This closet/dressing room is part of a townhouse on NYC’s West Side. The house was decorated by interior designer Samuel Botero in a mad eclectic mix of all possible ornate styles, including Egyptian Revival and Biedermeier and art deco, at his clients’ request. The rest of the place is very dark velvet/chairs with paws/animal print/excess, but then suddenly in the middle of it all there’s this bright fantastical room which actually transcends the general madness of the house and achieves something mythic. I could do without the black cloverleaf casket thing with the ribbon-motif and weird silhouettes, which Botero designed himself, though I suppose it would come in handy for conducting seances while also storing hatboxes or maybe the skeletal remains of small children. But Botero gets credit for extreme daring and for the genius use of emerald green and cream, and all joking aside I sincerely admire the way he just let his imagination run wild, if not amok. This is the sort of room that demands that you re-decorate yourself to match. You’ll need an entirely new period wardrobe, an upgrade from monomania to megalomania, and whatever exotic pet affectation strikes your fancy – an emerald green parrot maybe, or a talking owl. Or an albino cheetah, why not. And a leprechaun. They love hats. Photo by Phillip H. Ennis, via the ever strange AD.
“This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don’t like women in skirts, and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt - I think – then you have the pants under the skirt, and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants, underneath the skirt, and you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today. [Laughs.] I have to think these things up… you know! Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono, so we had quite a fight.”
I’ve been so irked by the fact that they’re making a new movie of Grey Gardens – was the Maysles‘ perfect documentary film not enough? – that I’ve been ignoring the latest wave of Grey Gardens fandom. But cult favourites all fall prey to the clumsiness of Hollywood eventually, and maybe now is probably the right time for Grey Gardens. Living large on nothing in the midst of galloping disrepair is an interesting allegory for the times, and maybe Grey Gardens mania is a more honest reaction to the current state of America than, say, the cultural offerings in the previous post. In an interview he did for in the Criterion DVD’s Special Features, Marc Jacobs talks about the clip from the real Grey Gardens, above, which shows the real Little Edie talking about her avant-garde outfit (the interview with him doesn’t seem to be on YouTube). Jacobs loves her DIY style and panache and mentions that her line “This is the best costume for today” has been the motto around his studio for years. Thanks to KEEHNAN for inspiring this by posting on Grey Gardens here and here, better than I could have, based on the amazing photos published by the NYT. Another video of Edie here.
This gets points for adventurousness and imagination and magic, if not success. It’s another image from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
