As every voyeur clutching a ticket and a dream knows, designer show houses are typically celebrations of the perfection that money can buy. More often than not in these open-to-the-public alliances of charity fund-raising and design-industry public relations, sumptuous taffetas shadow windows, kitchen cabinets flaunt labor-intensive hand-painted finishes, and there is always a room where the cost of one of the antiques would finance an Ivy League education.
So it came as a pleasant surprise recently when the Harlem United Show House opened its wood-and-glass front door to a soundtrack of furious hammer blows and furniture being dragged into position.
Fastidious show house devotees might have deemed the evening’s gala party a bit premature, but the 24 designers, their friends, clients and well-wishers gamely put a cheery spin on the chaos around them.
“We were a little crazy about the situation, but we decided to make it into a positive,” said Joan Gibbs, an interior designer whose entrance hall was an environmental album to African-American creativity, from photographs by James Van Der Zee to 19th-century furniture made by largely unrecognized black cabinetmakers who worked in Louisiana, Missouri and North Carolina.
“Most of the people who came had never seen a designer at work,” continued Gibbs, who admitted she would probably keep tinkering with her space for a few more weeks. “They had only ever seen the finished product in a magazine. But this was something different. It gave everyone an opportunity to ask questions about how the painting was being done, things like that. It was a wonderful experience.”
Women clad in sequins and sky-high stilettos gingerly clutched wobbling banisters as they climbed to the top of the four-story Edwardian town house at 459 W. 141 St., between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues. Dressed in black tie, their escorts brushed plaster dust from their shoulders as Alma Nugent shrugged at the electrical wires coiling around her feet and calmly explained what her second-floor landing would eventually look like.
Despite the loose ends and atmosphere of resigned improvisation, the Harlem United Show House, which runs through mid-July, is a revelation.
Of the two dozen participating interior and landscape designers, all but two are black. And not one of them bears a name that would be familiar to the readers of any of the leading American interior-design publications.
Spearheaded by Roderick Shade, a Manhattan designer, the Harlem United Show House bills itself as America’s first African-American show house. It is not the last, however: two others are scheduled to open this fall.
The Harlem show house, which benefits the Harlem United Community AIDS Center, is located in another black landmark. Built in 1906 for a white merchant, the four-story limestone and brick town house was once the home of Charles Blackwell, a black dancer, writer and stage manager whose credits included “Sunday in the Park With George” and “The Tap-Dance Kid.
“I wanted to draw on a tradition that we’re part of, too,” said Joan Gibbs, who anchored the entrance hall with antiques created by black craftsmen in the 1800s and then arranged to have them reproduced for retail customers.
Among the pieces are a humble ladder-back chair made by William Kunze, a Missouri slave; a luxurious 1850s mahogany day bed from the New Orleans workshop of Pierre-Charles Dutreuil Barjon, a Haitian immigrant, and a sober American Empire oak side chair by Thomas Day, a North Carolina cabinetmaker active in the 1870s. Prices for Gibb’s reproductions will range, she said, from $1,500 for a Day side chair to $7,000 for a Barjon day bed with oversize scroll feet.
