Interior Inspirations, Part II: Magnaverde

Editor's note: Not that Magnaverde needs any introduction, but it's impossible to resist saying a few words about the man who introduced me to Rue Winterbotham Carpenter and the most drop-dead glam interiors I have ever laid eyes on at Chicago's Casino Club. A comment from Magnaverde is something every blogger looks forward to - and many readers as well as he currently ranks in my top 10 search terms of the year. (Keep guessing #1 for a free copy of RR)

When Emily asked me to contribute something to her anniversary week posts, I couldn’t tell her no. In fact, I said yes before I even had a clear idea of exactly what the topic was supposed to be—Inspiring Interiors or Influential Interiors, something like that--but hey, that’s never stopped me before.

Anyway, if it was “Influential Interiors”, I can think of a slew of them: a large, high, lustrous-walled yellow salon in overcast London; a tiny brown-lacquered jewelbox of a studio apartment high above Manhattan; a monochromatic parchment-covered room in France; a glittering black-&-white dining room in Lake Forest, all of which have influenced several generations of later designers—but why talk about rooms that many Fans of Emily could describe better, especially considering that, unlike me, many of those people have probably seen said rooms in person, and know, (or have known) some of those rooms’ creators? So I’ll leave that subject to those who know what they’re talking about.

And I can hardly talk about rooms that have inspired my own work, since there’s not much of that & what there is is pretty insignificant. A few weeks ago I went to a reception in the ultra-glamorous Chicago penthouse that David Adler did for the Charles Goodspeeds in 1927,

Bobsy Goodspeed at home in her David Adler designed penthouse

and the very first person to greet me when I walked in the door was Joe Nye. Now, I’ve always been a fan of David Adler, and after seeing Joe’s wonderful apartment in last summer’s House Beautiful, I instantly became a huge fan of his, too, but I can’t imagine either of them being particularly thrilled to know that they’ve ‘inspired’ me.

Joe Nye's high style in his small-scale apartment

Basically, they inspire me in the same way that, say, an opera singer inspires the person humming along with the aria in row seven. The impulse toward beauty is inborn & the instinct to copy is innate, but sometimes, seeing (or hearing) the mediocre results, you wish they weren’t. So I’m not going to try to invite comparisons with the work of others by saying that ‘So-&-so has inspired me’. It would only embarrass everyone.

So I’ll avoid the potential pitfalls of those two excellent topics and simply say that the interior that made the single biggest impact on me was one I never saw in person. It ceased to exist a decade before I was born, and by the time I first saw a black-&- white photo of it when I was twelve, its creator had been dead for more than twenty years. Back then, that was a lifetime.

These days, of course, we have the Internet, and blogs, which act on printed history the way the ocean currents act on the sea floor, constantly casting up flotsam from the cold, dark depths of the sea onto the densely populated beach. Sometimes, it’s nothing, sometimes, in among the sea-wrack, you spot a gem. Other times, you looking away for just a moment & turn back just as the undertow grabs the gem & sends it straight back to the bottom. Like Ferris Bueller says, if you don’t keep your eyes open, you could miss it.

So, why, even in the days of the Internet and Google searches, is the name of William Odom so little known? Sure, he’s in Wikipedia & in the footnotes in all the design history books (if you know to look him up in the first place - Editor's Note: Erica Brown's book on the storied firm McMillen is a good place to start)—but, basically, he’s the Millard Fillmore of Interior Design: just another name in a list of names. To most people--even to most designers--his name means absolutely nothing. For me, though, Odom opened up a view of a different world, one unlike anything I ever saw in Danville, Illinois, or in Clinton, where we lived next. My dad was the head of the Chamber of Commerce, so we knew people with money, but none of their houses, not even the mansions of the town’s millionaires, looked anything like this. Then again, this room, Odom’s music room, was already thirty years old when I first saw it. It had a double-page spread in my mother’s copy of the 1947 edition of House & Garden’s Complete Guide to Interior Decoration.

The book was a wedding shower gift—it says so right in the faded inscription—so it must have been in our bookshelves for my whole childhood, but for some reason I never noticed it before that day in 1963. Who knows why I happened to pull it off the shelf that first day? But I did, and ever since, I’ve cared about the way houses look, and even more, how they ought to look. I was certainly the only kid on the seventh grade softball team that went home after practice to learn about pickled wood & Monel metal & moss fringe, all of which had been long out of fashion by the time I first heard the terms. But how would I know that? That’s the beauty & innocence of childhood. So I had no crippling fear of my newly-budding tastes being ridiculed as already dated or my new interest in such things being branded weird. Not, of course, that I made a point of telling my classmates what I was up to, either. In Clinton, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was standard operating procedure. After all, I had classmates whose families still made moonshine in the woods.

Anyway, that’s how it all started: me & a book & William Odom’s music room. Back then I loved the room because it seemed absolutely modern & white, 'modern', of course, being a relative term when you grow up in a house full of inherited black walnut furniture. Today, what impresses me is how Odom created that feel of crisp modern glamor--this could be a set for Jean Harlow movie--without using a stick of Modern furniture or resorting to any of the cliches of the period. There's no Marion Dorn rug on the floor, no chromium torcheres, no plaster palms on the walls. Instead, Odom used what could have been, in other hands, a dog's-dinner hodgepodge of period pieces: Louis XVI & Regency chairs, a Chinese Chippendale table, Venetian mirrors above unmatched console tables on either side of the fireplace, all of it topped off with a pair of spectacular bronze-&-marble Empire lamps in glossy paper shades. Yet the final result of all that is brilliantly Modern. Of course, an acre of plate glass mirror, plain white upholstery & gleaming white Venetian blinds to pull it all together didn't hurt. But the most remarkable thing about this room--and that thing that you don't notice at first glance--is that there's absolutely no art on the walls. But then, mere paintings would have been superfluous, because the whole room is a work of art. No wonder I was smitten at once with this thing called interior decoration. William Odom was my hero.

Magnaverde's own apartment which appeared in O at Home

Of course, I know now that I’ll never, ever have a room as beautiful and serene as this, but I still haven’t given up hope of someday finding a pair of those Egyptian lamps. In the meantime, I have a pair of tall black-&-gold candlestick lamps of the same general size, with shades in the same shape holding down either end of a long sideboard in my apartment: they’re nothing special, but that’s ok, because they’re just place holders anyway, waiting until the real things show up. They're out there somewhere.

Around here, though, EEE’s the real thing. Congratulations on your first year, Emily. And thanks for inviting me to your party. I’m honored.

A day on the town with Magnaverde and Rue, Part II

As promised, the eerie conclusion of the Rue Wintherbotham Carpenter story from Bart Swindall. It has been a pleasure sharing this space - like our day in Chicago together this spring, I am sad to see it end.


From Bart:

I bought Regency Redux the first week it was out, and I loved everything about it: the big, handsome format, the excellent production, and seeing a lot of photos for the very first time. The only thing missing was a mention of Rue Winterbotham Carpenter.

So I wrote to Emily, told her about Rue, and told her that if she was ever planning on coming to Chicago, to let me know, because I would try to get us in to see the interior of the Casino. She wrote back right away, saying “I’ll be there on May 1 to give a lecture on my book at the Merchandise Mart!” So I called the only member whom I know well enough to ask the favor of getting inside, and voila!—ten weeks later, after a full background check, we were given permission to enter. I’ve been there many times, but always as an invited guest, never as a miserable, cringing supplicant. I felt as though we were going to call on the Great & Powerful OZ.

Fortunately for us, our elegant and gracious guide was patient & she showed us everything there was to see. When it came time for her to smash any hopes we had of taking a few photos of the stunning rooms, she did it in the mildest, most elegant way possible. We spent half an hour in what is—for me, anyway—another world.

Then, suddenly, we were cast back, blinded & disoriented, into the noise & dirt & chaos of a regular weekday morning in Chicago. Actually, we were in a really tony area of town, halfway between the Ritz-Carlton & The Drake Hotel, but compared to where we had been, well, there was no comparison.

Anyway, we walked back to the Merchandise Mart, stopping into Alessandra Branca’s on the way, where Emily autographed a few books, then we went up to the 8^th floor of the Mart, where Emily gave her lecture to a nice-sized crowd. Afterward, she asked me if I’d like to go walk the show floor with her, looking for a few special items to feature in a piece she was doing for the Magazine Antiques. Sure I would.

Pair of French Cornucopia, circa 1840 from Mark J. West

One of the things she had already picked out was a pair of pretty blue opaline glass Victorian cornucopia vases that ended, not in a typical scroll or ram’s head but in a pair of silver hands resting on marble bases. They were beautiful. -

And here's where things get weird. A few days later, I was at the library, paging through the volume of Vogue magazine for 1930, looking for the article that Rue Carpenter had written, when, there on the page in front of me, was a photo of the very same pair of vases, featured in an unsigned piece that, having become familiar with the quirks of Rue’s writing and the kind of things she liked, I’d swear she wrote herself.

Later, I was looking through some photocopies I had made earlier, showing an apartment in an Art Deco building on Chicago’s Gold coast, an apartment that, to anybody who knows Rue Winterbotham Carpenter’s style, could only have been decorated by her, even though her name isn’t mentioned anywhere in the article. Then again, it hardly needs to be, since the apartment is that of Mrs. John H. Winterbotham. And there (cue the dissonant music) on the dining room table, and again on the table by the bed, were VERY SAME vases that, out of tens of thousands of top-quality antiques at the show, Emily had selected.


I can connect a lot of dots, but that I can’t explain that. Unless...

Magnaverde unveils Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, Part I

I am over the moon to share this space with Bart Swindall, historian of Chicago's Auditorium Theater. (You may already be familiar with his always must-read comments under his nom de web, Magnaverde.)

On my trip to Chicago this spring, Bart took me for a private tour of the Casino Club, which ranks with Dawnridge and the Brighton Pavilion as the most sublime interiors I've ever experienced. The still intact and jaw-dropping decoration was done by Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, of whom I was embarrassed to admit I had never heard. Bart has graciously agreed to enlighten all of us here.

From Bart:

I’ve called Rue Winterbotham Carpenter “Chicago’s Greatest Unknown Decorator." Of course, she’s not really unknown. In certain circles, her dynamic personality is still very much alive, almost eighty years after she died. The Chicago we know today might be a different city without her influence, and yet, even in the city where she spent most of her life, few people have ever heard of her.

One reason that Carpenter is virtually unknown is that, unlike Elsie de Wolfe & many of her decorating contemporaries, she never wrote any books & only a few brief articles & she didn't advertise. Most of her jobs were for friends, or friends of friends. But what friends she had! She was the best friend of Sara Murphy--of the Murphys, the beautiful American couple who moved to France after WWI, virtually invented sun-bathing, put the French Riviera on the social map and transfixed Scott Fitzgerald with their beauty (at least until he hung them out to dry in one of his novels). Rue & her daughter Ginny goofed around in Venice with the Murphys & Cole Porter before Cole Porter became famous,

and other photos show them posing on the beach with the Murphys the year that Picasso was part of the gang. He sketched her, but didn’t paint her portrait, although many important artists of the period did, among them Sir John Lavery, who married another Chicago girl. A gigantic Rousseau jungle scene hung in Rue’s Chicago living room. With her husband, the composer John Alden Carpenter, Rue was also friends with some of the greatest musicians & poets of the early 20th Century. She knew Gertrude Stein & Igor Stravinsky.

Back at home in Chicago, she was the president of the Arts Club for more than a decade, in which position she almost singlehandedly brought Modern art to Chicago, inviting many of her artist pals to come to the city for a one-man show.

The Arts Club of Chicago today which has kept many of Carpenter's furnishings to this day

So how does a woman like that vanish into thin air? Especially a woman someone whose work was so memorable, and so distinctively her own? Well, unlike the seemingly ageless Elsie de Wolfe, Rue Carpenter died fairly young, just as her work was beginning to attract national attention. Also, unlike de Wolfe, Carpenter seems to have had little interest in self-promotion. Famous artists may have painted her, but images of most of those portraits are hard to track down. Certainly there is a dearth of the kind of perfectly posed photos of Rue wearing the latest fashions, the way there are with de Wolfe. Also, unlike Elsie, Rue wrote no books, and only a single article was ever published under her name, entitled “Problems in Decoration” which appeared in the August 2, 1930 of Vogue magazine. But even that one short article, it seems, reached sympathetic ears.

Almost 20 years later, long after Rue Carpenter’s death, her words were quoted in a lecture given at the Parson’s School of Design in New York, by none other than Billy Baldwin himself—who had never met her. She had powerful friends, even in death. Archibald MacLeish dedicated a poem to her.

Another reason for Carpenter’s relative obscurity is that few of her interiors survive, and of the few that do, not one is open to the public. Carpenter's truly public jobs–her friend & Tribune critic Fanny Butcher's bookstore in the old Pullman Building & her gorgeous 1910 reimagining of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Theatre–are long gone. Well, sort of. The Pullman building across from the Art Institute is really gone, torn down in the 195Os, but Rue's long-forgotten decorative scheme for the Auditorium was documented in 2000 (thanks to the careful work of historic paint analyst Robert A. Furhoff) as part of the Auditorium's ongoing restoration. Underneath the recent recreation of Louis Sullivan's original 1889 décor, Carpenter's striking scheme still exists, hidden below a century’s worth of later overpainting.

When the Auditorium opened in 1889, Sullivan’s ivory & gold décor was a revelation, but by 1910, when Chicago finally acquired its own resident opera company, the theatre was tired & dingy and the theatre management hired Rue Carpenter to revamp the place. And did she ever. The gorgeous palette she devised was perfect for the company’s inaugural performance of Aida, with its orientalist decor. Under Carpenter’s direction, Sullivan's plaster reliefs & panels were glazed in glowing crimson & Pompeian red, lapis blue & viridian green, all highlighted with gold, and all of which jewel-like hues colors were set off with a Pompeian red velvet curtains & seats. Not only that, she had the entire ceiling of the theatre—by then a dirty beige—covered with aluminum leaf, lacquered to look like gold. Parisians had already seen–and loved–such violent color contrasts in the sets & costumes for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes the year before, but such brilliance in color was brand new to Chicago. The novelist Arthur Meeker said “For a season or two, we had an opera house worthy of the troupe that sang in it.”

In the late 1920s, Carpenter decorated the Fortnightly, Chicago’s oldest women’s club, having previously done the public rooms at the Racquet Club, then an all-male preserve. And, as president of the peripatetic Arts Club, she designed the interiors for its several homes over the years. Today, the Arts club is housed in a crisp Modernist space designed by John Vinci, but Rue’s beloved 19^th century furniture is still in place, and it looks as elegant as ever against a frankly modern background. In Chicago, she also decorated the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, the dressing rooms of the Palace Theatre and she did at least one hotel in Wisconsin, not to mention numerous private homes.

All these received lavish praise. But it was at the Casino—then, as now, Chicago’s most exclusive & prestigious club—that she did her most original, most beautiful work, and thanks to its careful preservation by the club’s membership, her work there still exudes its original drop-dead glamour & freshness.

In the Casino’s semicircular, black walled, vestibule, dim indirect light glows from a cove below a gold-leaf ceiling. In the elegantly-railed stair-hall, murals of black & white trees by the Russian artist Nikolai Remisoff decorate the walls. In the curving, black-walled salon are simple white marble chimneypieces in Directoire style, and cozy groupings of Directoire meridiennes surround marble-topped tables, perfect for quiet gossip over tea.


The oval ballroom’s walls are covered in emerald green velvet, broken at intervals by panels of wheel-engraved antique mirror glass, The swooping red satin curtains are done in Empire style. At the ceiling the room is ringed by an Empire-style frieze of red & white feathers painted by Carpenter herself: in her free time—whenever that was--she was also an artist. Higher-up yet, double-headed swans ring the coved ceiling, which is supported by pairs of tall delicate colonettes.The nearby dining room has gleaming jade green & black walls & pillars, a shiny black floor and, black-glass tabletops. Against a mirrored wall, a faceted Art Deco glass fountain in the shape of an obelisk glows from within, and the whole room is lit with Empire style torcheres. In a pair of twin dining rooms nearby, the walls are covered with pleated ivory fabric that gives the impression of classic fluting. A high elliptical bar room is finished in ivory enamel, nickel-plate & mirror, with hidden lights & sconces that reflect in the shiny black floor. Everything, everywhere, is shiny, and so impossibly elegant that you expect to see William Powell saunter around the corner at any moment, holding a platinum cigarette case & looking for a light.

You could send him down to the lower level, to what used to be a smoking lounge, where there is a suite of high-style black-&-red Regency furniture, tables in the form of military drums of about 1810, and where star-shaped bolts attach floor-to-ceiling panels of reverse-painted glass to the walls—glass for ease of cleaning, you know—except that, these days, you can’t smoke in Chicago. And there’s more: card rooms & ante rooms & sitting rooms & bar rooms in a bewildering array of shapes & early-19th century styles, all perfectly executed & perfectly preserved and all of these rooms seem to open onto each other in so many possible ways—every room seems to have at least six sets of doors—that you begin to lose all sense of scale.

I’ve tried to draw a floor plan many times, and have failed every single time. It’s like a Chinese puzzle box, much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. And that’s not all. The place is invisible, or it seems to be. Only the right sort of people can see it. I can barely see it myself. I’ve had Chicago cabbies drop me off there & remarking “I know this neighborhood like the back of my hand, and ya know, I never noticed this place before.” The place is like that. It’s magic. Rue Carpenter was magic.

Photo by Edward Steichen for Vogue

And the magic wasn’t just at the Casino, or just in Chicago. In 1930, she redecorated Elizabeth Arden’s salon in New York in black & silver & emerald green, with, of course, a ton of Directoire & Empire furniture. But here’s the fascinating great part: the furniture may have all been antique but the glittering effect is very New York 1930.

In Regency Redux, Emily used a full page photo that Edward Steichen took for Vogue magazine, a shot of two women on a sleek satin sofa in front of a wall-size mirror mounted with a chunky crystal sconce. That wasn’t a photo-studio set, but part of Rue’s décor for the Arden salon, and the sofa itself is a dead ringer for those that are still in use at the Casino. Anyway, that’s the good part about a style as distinctive as Rue Carpenter’s: there’s no mistaking her touch.

Tune in tomorrow when…

Rue Touches Emily