Until the nineteenth century most poor people worked outdoors and were tanned and thus the rich wished to be pale.  In ancient Greece and Rome affluent women whitened their faces with white lead paint (with deadly consequences).  The fashion for pale skin continued among European elites until the early twentieth century, arguably one of the most long-lived fashions of all time.  So why after two thousand years should this change?   The most important reason may be that Europe had become highly urbanized and now so many of the poor were pale and pasty-faced from spending long hours working in factories.  Being pale was no longer a sign of status.  Furthermore, the connection between exposure to the sun and vitamin D had been discovered and so doctors urged people to “take” sun in order to avoid diseases such as rickets.  For the first time, elites were provided with both social and medical reasons to be in out in the sun.

Among the first sunbathers were middle-class Scandinavian and German naturists. They believed that the sun was good for the health and were seduced by the old romantic image of “the Noble Savage,” a semi-naked person who was close to nature and uncorrupted by the artificiality of modern social life.  To be deeply tanned symbolized a romantic sensibility, whereas before the sun was thought to “coarsen the sensibilities”.

But northern European sun worshipers were a fringe group.  Had they remained the sole spokespersons  for sunbathing, it might never have caught on.  Instead, the true origins of sunbathing lie at the end of the First World War – tied not so much in the cult of nature as in the cult of celebrity!

In 1919, the French tennis champion, Suzanne Lenglen caused a sensation by playing in short sleeves and hatless, revealing her deep tan.  Diva that she was, she always wore a white ermine coat for her warm-ups before matches as it looked great with her tan.

[A tanned Suzanne Lenglen wearing her trademark bandana at Wimbledon , although, It is unlikely she got her tan there!]

But while Lenglen might have been the first celebrity to sport a tan, it was Coco Chanel who made it the “must-have” fashion accessory.  One summer day in 1923 she stunned and enchanted French society by stepping off the Duke of Westminster’s yacht looking as “brown as a berry”.

[Coco Chanel on the beach 1930]

As Chanel was already a fashion icon by this time, fashionable people on the Riviera began to follow her lead.  Her friend Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge later remarked “I think she may have invented sunbathing.  At that time she invented everything!”  While painters, invalids, and aristocrats  from Paris and northern European countries had been coming to the Riviera since the late nineteenth century for the winter season, it was only in the mid-1920s that the fashionable international set , including Americans, began to come in summer.  And they came for the sun!  The rich and the bored were joined on the beaches and the swimming pools of their villas by artists like Picasso, who loved the sun nearly as much as he loved other men’s wives,

F. Scott Fitzgerald whose Tender is the Night pays homage to tanned American bodies on the Cote d’Azure, and the photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who perhaps more than anyone captures this place and time in history when the tan was invented.

The above photograph shows  Lartigue on the Riviera with his muse Renee Perle, his light-colored clothing chosen to accentuate his tan.

One of his most famous photographs is a portrait of Perle looking deeply tanned.  I believe that this is a particularly  important photograph, as it marks an entirely new vision of beauty for white European women,  one that is dark-skinned.

[Josephine Baker]

And surely there is a connection between this new desire on the part of white women to look dark-skinned and the celebration in France at that time of Josephine Baker  as a sex symbol.

Arguably the most iconic image in the history of the tan is Lartigue’s  picture of the 1930s “It-girl” Chou Valton lolling on the Plage de la Garoupe in Cap d’Antibes in 1932.

She lies casually winding up her gramophone, a tray of drinks beside her, no doubt waiting for other “beautiful people” to join her.  Her shorts are slightly lifted, enhancing the erotic tension, while revealing how deeply tanned she is.

And so, we can trace the sun tan to a certain time and place, and yet, there are reasons why this momentous change in fashion should have taken place when and where it did.  The history of sun bathing is interesting and important, not only because it marks the sudden end of a two thousand year old tradition of paleness as an aesthetic ideal, but also because it ushered in the rise of the beach resort, and perhaps even a slight blurring of the idea of racial difference in skin color.

My grandfather, who was a boy in the early 20^th century, told the story of how his family rented a farmhouse in the French countryside. As they planned to stay for a few years, his father asked if he could install indoor plumbing at his own expense.  The farmer let him know in no uncertain terms that he considered going to the bathroom in the house to be disgusting. He would give his permission only on the condition that the toilet be removed before they left the house!

Although this took place less that a century ago, it seems a world away from a contemporary America where real estate agents tell us that a luxurious en suite bathroom is one of the most important selling points of a house. And yet one could argue that Americans retain a deep cultural squeamishness about having a toilet in the house by the language they use.  While an English guest at a dinner party would ask to use “the toilet” or if they were more posh “the loo” (see Debrett’s U & non-U Revisited), American dinner guests would ask to use “the bathroom,” although it would certainly be a breech of etiquette if they actually took a bath.

The first known private baths and toilets were built in Pakistan in 2800 B.C.  The ancient Greeks and Romans also had indoor baths and toilets with running water.

(Roman toilet)

The frequency of bathing has varied over the centuries. In medieval times people washed frequently for fear of the black plague. Some castles had hot and cold running water. But then indoor bathing greatly declined during the sixteenth century as water was thought to carry disease. Furthermore, Puritanism taught that the naked body was sinful and that washing the body had connotations of depraved sexuality!  By  the 18^th century bathrooms were still rare and running water (when found) was cold and ran only to the kitchen.

Until the 19^th century, people tended to wash only their hands and feet regularly, using perfume to cover up body odors. The famous 19^th century dandy Beau Brummell rejected perfumes and started the fashion among aristocrats to bathe daily. They washed in basins in their bedrooms or in a portable hip bath in a dressing room with water carried up from the basement by servants.

( Dressing Room and Hip Bath)

Toilets were found at the back of the house or more commonly in outhouses at the end of the garden.

(A pre-plumbing dry earth toilet)

By the mid 19^th century technological developments and a rising concern about sanitation led to a middle class revolution in indoor plumbing including the flush toilet. The most popular model was developed by Thomas Crapper in 1861, who made a fortune from his invention, but lived to see his name memorialized by the expression “to take a crap!”  While toilet paper was commercially available in the United States by 1860, until much later the British used scraps of paper bags and old envelopes!

(An 1860s built in toilet)

Home management books in the latter 19^th century suggested that the bath and sink be placed in the dressing room and that the toilet be located in a separate room.  And so the dressing room was renamed the bathroom.  That arrangement is still often found in Britain and France today. By the mid 1880s when the seals and the flushing mechanisms on toilets were perfected and no longer smelled bad, they were moved into bathrooms.

(An Early Flush Toilet)

Once the dressing room was plumbed with hot water, wallpaper was varnished and floors were tiled. More modest houses used the newly invented linoleum (1860). Such protection was especially necessary after the 1890s when showers became common. The early models had attached boilers which generated a large amount of steam and were liable to explode!

(A Victorian Bathroom)

While these 19^th century technological innovations led to the creation of the basic bathroom as we know it, it wasn’t until the 1920s with the emergence of Art Deco that the modern bathroom of sleek glass, mirror, porcelain and chrome emerged.  Once this happened, the bathroom became an object of beauty, not just for the rich, but for the middle classes as well.

White

Some people think that white is the absence of color.  But that is exactly what it is not! White is produced by combining all of the visible colors of light in equal proportions.  While blue is the most popular, since the early 20^th century there has been no color more important in interior design than white. And so, there are more commercially available shades of white paint than of any other color.

In the Western world white is the symbol of purity: the holiness of the angels, the virginity of a bride, the cleanliness of a doctor.   White is also the symbol of conservatism: the White Russians who opposed the Red communists during the revolution of 1917, the white shirt for the conservative businessman, plain vanilla as opposed to Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia.

White has long been a principal color in the home.  Think of white marble for buildings and decorative statuary in ancient Greece and Rome (although it’s worth noting that these were sometimes painted in bright colors.)  Whitewash continued to be a staple color in the humble homes of the Mediterranean.   In 19^th century Britain and America, white was the color of choice for walls in modest homes, while the more prosperous families used wallpaper.  This, combined with a penchant for dark wood furniture like mahogany, helped to shape our image of the 19^th century as a time of dark heaviness in interior design.

The 20^th century, on the other hand, saw the ascendancy of whiteness and lightness.   I can think of two major reasons for this.  The first is technological.  The decline of sooty coal fires and oil lamps, combined with the rise of better cleaning products and the invention of the vacuum cleaner made white fabrics a more reasonable choice.  The second reason is cultural.   Designers in the early 20^th century wanted to break away from the dark heaviness of Victorian design or even Art Nouveau.  Art Deco, on the other hand, was a new modern style that played with lightness, white and silver surfaces, as well as mirrors. An early version of this can be seen in Eileen Gray’s design for Suzanne Talbot’s living room. Here the whiteness of the modern style was punctuated by the dark starkness of the primitive in the form of animal skins and African tribal pieces.

(Eileen Gray design for Suzanne Talbot 1919-22)

The move to whiteness was carried a step further by Syrie Maugham of “cut it down and paint it white” fame who is usually credited with having introduced the first all-white room in 1920s.  It was in large part through her influence that white became the dominant color for interior design. The reason Maugham’s influence was so important was that Hollywood set designers in the late 20s and early 30s found her sleek white look (with contrasting dark objects) ideal for black and white filming. During the hard years of the depression, the light, bright interiors on movie sets became a fantasy of the high life.  This style was reinforced by publicity shots of the famous actresses like Jean Harlow lounging seductively on polar bear rugs, or Marlene Dietrich relaxing in her luminous Hollywood home.  This in turn influenced high-end designers and so the circle of interior designer—film set—interior designer was completed.

(Syrie Maugham  drawing room, Kings Road, Chelsea)

(Jean Harlow on polar bear rug 1934)

White didn’t die with Deco, in fact postwar design embraced white as a symbol of the purity and simplicity of modernism itself. As we know, white is the color of choice for museums and galleries because it’s such an effective backdrop for art.  For the very same reason it works wonderfully well in the home.  As we can see below, an architect like Richard Meier, has made white his signature color, collapsing the distinction between home and gallery.

Richard Meier interior of Southern California Beach House

A word of caution, though. A very white pallet works best with dramatic architecture or striking art and furnishings.  Otherwise your place might just look plain vanilla.

Since time immemorial people have had old furniture. But when did an old piece of furniture become a valued “antique”?  The short answer is during the latter half of the 19^th century in Britain and in the 1920s in the U.S. It is no coincidence that an interest in antiques developed at these times.

In mid 19^th century Britain many styles of furniture were available, but very few people collected antiques.  Prior to the 19^th century expensive furniture had been the prerogative of a small elite. This changed with the industrial revolution. A new class of consumers arose who they wanted to mark their new-found status through the purchase and furnishing of their houses.  But this class of new consumers tended to be unsure of their taste, so they bought copies of furniture favored by the elite.

But, increasingly after mid-century the quality of these copies declined.  This set the stage for a new hierarchy of prestige in furniture with the inferior copy at the bottom, the fine copy in the middle and for the first time, the “original” at the top.

Antiques were seen as not only beautiful in themselves, but also valuable because of their rarity. This same principle of scarcity-equals-value, explains why caviar is so expensive and prestigious, and why precious stones cost as much as they do.[1]

In 1835, the renowned design critic Pugin decried contemporary taste as bankrupt and immoral. He urged people to look to the past and adopt a Gothic (Christian) style of furniture.  After mid century pleas to adopt pre-industrial styles of design were taken up by John Ruskin and William Morris.  Although they advocated furniture in old styles using preindustrial forms of manufacture, their romantic perspective reinforced the prestige system that placed a high value on antiques.

Further, antiques (which could appear to be inherited like ancestor portraits) provided the newly rich with the material symbols of a genealogy.

But what happened in America?  During the 19^th century, there was little interest in antiques.  Of course, there were some east coast Anglophile elites who copied the latest fashions in England, but these were a small minority.  Some early American furniture was shown during the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, but there were few collectors and no general interest.  A more widespread interest in antiques developed in the 1920s driven in part by the display of early American furnishings in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1924.  This seal of approval set off a frenzy of collecting American antiques during the 1920s. The idea of collecting European antiques was spread to the middle classes through the influence of robbers barons like William Randolph Hurst and others who imported boatloads of antiques to fill their mansions.

And so, the irony is that antiques emerged after the mid 19^th century as a symbol of conservative rejection of the new industrial, capitalist society.  But because they were rare and expensive, the people who could best afford them were the rich industrialists.

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[1] On the other hand, the extraordinarily high cost of diamonds is not so much accounted for by their rarity, but the monopoly practices of mining companies like DeBeers, who stockpile vast quantities of diamonds off the market, coupled with a brilliant advertising campaign “Diamonds are forever”, which suggests that they are the only suitable stone for an engagement ring.

Whoever coined the term “nothing succeeds like excess,” probably needed their decorator to rein them in.  Excess as a design principle rarely works — whether too large, too many, or too bright.  But what constitutes excess?  It’s not easy to say because excess varies culturally, historically and by social class. When you cross a certain line people will think you have gone too far.  I don’t pretend to understand the psychology of those who crave excess, but I suspect it’s linked to insecurity. Each society, era or social group marks the boundary for itself, perhaps as a way of controlling levels of consumption.

My favourite example of excess is the house of the mad Roman emperor Nero.  His 300 room palace, the Golden House, was overlaid with gold covered in gem stones and mother of pearl. The dining rooms were fretted with ivory. The house was filled with treasure ransacked from around the empire. There was an immense vestibule with a 120 foot statue of the Emperor himself under a mile long triple portico.

What truly pushed it over the edge was the revolving ceiling cranked by slaves in the vast dining room simulating the movement of the heavens, complete with perfume-scented rain showers of rose petals.  When this gigantic piece of kitsch, which nearly bankrupted the Roman state was finally complete, Nero was reputed to say, “now at last I can begin to live like a human being.”  Nero’s folly seemed particularly excessive at the time because Roman interior decoration was relatively austere.

It was more difficult for an individual to be excessive in 17^th century France because the accepted gold and mirror quotient was so high. And yet the Sun King was up to the task.  His palace at Versailles was lavish beyond belief.  This example set off an orgy of competitive consumption among his courtiers, although none approached Louis’ level of excess, at least not if they valued their heads!

But even this level of decorative excess was topped by the horror of Rococo that originated in France in the 18^th century and then metastasized to other parts of Europe, reaching a particularly deadly form in Germany.  In the Reichen Zimmer of the Residenz in Munich, the decoration of the walls literally flowed onto and engulfed the furniture.  Perhaps there should be a name for a psychological state that will tolerate no space empty of curving lines!

In the sixteenth century, the issue of excess in interior design became a major point of theological debate. The newly formed Protestant sects judged Roman Catholic Churches to be excessively decorated. This was read as a sign of the worldliness and falseness  of Rome.  Apparently, both sides thought that God cares deeply about interior design!

Of course, we can’t speak of excess without mentioning the Victorians. Again during this period, the bar of what constituted excess was very high.  There are two reasons why Victorian homes were filled to the rafters with things:  the first was the industrial revolution and the second was the British Empire. The advent of machine-made furniture and decorative objects rapidly increased the supply while dramatically reducing the cost.  Added to this, the availability of inexpensive objects from around the world stimulated an unprecedented desire to collect things!   The industrial revolution was key. It created a love of the newest industrially-produced objects for the home and ironically, nostalgia for pre-industrial objects from Europe in the past and from parts of empire untouched by modernization.  And so began the love affair with antiques. But that I’ll leave for another blog.

Not to be outdone by their European counterparts, newly wealthy Americans in the late 19^th and early 20^th century took excess to new levels.  For example, nouveau-riche capitalists like William Randolph Hearst imported container loads of European antiques to fill his ersatz castle in California. (See  Moving Rooms by John Harris about the trade in architectural salvage.)  Hearst Castle was a monument to excess and a textbook example of the gilded age dictum “too much is not enough!”

Likewise, during the First World War, James Deering employed a tenth of the population of Miami to create his winter home, Vizcaya, a faux Italian renaissance villa filled with European antiques.

At present, newly rich entrepreneurs, movie stars and athletes display their over-sized egos by buying mega mansions, although only seldom are they filled with valuable art and antiques.  Rarely being connoisseurs themselves, they tend to go for quantity or size.

Having said that, an appreciation of quality is no protection from the perils of excess.  For example, I thought that the late Yves St. Laurent’s apartment in Paris was a nightmare of excess.  The precious objects individually deserved the breathless praise they received in the press, but the superabundance of objects in the apartment approached madness.  Wonderful pieces were layered behind other equally beautiful objects, so that the overall effect was more of a compulsive shopper’s lust, than a connoisseur’s eye.

Maybe the modernists were right, less is more!

6th Screen by James DuncanStanding Mirror by James Duncan

Representations of the Greek god Narcissus conventionally show him gazing at himself in a reflecting pool, the first mirror.

(Narcissus by Caravaggio)

The history of the mirror is a fascinating story of an object which has gone from being extraordinarily precious to absolutely ordinary. At times laws were even set up to govern who could own one, how many, and of what size.  We know that the ancient Greeks had mirrors in the 5th century BC, humble ones made of polished bronze and more precious ones of silver or gold.  These were either convex or concave so that they distorted the reflected image. Never more than five to eight inches in diameter, their sole purpose was for grooming.  The Romans, who discovered how to create larger polished metal mirrors produced the first decorative wall mirrors.  In fact, they built entirely mirrored rooms in which to hold orgies. It wasn’t until the 15^th century, however that glass mirrors were developed.  Although clearer than metal mirrors, they still distorted the image.  By late in that century the glass-makers of the island of Murano in Venice began to produce the first mirrors that even approached the quality of the mirrors we have today.  But they were unable to make mirrors more than forty square inches because of the limitations of their glass blowing techniques. Nonetheless, so valuable to the Republic were the skilled Murano mirror-makers that they there were prosecuted for treason if they attempted to go abroad to work!

Up through the 18^th century glass mirrors remained very costly. So ordinary people continued to use small metal mirrors. In fact, in the early 16^th century a Murano mirror in a silver frame sold for nearly three times the cost of a painting by Raphael.

With improved techniques of glassmaking the cost of mirrors declined sufficiently so that during the 17^th century wealthy people in France began to decorate their public rooms with mirrors. Typically, during this period mirrors were placed across from windows in order to lighten dark rooms.  This trend reached its apogee with the construction of Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1684. Seventeen mirrors each composed of eighteen pieces of glass reflected the view out of seventeen matching windows during the day, and magnified the play of candlelight and gilt at night.

(Versailles, Hall of Mirrors

But limitations on the size of mirrors changed at the beginning of the 18^th century when the first cast mirrors were made at Saint Gobain in France.  People were astonished when they first saw a single piece of mirrored glass seven feet by four feet.  The discovery of how to cast glass moved the center of mirror production from Venice to France in a stroke.  And just as the Venetian Republic had tried to protect its expertise in glass blowing, so now the French tried valiantly, although unsuccessfully, to protect the secret of casting glass.   But again the new large mirrors were extremely expensive due to a more than fifty percent breakage rate during manufacture.  They were also very unstable as the mercury-silvered backing on the glass (the tain) was susceptible to damp — so much so, that, throughout the 18^th century mirrors were never found in entrance halls of houses!  By the early 19^th century the tain had been stabilised. And so people have placed mirrors in their entrance halls ever since.

In the 18th century the use of mirrors as decorative items expanded greatly.  They were embedded in wardrobes and it was at this time that the mirrored dressing table was invented.  As the price of mirrors declined slightly, people could fill their houses with them, and they did!   Now, not only were mirrors placed opposite windows to capture light, they were used elsewhere in houses as well.  In particular, the craze for over mantel mirrors swept Paris and precious paintings were removed to be replaced by mirrors in painted, gilded, or tortoise shell frames.  So enamoured did people become of mirrors that the value of paintings and fine tapestries nearly collapsed.

In some places the craze for mirrors among the wealthy became a cause for official concern.  For example, the Republic of Geneva passed a law prohibiting citizens from having more than one mirror per room or having any larger than thirty two inches in height.  While by the end of the 18^th century, small mirrors were widespread throughout the population (it is estimated that two thirds of the population of Paris had one), large mirrors were still very costly and continued to be a mark of status.

Birds Mirror by James Duncan

During the 19th century, the industrial revolution ushered in technological changes that greatly reduced the cost of large mirrors. For the first time large glass mirrors became accessible to people of modest means.  The predictable result was to immediately decrease the status value of mirrors for elites.  For the latter, mirrors became functional, commonplace items and so the wealthy returned to their pre-18^th century use of paintings.

Palm Beach Mirror by James Duncan and Cynthia Thomas

By the 20^th century mirrors had dropped in price yet again. Thus they became an ordinary object even for people of modest means.  And this is where we remain today.  We see mirrors now as functional for reflecting our image, capturing light or reflecting our surroundings. Mirrors themselves are no longer precious. When they are highly valued, it is because of the beauty of the frames that we surround them with or the fine furniture we cover in them.

Trocadero Dining Table By James

We all know that different cultures have different dining hours.  In Seville, many restaurants are packed with families at midnight.  The Spanish may be an extreme case, but if you go to a restaurant in Paris before nine in the evening, chances are that your only dining companions will be tourists.  The French consider dining at eight in the same light that an American would view booking a table at six in a chic New York restaurant.

The reason, of course, is that food rituals are highly symbolic.

But a glance at history tells us that the “proper” dinner hour for elites in a country like England, where records of mealtimes extend back centuries, has varied wildly.  In fact, taking the long view, dinner doesn’t really refer to a time of day so much as to a type of meal.  We now associate it with the evening meal, except in the case of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes Sunday dinners, which are often served in the afternoon.  If we consider the meals of the day to be a planetary system with dinner as the sun, then breakfast, lunch, and supper are smaller planets trapped within its gravitational pull.

At the beginning of the 16^th century aristocrats ate dinner, the main meal of the day, at 11 am!  This was followed by a light supper in the late afternoon with numerous snacks throughout the day. Neither breakfast nor lunch had been invented at this time.

By the mid 17^th century fashionable people ate dinner at 1 pm. A hundred years later it was more common to begin dinner between 3 and 5pm.  By the mid 18^th century the retreating dinner hour prompted the invention of breakfast and a noontime snack.  During these years, upper class Englishmen rose at 8 am and ate breakfast at 10.  It was a light, but sociable meal of coffee and toast that never lasted less than an hour, but often continued until 1:00 pm.  If breakfast finished early, people might have a snack around noon to tide them over until dinner.  Interestingly, at this time such people considered it “morning” until they had dinner, which meant they said “good morning” to each other until 5 pm!

If you were invited to dinner during the late 18^th century, you would be expected to arrive around 3.45 and sit down to eat shortly after 4.30.  You would probably remain at the table for four hours or more, whereupon the table would be cleared and port wine and dessert brought in.  After an interval where guests could freshen up, tea would be served, which in turn would be followed by a light supper of hot and cold dishes, sweets, fruit and wine served between 10 and 11pm.  And so the dinner guest who arrived before 4 in the afternoon would not leave before midnight having had dinner, tea and supper!

In the nineteenth century lunch was invented. As the dinner hour retreated further and further into the evening and breakfast was served earlier, the noontime snack was elaborated into a meal in itself. However, luncheon was often thought to be primarily a meal for women, an association which survives today as the “ladies lunch”. By the mid 19^th century, the fashionable dinnertime was 6 pm.  The theater began at 7 pm and so now the post-theater late supper had to be invented!  It remains today the sole holdover of the late supper that had been so fashionable in the 18^th century.  By the mid 19^th century breakfast was earlier, at 8.00, and had become the often solitary meal that it remains today.  It was however more substantial with eggs and bacon, in addition to coffee, tea and toast.  By the late 19^th century lunch was regularly eaten at 1 pm by men as well as women, although the lower classes who couldn’t afford candles and had different work schedules ate dinner earlier, thereby continuing the older pattern of two meals a day.

By the early 20^th century the fashionable lunch hovered between 1.00 and 1.30 pm and the dinner hour continued to advance with quiet dinners at home served at 7.30 and dinner parties beginning at 8pm. In the 21^st century much is being made in the press about the death of the meal and the great increase  of snacking which is criticized as anti-social, as well as leading to obesity.  But it should be remembered that the snack is essentially a pre 19^th century form of food consumption. So the culture of snacking is a recycling of the past which fragments the temporal order of the day structured by mealtimes and no doubt will lead to further chapters in the history of dining.

Driftwood Dining Table

“Oh, my God, real books!” a friend who is an interior designer observed ironically as he walked into my parent’s living room. “They’re academics,” I explained, knowing exactly what he meant. Unfortunately, a real library full of “real” books is all too rare these days. Quite apart from the pleasure that reading brings, a library adds visual interest, color and warmth to a house. It also suggests that the owners are cultured in a way that a TV in the living room clearly does not. Or maybe it suggests that people who have libraries are old fashioned, while the culture has moved increasingly towards the cult of the visual image and the sound bite. Of course, one can have a library that is largely decorative. My grandfather’s was full of precious leather volumes many of which he had never read. He simply liked the look and feel of old books and the idea of a handsome library.

But if my parents have “real” books, then what did my friend consider to be “unreal” books? Most likely, he was thinking of coffee table books. It may be unfair, but I know exactly what he means. Most coffee table books aren’t meant to be read any more than articles in Playboy are meant to be read. It’s the pictures that are important.

Leaf through any design magazine and you see that almost all coffee tables have large books on them (usually in piles of two or three). There is invariably a book on Avedon, Hadley, Jansen, or one of the great modernist painters. You know because the photographer turns the books so you can read the spines. Sometimes I wonder, do these books really belong to the owners of the place? Or do the photographers for the magazines take the same five books to every shoot? What one can’t help but notice is that the art in the coffee table books is invariably better than that on people’s walls. This of course is understandable, but it’s as if people are saying: “if I could afford it I wouldn’t have what you see on my walls. This is what I would have.” So the coffee table book is a coded message about what sort of person one would be if money were no object. Perhaps also the these books have another message as well; that is, even if you don’t like the way that I’ve decorated my house, at least you can’t doubt that I have taste, because I like Picasso.

I’m not saying that people who have picture books don’t get genuine pleasure from their books, but clearly there is something more going on as well. And that includes not only the coded messages about taste, but also the fact that such books have become a decorative necessity, an accessory that must go on every coffee table. A coffee table simply wouldn’t look right without a coffee table book sitting on it. It isn’t just the contents of the books that suggest taste and savoir faire, but the placement of the books themselves that suggests this.

And yet, when everyone does the same thing you can be sure that it isn’t a matter of individual taste. The irony, and of course this is the great irony of consumer culture more generally, is that we show our individual good taste by following the shifting fashions of collective good taste as defined by the tastemakers. Design magazines continually reinforce the idea that a proper coffee table must have certain types of books on it arranged in certain sorts of piles. This, we tell people, is what good taste looks like. But maybe it’s just what people in the U.S. and Britain think is good taste. I say this because in browsing through some French and Italian design magazines, I notice that on the continent it is apparently possible to be a person of taste and not have coffee table books! I have no idea why.

Bespoke Semi Circular Atlas Sofa by James Duncan

Do you have a couch or a sofa? Some claim that they are not the same thing. Others think a sofa is simply an up-market couch.* But most Americans use the terms interchangeably. Actually the two terms have an interesting history, and so does the furniture they refer to.

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The word couch comes from the French word “coucher”, to lie down, and this is the word that came first into the English language. This isn’t surprising, as nearly 50% of French and English words have a common root. So, in 1450 the English had couches, but had never heard of sofas. The French, on the other hand call them canapés, not couches. To confuse things further, a canapé in English is usually finger food. But this comes from the fact that a bit of savory is placed upon a “couch” of bread.

In the seventeenth century, when an infatuation with all things Oriental began to sweep the elites of Europe, the word sofa, derived from the Arabic word “suffah”, meaning a long reclining bench began to be used. Wealthy people sat on their sofas and drank coffee, a newly fashionable beverage, also borrowed around that time from the Arabs and the Turks.

The sofa has been around for several thousand years. The ancient Greeks and later Roman men lounged on sofas when they dined. This privilege was restricted to men; women sat on chairs to eat.

The “modern” style of sofa wasn’t developed until the late sixteenth century, when wooden frames were padded with feathers and horsehair, introduced by the Germans, or dried sea moss, favored by the English. The seats and backs were then wrapped in burlap and covered in rich velvet, wool or silk. These early modern sofas were very expensive and consequently were the prerogative of elites in Europe. The other classes had to make do with benches, chairs and stools. Sofas were no longer used at the dining table, as in Roman times, although cushioned benches with backs sometimes were, which begs the question of where a bench ends and a sofa begins. But, sofas, as in Roman times were used for reclining, rather than sitting. Before the nineteenth century, they were much more likely to be found in bedrooms, where the leisured classes lolled during the day entertaining family and intimate friends. The sofa at this time not only symbolized luxury, but as it was in the boudoir, it had a whiff of decadence and eroticism about it.

Gondole Sofa By James Duncan

During the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution dramatically lowered the price of sofas, putting them within reach of the rising middle class. Not only did new industrial production make sofas cheaper, it also, with the introduction of the coil spring in 1850, made them more comfortable. But while this new class wanted to emulate the consumption styles of the elite, they did not have the vast sleeping spaces of the wealthy so put their sofas in the larger public rooms of the house. And since these sofas were considered very luxurious by the middle class, they were kept in the parlor to be used by important guests. There was no question of children lounging around on them as they do today.

Bespoke Montreal Sofa by James Duncan

During the twentieth century, as the price of sofas relative to middle class incomes once again dropped dramatically, the sofa became the piece of furniture most associated with the family. This was a total reversal of the nineteenth century sofa. Then, it was where one had polite conversations with guests. Now, in many households, it is where the family sits to watch the greatest conversation killer, the TV.

Tristan Sofa by James Duncan

Ironically, the modern couch potato, lounging around all day on the sofa, takes us back to the pre-nineteenth century use of the sofa as a place of solitary recline. But this isn’t the only contemporary resonance with the past. One can also see in high end sofas, a return to a nineteenth century elegance where the sofa is a more formal piece of furniture than the over-stuffed, comfy, family models that prevail on sitcoms. And again at the high end, the trend to put a sofa in a bedroom, takes us back to eighteenth century customs. And just as it did in the eighteenth century, the sofa in the bedroom suggests glamour touched by eroticism. Plus ca change; plus c’est la meme chose!

Atlas Sofa by James Duncan

*In the 1950’s Nancy Mitford published a list of U and non U (upper class and non upper class) words used in England at that time. Sofa was identified as U while couch or settee were identified as non U.

Chains by James Stuart Duncan

At the Milan Furniture Fair and in design magazines everywhere today we see the romance of the past. We see the return of Shaker furniture, steamer trunks and just about everything else, from 18^th century French chairs to 1950s, 60s and 70s classics. Many of these pieces are reinterpreted, but the references to the past are very up-front. Nostalgia is back in vogue.

Parchment Dresser by James Stuart Duncan

I want to reflect a bit on nostalgia, to look back, but not nostalgically, on the history of nostalgia itself. In centuries past nostalgia or homesickness, was thought to be a true disease. Swiss mercenaries in France and Italy so missed their mountain homes that they become depressed and sick. Since the late 19^th century, no one has seriously considered nostalgia a medical condition, but the term survives as a romantic way of thinking about the past. While the term nostalgia still has its old connotations of the love a lost home, today it refers more generally to a longing for an idealised version of the past — but not necessarily a past that we have experienced. So, for example, the New England village where I spent my childhood summers, was designed in the 19^th century to look like an idealised version of a white clapboard colonial village of the late 17^th century. And my grandmother’s nineteenth century American antiques were, like the village, nostalgic references to the goodness of our colonial fathers’ way of life.

Actually, the idea of nostalgia, if not the word itself, goes back to time immemorial. The Rome of the Caesars looked back longingly at the glories of ancient Greece and Roman houses and public buildings were decorated in the Greek style. Many would claim that the idea of nostalgia can be traced back to the Old Testament and the idea of the fall from grace in Paradise. People have always looked back longingly at earlier times. Feelings of loss and nostalgia for the past were particularly acute in the 19^th century as the industrial revolution swept away much of traditional material life and culture. And so Gothic Revival in architecture was a nostalgic longing for the community and faith of the middle ages and the Arts and Crafts movement a nostalgia for preindustrial design.

Back to the Milan Fair. It strikes me that we are seeing a different type of nostalgia. Neo-Gothic design referred to a loss of faith and community. Arts and Crafts referred to lost craftsmanship in the face of standardised machine production. Today, nostalgia in design is an ironic and playful form of nostalgia that refers largely to images of 18^th century France, 19^th century America, or 20^th century Europe. Although it is clearly an exaggeration, the contemporary world has been called a place where everything is an image. And that these images refer only to other images. The move to nostalgia at the Milan Fair offers a hall of mirrors, where images of the past and present reflect off each other offering themselves up not as an idealized past, but as an exciting future that understands that the past is irrecoverable except as inspiration.

Karton Art Design

Shaker by Ercol

Shaker by James Stuart Duncan