If we can’t poke fun at ourselves, who can we poke fun at?
The “ourselves” being interior designers, decorators, home de-uglifiers, whatever you want to call us…
When my husband and I were poking around this junk-slash-antique shop the other day, he unearthed this fabulous book from 1965: Interior Decoration A to Z, by Betty Pepis. I love old decorating and etiquette books, and reading this was the kind of guilty pleasure you’re supposed to indulge in when you’re on vacation.
Betty Pepis was one of those enterprising interior designers who, in the mid-twentieth century, sought to de-mystify the decorating process. (One of her other books is called, Be Your Own Decorator.) During the course of her career, she wrote for and/or edited sections of the magazines McClure, Look, and House and Garden; and The New York Times.
All this by way of saying that she knew whereof she spoke: she was an authority on the style of the time. So when we giggle at some of these pictures – and raise our eyebrows at those that could have been taken a week ago – we’re not mocking her. It’s a collective grimace at ourselves, whether we’re decorators or just consumers of style.
Here are some of the parts of the book I found most entertaining.
A: Accessories.
Gotta love this setup for a sea-themed “luncheon” (also under Accessories):
C: Color. “The most inexpensive asset in all of decorating,” she writes. I say this all the time. Different phrasing, like, “Paint is cheap,” but the idea is there.
Note the cantilevered hearth and shelves on the left here – very 60s to me:
This room (still under “Color”) is a texture explosion. I feel itchy just looking at it.
C: Corny. Don’t you love that she put this in? Here’s how Pepis defines it: “Embarrassingly unsophisticated. Results from too dedicated a devotion to reproducing down to the last itsy-bitsy detail the interiors of our colonial ancestors – forgetting that, in every period, people do depart from overly precise patterns of their own time.” Amen, sister.
F: Floor coverings.
If I had to work with that rug today, I’d ditch the plant and red accessories, make the chairs green, add non-matching patterned pillows (loose patterns, not stripes or geometric), and substitute a coffee table that didn’t have chrome legs that match the chairs…rough-hewn wood or something. Anyway.
M: Mauve decade. I’d just cited mauve as the color that most depresses me, so imagine my despair when I learned there was an entire era dedicated to its glorification. The decade in question is, “The last one in the nineteenth century, left its mark on interior design with golden oak paneling, heavily embroidered hangings…and – of course – that violet shade, mauve.” Fortunately for me, the accompanying picture is in black and white.
P: Pattern Placement.
Eeek!
P: Pegboard. I loved seeing this, because when I was a little kid in New York, our dear friends in the building had a pegboard in their kitchen. They also had a black-and-white floor in their entry and living room, so those two things have extremely fond associations for me. (The pegboard is still there, by the way.)
Z: Zebra. “Latest of the wild beasts to enter the home scene.” Excellent.
Isn’t it GQ that runs an article called, “Regrets: A Look at Our Occasional Lapses in Judgement,” which re-runs tips about things such as grooming your chest hair and how many gold chains are appropriate for which occasions?
This is kind of like that. A lot of fun, with some grimacing.