Obviously the pandemic quarantine is keeping us all at home much more than usual. So you may be seeing your home for the first time (again), and not liking what you see. Etiquetteer wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a rush on contractors, hardware stores, and anyplace furniture is sold once Social Distancing Restrictions are lifted. American residents feel the need of a Perfectly Proper Refresh!
As you daydream about Domestic Improvements, Etiquetteer suggests you consult “first lady of interior decoration” Elsie de Wolfe, whose 1913 book The House in Good Taste offers a great deal of sensible advice. While a bit “scented with lavender” in her way with words*, Miss de Wolfe** famously declared she believed in “optimism and white paint,” which could just as easily apply to the Bauhaus. She also said “There never was a house so bad that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile,” which should encourage us all.
The second chapter sets forth her three essential criteria: Suitability, Simplicity, and Proportion. She felt anyone could achieve these with practice and good judgment. “I grant you we may never fully appreciate the full balance of proportion, but we can exert our common sense and decide whether a thing is suitable; we can consult our conscience as to whether an object is simple, and we can train our eyes to recognize good and bad proportion.”
The second trio of words would be Light, Air, and Comfort. One of the defining characteristics of de Wolfe’s aesthetic was her absolute rejection of the dark, the heavy, the Victorian. She revolutionized American taste by sweeping out the horsehair upholstery, dark woodwork, and bales of wine-red velvet in favor of spaciousness and chintz. Her personal anti-Victorian bias led her to favor older styles of furniture, especially French, but her reliance on painted furniture is - how to say this? - not exactly in vogue at the moment.
de Wolfe makes some specific recommendations Etiquetteer would define as timeless: symmetry, mirrors, open fires, soft and light colors, plants, and useful things where they ought to be (such as reading lamps by chairs, etc.) We all know mirrors make a narrow room wider. de Wolfe did so by mirroring a staircase in her Sutton Place home to make the center of the house appear more spacious. How about that?!
Another unusual innovation was to cover a stair rail with velvet (to match the woodwork) when she lived in the Washington Irving House in Manhattan. Etiquetteer would never even have thought that a possibility, but how novel, how creative! In the same house she also created a mini-conservatory out of a bay window, not just by adding plants, but also a tile floor and a fountain, along with a marble curb to protect the rest of the room from any sloshing water. Isn’t that a pleasant thing to daydream about?
Central to the de Wolfe Look at the time of The House in Good Taste were her use of chintzes and toile de Jouy fabrics, French furniture (usually from one or more Louis), and chinoiserie. She rhapsodizes over the boudoir she designed for Anne Morgan: “radiant with color and individuality, as rare rugs are radiant, as jewels are radiant.” She furnished the room with Louis XVI pieces, added a multicolored Persian rug, and painted all the walls cream with blue accents. Even though she later grew to accept Art Deco and flirted with rococo and baroque interiors near the end of her career, this is the style most identified as Elsie de Wolfe’s.
Reading this book, it will help if you know a bit more French than salon, boudoir, Moulin Rouge, rouge et noir, champagne, absinthe, “Louie Sez,” and bonjour. Etiquetteer had no idea what a bonheur de jour desk was until having to look up just what bonheur de jour meant*. And just look at that thing! It’s so petite Etiquetteer couldn’t even sit at it sidesaddle.
The 21st-century Design for Living accommodates much less square footage than hitherto for many people, especially in the big cities where micro-units have become a necessary vogue. de Wolfe includes a chapter about “The Small Apartment,” but she rather negates her understanding of the situation by adding “Of course, many of us who live in apartments either have a little house or a big one in the country for the summer months, or we plan for one some day!” Umm . . . no. But she does go on to offer some solid advice for apartment dwellers: buy compactly, buy gradually as you discover what your needs are, and avoid massive pieces. “Remember that a few good chairs of willow (!) will be less expensive and more decorative than the heavy, stuff chairs usually chosen by inexperienced people.”
Clutter, exemplified by Victorian excess, was de Wolfe’s enemy. That makes her the natural ally of this century’s revolutionary home guide, Marie Kondo. As you look about your quarantine environment and contemplate changes for your comfort, both physical and emotional, go over everything with Elsie in The House in Good Taste, which is free online at the Gutenberg Project. de Wolfe’s ultimate goal was “A house that is like the life that goes on with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it - and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand, a house that looks refined.” French antiques may not be in your future, but a new mirror, a tabletop fountain, a chintz slipcover, or a can of white paint and optimism might be. Etiquetteer wishes you Perfectly Proper Joy as you contemplate plans, and then begin to realize them.
Elsie de Wolfe’s dining room in the Washington Irving House, 1898. Photograph in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
*For instance, “narrow molding of wood” instead of “narrow wood molding.” Language, too, has its fashions.
**Miss de Wolfe, after sharing a home with theatrical producer Elisabeth Marbury for decades, ended up marrying Sir Charles Mendl to become Lady Mendl. When he is remembered at all, Sir Charles is remembered for appearing as one of Ingrid Bergman’s doddering old playboy gentlemen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.
***”Daytime delight” is the proper translation. Perhaps “Afternoon Delight” is bonheur de l’apres-midi? And what sort of furniture might have been created for that?