Finding inspiration

I have always loved magazines. My first subscription was to Seventeen. Then I moved on to Glamour and Mademoiselle. It was around this time that my dad was an editor for Conde Nast. We always had magazines around; now we had more. In my early years writing ad copy, I was mentored by a former editor at House and Garden. In my last professional position I edited two trade magazines. Do you see a pattern here?

I have also always loved decor, arranging and rearranging my teenage bedroom, putting my personal stamp on my first basement apartment furnished with the land lady’s cast-offs, hauling home estate sale bargains to refinish for our first house. This is just who I am. So this weekend when I was sorting miscellaneous papers and discovered what is left of my old decorating files — essentially pages I had torn from magazines featuring furniture arrangements, color schemes, collectibles, centerpieces, window treatments, holiday decorations, you name it — all the ideas we now save on Pinterest and Instagram, I felt like I’d unearthed hidden treasure. After I took some time studying these pages, I realized they were not historic (although some are more than 20 years old!) but rather the backbone of my personal design “aesthetic.”

I sat down and took the time to savor them, page by page, the way I sit down to dig into a new magazine. I went thru them once, just to see what I had, then again more slowly. I remembered these photos and have even seen some of them on Instagram. But rather than feeling stuck in the past, I realized that good design (however we define it for ourselves) is always in style. Had I chosen that well? Or do I just know what I like? Maybe some of both.

Style seems to morph with the times. The reds, blues, greens and golds I started out with have now mellowed into white and pale grays. The plates and photos that once crowded occasional tables are cleared out, along with some of the tables. I’ve been through a wallpaper phase and then stenciling. I loved them both until they seemed dated. I’ve been editing a lot, or at least a lot for me. As I said in one of my earlier moving posts, I’m looking for leaner and cleaner these days, keeping the best and getting rid of the rest. Which takes me back to these pages…

I realized how many of these ideas I had actually implemented in my own home. Here’s an image of Dan Carithers’ own kitchen, decorated decades ago and still looking timeless when it appeared in Country Home or Traditional Home (not sure which) several years ago:

And here’s a parade of white ironstone pitchers on top of a cabinet in our new house:

Here’s a good example of inspiration that somehow stayed with me, however subconsciously. I tore this image from Country Living in 2009.

A few years ago, looking for something simple on my farm table, I gathered up my own collection of brass candlesticks. Then I re-did it with glass candlesticks. You may have noticed I did the same thing on one of the library shelves in the Reset.

When I wrote about our new “library” here, I said I had been saving bookshelf images for a long time. In fact, that idea pre-dates my Instagram.

Where am I going with this? First, good design, design that really speaks to you, is always going to be good. Decorating on a whim is fun, but like those old bell bottoms in the back of your closet, it just doesn’t last. Recognize its limits. The best rooms are edited. Early on when I was dragging home the estate sale finds, they were fun but intentionally temporary. The old tea cart I bought at an estate sale and painted tangerine to be a fun table in our tiny kitchen was a temporary fix. I sold it when we moved to the next house.

And it doesn’t mean I’m not going to try a few trendy things now, like faux greens in a glass vase between the sinks in our master bath or a trio of orchids in a large bowl (staged with plenty of moss) on the kitchen island. That kind of styling is way too much fun!

But back to my file of old magazine pages. They were really my home-grown, do-it-yourself design class. I learned a lot from those pictures: balance, symmetry versus asymmetry (they both have a place in design), scale, the difference between country and primitive and traditional (and all their variations), and the importance of detail.

To think it all began with Seventeen magazine.

Thank you so much for stopping by. See you again soon.