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Despite the best-laid plans, the least likely events can arise while decorating a home. We’ve asked top designers Darryl Carter, Barry Dixon, Thomas Pheasant, and Barbara Hawthorn, who all have eponymous firms, to share some of their biggest surprises.
Mi Casa Es Su Casa
Darryl Carter was having a stair runner installed at a client’s house when something unforeseeable happened. “This was perhaps the most laughable train wreck of all times,” Carter says. “One of my associates was at a client project awaiting the delivery and install of a stair carpet runner. There was a clear delay, so she called the office so that we could inquire with the vendor about his estimated time of arrival. Upon reaching that vendor, they were insistent that the install was in progress. My associate assured me that she was standing in front of the stairs in the foyer awaiting the install,” the designer says.
Wires got crossed because the road where the client lived had an East address as well as a West address.
“The associate was on East; the install was taking place on West. Evidently the housekeeper on West was very accommodating, much to the homeowner’s shock. A perfectly good sisal had replaced a perfectly handloomed Aubusson. This is only funny because we had no fault,” Carter says. “The vendor made all parties whole.”
Serendipity at Work
For the grand living room of a show house in Virginia, Barry Dixon had ordered 55 yards of Italian fabric, a woven silk and linen he planned to use for floor-to-ceiling draperies for the windows on three sides of the room. The fine fabric had an over-scaled arabesque pattern he particularly liked. But the company misread the order and sent him 5.5 yards by mistake. “When we told them they’d sent the wrong amount, they said it would take another four months to deliver, but we were only three months from installation,” Dixon says.
Faced with this dilemma, the designer improvised. He substituted a pale maize linen of a similar weight that was the same color as the background of the original pattern, which the company had in stock and could overnight to him. Then, because he really wanted some of that design, he had the arabesque designs cut from the 5.5 yards of fabric and beautifully appliquéd onto the leading edge of the bottom corner of the draperies. The effect was like going from off-the-rack to haute couture, he says.
In the end, Dixon liked the new design better than the original, it cost less, and he was able to meet his deadline. “Sometimes there’s serendipity to the way things fall in place,” he says.
Size Matters
Thomas Pheasant had an online experience he’ll never forget. “Years ago, there were only a few dealers you could find who had Internet postings of their products,” says Pheasant, who was searching for dining room chairs for a client. He found a photo of some handsome chairs online and ordered six of them at $400 each. “The chairs were in a row … and they were priced so reasonably,” Pheasant says. But when they arrived, he was shocked.
“They were children’s chairs!” Pheasant says. “They were beautifully made, but the seats were 12 inches off the ground. They were literally scaled-down versions of adult dining room chairs.” In retrospect, he realized no one was standing next to them in the photo to give a sense of scale and no dimensions were listed. “I think you learn more from your mistakes than your successes,” the designer says. “The Internet is fantastic for resourcing, but you have to really investigate, ask lots of questions.”
Phantom Faucet
About five years ago, Barbara Hawthorn was working on a house when she encountered a conundrum. “You know how we like to be on the ‘cutting edge’ of design and new technologies and how [these clients] just love clever new things,” Hawthorn says. “When we were designing their sitting room and wet bar, not only were we the first in the area to use the new ‘green’ product IceStone for the countertop, but we also decided to use one of the first generation of infrared motion-activated bar sink faucets designed for residential use. The installation went perfectly and all was well until – the faucet started to turn on and off by itself!” Hawthorn was perplexed. “Was it ghosts? Mice? How was it turning itself on?” she wondered.
She spoke to the manufacturer, had the installation inspected, and checked out the sensor. “Everything was perfect except that the faucet had a mind of its own.”
Then one day, she was there when it went on by itself. And she noticed a play of light and shadow coming through the window that was angled towards the faucet.
Aha! Hawthorn realized the dancing light was causing the faucet to go on and off. “Luckily, we were able to reinstall the faucet and rotate it away from the fluctuating light and shadows in the window.” Mystery solved.
Found Beauty
Dixon made a pleasant discovery on another house he was decorating, which hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. The former owners had lived there for 30 years and the house was cigarette-smoke stained and tired. Dixon was busy planning the updated interiors with the new owners before they could take possession of the house. The walls of the foyer, long hall, stairwell, and upper hall were all covered in a bold flocked velvet and Mylar wall covering. “We couldn’t wait to get that wallpaper down,” Dixon recalls. As the designer and his clients were deciding what to replace the old wall covering with, they were simultaneously trying to figure out what to use on the dining room walls. They found a wall covering they loved for the entry, but couldn’t decide what to put in the dining room. When the renovation began, the workmen were in the middle of ripping down the flocked wallpaper in the entry hall when Dixon stopped by.
“The most incredible designs were left on the walls; it was almost a ghost image, faded and crusty; almost like aged Fortuny [fabric],” Dixon says. He stopped the workmen, called his clients, and suggested that they keep this wonderful after-effect and simply paint the trim so it looked fresh and crisp. Then they could use the wallpaper they had planned for the entry hall in the dining room. “I loved the look, because it suggests the age, patina, and history of the house,” he says. Dixon’s clients thought so, too.
“That experience taught me that you should have your plans, but keep an open mind.
“Now, instead of doing perfect designs on my walls – anyone can do a perfect design – I try to do crusty, barely there, ghostly walls. There’s a wonderful quietness to them,” says the designer, who works with decorative artist Tom Warnock of Warnock Studios to try to create deconstructed finishes. “To this day, whenever I tear down wallpaper, I like to see what’s left. Sometimes it’s horrendous, but a couple of times I’ve pulled down stripes and found a similar effect… It’s aged, distressed, faded or worn in a good way. I love the echo of that pattern being on the wall.”
Dixon encourages others to be open to alternatives. “Sometimes we prepare our plans and don’t want to veer a degree, but sometimes the most beautiful environments are the gentle product of compromise,” he says. “Always stop and look and see where you are in the process and reevaluate. If you’ve got a better idea, share that with your clients, see if they’re open to it.”
Dixon says interior design is not just creating. “It’s transforming existing things magically. We’re alchemists,” he says. We agree – alchemists with a sense of grace, style, and humor.
