”Versailles goes punk,” is how Carey South laconically labels the unique, some might say outlandish, style in which he has decorated his apartment.
South, 30, is owner of an Oak Street hair salon where he trims the locks of such trendy folk as Jim Guth, Chicago`s hottest young caterer; Jon Cockrell, equally high voltage interior designer and avant-garde furniture designer; a gaggle of cool River North art gallery owners; and many of the male models from top agencies.
While she still lived in Chicago, South cut his friend Marlee Matlin`s hair, ”before, during and after `Children of a Lesser God,` ” for which she won an Oscar as best actress. South was a popular stylist in the salon of Robert Bracken for nearly seven years before he opened his own place last spring.
South has lived in his rented apartment–in a ”very Victorian graystone, 75 to 80 years old”–for 8 years, and, over time, he has created a bold design statement without damaging the one at the bank.
Almost every corner or nook has something that jolts the eye and provokes the thought: ”That`s really different. Why hasn`t anyone else thought of that?”
”I never watch television,” South says. ”I write messages on my television screen, it is so dusty. Out of lack of anything else to do, I would piddle around and create things.
”When I walk the dog (his faithful companion Kava, who looks like an explosion in a string factory), I pick the garbage. I`d find things in the alley and redo them in some way, create some form of sculpture, then give them away.”
Some of the more successful pieces he has kept, such as a small chair bristled all over with a ”furry” coat of bronze conductor wire; an ornate mirror found in the alley, regilded and draped in a Veronica Lake style
”hairdo” of metallic gold fabric; and a round footstool stripped of its vile green Naugahyde upholstery and recovered in turquoise fabric.
Mixed in with such found objects is sleek custom furniture by designer Jon Cockrell, such as a stunning black lacquer silk and rayon sofa in the living room and a smaller black lacquer coffee table. In the dining room is a massive but elegant white lacquer table with an altar-like feeling, the first piece Cockrell ever designed, says South.
”Jon Cockrell is a good friend. I`ll suggest a piece of furniture and let him go wild. People usually work better that way. I know I work better when people let me do what I feel is right in doing hair. It doesn`t necessarily mean I`m going to go wild or nuts,” he says and adds, ”I don`t carry my eccentricities into hair. No matter how eccentric or avant-garde you are, you still have to be able to adapt to this boring society.
South says he`s not so avant-garde that his style intimidates people, though some might not consider exactly conservative his chartreuse foyer with a wildly streaked James Marisie painting hung across the right angles of a corner, and curtains hung from two knitting needles stabbing into space.
”That`s why Jon and I get along,” South says. ”He looks very conventional. He`s another fine example of just going as far out as you can go. Some of his furniture is a little wild. He`s sort of taken wild and made it elegant, so it becomes more acceptable.”
Before he got his first piece of Cockrell furniture, the white dining room table, South went through his cinder block period.
”I would find cinder blocks at construction sites, and paint them, basically metallics, pinks, purples, blues, greens, and then continually rearrange them. It looked like a place where you would invite the dead over, because it was so hard; but it did look wonderful.
”They would be furniture one day; the next, a piece of sculpture; the next, all lying flat. There was no other furniture in the apartment.
”Several times I`d stack them so high that if a bus went by, they`d fall over, like a domino effect. It was a little cold and uncomfortable for some people. But,” South adds, ”if they didn`t like it, they didn`t belong here.”
”Some people buy furniture simply to take up space and sit on and never really look at it, for practicality,” South says. ”I`d rather have nothing if I can`t have something wonderful. No H. Brian convertibles for me!
(contemporary sleeper sofas, many in beige tweeds).
”The cinder blocks remained until I got the sofa I have now.” Also by Cockrell, it`s in black lacquer and covered in a synthetic black metallic fabric, with bright metallic pillows.
His living room/dining room sets the tone for elegance gone wild and a little to seed, with lavish drapes of purple cloth over ”sheers” of silver coat-lining fabric. ”I needed so many yards and I was working on a budget. . . . Seventy five cents a yard is very cheap, and it has that metallic look to it,” which South can`t seem to get enough of.
”I tried to create something that was a little more Renaissance, had some elegance, some softness to it, because of the furniture,” he says of the window treatment. ”Things that are very contemporary can be very cold.
”It sizzles. At the same time it`s very soothing, very healing,” he says of the lavish use of metallics in the living room. ”It`s a great place to have a party. It glows.”
Designer Cockrell, who says he did not ”do” the apartment, but was an interested kibbitzer, says the ”most fun thing I participated in was the design of the metal panels over the old fireplace. That was a very inexpensive solution for a very ugly problem of a fireplace. He took sheet metal used for air conditioner ducts, hung it on wires, and I thought it was very effective.”
South says he did the fireplace ”out of necessity. I hate brick! It was a great way of disguising the brick and making it blend a little better with the apartment.” And he didn`t have to make any structural changes. Out of leftover sheet metal, South created a sculpture for the back yard.
South may be imaginative, but he`s still practical. A visitor noticed something unusual about his kitchen cupboards–he moved the handles to the inside because they were so ugly. ”One thing you have to remember when you`re renting an apartment,” he says, ”is you`re going to move and you`re going to want your security deposit back, so you want to be able to change it back to what it was.”
He says he comes ”from a very poor family and my mother being industrious and resourceful, I learned a lot about skills such as plumbing and carpentry.”
His carpentry skills show in the unique shutters he created to cover the old windows in his apartment. ”I couldn`t take them down, I couldn`t paint them, I couldn`t throw them out,” he says of the unsightly windows. So he hid them behind shutters cut in folding tiers in unusual interlocking shapes. The shutters are made of particle board, then lacquered in bronze. ”The reason you use particle board is there`s no grain and you get a nice smooth finish. You get it at the lumberyard and it`s cheap.”
He has a number of large free-standing abstract sculptures throughout the house made out of the same particle board. He mixes them with the paintings he collects by Jim Marisie and Frank Morreale.
”The radiators were another thing you cannot eliminate,” South says.
”I used red copper metallic dust on them, so they become a piece of sculpture, rather than something just taking up space.
”It is an extreme,” South says of his apartment. ”It is not accepted by most people. It`s accepted by few and those are the few you want to get to know. They extend themselves creatively, they`ve extended their minds, and I want to get to know them. Things that are accepted by everybody are real boring–like khaki raincoats.”
Jon Cockrell says: ”The great thing about Carey is that he`s willing to take risks. Some things he found and some things he paid hundreds of dollars for. And he brought them all together. He doesn`t do it from a trained eye. It`s just from being observant. If a person, Carey or anyone else, goes through life and tries to be aware of their surroundings, they can pick up on how to do things without going too far off. There`s several people around the city who have done it on their own, with stabs in the dark, that have come up with fascinating interiors.
”They`ve learned you can play and have fun and understand you do not have to be serious. Since you`re not talking about a $100,000 budget, you can play. It`s great when people do that. Not enough people are willing to strike out. It`s too conservative of a world.”
And what would South buy if he ever bought his own place?
”A garage.
”It could be fun.”
