Mark Hampton On Decorating by Mark Hampton

Author:Mark Hampton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

In Jan and Merrill Stenbeck’s 17th-century farmhouse near Stockholm one of the guest rooms contains white-painted Gustavian furniture, gauze-draped windows, and printed cotton bed covers. The floors are scrubbed pine and the wall planks are painted blue gray. The colors of the room, so typically Swedish, are those of air and water.

Inside this lovely Chinese-style building, beyond the ruffled pagoda roof with its bells dangling from the mouths of dragons, is a range of furniture styles that spans the European taste of the time. The decoration tells us volumes about people of fashion everywhere in the late eighteenth century. It also tells a lot about the Scandinavian genius for color and light.

The strange, forbidding climate of the Far North has had the positive effect of teaching the people who live there the value of these two visual qualities—qualities that in addition to pleasing the eye lift the spirit. For example, there are rooms in this fantasy retreat at Drottningholm that are painted vermilion red with black-and-gold lacquer panels and furniture with gilded frames and bright red covers. Other rooms are peacock blue with emerald green and gold decorations and black lacquer chairs, or forest green with hot pink panels outlined in gold leaf, or egg-yolk yellow with red-and-black japanned panels. Imagine all of this going on before the Royal Pavilion at Brighton even existed!

Some of the furniture at Drottningholm was made in Paris, the nerve center of the fashion world. Other pieces, however, have the unmistakable look of Swedish furniture. Painted chairs abound in a sort of Queen Anne style, but they have odd knees on the legs and strange feet, and they are always fanciful. The combination is provincial and sophisticated at the same time.

What this prodigious design statement was leading to was the Gustavian era that came with the last quarter of the century—the culmination of the light, airy, cottony rooms that a small coterie has loved ever since, and that all of us love now.

Gustavus III, the son of the builders of the Chinese Pavilion, was one of history’s meteoric creatures whose talent and glitter refuse to die, although these sparkling people often die young. Poor Gustavus was assassinated at forty-six, but his immortal legend was well established before then.

Gustavus was a great student, a brilliant writer (the Swedish theater was virtually created by him), and an altogether unforgettable fellow. As a very young man, he was tutored by the great statesmen of his day, one of whom was the son of Tessin, the extraordinary Swedish architect whose own father had also been a great architect. As a youthful emissary to France, Gustavus was the hit of Paris. He also adored French taste, although who in the world could have resisted it in the 1770s?

Gustavian furniture and decoration possessed a clean simplicity and spontaneity that is especially appealing to us. Rooms in light colors, mixtures of gilded, painted, and natural wood furniture covered in simple, cozy cotton materials convey an unpretentious atmosphere that comes as a relief to those of us who love period decoration but dread being stifled by too much richness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.