Lifestyle

lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

Singled Out

April 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how two million women survived without men after the first world war

Before the First World War a single woman was expected to have one aim in life – to get married. But three-quarters of a million British soldiers were killed in that war, leaving not enough men to go round for a generation of what became known as ‘Surplus Women’. Virginia Nicholson is the author of the widely acclaimed Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. Her latest book Singled Out is a study which explores the extraordinary lives these ‘left-over’ women made for themselves. It tells how they challenged conventions, how they campaigned to better their lot, how they often coped with poverty, childlessness, and frustration. Above all, it shows how women proved that there is more to life than finding Mr Right.

It’s a work that skillfully combines real-life biographical studies, their reflection in imaginative fiction, plus a mercifully light dusting of historical and sociological statistics. Nicholson has selected her illustrative examples from as wide a social range as possible, but those which stand out are inevitably the middle and upper class women who have left a written record of their experiences.

The most memorable are Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and novelists Rosamund Lehmann, Phyllis Bentley, and Christina Stead. But she has gone to a great deal of trouble to represent a wide spectrum of life stories, digging out working and service class biographies, and interviewing rare survivors of the period and its difficulties.

There are lots of inspiring stories – such as the skill and determination which took Beatrice Gordon Holmes from humble beginnings, via office accounts, to control of a senior company on the Stock Exchange.

The imbalance between available men and women persisted into the 1920s, and at some points the situation was regarded as so desperate that women were encouraged to emigrate to find husbands. After all, the colonies had not lost such a large proportion of its young men in the war. Young ‘gels’ were encouraged to join the ‘fishing fleet’ and trawl for a suitable huband abroad.

Women were caught in all sorts of double binds regarding their life chances. They were expected to have but one goal in life – marriage. But when most of the men went off to be slaughtered in the ‘Great War’ women were simultaneously expected to replace them in their jobs as laborourers, drivers, and munition workers, yet were looked down on (often by their married sisters) for ‘going out to work’. Then when the war ended they were criticised for occupying jobs meant for men. If they went into the only career paths open to women – nursing and teaching – they were expected to leave if they got married.

The unequal pay levels were the product of an ironic kind of double-think by the powers that be. Men must be paid more in order to support their families, ran the argument, and a single woman has only herself to support, but at the same time women must be deterred from breaking free of motherhood and the home. High remuneration would encourage the bachelor girl to escape her destiny as breeder of the race, so the differentials must be maintained in the interests of demographic stability.

If a single woman followed all these restrictive practices forced on her by the tradition of social prejudice, she could also end up being an unpaid carer to aged parents. Nicholson documents several heart-breaking instances cases of young women whose aspirations are totally crushed by demanding and self-centred mothers. Their stories, culled in old age from interviews conducted in nursing homes, read like the plots of Anita Brookner novels.

In focussing so intently on questions of personal fulfillment, it’s impossible for Nicholson to escape the issue of sex in a spinster’s life – but she skates across it as rapidly as possible, pausing only to include mention that some women did actually admit to having ‘urges’.

Fortunately she does much better in covering the topic of lesbianism – which was euphemistically known in the inter-war years as ‘Uranism’ (a term coined by Edward Carpenter). Radclyffe Hall is the stand-out figure here, partly because of her flamboyant appearance and behaviour, and partly because of the scandalous Well of Loneliness trial. But Nicholson also adds many other examples of lifelong happiness found in women’s same-sex partnerships – by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Renault, and Angela du Maurier (Daphne’s elder sister).

She finishes with a clutch of biographical sketches illustrating the extraordinary achievements amongst this generation of women who fell out of the marriage market following the husband shortage caused by the carnage of the First World War. Some went on to be qualified engineers, university teachers, leaders of political movements, aviators, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo.

Miss Eve Balfour … discovered that eating compost-grown vegetables cured her rheumatism [and] began her experiments with organic cultivation. Her book The Living Soil (1943) was the influential text behind the formation of the Soil Association, which she co-founded in 1946. Not content with her role in this (literally) ground-breaking project, Lady Eve played saxophone in her own dance band, passed her pilot’s licence in 1931, crewed sailing ships and wrote successful detective novels. ‘I am just surprised to see that what I stood for all my life is no longer derided but more or less accepted’, she remarked at the age of ninety.

Nicholson argues very persuasively that these women paved the way for the radical feminists of the last few decades. But unlike their sisters of the contemporary world, their achievements were solidly founded on the fact that they never married. This is a splendid piece of documentary writing and social history which provides sympathetic insights into the difficulties and the triumphs experienced by young women as they dealt with the war and its tragic consequences.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.312, ISBN: 0141020628

More on lifestyle
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Talk to the Hand

October 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)

Lynne Truss must surely be one of the next participants lined up ready for the TV show Grumpy Old Women – in which celebrity ladies of a certain age ventilate their pet grievances. First she was grumpy about failures of punctuation in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and now in Talk to the Hand she is being grumpy about modern manners – or lack of them. Fortunately, her grumpiness is served up with generous helpings of witty exposition, well dramatised anecdote, and self-deprecating humour.

She rails against people who don’t say ‘Thank you’ when you hold open a door for them – but goes further by analysing the reasons for our social expectations and our reactions to them when thwarted. The same is true for people who let their children run amok in other people’s houses – and are affronted if you don’t share share their self-indulgent view of them.

Fortunately, her own expectations in righting these situations are self-limited:

This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble and fan it madly with a big hat.

She’s against being prescriptive or proscriptive, and has a basic position that can be summed up as “Remember you are with other people; show some consideration.” Her chief bêtes noirs are (fairly predictably) automated telephone call services, shop assistants who don’t pay attention, and most things to do with information technology (‘There’s a WEBSITE for people with INTERNET ADDICTION’ [!])

Strangely enough, she is quite tolerant of people using mobile phones in public places and saying asinine things such as “I’m on the train. We’re just leaving Euston/Manchester/Bristol”. But I was glad to see that she secretly wished physical pain (as I do) to kids who skateboard or cycle on the pavement.

She’s good at cataloguing the language of insolence and contempt in sloppy service expressions – as when the waiter plonks down your main course with “There you go” and when you say “Thank you” replies with “No problems”.

She’s at her weakest when she makes the case for respect, and takes the Armistice Day memorial service as an example which ought to tug at all of our emotional coat tails. But she has lost none of her skill for switching deftly into the persona of the person she’s writing about – conjuring up their vocabulary and tone of voice with her well-attuned ear for speech and language patterns.

Of course what constitutes good manners changes with time. Nobody but a complete oaf would spit in public these days – yet I can remember when “No spitting” was a standard injunction on all public transport, even after the war. The second world war, that is.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand, London: Profile Books, 2006, pp.240, ISBN: 1861979797

More on lifestyle
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Tricia Guild Pattern

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

interior design and furnishing with style and colour

Tricia Guild is an interior designer and the brand name behind a successful company which features a vivid array of fabrics and furnishings – all of which feature striking colours, bold pattern, and luxurious textures. To live with this style you have to be confident enough to choose wallpapers with huge floral designs, curtains which are multi-coloured and decorated with magnificent swags, and be prepared to upholster your three piece suites with fabrics which grab you by the lapels. You need to put turquoise silk next to hot red damask, and if you want to achieve some of the effects illustrated here your house needs to be spotlessly clean and full of marble.

Ornate gold mirrors, and fresh-cut flowers which offset the decor in every room would be a help too. She is inspired by fabrics, techniques, motifs and designs from all over the world and from every period of history – brocades and damasks from the Far East; the rich history of botanical illustration and flower painting; checks, plaids and stripes from northern Europe; vibrant ethnic prints from India and Central America; painterly designs from Chinese and European porcelain; the bold abstracts and geometric patterns of contemporary painters.

Not that it’s all entirely in-your-face colour and bold pattern. She also has some subtle and restrained examples of ticking used to create a cool, contemporary atmosphere. But those are the exception. Most of the book is filled with hot, passionate colours, and rich textures emphasised by extreme close-up photographs. There’s a whole chapter on the use of flowers in fabric patterns – tulips, poppies, roses, and chrysanthemums.

I feel a bit sorry for the people who supply the text for these books. They are competing for the reader’s attention against overwhelming odds. The visuals drown out everything. And yet Elspeth Thompson has some interesting things to say about the nature of pattern and she offers thoughtful analyses of the interiors illustrated in the examples shown.

Many of the pages are like Howard Hodgkin paintings. It’s difficult not to be seduced by the visual texture of it all. My recipe for these interior design style books is to look at the overall effect, then choose one element on each page which you could incorporate into your own home. It could be the colour scheme, the positioning of furniture, the lighting, or (in this case) the use of patterned fabrics to breathe life into a room.

The book itself is a bibliographic reflection of this torrid style. It’s printed on thick paper, with occasional translucent inserts, beautifully photographed and illustrated – and has a cover jacket that’s like flock wallpaper from an Indian restaurant.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Tricia Guild and Elspeth Thompson, Pattern, London: Quadrille, 2006, pp.208, ISBN: 1844003264

More on design
More on media
More on web design

Uncommon Arrangements

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a “a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.” But the truth is that many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called ‘experiments in living’, or less politely, ‘having your cake and halfpenny as well’. In Uncommon Arrangements Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty – particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose.

Her examples include H.G.Wells whose wife Jane tolerated his long string of mistresses, including Rebecca West, the one featured here. Katherine Mansfield gave as good as she got from her faithless husband John Middleton Murry. The feisty Elizabeth von Armin (Katherine Mansfield’s cousin) clung masochistically to Earl Russell, even whilst he treated her with disdain and physical violence. Vanessa Bell lived with her lover Duncan Grant, who was a homosexual. Una Troubridge performed a slavish role as wife and helpmeet to her lesbian ‘husband’ Radcliffe Hall, whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year affair with a young Russian Evguenia Souline.

The examples might reflect only the author’s tastes and enthusiasms, but in all of them the men come out worst as monsters of egoism, opportunism, double standards, and worse.

H.G. Wells treated his wife like a doormat, pleading that she could not meet his sexual needs, and all the time protesting that he loved her dearly. John Middleton Murry left his wife Katherine Mansfield on her own when she was suffering a terminal illness, and wrote endless letters saying how much he missed her. And Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) engaged not one mistress alongside his marriage, but two. The same was true of Philip Morrell, who announced to his wife Ottoline that both his mistresses were pregnant, in the hope she would help him out of an embarrassing scrape – which she did.

The one exception she explores is Vanessa Bell, who managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry co-existing as friends together under the same roof without any overt friction.

Katy Roiphe reveals the facts and recreates dramatic episodes of these people’s lives in a successful journalistic manner, but when it comes time to analyse contradictory behaviour she often retreats behind rhetorical questions. Why did X tolerate this? Why did Y never leave him/her?

Her evidence for these accounts comes from what they left behind in letters and diaries. This is a slightly risky procedure, because what they said needs to be placed in its context. The motivation for saying something needs to be taken into account, and contradictions with other evidence noted.

But there’s a more obvious and serious weakness in her approach: it’s that she fails to recognise the legal and economic basis of marriage, and (to quote Frederick Engels) its relationship to the family, private property, and the state. She is more interested in comparing these social pioneers with the plight of contemporary relationships. As she rightly observes

Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in.

Of course, as Victoria Glendenning has observed, “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes” – which is true, so long as the all-important conventions of inheritance are not disturbed. The niceties and social concerns of who couples with whom are something of a smokescreen; they are the superstructure of which concern for preserving inherited capital are the base. And as soon as we look at the economic foundations of these relationships, many of the mysteries evaporate immediately.

Jane Wells tolerated her husband’s flagrant infidelities because he was rich and kept her in economic security. Elizabeth von Armin kept the receipts for items she purchased for her own home, so as to be able to prove ownership in the event of a dispute with her husband Earl Russell – a dispute which did eventually take place in the courts of law.

Una Troubridge clung to her humiliating position as Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian ‘wife’ for nine years, and was rewarded by being made Solo Executrix to Hall’s will – whereupon she took economic revenge on her former rival.

In fact these cases of strange arrangements could have been made more acutely with other examples. She could have included Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, both of whose marriages tolerated sexual plurality (though Virginia’s tolerance was never tested) as well as the most extraordinary union between Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge, who lived together with the man they both loved, Lytton Strachey.

It might be that the solution found by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvill-West was easier to tolerate. They both had lovers of the same sex. Does this leave people less existentially threatened? (to sound for a moment like Katie Roiphe). But when Vita ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis, Nicolson and Dennis Trefusis chartered an airplane and flew across the Channel to bring them back.

This book raises a number of contentious issues which are still of interest today. Ho does one reconcile the desire for sexual freedom with the comforts and protection of pair-bonded monogamy? Can women ever have the same sort of freedoms as men unless they have economic independence?

It’s a readable and very stimulating narrative, but it lacks a serious theoretical underpinning – though she does in the end show that many of her chosen examples, no matter how radical they appeared to be on the surface, were at a structural level clinging to the Victorian conventions they thought they were rebelling against. After all, the Bloomsbury radicals were still summoned to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner by bells rung by servants at fixed times throughout the day.

But readers who don’t already know the shenanigans and the apparently ‘curious arrangements’ of this sub-group will be very entertained. This book doesn’t pretend to answer any of these questions, but it presents examples of pioneers who thought the struggle worth fighting for.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, London: Virago, 2008, pp. 343, ISBN 1844082725

More on lifestyle
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Vita and Harold

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer – indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s – but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold is a selection from their personal correspondence.

They wrote to each other voluminously (10,500 letters) throughout their long relationship – mainly because so much of it was spent apart. He worked in Persia whilst she stayed at home. Later, he had his rooms in Albany where he lived all week: she stayed in Sissinghurst writing and tending their gardens. The children were kept out of the way, and they met at weekends. In the meantime homosexual affairs flourished and they wrote to say how much they were missing each other.

The early letters are very playful and, it has to be said, full of the protestations of a deep friendship based on shared interests and understanding on which they later claimed the success of their marriage was built.

She is very understanding when he contracts a venereal infection from another male guest at a weekend party he attended with her as his new wife. He is more concerned but ultimately forgiving when she leaves him and their two children to ‘elope’ with Violet Keppel, who had just married Denys Trefusis.

She even writes to him from the south of France whilst he is attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – complaining that the exchange rate had dropped before she could convert her pounds sterling. He was negotiating the terms of the Armistice, whilst she was getting ready to gamble away her money in Monte Carlo.

It’s an interesting lesson in how letters must be put into a historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood. Vita writes a letter declaring undying love for her husband – but you would never guess it was written on the very day that she went off for the last time with Violet Trefusis.

Although Vita was the more successful author, his letters are more entertaining – at moments given to (unintentional?) humour:

[On horticulture] Shrubbery is a great problem if one is to avoid the suburban…[On his younger son] I said that about masturbation he must put it off as long as he possibly could – and that then he must only do it on Saturdays…[On education] I said that co-education was calculated to make boys homosexual for life, whereas Eton was only calculated to make them homosexual until 23 or 24.

Vita on the other hand is often more philosophically reflective, even if her observations are laced with a breathtaking notions of superiority:

The whole system of marriage is wrong. It ought, at least, to be optional and no stigma attached if you prefer a less claustrophobic form of contact. For it is claustrophobic. It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior; and I have a suspicion, my darling, that even our intelligence…wouldn’t have sufficed if our temperamental weaknesses didn’t happen to dovetail as well as they do…In fact our common determination for personal liberty: to have it ourselves, and to allow it to each other.

Serene detachment and au-dessus de la mêlée – yet this is the woman who travelled all the way to Paris to seduce Violet Trefusis whilst she was on her honeymoon, and forebad her to have any sexual relationship with her new husband Denys.

It’s amazing how many important political events Harold was connected with. He was the only person to be present at the settlement of both world wars. And he knew just about everyone who was anyone. In the course of his busy life he hobnobs with James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Charles de Gaulle.

No doubt there are today people with unconventional marriages, bisexual relations, connections in high places, and lots of money – but this one offers a glimpse of a world which has gone by. And I somehow doubt that people in future will be reading the emails and text messages which have replaced the written letter as a means of communication.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Nigel Nicolson (ed), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910-1962, London: Phoenix, 1993, pp.452, ISBN: 1857990617

More on Harold Nicolson
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on Vita Sackville-West
More on the novella
More on literary studies

Women, Marriage, and Art

July 15, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

Here’s a sample of recommended studies featuring women, marriage, and art. Women not as artists themselves so much as the wives, mistresses, and the muses who have inspired creation. Some have had the misfortune to partner with monsters of egoism, but others have been women brave enough to defy social norms and live successfully in an unconventional manner.

The Bride of the Wind [full review]
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that’s her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying “I only marry geniuses”. He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn’t even go to his funeral.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Mistress of Modernism [full review]
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress – though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side’ of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov [full review]
This is a fascinating biography of a woman who devoted the whole of her life to her husband’s literary production. Vera Slonim became Vladimir Nabokov’s secretary, his editor, proofreader, and literary agent, his driver, protector (she carried a revolver in her handbag) and sometimes she even delivered his lectures. She was just as imperious and aristocratic as he was, but gave herself up entirely to his ambitions. Nevertheless, after suspecting him of dalliance with a young American college girl, she took the precaution of attending all his classes to keep a watchful eye on him.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Among the Bohemians [full review]
The early part of the twentieth century was a period that gave rise to bohemianism in British life. People (and women in particular) kicked off the social restraints that were still hanging round as a shabby residue of the Victorian era. Most of the female figures Virginia Nicholson deals with in this study were artists and writers: Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, painters Dora Carrington (who lived with two men) Nina Hamnet and the illustrator Kathleen Hale (who was secretary and lover to Augustus John) and the society Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had affairs with both her gardener and Bertrand Russell amongst others. These women took up smoking, wore jumble sale clothes, drank to excess, tried drugs, and refused to do any housework. Very politically incorrect role models – but fascinating characters.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Parallel Lives [full review]
This has become a classic study of four Victorian marriages. John Ruskin was an authority on art and beauty, but he is famous for never having consummated his marriage. What’s not so well known is that when his wife divorced him on these grounds, he offered to prove his virility in the courtroom. John Stuart Mill also had a marriage blanche – but on the principle that men ought to compensate women for the social injustices they suffered. George Eliot on the other hand defied conventions by living with a married man, then when he died married a man twenty years younger than herself. She meanwhile wrote some of the classics of nineteenth century English literature.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Singled Out [full review]
By the time the first world war ended, more than three-quarters of a million young British servicemen had lost their lives. The single young women who had ‘kept the home fires burning’ and waited for them faced an alarming shortage of marriage prospects. And matrimony was the one escape from the shame of spinsterhood offered to women at that time. This searching original study by Virginia Nicolson (grand-daughter of the painter Vanessa Bell) tells the stories of women who were forced to invent careers for themselves. They became teachers, librarians, journalists, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo. Some sacrificed emotional ties to further their careers; others invented new forms of friendships and intimacy.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Uncommon Arrangements [full review]
In an age where one third of marriages end in divorce, it’s refreshing to look at alternative arrangements some people have explored. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry all frioends with each other. Ottoline Morell helped her husband cope when he revealed to her that both his lovers were pregnant at the same time. Una Troubridge remained loyal as lesbian ‘wife’ to Radcliffe Hall (of The Well of Loneliness fame) whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year long affair with a young Russian girl. Troubridge however took economic revenge when she was made executrix to her ‘husband’s will. Katie Roiphe’s study of radical alternatives to conventional marriage in artistic circles includes a fair amount of emotional suffering and masochism – but it’s certainly thought provoking to see what lengths people will go to in enjoying a little sexual self-indulgence.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

More on biography
More on literary studies
More on the arts

Working at Home

June 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

combining your office with your home – elegantly

Working at Home is the second book on the interior design of home office space I have recently consulted as research for a move to new office premises. Like the first, Working Spaces, it offers a powerfully stimulating set of examples, generated by people with imagination, flair, and in some cases, courage. If the selection of examples are typical of interior design today, the cities pushing this trend are New York, London, Berlin, Barcelona, and Tokyo.

And the fashion is for old industrial spaces preserved for their high ceilings, big room spaces, and vast windows. In each case they have been transformed by adding luxury furnishings, yet the original features have been preserved – so that there at first appears to be a tension between domestic and commercial purposes. The examples show interior design solutions for writers, artists, musicians, architects, graphic designers, a printers, business people, and a textile designer. And in most cases the usual clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged – to good effect.

It has to be said that most of the samples illustrated are examples of minimalist design – plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen downlighters, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather.

There are architectural plans reproduced in each case which illustrate how the overall space has been used and how the parts relate to the whole.

One of the recurring features I spotted here was floors covered in epoxy resin – which results in a hard, shiny surface which is practical and easily cleaned. Not everybody would wish to settle down for a cozy evening in such surroundings – but the results look great.

What conclusions can be drawn from the examples on display? In almost all cases there are few decorations in the rooms: no pictures or shelves or decorative brackets. The rooms, with their pale walls and clutter-free surfaces are left to speak for themselves.

You might imagine that people working in the creative industries would want to decorate every inch of their surroundings with objects which expressed their tastes and cultural values. But the opposite appears to be the case. And these might indeed be shining examples illustrating Mies van der Rohe’s mantra – Less is More.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Aurora Cuito, Working at Home, New York: Loftpublications, 2000, pp.175, ISBN 0823058700

More on architecture
More on technology
More on design

Working Spaces

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

interior design glamour for the home office

Lots of people work from home today. In the world of an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you’re a consultant dog on the Internet. But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional workspace. Many people start from a small study or working in a corner of the spare room, but if your business grows, I guarantee you’ll feel more professional with a proper office. Working Spaces is packed with examples of how it can be done.

This book is visual proof that you don’t need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples illustrated include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment. They also recognise that people working from confined spaces may need to put a single area to different uses at different times. A workaday meeting room might become a weekend lounge; or an office might need to be converted to accommodate guests from time to time.

What I admire about these Taschen publications is that although they have the outer glamour of coffee table luxury, they do in fact deal with real-life examples. There are plenty of cases here of one and two-roomed apartments which have been adapted to maximise space and preserve elegance, whilst at the same time functioning as proper offices with computers, storage for box files, and desks with telephones and wastebaskets.

The photography is superb throughout; the text is in English, French, and German; and every example is accompanied by architectural plans showing the floor layout. It’s also bursting with good space-saving ideas – foldaway beds; hinged partition screens; and lots of tables, chairs and bookshelves with wheels. Another common design feature if you’ve got the courage to try it is white floors. White everything in fact.

How can you make your own working space more pleasant, more aesthetically soothing? Well, ask yourself these questions. Do you really need ugly filing cabinets immediately to hand? Why not conceal them or put the contents somewhere else? Why not have bold decorative features in your workspace, to make it more individualised and humane? Large pictures and big pots of flowers will do the trick.

Most of the owners seem to be graphic and interior designers, and architects – which might be cheating somewhat. I know a number of professional writers who operate from spaces far less elegant (and that’s putting it mildly) . But this gives an idea of what is possible, and moreover attainable without a great deal of expense.

In fact I’ll summarise it all in one tip which is guaranteed to make your own working space more stylish and effective in one quick step: Get rid of all the clutter- now!

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Simone Schleifer, Working Spaces, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.384, ISBN: 3822841862

More on architecture
More on technology
More on design

Lifestyle

lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

how two million women survived without men after the first world war

The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)

interior design and furnishing with style and colour

married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

combining your office with your home – elegantly

interior design glamour for the home office

Get in touch