Great Rooms

News flash: As I slide into my dotage, my interior design style is evolving.

I used to prefer the spare and the pale, and still do love it... in my living room, for example, featuring Aunt Anne's childhood writing desk and two prints I bought from my friend Jane Roesch at her exquisite antique shop, Merrivale Antiques, years ago...

More globally, here's British designer/aesthete David Mlinaric's exquisite London dining room, courtesy of the fabulous HabituallyChic.com blog... tranquility, defined.
BUT...

I also find myself drawn to that particularly British phenomenon, the Great Room/Library... there's more clutter here, to be sure, but there's something about all those books and paintings and comfortable sofas that just pulls me in and wants me to plant roots. I like warmer colors, too.
Something like this:

This is our dining room -- except when it isn't. Now, it's kind of an all-purpose reading, piano playing, hanging out room... for me, anyway (there's no television so there's not much appeal for the rest of the family). I love a dining room with walls of books... actually, I don't have a WALL of books, alas, but I found a respectable looking bookshelf at Target for $80 which does just fine. See a glimpse through the front hall, below:











Actually, that shelf is twinned with a smaller farmhouse bookshelf in the room. They're not exactly symmetrical, but I don't care, I love their quirky, mismatched quality. Annie's piano doesn't exactly make an elegant decorating statement either, but I love it because it's old (a Wurlitzer, which, it is rumored, once bedecked a dance hall) and she learned to play lovely music on it. The color, a kind of pumpkin, is an experiment for me. I just got tired of pale pink, and so far I like it, although the jury is still out...









On a far grander scale, but nonetheless still inspirational, here is Oscar and Annette de la Renta's Great Room, as designed by Ernesto Buch, in their Connecticut house...

You can look at more pictures of their house here.

John Richardson's library/great room in his country house can't be found online, alas, but I scanned some photos from an old magazine which might give an idea of how alluring that space is:

You can read about Richardson's quest for a similarly comfortable place to work in New York City in a Vanity Fair piece here. Richardson, author of an acclaimed series of biographies on Picasso, didn't have an easy time of it, but oh, to have such problems:

"... the English grainer and marbleizer Malcolm Robson came up from Virginia to glaze the walls with the colors that paint-mixing machines can never approximate. As I had hoped, everything glowed with light, and the spaces opened up into one another as attractively as they would in an 18th-century English country house. Unfortunately, the scale of the layout upstaged my battered bits and pieces of furniture. Nice little Regency tables looked forlorn; everything seemed to have shrunk..."

Then, of course, there's Nancy Lancaster's hugely legendary great room at Ditchley, a room that is a tad grand, perhaps, for my tastes, but oh, to have seen that room, just once (see photo, below).

David Cecil, in his wonderful biography of Lord Melbourne, captures this particular sensibility -- born in the 18th C. -- perfectly:

"The great Whig country houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are among the most conspicuous monuments of English history. Ornate and massive, with their pedimented porticoes, their spreading balustraded wings, they dominate the landscape around them with a magnificent self-assurance. Nor are their interiors less imposing. Their colonnaded entrance halls, whence the Adam staircase sweeps up beneath a fluted dome; their cream and gilt libraries piled with sumptuous editions of the classics; their orangeries peopled with casts from the antique; their saloons hung with yellow silk, and with ceiling a doorways painted in delicate arabesque by Angelica Kauffmann...

"Yet they are not palaces. There is something easy-going and unofficial about them. Between library and saloon one comes on little rooms, full of sporting prints and comfortable untidiness... even the great rooms themselves, with their roomy writing tables, their armchairs, their tables piled with albums and commonplace books, seem designed less for state occasions than for private life -- for leisure and lounging, for intimate talk and desultory reading. And the portraits that glow down from the walls exhibit a similar character. The gentlemen lean back in their hunting coats, the ladies stroll in their parks with spaniels snapping at the ribbons that dangle from the garden hats slung on their arms. In big and in detail these houses convey an effect of splendid naturalness...

So, you get the general idea. Great rooms are great!