In Vivid Living Color

From Mousy to Marvelous!

Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. Next week, I’m back to art - two exhibitions about two women artists, Mary Cassatt and Tamara Lempicka, at the two Fine Arts Museums of S.F.

This week I want to share the design dilemma that has bedeviled Ginevra and me for the past several months. What color/s to paint the front of the house. Which I am sure is a decision that no-one with a house ever takes lightly. But it was a decision that we put off until, well, until we couldn’t any longer. Cracks on the stucco had to be repaired and the repair left an unsightly bandage across the entire width and length of the bay windows. You would think that after walking in and out of a house, the color of which you hate, for nearly 18 years, you would have a pretty good idea of what color you would have preferred the previous owner to have chosen before putting it up for sale. When we started talking about it, we realized that all we really knew was what color we didn’t want the house painted.

At first, we were going to go the traditional route and paint the house one color and the architectural details another color or two. To find which colors we like, we took long walks around the neighborhood looking at houses and trying to decide which color/s seemed right for us. None of them did. Then we had an epiphany. Maybe the exterior should reflect the owners every bit as much as the interior does.

Here’s what that means for this house. About twelve years ago, Ginevra started exploring a career in interior design. Our interiors became her laboratory. For a while, she was changing the decor as often as most people change, oh, I don’t know, their underwear. That’s mostly over but she makes (mostly) small tweaks all the time. Which is fine with me because it is fun and fresh and even if you buy expensive paint, which we do, (Farrow and Ball), and expensive wall paper, which we also do (Fornasetti), a ‘do over’ is always less expensive with paint and paper than with furniture.

For Ginevra, furniture is an accomplice to the playfulness of wall treatments. For example, the living room ceiling is green, the cornice that wraps around the entire space is orange and a fat blue stripe marks the place that … well who knows!

The living room / dining room is one open space. Along one wall of the living room is a bookshelves in which the books are organized according to the color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet; aka “ROYGBIV.” On most of the shelves, either nestled in with or overtaking the books entirely, are blown glass art pieces from all of Nicolas’ many and various style periods.

Around the three barrel windows, several hundred pages of a book cascade down to the floor. On either side of the fluttering pages, is just enough Fornasetti wallpaper (Procuratie e Scimmie) of vigilant monkeys and neoclassical architecture.

On the wall above the fireplace, Ginevra enlisted Nicolas to do graffiti. Bold black swirls on white paint aren’t confined to the wall but creep onto the mantle. For the pattern he design on a rug, Nicolas used as inspiration, a Givenchy sweatshirt we saw in a Barney’s catalogue. He followed his own muse when he decorated the Bergère (Louis XIV style arm chair) from Restoration Hardware. On a stool Ginevra found on One King’s Lane, Nicolas channeled his inner Keith Haring. (Figs 1 - 6)

Figure 1. ROYGBIV bookcase wall with Nicolas’ glass pieces, Castiglioni Parentesi lamp & Ginevra on Starck Gnome Stool

Figure 2. Detail of bookcase wall with Eileen Gray side table and Front rabbit lamp

Figure 3. Pages of “The Beautiful and the Damned” and Fornasetti wallpaper (Procuratie e Scimmie), ceiling pendant Ikea

Figure 4. Detail of Mantle with Fornasetti faces (right), Venetian mask (far left) & nude sketch by Ginevra, center

Figure 5. Ceiling and wall painted orange, green and a stripe of blue (which is echoed on the exterior). Charlotte Perriand chaise lounge, Nicolas decorated chair, stool and rug, Fornasetti pillows, Alvar Aalto vase

Figure 6. Nicolas designed stool, detail

The one wall in the dining room is a real find, Maison Margiela black and white trompe l’oeil wallpaper, a pair of rococo doors. I first saw it in a change room at Bon Marché. When I discovered that Merci sold rolls of it, I was over the moon. I called and asked them to save a roll for me. It was on sale! (Fig 7)

Figure 7. Dining Room. Eero Saarinen marble table, Zanotti leather chairs, Castiglioni Frisbi light and Maison Margiella wall paper trompe l’oeil doors

Among the many other visual delights that keep the interior of my house lively - in my bedroom, each of the 4 walls is a different color, only one of which is a single color - a deep blue. On one wall, Nicolas graffitied the word, ‘Rève.’ The second bedroom has a wall of Fornasetti wallpaper, 'Il Teatro.’ Fashionably dressed men and women, seated in a plush theatre, look directly at the spectacle in front of them - in this case, whoever is on the bed. You get the idea. (Figs 8-10)

Figure 8. My bedroom with the word Rève painted by Nicolas, decorative pillow fabric from Toile de Mayenne

Figure 9. Corner of second bedroom with Fornasetti wallpaper, 'Il Teatro,’ and Starck’s Ghost Chair

Figure 10. Bed with empty picture frames painted blue and white giving architectural detail to a room that had none

Ginevra’s interior designs for my house have been written up several times, most recently this past July. Here’s a link to that article.

After Ginevra was finished (more or less) with the house, we couldn’t ignore the fact that we had been neglecting the garden, which is as wide as the house and pretty long. We cleaned up years of indifference and planted ivy as ground cover. The supposedly invasive ivy never took and then, for some reason, Ginevra took to gardening. She brought to the garden the same joyful enthusiasm she brought to the interior. Of course there is not the same immediacy as with interior design. You have to be patient - some plants grow slowly, others not at all. Especially in a city where Mark Twain allegedly said he spent his coldest winter. But Ginevra has not been deterred. The garden is now an exuberant and lively place, although mostly in shades of green with various lavender species adding different shades of, well …. lavender. Ginevra has also become obsessed with roses from David Austen. I think she selects the roses as much for their names as for their colors and scents. Roses called Darcey Bussell, Vanessa Bell and Gertrude Jekyll grow in our garden - a who’s who of famous English women from a ballerina, to an artist to a gardener. (Figs 11 - 13)

Figure 11. View of garden from house

Figure 12. Garden detail

Figure 13. Garden view from above

With the garden looking better and better every day, we could no longer ignore the fact that every time we walked into the house from the garden, it was through a door on a rear facade that didn’t make us happy. The color was as boring as the front of the house. We decided to paint it. Since the rear of the house opens onto our private garden and not a public street, I considered it a casual decision. So, I let my designer do what she wanted. So, she channeled her inner Barragán. He’s the Mexican architect who painted his minimalist plaster clad houses in brilliant colors. (Figs 14, 15) Ginevra has always been a fan and his palette has always been her own. I can’t tell you how many things in the two houses in the Dordogne have been painted pink - from shutters and beams to bird cages and statues. (Fig 16) Ginevra found a paint company called Backdrop. It’s less luxurious (and less expensive) than Farrow & Ball but it’s a step above the standard brands. And, like Farrow & Ball, they name their colors well. Barragan-cito (hot pink) and Color of the Year (orange-yellow) are the two colors that now grace the garden side of the house. What a delight it is to sit at the far end of the garden and admire the house. (Fig 17)

Figure 14. The Antonio Gálvez house (Mexico City) designed by Mexican architect Luis Barrágan

Figure 15. Another Barrágan House

Figure 16. Petit Bout beams and doorways and …… Ginevra pink

Figure 17. The back facade of my house painted in Barragan-cito pink and Color of the Year orange

Now the time of reckoning had come for the front of the house. I thought that with a decision mandatory, we could finally do what we have been unable to do so far: find a color. But should we keep it simple? I remember seeing a movie about the Beatles a long time ago. One scene in particular has stuck in my mind. The four lads rush into a house on a row of identical row houses. When they get inside, the place is bursting with color and whimsy. And I thought that uptight and buttoned down on the outside, exuberant and full of life on the inside could/should be the way to go. (Figure 18)

Figure 18. House with band aid

While I was thinking about the boring exterior of my house on a block of equally boring houses, in a neighborhood full of mostly the same, I decided to learn more about my house. Turns out that it may be one of 17,000 (!) single family homes built by Henry Doelger and his brothers. Their heyday was from 1925 to 1945, when they built single family homes on either side of Golden Gate Park all the way to the Pacific Ocean. All Doelger houses have redwood framing and stucco exteriors; barrel-fronts and recessed garage entries; open stairwells and red tile roofing. The internet tells me that the houses were well built, I sure hope so. When I first moved out here, after living in the Haight-Ashbury, I was numbed by the sameness of all the houses. Then I started noticing all the little decorative details, like escutcheons, medallions, dentils, eggs and darts, etc. The Doelgers didn’t have to add those details, they aren’t structural, they aren’t useful, they are purely decorative. In a world of conformity, he offered his clients a glimmer of originality, the decorations change from house to house.

As I read further, I learned that my neighborhood got its name from the man who also built houses around here and who designed the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. He named my neighborhood after the one in which he grew up, in Melbourne, Australia! By the late 1920s, the Richmond District was largely built out and the neighborhood became one of San Francisco's "most urban suburban neighborhoods." The district remained largely unchanged until the 1960s, when Russians arrived and built Orthodox churches and so many Chinese people moved in, that it became a second Chinatown. Through the 1970s, the Richmond was one of the few neighborhoods in San Francisco to gain population. Apparently, many of the original single family homes were demolished to make way for apartment buildings. That’s pretty much over now, as gentrification has moved ever westward and the district's historic architecture has become interesting.

All of which didn’t really help me resolve the problem of what color to paint the house. It was not only an aesthetic dilemma, it was a philosophical one. Should the front exterior be staid and austere with the interior and garden (and rear facade) exuberant and joyful. We were looking through our photos of Burano (the island off Venice) when we made the decision that the exterior should reflect the spirit of the house and its occupants. (Figs 19-23) Our palette is - Pink (of course) Orange (what else) Teal Blue (because why not) with enough gray to make the other colors pop. We directed the painters to ignore the architectural details and go with color blocking, just like the living room. We showed them a photo we took last fall, of our favorite Gaudi chimneys. (Fig 24) We’re getting one of those, too! The painters began on Monday. After days of primer, they finally began painting the colors mid-week. (Fig 25) It’s been scary as well as fun to watch it all come together and come to life. Thank you for reading about my design journey, I was happy to share it with you! Gros bisous, Dr. B.

Figure 19. Ginevra in Burano wearing her Burano appropriate dress

Figure 20. Ginevra in Burano, continued

Figure 21. Me in Burano, too!

Figure 22. Ginevra choosing colors from her collection of cotton threads

Figure 23. Me and the not quite finished stairwell in San Francisco

Figure 24. Chimney detail of Palau Guelle, Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona

Figure 25. Mid week we realized that the painters have been using the wrong blue ….and the tree must come down!!!

Thanks to everybody who sent comments about my review of The Propagandist - the book I reviewed last week. I am always grateful!

Dear Beverly, I enjoyed your review of the Propagandist. What a great (and sad) story. The mystery of how France could collaborate as it did is a great and on-going mystery. Perhaps "survival" was the motive for most. But the book paints a different and very sad picture. John, Berkeley

Bonjour Beverly, An excellent post about The Propagandist, which Arnie and I read last month, since coming back to Paris. How timely to have your thoughts on it and also to benefit from your thorough research. Merci beaucoup! Melinda, San Francisco & Paris

(Y)our review of La propagandiste. The book sounded so fascinating that I ordered it for my Kindle. I already find it totally gripping. Thank you so much for recommending it. Bees Julia, Vallauris & Paris