People have the wrong ideas about what a house is.
I’ve spent a goodly portion of my life observing people and their houses. I think that dwellings show more about people than any other publicly available information about them. Hell, no psychiatrist knows more about a person than their housepainter.
People have got it into their head that a house is an elaborate and fussy thing, antiseptic; it’s like a gigantic automobile, and that it should look brand new at all times, forevermore. I do not share this view. I think that your house should get better –be better, more comfortable, more visually appealing –the longer you live in it. It should suit you, not the other way around. This is not achieved with plastic slipcovers and powerwashers.
I am living in what was, until recently, an abandoned home. It had big holes in the roof through which animals that could cast shadows passed in and out. All the plumbing and heating pipes had frozen and burst. It had suffered at least two fires before, the evidence of which was still visible. It was a wreck, and so, cheap. But it had not been neglected. I pray to someday own an old house that has been neglected. Neglect does not indicate a profound contempt for the value of the original house the way the mindless remodeling that went on here does. Wave after wave of owners had mostly wrecked everything in the house worth saving, and had added all the cancers that Home Depot has to offer in their place. They figured the stuff wasn’t brand new and shiny any more, so why keep after it? I have muttered under my breath: I can fix the hole in the roof; what did you people do with all the goddamn doors? I don’t need a ceiling fan in every room in a house within driving distance of the arctic circle, you lunatics; I need doors in the doorjambs.
Everyone searches for a free lunch. But there is no free lunch in a house. Only a direction. Or, more to the point, there are only two directions, better or worse. You are never at rest. Most everything I see touted for installation in a house touts as its prime characteristic that it never need maintenance. That’s the “tell.” If you ever see the term “never needs maintenance” again, substitute the word “disposable,” because that’s what it is. It never needs maintenance right up until you throw it away in an angry fit, 100 years before things that need maintenance are getting warmed up.
I work, really hard, making cottage furniture here in Maine, on one floor of my house. It’s fairly large. It’s partially below ground, and two storeys up at the same time. It was a really dreary hole when I first set up shop. I’ve noticed that the longer I work in there, the pleasanter the place becomes. I tinker with it some, but mostly it organically becomes more useful and pleasant because I begin to place things where they are handiest, so clutter is slowly cleared away, and with less clutter, the place is easier to clean up. I put back five windows that former owners had removed, so it’s brighter and warmer than it used to be, too. It’s an example of the phenomenon: the longer you bustle about a place, the more suited to you it should become. Many kitchens achieve this in American houses, but few other rooms really do. I’ve found many dozens of people, living in houses with 5,6,7000 square feet — even more than that — and still huddling in some little corner of it with the only possessions they truly like, trying to be comfortable, while the rest of the house is a furniture museum. They used to ask me what color they could paint the abandoned rooms that would tempt them to enter them.
The siding on my house is 111 years old. It requires painting. There will never be a house with 111-year-old vinyl siding on it. And the siding on mine will be structurally sound for another hundred years — or two. There are dozens of windows in my house that are 111 years old. They are made of wood, many still with the original wavy glass in the sashes. There will never be a house with 111-year-old double-glazed vacuum-sealed windows in them. My house has 111 year old birch strip flooring in it. There will never be a house with 111 year-old Pergo flooring in it.
I could belabor this point. But the only truly permanent installation in a house is ceramic tile in a color you can’t stand. If you like the color, it falls off the wall. Everything else is ephemeral, and will require maintenance once in a while, or replacement if it can’t be maintained. You might as well get used to the idea up front.
Women now visit the vivisectionist — er, I mean the doctor — and say they’ll pay big money to look like a 48-1/2 year old burn victim with a fat lip instead of the fifty year old woman they are. Others buy vinyl siding. But the impetus is the same. You recognize the direction you’re heading, and instead of cultivating the passage of time, you want to fight it. Deny its very existence. Good luck with that.
Most decorative painting is dreadful. Bad ideas, inexpertly done. I’d say amateurishly done, but of course the word “amateur” is derived from the Latin word for love. To do something for love is supposed to transcend the motive of filthy lucre. Everyone just loves making a mess to my eye. I stand by my assertion that there are few things in this world more dangerous than a gallon of metallic paint in the hands of a housewife. Only a professional could do worse, because they can do as bad a job faster.
“Real”artists try their hand at murals and so forth to keep themselves in absinthe and Gauloises between “real” commissions. They hate the customers and their houses and their lives and their own lives and paint really small things all over a really big area. It’s not portrait painting, only bigger, so they fail miserably and expensively. Even if it was portrait painting, most “real” artists are totally flummoxed by any request to paint anything that’s a recognizable representation of life. They were absent that one day at college when that one teacher mentioned it, derisively, before returning to women with their nose to the left of their three eyes.
But every once in a while, someone knows what they are doing, and finds someone that knows how to pay them, and you get extraordinary results. Graham Rust is like that. Of course it took him fifteen years or so to finish Ragley Hall, pictured in the video. I had no idea England has a union for wall artists. Don’t kill the job! is on their coat of arms, I imagine.
For the full effect, you have to understand that a toilet would be plopped down along the left-hand wall, as far in as it would fit. That’s a seven-foot-plus-high door, IIRC, and there’s three or four more feet of wall above it. It was a ridiculously proportioned room. The architect should have been maimed.
You can see the sandstone block walls effect. They had quite a lot of textural color variation when you got right up to them. The baseboard and doorframes are faux siena marble. I’d been doing work like that since the late seventies. I was fairly good, and quick, at that genre. It was a fairly common motif back in the day. Not sure if anyone’s doing it much now.
The effect is not that hard to achieve. The trouble with almost all of it, as executed, it the people doing it have no idea what a real rock looks like. They learn it from a style book, which has a little patch of it pictured, and then paint a mile of it somewhere. Veins that are supposed to look like lightning bolts look like vermicelli.
As I got better at stone techniques, I used fewer and fewer tools. After a while, I discovered you could use crumpled up newspaper, pressed into a glaze, to make the primary pattern. The owners of the houses generally don’t like to see you making six figures painting their houses using a newspaper that looked like a bum’s comforter, so you’d have to keep a box of expensive French badger hair brushes around for show. Back when I was single, I’d tickle their nannies with them to keep them limber. Keep the brushes limber, I mean.
I have almost no pictures of my work from back then. I tell my children that you used to have to buy a reel of plastic film covered with metallic goo and keep it hermetically sealed in an expensive camera, and when you were done with 24 pictures or so, you’d take them out and drive to a store and leave them with a clerk and then go back a week later after they were done drizzling them with strange chemicals and printing them on shiny pieces of paper. They were all completely white or completely black, generally, when you finally got a look at them.
I tell them, but they figure I’m pulling their leg.
Sorry about the scans; don’t have a good scanner available. At least you can clicky-pop it and look at it larger. It’s not that “bright” in real life. I think I referred to Decorating Magic by John Sutcliffefor the sandstone wall motif. The book’s out of print but you can get a used one for cheap. It’s not really a how-to book as much as an overview of possibilities. It’s 20 years old, but not much looks stupid in it. 20-month-old design magazines usually look insane. Good work doesn’t get painted over every couple years. Fads come and go. I told you to stay away from cocoa brown and powder blue, but did you listen?
I’ve had lots of interesting jobs in my life. I’ve had lots of very uninteresting jobs, too, but they always seemed to turn interesting somehow. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m unlikely to figure it out now.
I used to paint. I’ve painted lots of things. Plain things. Ornate things. Big things. Little things. Important things. A long, long time ago when I was a young man I was offered a job by a man I hardly knew for a project that was just beginning. He said he was painting the White House. There was something about the offer that told me that all the “interesting” was on the cover of the book, as it were, but all the pages were blank. It sounded exciting but turns out boring. I am not generally wise, but I turned it down, and had a glint of recognition a few years ago, when I read an obscure notice in some publication that the job was completed. “My mind is kind,” my older brother says often, meaning we often forget that which is unimportant, but I think 6 presidential terms had gone by in the interim. I’d had 4 or 5 careers in the interim.
There is a reaction, somewhat common at the Post Office, which is featured on the news from time to time, that inflicts people who seek a sinecure and then are faced with endless quotidian diet of the same damn thing. Be careful what you wish for.
Anyway, I used to paint on the walls. There’s a long and proud tradition of painting on the walls, and I was allowed to be included in that tradition, even if it had a little less Michaelangelo to it than maybe it should have.
Trompe l’Oeil. Fool the eye, it’s called. There’s a fellow named Graham Rust who’s published a few books about it recently, and is very good at it. If I had dedicated my entire life to it, or at least as much of my life as the average White House painting job lasts, I’d probably be about half as good at it as he. I dabbled. It was fun.
It’s hard to explain fool the eye. It’s like a joke; if the audience doesn’t laugh, it’s pointless to explain it. It’s not a mural exactly, it’s more like an illusion of depth or space or material. The lines between all these various kinds of painting on the wall are fuzzy. It falls in and out of favor, but goes all the way back to a cave in Spain. Any Steely Dan fan knows that. Out of favor or not, it’s not going away any time soon. Upon reflection, it’s not the only thing I have in common with stone age men.
The picture above is a powder room in a fairly elaborate sort of Gothic revival house. The owners of the house were the nicest people I’ve ever had as customers. Everyone who knows them would give them a kidney, but they don’t need any. They wanted interesting things to look at in their home, and I hope they’re still interested in it after all these years.
I jabber all the time. But like many who talk too much, I don’t reveal much, really. The words are for you; my thoughts are my own. But I’m going to explain why I did what I did in that room for the first time, ever, although it’s been over ten years since I did it.
People would rely on me for advice, guidance towards what was possible as much as what was desirable. And when I was smart, sometimes I’d offer advice that was pointed towards the ultimate benefit of the end user, without them really understanding it. That’s risky — if you fail, you can’t go back and explain why you did what you did.
There was this magnificent house. You’d walk in the front doors, which were massive mahogany items, and enter an big hexagonal foyer, with a marble parquet disc in the center of the floor copied from a portion of the floor at St. Mark’s in Venice. Two and a half stories up there was a mural of the sky. But the architect was trying too hard to impress, and forgot his real job. The very first thing you noticed in that house, the thing that caught your eye first and foremost — was a toilet in the powder room off this foyer.
Trailer park meets mansion. The powder room was very small, too, but the ceiling was high, as the first floor rooms had high ceilings. It was like an elevator shaft with a crapper in it. As the picture demonstrates, it’s hard to get far enough away from anything in that room to even get a picture of it.
I painted all that stuff on the walls and ceilings with the help of my brothers, and the owner of the house later told me that she couldn’t keep anyone out of that room. Her children were instructed to use one of the other numerous bathrooms in the house, but they’d sneak in there to look at the stuff on the walls, sometimes even when they didn’t need to use the toilet.
The owner was pleasant enough to tell me that the little powder room was the most memorable thing in the house to a visitor. I was pleasant enought to refrain from telling her that it was even more memorable, in a different way, before I started.
. It’s out of print, I think, but a used one will be fine. Yours will look plenty used plenty quick if you leave it open while you work anyway.
for the sandstone wall motif. The book’s out of print but you can get a used one for cheap. It’s not really a how-to book as much as an overview of possibilities. It’s 20 years old, but not much looks stupid in it. 20-month-old design magazines usually look insane. Good work doesn’t get painted over every couple years. Fads come and go. I told you to stay away from cocoa brown and powder blue, but did you listen?
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