The Shaker hymn lays it out plainly: ” `Tis the gift to be simple. `Tis the gift to be free. `Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be.”
The complicated part is applying those words to one`s life, to one`s home. It`s hard to be simple, especially when you have a lot of stuff, especially at this time of year when gifts add to the “collection.”
How do you pare down, without throwing away comfort and warmth? How do you create a simple look that doesn`t look empty?
We asked two people who have the gift–and a lot of style too. Andree Putman of France is one of this century`s smoothest Modernists. Minimalism is definitely her thing, an elegant minimalism.
In her 20-year design career, Putman has done the interior of the Concorde for Air France, the Morgans Hotel in New York, boutiques for fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler and Yves Saint Laurent. She does homes “for people I know intimately.”
Victoria Hagan is more of a newcomer. But in a matter of just seven years as head of her own design business, the 36-year-old New Yorker has turned heads from coast to coast.
Hagan`s version of simplicity is more warm and less spare than Putman’s. Mixing antiques with new pieces, high design with Pottery Barn, Hagan has become known for her use of natural materials and her fondness for the color white.
We interviewed both designers about their notions of simplicity and how the rest of us might get it.
OVERFED WITH CULTURE, PUTMAN TURNS TO MINIMALISM
Andree Putman
What do you do if you have accumulated so many things through the years, including gifts from other people. How do you begin to empty out?
I would begin with what is taking the most space. . . . If you have seven books about a painter you just hate, but people know you are interested in art and you were given the seven books for Christmas, you better get rid of them quickly.
Without much prompting, French designer Andree Putman launches into her own personal history with simplicity, during a visit here earlier this year to give a lecture at The Art Institute of Chicago:
I think I was the best client of the flea markets in the ’60s, and even before that, I bought the best pieces. I own museum pieces. I don’t mean that pretentiously. . . . But this typical excitement (over owning wonderful things), I never experience anymore, because I had so much of it. . . . I don’t need to own anything except a kind of very elegant minimum, which is not cheap. I don’t want to sound like a nun from Tibet. I am very realistic and extremely spoiled by life, and I realize my minimum is unbelievably exciting and luxurious.
Where did your preoccupation with minimalism come from? I think the rebellion started early when I was overfed with culture, with beauty, with art, with very interesting and important things that included the feeling of belonging to a world that was extremely advantaged, by chance. But I was shocked by the relationship of the people with their servants, the relationship between the people. What was looked at as beautiful was always, for me, overly rich. . . . It was one of the facets of my rebellion–wanting to avoid all the beautiful, pretentious, arrogant things I thought were in my personal environment.
I asked my mother to get rid of all that. I couldn’t stand it. I lived in a very austere way, and I thought I would fight against all that, all my life. It was almost political. I was like 15, 17 (years old). . . . So I was very moral, in a way. And little by little, it had a very big influence with this idea that simplicity was the only way to live. . . . Simplicity can bring style, but the goal is not style. The goal is simplicity. . . . I believe emptiness, which is exactly how I started when I was 15, to empty the room and to create quietness, symmetry or very clear asymmetry, axes, logics, geometry, hidden sources of light, no colors but an amazing amount of color–which are only non-colors (coming) all together–this is an extremely interesting exercise.
I always start like this. . . . It is a very humble beginning, and it works on logic and the qualities that the place evokes for you because it is pure and empty and it’s meant to receive something. (You have to figure out what you want it to receive.) It’s a very interesting moment.
What if your whole house is overstuffed with things, including gifts from other people? Never in my case. I keep space breathing well. . . . I live in a loft. If I had built closets, I would have lost columns. They would have been included in the closets, and for the beauty of the perspective, these columns were essential. So I found out when I moved–what, it’s 20 years ago–poor Andree, you have no room to hide anything. Everything is going to be showing. I dealt with that. I kept very little clothes and I decided six pairs of sheets is enough. I destroyed that idea that was so fashionable even when I was a little girl, which was when you get married, you have 60 pairs of sheets, you have 24 nightgowns, you have da, da, da. It is too boring. And it doesn’t make sense.
All of that has to be revised. It’s like dining rooms.
What do you mean? They don’t make much sense anymore. So if you buy a great-looking house at the sea, of course there is a dining room. It was built maybe 1910 or so. You have to invent other ways to use that room (so it is used more often). . . . I think you can live in a very modern and evolved way in a very old-fashioned house and suffer and be very clumsy in a wonderful, new house with old ideas.
In the old house with the dining room, what else could you do with the space? You could do a library, you could play billiards, you could collect videos and organize it so that four or five or six people could be incredibly comfortable in chairs to watch movies. Everything could become so flexible.
You talk a lot about the importance of light. Is light the most important element in a room? Yes, maybe the space and the light are equal in their importance. . . . The dream would be to avoid clear sources (of light, like lamps and other fixtures). Maybe the lamp (the object) is nice, and it belongs in the space. But if you depend on objects to get the right light everywhere in a house, it implies hundreds of objects and it becomes very busy. So I love the idea of hidden sources–cornices that hide light and make the room glow . . . a line of light across (the edge of) shelves.
There isn’t a lot of furniture in your interiors. I think furniture is useful, but as a sign of power, I don’t like furniture. I don’t like when furniture gets so enormous and important that it takes up so much space and eats up the light. . . . I don’t like when an interior becomes heavy and very material. I like when it’s airy and more like an ideal place to rest and dream.
You talk about non-color. Does that mean walls have to be pure white to be simple? No, there can be a lot of tiny influences–maybe some pink or some blue, depending on whether you face east or west or what the light is going to be. Also, very pale taupe or very pale gray can be wonderful, but hardly noticeable.
Although all these colors look or can be described as hardly noticeable, in fact, they count very, very much. I love something I’ve done once, which is to paint the four walls of a traditional room in a different color.
Each wall a different color? Yes. But hardly noticeable. . . . A pale, pale blue, a pale, pale pink, a pale, pale mauve and a hardly pale green. They’re not different whites. There are names for these colors. But they’re so pale.
Of course, it has a lot to do with the orientation of the room. If you get the sun in the afternoon on the pale blue wall, which might seem cold, it turns warm. At night, you again see a small difference, and it creates something very exciting.
How do you feel about draperies? I am not too interested. . . . Also, I dislike very much the idea of a sofa in front of another sofa and coordinated armchair, all that. Maybe it’s an OK solution, but it is really boring.
So what would you do instead? I believe in eclecticism more and more. And I think in the future people will feel more free. Imagine, people going to India on holiday and finding this wonderful Anglo-Indian piece, and then they find two armchairs in Bali, and they meet the people who produce them. They add these pieces to their house and make them a human experience, first (and items of decoration, second). . . . It is encouraging for people to see that there is a certain charm in simplicity, that it makes possible this alliance among things that never met before.
HAGAN SAYS TO CLEAR THE ROOM FIRST
Victoria Hagan
How do you feel about collections and all sorts of things around the house?
I am a big fan of collections and photographs and objects and accessories. But I think there is a point where you can still be comfortable with a collection, before it becomes clutter.
What I do is I have a cabinet, and I put some things away. I don’t want to get rid of them, but there are times when I’ll just alternate. And sometimes, something that’s in one room, you might find a place for it in another room. I think a lot of times, our rooms are finished and our living room is our living room, and the thought of moving a chair from the living room to the bedroom might not occur to us. But it really might make a great improvement by just moving the furniture around.
How do you begin to simplify if you already have a houseful of stuff and no budget to hire a designer, we asked New York designer Victoria Hagan. Are there any tricks?
I would recommend if you don’t want to spend any money, just take all the furniture out of the room and put it back piece by piece. You’ll be surprised. You’ll get to a point before you put everything back in, that you like the way the room looks. You might be removing a couple of tables. You might be removing a couple of lamps. I would clear a couple of surfaces. Not every surface has to have something on it.
What is your goal with furniture? Is it only comfort, only function? I always think there are one or two pieces in a room that are more like sculpture, that are there for interest, as you would hang a painting. It could be a chair. It could be a table that has beautiful lines. It might not be the most functional piece of furniture in the room, but I think it really adds great interest. . . . There is dialogue created by the relationships of the pieces. It’s really hard to create any interest in a room by using all upholstered furniture.
You are known for your use of white, particularly on walls. Does a simple room have to be white? Absolutely not. . . . I just came from a project where the client had painted all the walls white and thought I would love it. I then worked on the interior and when the interior was finished, I turned to her, and I said, `We have to paint the walls. They can’t all be white.’ She was so shocked that I would say that, but it was too white. It needed warmth. It didn’t work. I think a lot of what people respond to in my work is the simplicity and the sense of light. There is a lot of color. I think we use colors that are not typical.
Such as? Would you ever use a bright red? Yes, in this little library we did bright red with mahogany. But there are different tones of red. I like colors that are sophisticated in the depth of their color. I wouldn’t say I like clear colors. . . . When you are working on an interior with color, it is almost like working on a painting. You’re really working with different hues and subtleties.
Do walls come first? Not necessarily. I think just the general feel of a home comes first and then it’s blocking it out, where the color falls.
How do you feel about floor coverings? We use so many different things. There are different reasons for them, and each project has its own requirements and issues. I love beautiful wood floors. We use a lot of stone, but more honed stone, not highly polished stone. And we use a lot of hand-woven rugs and still use a lot of sisal.
So floors don’t have to be bare to be simple? No. Again, it’s a balance. What do you have in the room next to it? If I’m dealing with an entry foyer, living room and dining room, generally I don’t have rugs in each room. There is space left. Maybe the dining room doesn’t need it. Maybe the entry doesn’t need it. It is really a balancing act–the notion that each room needs draperies, rugs, the whole list, it doesn’t. It’s knowing when to and when not to use them.
Do people really feel comfortable going without draperies? I think it really depends where you live. A lot of family rooms with great views, we tend not to use window treatments because the view is so great. . . . I think people have different ideas of privacy. Some people really like the idea of being able to close a window treatment, so they definitely have their place. . . . But sometimes, architecturally, a room doesn’t need a window treatment. If you’re working in a budget, I would tend not to put your money there. I would maybe put it into a better piece of upholstery.
Natural fabrics, like cotton and linen, typically don’t work if you have children. Can you recommend others that might have a similar natural look, but will hold up to wear and tear? Some textured chenilles. We also do some Ultrasuede sofas. If you use the right color, it can look like real suede. And it holds up quite well.
What is the most important element in a room? It’s energy. Rooms feel good by the mixture and the combination of so many different elements.
