Three French kings named Louis started it all. While they ruled, their fancies dictated the conventions and trends of the day–right down to food, fashion and furnishings.
Rich and heavily ornamented trappings that embraced pomp and splendor were Louis XIV’s thing; ornate, extravagant and exotic pieces that were smaller in stature and sported curved or free-form lines prevailed under Louis XV; and simpler designs that used classical architectural forms and orders developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans were the rage after Louis XVI took the throne.
The kings, of course, didn’t endure forever, and after they died neither did the furniture styles they championed.
But then, years later, something happened that nobody had expected. The furnishings associated with each of their reigns began to make a comeback, and each time a bit differently.
They still do.
Today, there’s Louis XIV for fans of the no-holes-barred Baroque look, Louis XV for those who want rococo extravagance, and Louis XVI for those who favor something charmingly discreet and classic. Buyers can select antiques, line-for-line reproductions, slight variations, subtle derivatives and, if they’re feeling more daring, hip contemporary interpretations. At what other point in time could designer Philippe Starck take an elegant Louis XVI fauteuil, render it in transparent tinted plastic, rename it the Louis Ghost and have an international hit on his hands?
Some styles never have fallen from favor, others have been recycled often without achieving the same level of acceptance and permanence. Some utilitarian furnishings, such as the storage cabinets or chairs produced by tribal cultures in Africa, China and Japan and provincial craftsmen in Scandinavia and France, remain as fresh and desirable as ever, while similar pieces made to conform to specific styles such as Victorian, Colonial, Continental or Georgian, often seem dated and have a narrower appeal.
The same is true for architectural styles. The Georgian, Colonial and Federal styles keep getting recycled, Palladian windows and all, while Tudor, Queen Anne and Neoclassical homes seem to wane more than they wax.
Why are some styles perennially timely and others have a more fleeting popularity?
For starters, some designs are more practical. “The Shakers believed that you shouldn’t make something unless it could be useful,” says Clodagh, the New York designer whose work has been featured in national shelter magazines.
Aesthetics also come into play. “If useful, it should be made beautiful so it will last,” Clodagh says, citing examples from different eras such as a Beidermeier desk and a Barcelona chair. Entire rooms can also appear timeless. Clodagh’s publisher, Clarkson Potter, selected one she designed more than 20 years ago for the cover of her book “Total Design” (2001). “It summed up my vision. It represented beautiful stuff that would last–and it has,” she says.
Understanding what aesthetic components will stand the test of time is tricky, but certain elements provide clues.
According to Clodagh, a piece has to have “good clean lines that are hard to put a time on rather than be trendy,” she says. The wooden breakfronts many of our mothers longed for in the Forties and Fifties to show off their china and glassware sets were long on function. But, when compared to spare, sleek Oriental storage cabinets, they seem clunky and old-fashioned. The former worked at the time as part of a practical, matched set. Oriental designs also worked well, but they continue to appeal because they mix better with other designs and settings.
Besides a yen for this kind of continuity, most of us also yearn for things a bit more current, in part because we’ve been conditioned by the fashion industry, which suggests that newer is better, says Clodagh, who previously worked in that field. Yet Nada Andric, a Chicago architect, associate planner and director of interiors at SOM in Chicago, the architecture and interiors firm, notes, “If the very definition of fashion means that something is the taste of the moment, then enduring style is not fashionable.”
That seems to suggest that lasting style is not, well, stylish.
But the best furnishings have qualities that make them appealing when first introduced and keep them popular long after the novelty wears off. A restaurant like Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe in New York was considered fashionable when it opened more than a decade ago, and it still ranks among the country’s best because of its continuing quality of food, service and setting. In the same vein, a vintage black-and-white Valentino gown still flatters and dazzles years later because of its simple lines and straightforward color scheme, especially when worn by willowy Julia Roberts.
The design of a home is no different and involves both classic furnishings and classic spaces, says Chicago architect Carlos Martinez, director of interiors in the Chicago office of Gensler.
Martinez’s residences prove his point. His first apartment was a modernist space in a Mies van der Rohe building dramatically furnished with his extensive collection of modern and contemporary classics. In his new home, a vintage high-rise designed by Holabird & Roche in the Twenties, they retain their forceful presence.
“I have a very different way of living now, but in both cases I set up a strong tension in each apartment with my furniture and possessions, which remained the same. When you put things together that are individually enduring yet contradictory, they come together in a powerful way, and there is beauty in this force.”
Furnishings that stand the test of time “are well-proportioned, constructed, fulfill basic individual functions and often make strong historical references. But they also endure because people are happy with them,” says John Gabbert, the Minneapolis-based president of Room & Board, a group of furnishings stores he founded 23 years ago to fill a gap in the market with well-designed, value-oriented pieces.
“Our premise as a company when we started was to produce products that would endure and evolve based on what came before,” he says. “We’ve stated we’re not in the fashion business but the design business, and we’ve found that when you try to take something to the extreme, you lose the classic feelings and proportions.”
Los Angeles designer Nancy Corzine, who also designs furniture for her showrooms, agrees with Gabbert about the importance of understanding historic roots and borrowing the best elements. Looking at the furniture of the ancient Chinese dynasties or from the periods of the French kings named Louis, “You find the different flavors that emerge later in more contemporary designs. Any flavor that’s really good will continue and be used to spice up furniture in any era. We’ve seen this in the way the best parts of mid-century design are now revived,” she says.
In contrast, Chippendale designs, which, she says, “have been bastardized forward and backward because of their popularity, have not endured in all forms.”
Clearly, the good survives and the bad dies.
As for interior and exterior spaces, which some consider most critical to setting an enduring ambience, the essential components are the right size, scale and materials, says Roberta Feldman, an environmental psychologist and professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“I’ve taken students into many buildings and there are certain ones, irrespective of their style, that everyone likes. Most of these have dimensions that follow the ancient Greek concept of ideal proportions. The specific measurements may vary from culture to culture, she says, but “spaces that endure have a certain universal appeal because they somehow subliminally are acceptable to most of us.” The way these well-proportioned spaces are filled also affects the feeling of the whole.
So how can the average person avoid making his or her home hopelessly outdated in a few short years, particularly when furnishings and backgrounds are so costly? Designers, who try to create enduring settings rather than the latest fads, offer a variety of approaches.
“Things that date a room are swags and jabots–save them for hotels; most valances since they’re too horizontal; toiles, which have become overdone; laminates in kitchens; saturated deep wall colors, though they’re easy to change,” says Boston designer William Hulsman.
Clodagh thinks design longevity stems from building a highly simplistic, minimal look with the best basics. “Buy less, but make sure everything is beautiful and elegant and reflects your instincts or what you gravitate toward, without creating a stage set,” she says.
Gabbert believes the key is to mix styles and eras, as he has in his own home with 150-year-old antiques, some pieces from the mid-20th Century and some from, of course, Room & Board. The major purchases should be classic; the minor ones less expensive yet interesting and eclectic, he says.
Sometimes enduring style lies in the way that living space is used or the way its volume, light and color are manipulated; other times it’s through an accumulation of unconventional objects or cultural references that evoke other times and places, explains Andric. For instance, furnishings or architectural forms can be used to shape space and distribute light to make it suit our needs. Certain collections, be they artworks or objects, can become a defining factor that creates the focus in a space. Any of these devices can be used to anchor, organize and refine.
While investing in pieces that last is important, taking stock of your personal interests may be more so, says Dominique Browning, editor of House & Garden magazine and author of “Around the House and in the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement” (Scribner). “Pieces should speak to you in a timeless way so that they reflect your innermost self and make you smile, give you a lift emotionally and make you feel terrific,” she says.
Feldman thinks those choices often hark back to childhood experiences and what once nurtured. “We find that people try often to reproduce something from an environment that made them feel comfortable before. They tend to pick places that have something similar over and over. There’s a core that seems to stay,” she says.
If taking these ideas and applying them still seems tough, it can be. Browning offers an exercise to help. “One of the best ways to learn about great designs that will last is to look at great rooms. Maybe you can’t afford all the things we show (in the magazine), but you learn and train the eye to understand what’s timeless. You can dig out old magazines from 10 years ago and see what rooms and designs still speak to you and which seem dated. You begin to understand,” she says.
Once you’ve created a version that feels right, try to leave it intact. Change only certain things. Says Boston designer William Hulsman: “You can add freshness in wall colors, pillows and accessories, which are easiest and most affordable to change.” He has deepened the wall colors of an apartment he first decorated in the mid-1980s, originally from oyster white and now to mushroom to change its mood without altering a style that worked.
The bottom line is this: In decorating you don’t need to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel, but you should try to understand why the wheel–or window, door, corner chair, tallboy and so on–has endured and will continue to do so.
