La Miniatura, Pasadena, Frank Lloyd Wright. Interior decoration by Annie Kelly. Photography by Tim Street-Porter.Annie Kelly writes about design for magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including Vogue Living and English House and Garden. She is also a decorator whose work has been included in Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, and Elle Decor.
Kelly’s husband, Tim Street-Porter, is an award winning architectural and interior design photographer and author whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and books. His recent books include Modernist Paradise and L.A. Modern, both with Nicolai Ouroussoff. Street-Porter and Kelly have collaborated together on several books, among them Rooms to Inspire: Decorating with America’s Best Designers and Casa San Miguel: Inspired Design and Decorations, with Jorge Almada.
Here they are interviewed by John Leighton Chase, Assoc. AIA, Urban Designer for the City of West Hollywood and a member of the arcCA editorial board. Chase is co-editor with Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski of Everyday Urbanism (Monacelli Press), newly revised and updated in 2008.
arcCA: What advice would you give to architects about working with decorators?
AK: The architect should take the time to educate the decorator. The decorator needs to understand what the architect’s influences and ideas are, and there has to be a dialogue. The decorator can sit down with the architect and ask, “What is your favorite furniture, what do you like, what is your aesthetic?” And it’s therefore important for the architect to develop an aesthetic. If the architect can say to a decorator, “I love [a particular designer’s] furniture,” it gives the decorator a starting point. An architect should be fully resolved and able to articulate a vision for the interior. You can then build a really interesting interior based on where the architect is going. If you follow the architecture, the decoration will be right.
For example, Frank Lloyd Wright had never designed any furniture for La Miniatura (his 1923 house for Alice Millard in Pasadena). He wanted to, but Mrs. Milliard was an antiquarian. Even though he had built an earlier house for her, she wanted an eighteenth century Italian Villa. So, when it came to redoing the interior of the house, where do I go? I am not about to buy Alice Millard’s furniture, Venetian furniture to go in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. And there was no money in the client’s budget.
arcCA: The real thing would eat up the budget fairly quickly.
AK: Yes, one footstool would do it.
TS-P: And you’re competing with major museums for it now.
AK: So the solution was to go to the sources of the architect. That was an example. The furniture came out of the east, from his influences.
arcCA: What can architects learn from decorators?
AK: Where architects can really listen to a decorator is how people actually live in the space.
TS-P: For example, clients who need wall space for their art.
AK: Architects should listen to the decorator on where things might be positioned. Because, basically, to live inside a house is about comfort and the way things are arranged. Decorating is not about just coming in and putting pink satin everywhere. I can decorate a house down to the last ashtray without even specifying style. Strange to say, there is a logic about decoration. You could spec everything before you even talk about whether it’s going to be modern or 18th century. There are rules for everything—where you have the side table, the correct height of the bedside table to the height of the mattress. The architect should say, “I want a real interior decorator, not someone who is just going to put tassels on doorknobs.”
A good decorator should be able to accommodate anything an architect suggests—good or bad. And one of the things a skillful decorator realizes is that you can overcome bad architecture. A screen will hide an ugly column. There are, however, a few things that will defeat even the best decorators—those pockmarked ceilings with all those can lights, for one thing.
La Miniatura, Pasadena, Frank Lloyd Wright. Interior decoration by Annie Kelly. Photography by Tim Street-Porter.arcCA: Do you think architects generally understand what interior designers do?
AK: No, I think they are terrified of them as a rule, as well they should be. It’s all very well doing the most beautiful building in the world, but unless the interiors are fully formed and thought out in an attractive way, no one will ever see it, because it becomes unpublishable in books and magazines.
TS-P: I have had occasions when I have been photographing a house for an architect who does the architecture but then gives over his control of the interior, and at the same time complains that the interior designer or decorator completely ruined his vision. When you do that, you relinquish something that is very important. John Lautner always claimed that he worked from the inside out, instead of the conventional way of architects working from the outside in. If you are an architect, and you accept that the interior is part of the architecture, you want to retain as much control as you can—in the extreme case, like Richard Meier, who writes it in his contract that the designer must be one he is happy to work with, whom he has control over, a designer who is on his wavelength.
AK: Not every architect has the luxury, however. I think Tim is talking about architects who don’t want to do the interiors. I am not saying that architects should always do their interiors, but at the very least they should choose the designer that they want to work with, who understands their work.
Decorators envy architects, because architects have technical knowledge about things like drains and structures. Consequently, they are able to get away with much more than the decorator. Architects can dazzle the clients with this expertise. Also, clients are much more involved in the finishes of domestic things inside the house than the actual building itself, because that’s what they see and touch every day. Therefore, it can be incredibly complicated when they have to decide among five different finishes for a door handle. The trick is, actually, you don’t let them know there are choices. Because that can make them crazy.
The architect is usually the luckier of the two, and it’s actually less stressful to be an architect from a decorator’s point of view, because as a decorator there are lots of changes. With an architect, admittedly, you get lots of change orders that drive you crazy. But when you are a decorator and have ordered ten thousand dollars worth of furniture on the client’s say-so, and then they change their mind: “Can you send it back?” It’s not the same as architecture: if the client asks for a copper roof and it’s put on the building, the client can’t say, “I didn’t want a copper roof, I’m not paying for a copper roof.”
The actual manufacturing wing of the design business is one of the most grossly inefficient industries in America, and the reason they can get away with it is they have an apologist permanently in front of them in the form of the decorator. The decorator is always there explaining to the client why something’s twelve weeks late. And that’s why clients often dislike their decorators. And it’s not their fault. The manufacturers are allowed to exist because the decorator is always there to smooth things over. Take the decorator away and that part of the industry will be forced to be more efficient, like Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel. Those companies couldn’t stay in business if they were like the companies, let’s say, in the Pacific Design Center, bless their hearts.
When you go into a showroom in the PDC and you select ten fabric samples, you will find—when you have seen all the fabric, and you start writing out your order—that probably only three or four are available. They have been discontinued. And you ask yourself, “Why don’t they take them off the floor?” Or you put the order in, you’ve got client approval, you’ve got the sample. And three weeks later it comes back, “Oh no, we can’t fill your order. Its just been discontinued.” And you think, “Oh, my God.” So you have to go through the whole process again.
arcCA: So you have convinced the client that this is the best thing in the universe. Then you have to go back to them and say, “Well, now we can’t get the best thing. How about the next best thing?”
AK: And does that make you look good? I don’t think so. No wonder clients have trouble with decorators. Decorators are the whipping posts of the design world!
Originally published 4th quarter 2008, in arcCA 08.4, “Interiors + Architecture.”
