Room for Every Taste

Next to the cost of the house itself, the single biggest family expense for many middle-and upper-class Americans is the furniture and decoration that go to make the house a home. Nor is it any longer a once-in-a-life-time investment. "Forty years ago, you furnished a home and were done with it," notes Robert Lauter, vice president of Manhattan's R. H. Macy Co. Today, one out of five families changes residence every year, and it is a common pattern for a married couple to start off in a small apartment, move to the suburbs when the children arrive, shift from suburb to suburb as income rises, and then move back into the city after the children are grown--decorating and redecorating all along the way. Let there be a divorce, and the master bedroom, if not the whole house, is sure to be redone by the remaining partner. And even without such upheavals, Americans think of change as a form of therapy. "People can afford to be bored," says Dallas Decorator Howard Goldman. "They can now tire of things they couldn't afford to tire of in less affluent times."

The more Americans decorate, the better they decorate, and the more they rely on some form of professional guidance. Rare is the department store, nowadays, that doesn't offer essentially free decorating service as a sales come-on. In Detroit, J. L. Hudson has a staff of 58 full-time decorators; Rich's in Atlanta employs 30. Manhattan's Bloomingdale's advised 1,500 customers last year, more than twice the number five years ago. The store's designers visit the homes to be decorated, draw up floor plans and supply all the furnishings, even if some of them must be obtained elsewhere. To discourage freeloaders from taking advantage of the advice and then buying everything from another source, some stores charge an initial $50 consultation fee, which is credited against future purchase.

End of the Period. Another way of decorating is through the "ten-percenter," often a dilettante who, with no formal design training and as little as two years of experience working with a decorator, obtains a wholesale discount card and works for 10% of what the customer intends to spend. To the dismay of reputable professional decorators, who usually take the entire 30% to 40% retail markup as their fee, "ten-percenters" are overrunning the field. "You have to stand in line at the fabric houses because of them," sighs one San Francisco decorator.

For decorators and clients alike, the most important part of the entire undertaking is the in-depth interviewing at the very outset. Do the members of the family live formally or informally? Do they favor buffet suppers or sit-down dinners? Do they play bridge? Are they hi-fi buffs? Do they have young children or teenagers? What are their hobbies? Working with a decorator is thus something like going to a psychiatrist, only more expensive: name decorators reckon on spending at least $10,000 for each room and a minimum of $50,000 for an entire house.

Whatever the cost and whoever the decorator, the look that is in vogue in the '60s is openly, eclectic (see color pages). States Sears, Roebuck's Director of Design Richard D. Butler: "The period room is a thing of the past." With the prices of authentic antiques soaring as the worldwide supply diminishes, it was inevitable. The decorator, as a consequence, has become an artful mix master.

Simpler & Livelier. "Most living rooms are a total disaster because they are not used--they were meant to be looked at," says San Francisco Decorator Michael Taylor. Taylor spent a year transforming San Francisco Socialite Mrs. Davies Lewis' drawing room from a masculine retreat with wood-paneled walls and bookcases (the taste of the former occupant) into an elegant, eclectic ensemble. "It is more European than San Franciscan, which is what I wanted," says Mrs. Lewis, who has used Taylor twice before, jokes that she agrees with Taylor on all but one matter. "I don't usually like his price," she says.

"As long as the scale is right, people are mixing away and coming up with very beautiful results," says Manhattan Decorator Ellen McCluskey, whose apartment foyer for Mrs. Ruth Lachman is a tasteful case in point. "This is a time for mixing not only periods but also nationalities," says Albert Hadley, partner with New York Decorator Mrs. Henry Parish II, who proved it by deftly combining 17th century Oriental art, 18th century English furniture and a 20th century American carpet in the Charleston, W. Va., living room of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller IV. The driftwood shutters that Mrs. Parish designed for the "morning room" of Publisher John Hay Whitney's Manhattan town house signal another trend: heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes are Out, and simpler, livelier window treatments are In.

On the Wild Side. Floors? Wall-to-wall carpeting, once a status symbol, is giving way to area rugs, which allow polished wood floors to show handsomely, as in Decorator Anthony Hail's own San Francisco studio. Walls? The trend is away from stark, white-painted plaster and toward colors and textures. Decorator Frank Austin used burlap in Actress Polly Bergen's Beverly Hills living room; Decorator Arthur Elrod specified walnut wood and marble for Film Financier Eugene Klein's hilltop home near by.

Fabrics, as well as colors, are on the wild side. Fur for rugs, pillows and even bedspreads is increasingly popular. For Vogue Publisher S. I. Newhouse Jr., Manhattan Decorator Billy Baldwin not only covered the hassocks with suede but even turned a pack of scavenging jackals into a luxurious rug. Busy patterns, thinks Bloomingdale's Interior Design Chief David Bell, will be increasingly used to make small apartment rooms appear bigger through trompe-l'oeil. At the moment, the most popular style of furniture, at least in the mass market, is Early American, but a change may be in the wind. "With the 1930s being revived in fashion," says Dabbie Daniels, a senior decorator at Manhattan's W & J Sloane, the nation's oldest home furnishing house, "I think we will see 1930s rooms with lots of white and silver and mirrors--very Jean Harlow, very much the platinum movie-goddess look of opulence."

Wrong Note, Right Touch. One thing all decorators agree on. Their job is to express the client's personality, not their own. Methods vary for discovering just what that personality is. "I look in the woman's closet to see what color her clothes are," says Ellen McCluskey. Says David Bell: "I look at the color of their eyes." Both regard the husband's participation as essential. "After all, he has to live in it and pay for it," says Bell. Adds McCluskey: "I've often found that he's on a budget--and she isn't." Decorators disagree as to whether they should take clients along on shopping forays to the showrooms. Billy Baldwin, though he averages only 20 assignments a year, does so only reluctantly. Says he: "My job is to eliminate everything but the very best of what they might want." Miami Decorator Waldo Perez concurs: "They would go crazy. They would like too many things." Fellow Miami Decorator Henry End feels just the opposite. "I wear them out, and they give up trying to remember what was what," says End. "Then they tell me to choose what I think is best."

What if the client insists on selecting something in atrocious taste? Some decorators refuse to buy the offending object, though few go as far as Lady Bird Johnson's favorite designer, Washington's Genevieve Hendricks. When she is overruled, she likes to preserve her integrity by pinning a note to the underside of the disputed chair or sofa stating, "I, Genevieve Hendricks, do not approve this piece of furniture." Others are more tolerant. "I like eccentricities--if they are the eccentricities of the owner," says Billy Baldwin. "I approve of permitting the wrong note in a room in order to achieve a personal touch." One of the benefits of the contemporary mood for mixing and matching is that it allows personal touches to be at home. Often they are exactly what is needed to pull a room together and make it both alive and liveable.

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