To change, just rearrange By Carol Stocker, Globe Staff, 11/05/98 I was drawn like a moth to the torchier when Lauri Ward, a big-time New York decorator, agreed to illustrate our interview by redoing a room in my house. She was promoting her new book, ''Use What You Have Decorating,'' which is full of heartening before-and-after pictures of her clients' houses. The jacket blurb promise s: ''Transform your home in one hour with 10 simple design principles - using the space you have, the things you like, the budget you choose.'' I'm always trying to use what I have space-wise, budget-wise, and thing-wise, so this seemed intriguing. But as the appointment approached, I found myself viewing my comfortable little nest with a more critical eye. I realized it wasn't a question of re decorating because I'd never decorated in the first place. Each room is divided into areas where you can walk or sit and areas where you can't, because of the piles of clothes to be washed, stacks of newspapers to be read, bags of hangers to go back to the cleaners, and boxes of inherited memorabilia to be sorted. My home is less a design statement than a to-do list. Do other people live like this? If not, they must have more storage room, plus a dry basement. On the other hand, they probably don't still own a World Book Encyclopedia from the 1940s. I realized I didn't need a decorator. I needed a yard sale. And I began to feel that I had set Ward an impossible task. A simple principle But when she arrived, trimly tailored in an expensive navy blue, she seemed game. She'd done this before. No schmoozer, she was intent and mostly silent as she toured my home. I would later learn why. Use-What-You-Have Interiors is the name of the business Ward started 18 years ago in New York City, based on the idea that she - or you, if you read her book - can redecorate by rearranging and culling your current belongings without buying anything new. It sounds like an obvious idea. Still, she said, ''people were taken aback.'' It runs counter to the practice of many interior decorators who, Ward said, make much of their income as commissions on new stuff they buy for their clients. Ward pioneered the concept of ''one-day decorating.'' For an hourly or by-the-room fee she goes to clients' homes, helps them rearrange furniture, and tells them what else she thinks they should do. She also runs a decorator training program called the Interior Redecorators Network and will refer potential customers to local graduates. (Call 800-WE-USE-IT or visit her Web site at www.redecorate.com.) Marking the mistakes Ward's technique revolves around a kind of decorator's Ten Commandments she dubs ''the 10 most common decorating mistakes.'' Ward started in my kitchen where she confronted mistake No. 7: ignoring the room's focal point. The what? ''The focal point is the largest, most dramatic element in each room. In most kitchens, the refrigerator is the focal point,'' Ward informed me. On a gut level, that made sense. The refrigerator magnets had to go, Ward said. ''Nothing on the refrigerator. If you need to stick up pictures and notes, get yourself a nice bulletin board.'' Silly me. I thought the refrigerator was a bulletin board. Could I really part with my magnetic badger family from England and my little bear from Yellowstone? The living room broke rule No. 2. It lacked a comfortable conversation area. Ward defined this as ''a simple arrangement of furniture so that people can sit facing each other and can speak without raising their voices.'' (In many living rooms the chairs are too far apart, placed at what Ward called ''screaming distance.'') The basic ingredients for conversation, besides people and a topic, are a sofa and two upholstered chairs, all within reach of a piece of furniture serving as a coffee table (it can be an ottoman, for instance). Because no more than four people can fit in my living room, somewhere along the line I had just given up on having a conversation area. When my book club meets, we converse around the kitchen table. In order to make a space to exercise, I had emptied the living room of everything but a chair for my indoor cats and a gigantic sofa I'd bought two months earlier. But Ward pointed to the coral leather (it was a markdown!) and said, ''It should go. It clashes with the rug and it's too big for the room. Get a smaller one, and put it on the diagonal facing the fireplace. Get a leather ottoman in taupe.'' She pointed to the old wing chair that double s as a scratching post for the cats (my way of trying to lure them away from better furniture). ''Get that reupholstered (with its twin in the garage) in maroon and taupe stripes in the exact shades in the rug. It will look beautiful!'' I knew the cats would shred it in no time, but nodded glumly. Transforming business Ward selected an upstairs bedroom for actual transformation. She stripped off her elegant jacket to reveal a white T-shirt underneath. We were getting down to business. I didn't time it, but she and her assistant probably took 20 minutes to rearrange the room. And it did look a lot better when they finished. While they pulled the bed out from the wall and turned it on the diagonal, I busted the dust exposed underneath. Ward banished a rug, my reading light, and all the necessities of life such as melatonin and night cream that sat on the bedside table. Then she started building a still life out of objects from all over the house that she had spotted during that initial prowl. She quickly assembled the best things I owned: my maritime painting, my Wedg wood statue, my Chinese lacquer sewing box. She cannily pulled out the good stuff, things I halfway took for granted because they had sat for so long surrounded by not-so-good stuff. She discarded the gold rocking chair with custom cushions matching the wallpaper and replaced it with a somber brown-upholstered Lincoln rocker that went with nothing. It looked great. Brown is big Ward then added other touches of brown to the table top: the sewing box, an antique leather photo album, and a fistful of eagle feathers she had spotted in other rooms. Brown is a big decorator color this year. The bedroom morphed from quaint to stylish before my eyes. But was it livable? Also banished was the bedside book I was reading, a red paperback ''Gone With the Wind'' with Clark Gable clutching Vivian Leigh on the cover while Atlanta burned. Admittedly, it didn't go with the new decor. Ward replaced it with Carol Gilligan's ''Mapping the Moral Domain'' and Stephen Davis's ''Jajouka Rolling Stone,'' hardcovers with lots of brown. But they were books I had already read. This brought to mind a gentleman I had once interviewed who, among his many more notable endeavors, was making matching paper book covers for every volume he owned so they would not clash with his living-room decor. As Ward flew out of the front door to catch a plane to the next city on her book tour, she turned and reiterated her theme. ''You already have everything you need. You just have to learn how to use it.'' Yes, I had much to learn, including what I wanted in a home. Beauty or comfort? Brown books or red? Mulling this eternal conundrum of form vs. function, I headed back upstairs to close the door to the redecorated bedroom. The cats lived for unguarded opportunities to sharpen their claws on that Lincoln rocker. For them, it had always been a focal point. This story ran on page G01 of the Boston Globe on 11/05/98. |