to the little china pantry we have created. The room has a large sideboard already overflowing with china and a small bookcase stacked with recipe books. However at the rate we acquire both china and recipe books, more storage was clearly going to be  needed.

We were looking for a butler’s stand. The logical thing would be to move the old beaten up one from the studio and to buy a nicer looking one for the big room. However that piece seems so right in the position that it’s in we decided instead to find another for the china pantry.

The local auction house failed to oblige and those in far-flung destinations didn’t seem quite right. So when M&F offered up a large painted safe which we thought might do the job.

Described as a Kauri (a local version of pine) safe, it was painted in a thick dark chocolate-brown – but some of the original blue paint could be seen underneath.  While it looked like it had come from a shed on a farm somewhere, I suspect that someone had purchased it in order to do it up but simply run out of puff because there was a strong reserve. This happened to be our top bid and it came our way.

Taking a good look at it  – it was solid and in good shape. There was no sign of rot or any other real decay, just an annoyingly unstable looking paint surface.  The wire weave sides were distressed. I had initially intended to replace. However closer inspection revealed that each was held into place on four sides in what were nine separate panels of wire. This was my first clue to what revealed itself to be a quality – well made – piece of furniture and not the country item I first thought.

Given a chance Peter will paint anything green, especially anything destined for the kitchen. So I wanted to have an alternative ready for the eventual suggestion that we might paint the safe green.  There is a little shelf on the wall of the china store and on it an assortment of small vases – most of which are in constant use for flowers plucked from the garden.

My favorite is a blue vase with splashes of pink and yellow with a real fire-licked quality in which the colours are fused together. I love these early twentieth century Japanese vases (never deemed very collectible) because of their excellent glazes and color ranges. There are about half a dozen of them scattered about the house. So I decided to use this one  as an inspirational starting point.

lowers plucked from the garden. My favorite is a blue vase with splashes of pink and yellow with a real fire-licked quality in which the colours are fused together. I love these early twentieth century Japanese vases (never deemed very collectible) because of their excellent glazes and color ranges. There are about half a dozen of them scattered about the house. So I decided to use this one  as an inspirational starting point.

Sometime back I bought a little portrait at Dunbar Sloane in Wellington. Well as it happened I bought two on the same night but this is the story of one.  I discovered it among a number of small paintings in one of their antique sales. So the painting, by an unknown artist, was considered decorative rather than anything special art wise.

This is not a story about discovering a lost masterpiece. I liked the painting because, although a little naïve, it represented a kind and gentle-looking younger man.  He was dressed in a severe black coat and a crisply tied white cravat and was seated on a little red chair. This painting was a nice depiction of men’s costume in the early 19^th century but it’s no great shakes as art.

Most portraits that come up for sale seem to be of garrulous balding ruddy-faced types and so I decided that this sweet-faced young man could come home with me. The other portrait purchased that night was of a young bearded Renaissance scholar (with something slightly Brad Pitt about him) so you get the theme of my portrait collection – attractive young men in need of a home.

The little portrait has been hanging in the library for some time now and in an archaic yet modern version of identity theft I’ve used him as my digital avatar on a number of occasions and I’ve become very fond of him – as I have of each of my small collection of portrait paintings.

After a while it became apparent that, even in the red hued gloom of the library, that the man in my picture was getting a bit stressed and tired around the edges. The big gilded frame is tatty but the painting itself (on wooden panel) is solid but crazed and dirty. So I decided that this young proto-metrosexual needed a little work done and sent him off to the oil painting version of a day spa.

Earlier this week I collected the painting from the painting conservator Nel Rol – who a little while back cleaned and re-stretched the large Joseph Gaut that now hangs in the studio. I am on a little bit of a conservation spree at the moment. I think we hesitate to get works cleaned in part because there are horror stories and part because of the imagined cost. However each newly returned work from Nel is a joyous revelation and I highly recommend getting a little work done where and when it needed.

Not only has my little chap come back freshly barbered with his face clean and smooth, but also his linen has been freshly ironed and his coat brushed. Even the little red chair he sits on has been spring cleaned.

He’ll be popped back in his frame and again take his place on the library wall – a lesson to us all that we need to moisturise a least once every one hundred and eighty years.

DLJ

An epergne is an Edwardian or Victorian vase-like arrangement for the centre of the dining table. It usually has several stems and allows for a kind of mass effect – utterly decorative and of no practical use.

Of course as decor extremists we needed to have one.

I had been searching for one over the past few years.

I inherited a rather plain simple EPNS one from my mother but Douglas decreed this was too simple to have the desired panache.

We kept an eye on epergnes at auctions and in fact passed up on a milk-glass one, dimpled all over in the way your flesh goes when you have a cold swim.

Note: many epergnes are just plug-ugly. The Victorian and Edwardian era – pre modernism – was a riot of invention, you might almost say over-invention. Modernism brought back strict rules (and hence those yawnsomely stereotyped ‘Modernist’ inspired contemporary homes that fill design magazines.)

Before the iron curtain came down, the only law was invention: and epergnes, like flower buds floating on a stream, came into their own.

Often they were made of spun glass, and can have the same slightly sickening colours – yellow-green is a fave, as is pink-purple. They can be highly elaborate, multi-tiered or more basic.

Because of their delicacy the glass ones are often broken.

They seem surprisingly popular – surprising because they completely go against the convention of casual dining.

It is all about entering a room and inwardly gasping at ‘the look’.

You could put flowers in the epergne or, even better, fruit like grapes, mandarins – anything which implied a sense of careless excess.

In the end in the junk sale down the road this silver model came up. It was very basic, tarnished and we got it for not very much money at all.

One of the flower buds seemed slightly in the wrong place. When I cleaned the silver it suddenly came to life. The flower buds had been yellow and dirty but with a careful wash in sudsy water they came up clear. Then – disaster. In trying to twist the one flower back into shape I exerted too much pressure and the silver snapped at the base.

Suddenly the epergne which is made to be side 360 degrees lost one whole ‘side’.

I felt – well, not devastated – but disappointed.

Nevertheless for our midwinter dinner last night I decided to premiere the new (slightly wrecked) epergne. I ran out into the winter garden and picked winter roses. I tried them out first, without putting water in the glass flowers, to see what they would look like.

They looked fabulous.

Gorgeousness, in a word. The very motto of that curious tribe known as…decor extremists.

PW