Trust a mother to love her son. Trust a son who is a decorator to raise the red flag of rebellion in just the right shade.
“(My parents) went away at Thanksgiving,” recalled interior designer Tom Britt of his first foray into decorating as a boy in Kansas City, Mo. “I tore up the entire house.”
“I was about 15,” Britt said. “I moved walls, put pilasters in the dining room, Empire-period French painting in the living room. For my mother’s room, ticking. I did my father’s bedroom all red and covered his walls with these Napoleonic things.”
And when Britt’s parents got home? “My mother kind of loved it,” he said. “My father was enraged–he hated the red room.”
If decorators have a gift, it seems to be a gift for understanding early in life there is a way of externalizing your relationships with your mother and father. Redecorate them. Your trademark look? The independence of your own identity. Show them what you can do–in their home.
Growth spurts
Many decorators got their start in their parents’ house. Or came back to take care of unfinished business. More than parental license, more than a feeless first commission, it is an opportunity to sit down and exchange the pieces of childhood for adulthood, like furniture on a floor plan. Using the clients’ own things, you present them with a new point of view. By your introduction of new elements, they see you. Hopefully, you learn to work together.
“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I was talking to my therapist about this whole ordeal,” said Anthony Baratta of Diamond Baratta Designs in New York. He has twice redecorated his parents’ Nutley, N.J., home, the house in which he was raised.
“I have this recurring dream,” he explained. “I never get my parents’ living room right. I have redecorated it in this dream about a thousand times and I still don’t think I got it right, but in reality, it’s done, it’s been done, and they love it.”
Other decorators, such as Jeffrey Bilhuber, refuse family requests. “It’s called `asking for it,’ ” he said.
Evan Lobel, an investment analyst and trader, isn’t a professional decorator. He used his love of design, however, to furnish a relationship with his mother that would allow them to regard each other as equals, as well as mother and son. When Sheila Lobel, a medical secretary at North Shore Hospital in Glen Cove, N.Y., moved into a new apartment in Hollis, Queens, Lobel asked to decorate it.
“He’s got a beautiful apartment and every time I go there, I tell him how beautiful it is,” Sheila Lobel said of her son’s one-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue South in New York City.
“I went through her apartment and realized she was still using my bedroom set from elementary school,” he said. “She likes to hold onto things. Her old apartment was full of tchotchkes. I told her she had to start over, with fresh dust.”
A self-taught convert to the field of decoration, Lobel began collecting furniture for his own apartment three years ago. He knew little at the time about modern design.
“He connected to it,” said Paul Donzella, a New York dealer from whom Lobel bought his first piece, an Italian 1950s coffee table designed by Eco Parisi. The two men became friends. Donzella tutored Lobel.
“He borrowed books from me,” Donzella said, “and went to a lot of auctions and shows. He was happy to know the stuff had a story to go with it.”
Lobel taught himself the names of designers such as Edward Wormley and manufacturers such as Widdicomb. He developed a circuit of places to shop, where he made rounds each weekend.
Quickly, Lobel developed a design formula: 1950s Italian and American furniture with highly sculptural profiles, colorful abstract or Cubist-style paintings, overscale table lamps and Italian and American ceramics, glass and metalwork. He made big selections like a collector–T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and George Nelson are well represented. He deployed these pieces, however, like a decorator–chairs in pairs, tables between, matching night stands in the bedroom. He added accessories such as a brass coffee set by Tommi Parzinger, a 1950s decorator whose pieces balance on the fine line between serious design and decorative fun.
Willing guinea pig
Lobel was ready for a client and his mother agreed to volunteer.
“The fact that he’s my son comes into it,” she said. “But if he didn’t have good taste, there is no way he was going to do my apartment.”
In initial consultations, mother and son, client and decorator, went through magazines and catalogs, choosing styles and types of furniture that appealed to them both.
“Since I had never decorated another person’s apartment before, I think she was afraid my sensibilities were limited,” Lobel said. “I was very, very aware and careful to cater to her. It also helps (to have lived) with someone for 17 or 18 years.
“It was a big learning curve for my mom,” he said. “But when she understood how much I wanted to understand her, by understanding her style in the new apartment, she let go. She let me help her.”
“Nobody knows me better than Evan,” Sheila Lobel said. “Nobody else could have done this for me. When I walk in at night, my eye goes everywhere. The apartment is beautiful, because he was passionate about it. I see Evan’s passion now to do things his way.”
For Lobel, the lesson was as great. The furnishings–and fee–were a gift to his mother, and something she now understands about him.
