For some, decorating can be an emotional, all-encompassing experience aimed at creating a certain reality. It’s the rare individual who actually succeeds in saying something new. n Madeline Roth, a decorating devotee since girlhood, not only beat the odds in her own Geneva home, she managed to turn her decorating talents into a full-time pursuit. A 1995 visit to Paris prompted Roth, a general contractor by training, to open Pariscope in Geneva to sell the French furnishings and accessories that had captivated her. In addition, requests for her design services snowballed over the last eight years, prompting a move to a full-blown design atelier under the same name to focus on both pursuits-selling and designing-next month. n “Decorating has always been my first love, which is how I got involved in the home-building and design industry to begin with,” she says. That also explains Roth’s ardor for beautifying her own home, a 1921 two-story stucco that she bought in 1993. On the outside, it is the architectural equivalent of a charming mutt-part proper English Tudor manor, part earthy Arts and Crafts cottage. On the inside, it’s a fantastical hybrid of an entirely different sort.
Once you enter the front door, a floor painted with overblown heraldic emblems in black and white-a pattern Roth appropriated from a marble floor she spotted in a British hotel-gives way to an equally outsized, angled checkerboard that transforms the oak plank floors from prosaic to tastefully snappy.
A prissy Louis XVI style settee tinged with gold leaf and topped with a wall of fancy gilt-framed mirrors is rendered capricious by the mirrors’ bantam scale. It shares the foyer with a pair of 6-foot-tall topiaries in stately pots, whose tiers are shaped like pompoms that give them a surreal demeanor.
Every room in the house offers more of the same, serving up huge helpings of visual magic. It’s sorcery that is grounded in the romance and glamour of a bygone era but has its footing firmly in today.
A pair of svelte love seats swathed in faux leopard-skin velvet hold court over an overblown hatbox of an ottoman. They anchor the living room along with an aristocratic daybed with a Directoire demeanor, calling to mind the quirky exoticism of legendary 20th Century interior designer Rose Cumming. They’re surrounded by clusters of equally smart bergeres upholstered in cotton-candy pink chintz, and these tailored pieces, along with the kinky ottoman, reflect the bold glamour of Dorothy Draper, a design doyenne of the exact same era. (Cumming lived from 1887 to 1968 and Draper from 1889 to 1969.)
Details and decorative accessories in the room also channel both designers. Offbeat touches such as miniature bananas-complete with leaves-that Roth tacked on to a brown silk lampshade, and cameos affixed over her mantel with double-stick tape in an improvised pattern, are pure Cumming. Roth snagged these antique baubles at the Marche aux Puces in Paris. The bananas are milliner’s fruit, and the cameos were glued onto paper and were “most likely salesmen’s sample cards,” she says.
The bold checkerboard floors, which run throughout the entire first floor, lorid cabbage rose fabric on the daybed’s curvaceous arms, and the layout and scale of the pieces in the room, are all Draper; she was known for her boldly patterned fabrics and gracefully scaled rooms.
Despite the admiring nods she’s made to her decorating heroines and their styles, Roth has developed a vernacular that’s totally her own. For instance, opulent, gilt-encrusted dining furniture she picked up in France and Palm Beach is made more approachable with super-sized sky blue gingham fabric on the chairs and those checkerboard floors, while a witty striped pattern on the walls brakes the glossy perfection of a guest room filled with serious Deco furnishings. Those bold patterns were a device Draper employed time and again, but not in such quirky and varying contexts.
Roth’s sentiments about decorating include her dim view on the idea of perfection, a goal she considers overrated. While Americans tend to strive for perfection and like things to match, Roth points out that the opposite is true in Europe, where “nothing is flawless, things don’t necessarily match and homes rarely have an over-decorated look.”
Instead, the European modus operandi is to “inherit and acquire things, and work them into your home. The beauty is in the blemishes and flaws,” she maintains.
With fine cracks registered on many of the walls in her home, her penchant for picking up pieces wherever she goes and a healthy disdain for matched sets of anything, Roth ascribes to this approach and has made it work in her favor.
The kitchen is a mesmerizing space where the original metal cabinets from the ’20s are intact and lovingly painted in that cotton-candy pink. A gleaming stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator is countered with a Wedgewood range from the 1940s she bought in Los Angeles. “Anyone else would have gutted a perfectly good kitchen,” she points out.
Another ingredient Roth employs is the unexpected. “There has to be something surprising to make a room come alive,” she explains. By this measure Roth’s rooms are action-packed, but her true talent lies is an ability to keep these surprises from overwhelming a space or seeming kitschy.
She accomplishes this feat with restraint and a finely honed sense of equilibrium, which is easiest to observe in the living room. There the seating clusters form an irregular, yet balanced, constellation around the love seats, just as the asymmetric tableau of cameos manages to have perfect proportions on the wall.
Roth thinks of her style as a unique blend of “glamour, romance and whimsy.” It is certainly welcome in an age when mass production and homogeneity make individualism so hard to achieve.
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RESOURCES
MAKE A WISH: Pg. 29: Daybed, chandelier and pier mirror-Marche aux Puces, Paris; Blackamoor side table and vintage curtains upholstering daybed arms-personal collection; pillows-fabric, personal collection, fabricated by Pazazz, Batavia.
Pg. 30: Dining room: Dining set-The Elephant’s Foot, West Palm Beach, Fla; oil on canvas Venetian panels-Gary Sargent Antiques, Woodbury, Conn.; Venetian chandelier-New Metalcraft, Chicago; gilt mirror and gilt console-personal collection.
Pg. 31: Garden room: Table made by owner; wicker pieces and Eiffel tower lamp-personal collection; chairs-Crate & Barrel; chandelier-Marche aux Puces, Paris.
Pg. 32: Guest room: Painted walls-Matt Donohue, Batavia; mirrored chest, Jules Leleu chairs, Deco bed-Marche aux Puces, Paris; lamp-Old Chicago Antiques, Chicago; pastel on wood-personal collection.
Living room: Loveseats-Circa, Geneva, Ill., covered in Rose Cumming leopard spotted velvet-Hinson, Merchandise Mart, Chicago; pair of lamps-personal collection; ottoman-Antique and Artisan Center, Stamford, Conn.; bergere, footstool and cameos-Marche aux Puces, Paris
Pg. 33: Settee: All furnishings-personal collection.
Pg. 42: Living room detail: Bergres, lamp, side table-Marche aux Puces, Paris; vintage American oil on canvas-personal collection.
COVER: Foyer: Painting-Matt Donohue, Batavia; vintage Italian lantern-Ellen Ward Ltd., Stamford, Conn.
