The Design of Things

human endeavor + the natural world

Category: the design of Connection

March 17, 2018

What really lasts: Enduring decor

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“What really lasts.” This is the theme of my favorite issue of House Beautiful, published in January, 2008, and it’s amazing to me that every picture in its pages has, in fact, lasted in its appeal. One of the core tenets of sustainability is durability, a quality in short supply these days. I’ve noticed a kind of liquidation quality to décor magazines over the last two years – garish color, insanely competing patterns and textures, weird 1970s and ‘80s references utilizing far too many finish materials that rely on mining, all within homes that are too new and (still, when will it end?) far too large.

This issue inspired my own home though I copied none of it exactly. Not all of it reflects my own personal taste – I don’t love rolled arm sofas; I wouldn’t choose Chinoiserie; some of it is too preppy for me. But the threads that run through it show us exactly what lasts.

In each feature the rooms are furnished comfortably, easily functional without large spaces to traverse between rooms or among pieces. There are balances of sizing – normal-scaled sofas and chairs in a relatively low-ceilinged living room are dominated by wall-sized oil paintings from the hunt. There is a balance of color —  airy neutrals are interrupted by an oversized brown check on the armchairs;  tall walls painted in the airy  pale green of Benjamin Moore’s “Nantucket Breeze” are offset by long orange silk drapes, the color echoed in the striped upholstery of French dining chairs. Color is present but threaded through these palettes, allowing light to dominate.

In each layout the quality and location of the light is clear, whether it’s the cooler grey bright light filtering through the windows of an antique Newport, RI cottage, or the open, warm weight of the air in New Orleans. The home signals and responds to its surroundings, in a way that is both immediate and timeless. None feels “decorated” – that imposition of ideas that might not relate to the home’s geography or quality of life outside.

 

You can feel these houses. The soft hush of the home in Atlanta, pastels warmed by dark wood. The airy high ceilinged gorgeousness of the New Orleans townhouse, filled with antiques but made fresh with white trim and bare touches of gold. The cozy breeziness of the Newport cottage, all the way up to the toile covered tiny bedroom at the top of the stairs. You can be their guest. You would love to visit and stay, year after year after year.

 

A tiny attic bedroom.
No need for space, just a bed and glorious light.

 

 

The pleasant functionality of a place to play games.
Thonet chairs.
Large, graphic color against natural materials.
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March 24, 2016

nature abhors a rectangle

 

The American backyard is generally a fenced-in and mown space of grass. Any trees or plants stand along the edges, based with mulch in an attempt at clean perfection. But designs for clean perfection are static, and often devoid of life – they miss the chance to reference and nurture the greater environment. They require artificial aids to maintain, because nature works against squared off, scrubbed portions of the outdoors.

Lawns are lovely, for sure. Though our “lawn” is about a third crabgrass and violets, it’s a sweet expanse of green when it’s just been mowed. I imagine lying on it, on a blanket, on some Saturday afternoon when I commit to relaxing in my backyard with a book. But it dries out easily. Weeds spring up. It’s not very interesting. The basic rectangular views leave no mystery – no secrets or surprises. We have a panoramic view of this yard out our kitchen windows. What we mostly see is the back fence.

Our yards are part of a much bigger landscape, even if we work to keep them as barren nicks in the canopy. Where I live, the original landscape is composed of forests, meadows, wetlands, and ponds. A few miles east of me, salt marshes signal the transition from land to sea. Wildlife travel across and thrive within these landscapes where they can, though humans disrupt their habitat and corridors not only with concrete but also with mulched and pesticided perfection.

It doesn’t take much to turn your small piece of the rock into an oasis of flora, a connector and resting place for the fauna that belong where you live, and something much more soulful to enjoy. When planted with depth, yards become more visually intriguing and sensually pleasant.

Rather than decorating the edges with the usual plant fare at Home Depot – plus mulch – consider disrupting the rectangle, even when it’s fenced in. You can start small, as we’re planning to in our yard this year. I’d like to plant a few smaller trees throughout the interior, trees that might naturally succeed in a sun-drenched forest clearing and would look pretty out the window in the winter. I discovered that two such natives in my state are black birch and serviceberry. I also learned that the right trees would support not only birds and other usual arboreal customers, but would also provide hatcheries, in their bark, for butterflies and moths.

Start with one change this year – a single tree in the center, three or four native shrubs to one side, or an area of native grasses and perennials in your own private hummingbird and butterfly meadow. Take down a side of fence and plant a natural barrier of native shrubs that will thrive in that spot, with a native ground cover, rather than mulch, to spread beneath them.

Then sit outside, or look out the window, and start documenting the new life that you see – the birds that visit, butterflies, bees – it’s addicting once you get started.

Backyard

Here is our yard at its bleakest: After the winter, before the spring. Soon the leaves will be cleaned up — they were left deliberately to mulch the lawn. The bushes and trees will leaf out, and the rhododendrons, azaleas, and forsythia will bloom. Birds will sing, and bunnies will continue to bound out of our leaf pile. It’s a sure sign we got our piece of the rock. So why is it so… square?

 

If you give Nature an inch, she will take a mile: In the corner of our yard, shared with our neighbor, stands a five story tall hemlock. Its lower branches spread above our sprawling leaf pile. While I took the dogs out yesterday I heard a tap tap tap that made me look up, and I saw a small woodpecker making its way around one of those limbs. Closer to me, several chickadees trolled for seeds, their gray and white, black-capped bodies hopping around just above my head. Two blue jays flew out of the middle. We’ve seen red tailed hawks regularly landing at the very top, many other birds at the mid-section, and rabbits, possums, squirrels of course, and a fox beneath it.Just looking up brought busy and multi-colored life into view, all around one tall tree.

 

 

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January 2, 2015

Nature in the New Year

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A year or two ago, we went to the Boston Ballet to see a program of three contemporary pieces. The second, choreographed by Jorma Elo, was set to solo piano music, selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. Like the music, the dancing was complex, classical and precise, and yet organic – rather than big numbers interspersed with solos and duets, it was presented as an endlessly changing tableau, varied in rhythms and tenor, in a long, continuous thread. Sometimes there were many dancers, sometimes there were only two or three or even just one, the many combinations moving seamlessly in and out from one to the next and next. The audience seemed rapt, silent beneath the music, hardly a cough or rattling of a wrapper among us.

About twenty mesmerizing minutes into it, I realized, “This is nature.” Here comes one thing, and then another. There are interactions and couplings, there are outcomes, and then there is disintegration. Things come together and apart, it is all part of a whole, and it never stops. It was what you might see if you sat still for any length of time beside a pond, in a forest, in a meadow, or in your own backyard. It was so beautiful.

I wrote recently in an article for Rensselaer alumni magazine that while the twentieth century may have been about conquering nature, the 21st century may be about trying to take our place within it. So much of what we did in the 20th century was critical to the human experience, from fighting disease to growing and preserving and transporting food to radically improving communication to finding other ways to lengthen and enhance our lives. But our environmental problems all stem from not noticing nature and eradicating its connections, even to ourselves. Never mind on a grand scale – even in our private lives we stamp out biota, let poison casually run from our pretty grass, raze or bulldoze or pave resting spots for birds and butterflies, and in many other ways reduce the number of species that reside around us, from microbes in our soils to flora and fauna that we can see.

I don’t believe we’re going to continue on this path, necessarily. There are hopeful signs around the world, from preserving rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia to growing awareness here at home of the effect of pesticides on honeybees and habitat loss for Monarch butterflies, for example. I believe enjoying modern life no longer means arming ourselves against the natural world – I think addressing these problems can bring new meaning that we crave, give us deeper satisfaction and peace, and train our children to excel in the sciences. This year I’m going to blog about small but meaningful changes we can make in the design of our lives, our homes, our yards and our communities that can invite nature back in and draw our deeper selves back out. I’ll also let you know about changes in products and commerce that may make a big difference. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are, too. Thank you so much for reading The Design of Things, and happy 2015!

photo credit: Boston Globe.

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October 29, 2014

in my own backyard

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I’m in a science book club. I’m the only non-scientist. There are three ecologists, an ornithologist, two biologists, and a physicist. (They all walked into a bar…) They named it Dangerous and Wondrous Science (DAWS) and our instruction is to choose books that offered “dangerous” – table-upending – ideas that also transmit the wonder of the world to readers. We started with the Origin of Species.

One of my persistent worries is about the state of the natural world. I’m not helped right now by our current book selection, The Sixth Extinction, by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert. You can imagine what it’s about. Things are not looking good. So far, the book is wondrous in the sheer magnitude of what it presents – it’s kind of mind-blowing to get the sense of the vastness of geologic time, time that contains entire previously populated Earths (ending in various types of apocalypse) that look nothing like this one. Or, get this, the idea that extinctions might occur in “periodic bursts” having to do with “the passage of the solar system through the spiral arms of the Milky Way,” as two scientists surmised in 1984 (later debunked.) Or even just the idea that humans are the only species that can and do go everywhere – one effect of which is tramping fungi around that are killing off the world’s amphibians.

It’s freaking me out.

I fret that modern people are not connected to the natural world and so will speed the rate of destroying it. Then I looked at how I spend my days. I hurry through, intent on work and to-dos and do not take the time to notice that much.

Today was warm for October. (Let’s not even get into that.) The garden looks tousled and beautiful in that fading autumnal way. When I was finished working, I took my laptop and yoga mat and set out to do stretches in the backyard along with “My Friend Maia,” to enjoy things just as they are right now. I also took our terrier out, because he, too, needs some time just hanging outside, rather than being hurried down the sidewalk twice a day by preoccupied and impatient me.

It was already getting dark, and the leaves on the trees looked even more orange against the cloudy sky. I started the stretches, tried to enjoy. (“Have some pleasure!” said Mrs. Soprano to Tony.) A little bird flitted around in circles overhead. Only it was a bat. Winging around in that batty way, as if its wings were pulled by strings. He circled and circled and then disappeared.

Aren’t they going extinct too? Aren’t they afflicted by a mysterious fungus also? He was gone for a good ten minutes, and then he came back. Then he left again. And then he came back. And then he came back.

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September 20, 2013

Color Connection

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Our national colors, as expressed through Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Target, FrontGate, and Home Goods, are the colors of autumn. Gold, red, brown, sage and olive green.

In the September sea of catalogs, I’ve noticed that other colors are often turned toward this palette. The oranges are burnt, the blues are tealed (or if dark, navy or denim, not indigo), the greens are yellowed or mossy, and the greys are browned. There’s nothing wrong with these colors – they’re warm and cozy where we want that effect. They can be richly pretty. But they’ve become the colors of the American indoors, regardless of light, climate, or landscape.

It’s hard to talk about color without getting into individual taste. And you can only do mass market sofas and throw pillows in so many color options. Browned colors are cheaper to make than clear ones. They’re not thinking of the light in your living room, or whether you live with a dark winter, a rainy climate, or somewhere sunny all year round.

That’s up to us. With paint, and wallpaper, we have an opportunity to tune our rooms to our surroundings.

I used to only think about colors I liked. I once painted a bedroom tomato red. I can’t remember what inspired (or possessed) me, but it wasn’t restful. And it wasn’t long before a policeman arrived, sent by the insane lady next door who had glimpsed the red through the window and decided I was a prostitute.

In another apartment I tried to spruce things up with a Ralph Lauren-ish dark moss green on one wall in my living room. It was beautiful, but it made no sense. By day it swallowed the sunlight and at night it turned black, showing circles of green only where the lamps were lit.

In both cases, I lived in down and out neighborhoods. I wasn’t trying to connect to the outside; I was trying to insulate myself against it. I had only picked the color, not the experience of it. A moss green might be incredible in a hallway in New England, dark and forest-y. A tomato red might be fabulous lit by the sunset in a west-facing study. A friend of mine just bought curtains the color of midnight for her bedroom, silky enough to catch the light by day. Another friend painted her yellow kitchen green to better frame the picture window view of trees outside.

I had all kinds of ideas about colors for my house until I lived in it. Laid up after knee surgery and unable to get on a ladder, I was forced to spend months looking at the light in different rooms. I started to understand where it was yellow and where it was bluish, and noticed what was directly outside every window. I started recalibrating my thinking to make those connections. Where I have achieved it, I feel less antsy to keep changing it up by buying accessories.

A good example of what I discovered is how our bedroom turned out, despite my original plans. On the back side of the house, facing northwest, the room is small and not very light. Evergreen spruces and hemlocks fill the view out the windows all year. Before I moved in, I had imagined “brightening it up” with yellow walls. But when I tried it (having bought a whole gallon of paint in my certainty…) the inside and the outside resisted each other, making a pretty starry yellow look garish and making the trees look “wrong”.

I ended up with deep pewter and bluish grays, not colors I am normally drawn to – not colors that I wear, for example. But it is a rich and peaceful bedroom. The greys invite the spruce and the hemlock and the trees are more present in turn, as if they are reaching inside, as if we were floating among them.

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