Home 
Landscape Design Surround Yourself With What You Love
Landscape Design Surround Yourself With What You Love
Surround Yourself With What You LoveIm a painter who happens to like furniture a little too much. Ive been collecting a long time. I also have furniture from my parents, dear friends Ive lost, relationships that ended. I wish I werent the sentimental type, but it sort of grounds me. No matter where I live, as long as I can have this stuff around, Ill feel at home. This obsession for collecting started when I was a boy. I think everyone to a certain extent invents themselves or creates a fantasy in which to live. In my case it was Chatsworth and any number of other grea: old homes of England, where they live with beautiful antiques that are frayed and torn and very used. Im very much an Anglophile. I like the English way of decorating, the layering of everything. As big and as grand as these homes are, they still look lived - inand no; like museums. I wanted to give the impression that I came from old money. This is so far from the truth its laughable. I grew up in a tract house in Dearborn, Michigan. My father worked for a beer company —he would have been happy to furnish our house with beer crates. But I knew there was a better life out there somewhere. I got a firsthand look at how the other half lived when I got a job as an assistant to a decorator in Grosse Pointe. All those grand estates! I thought I was in England, i would sell paintings to rich housewives for a few hundred a whack. I learned about all the greats. John Fowler, Frances Elkins, Sister Parish, and, of course, Billy Baldwin are all inspirations, espe cially on arranging and mixing all this stuff. Billy Baldwin is my god —I always have two slipper chairs, sisal, and black lacquer. Also John Dickinson, who I actually met in San Francisco. I almost had an aneurysm. I really dont have any kind of decorating philosophy except to make everything I love fit wherever I am, without it lookinglike a storage unit. My apartment is a downsized version of the dream home that I had to let go of because of the economy. My partner, Philip, and I lived there for 12 years. The shutters started to fall off, we needed new gutters. Philip and I had so much money tied up in our house and furniture that we almost lost our minds. The electric bill was $1,500 a month —its Dallas. Our rent here isnt even that much. The house was 3,000 square feet, and we have less than half :hat now. Ive always said Id rather have a chic little apartment like Billy Baldwins than a big, empty house. But I still have the furniture fora 10,000 - square - foot house. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|