Oh, Nicky, You’re So Fine, You Blow My Mind, Hey Nicky!

Nicky Haslam is an in-demand author, incisive lecturer, nascent nightclub singer, daring video artist and artful biographer and writer.

He has been an interior designer of note for four decades—and there is not a thing about chic English country style that he does not know. John Fowler, eat your heart out.

Now he has a lively, witty, and inspiring new book—and everyone who loves ultra-relaxed English country interiors (the kind that look as if dogs sleep on the sofas and chairs and floor, all day)…with great charm, comfort and happiness. 

Nicholas Haslam has been and continues to be a fixture—a handsome one—of the London social and decorating and antiques worlds since he left Eaton. Even today, at the handsome age of 73, he is in and out of the gossip pages, attending parties too divine to mention, writing books, dropping names, setting trends, and inspiring his clients and friends with his bons mots. 

Now he has published ‘Nicky Haslam’s Folly de Grandeur: Romance and Revival in an English Country House’, with superb photography by Simon Upton. Rizzoli published his book in the US.

It’s the best new book on authentic, relaxed and charming English country style. 

Nicky Haslam spends weekends in an exquisite Tudor hunting lodge. Its petite dimensions are decorated with deft and unerring style.

“The rooms you see in this book are a culmination of a lifetime’s passion for refinement and embellishment. And the house’s soul doesn’t seem to object to the hodgepodge,” notes Haslam.

The book covers five centuries of the house, living with its history, as well as the traditional garden, the furnishings, the comfort, versatility and ease of every corner.

Ever page and each image is a design lesson—from vignettes showing how to make sofas comfortable, to creating tableaux, classical elements, hallways, evening cocktails (his bar is inspiring), and entertaining with panache. 

It’s clear that Haslam is wildly in love with this 1720 house. He is seduced by its quirky Jacobean façade, pleached yews, espaliered apple trees, topiaries, chintzes, and the miniature scale of the interiors. 

Nicholas Haslam offers floor plans and diagrams, and splashes the pages with delcious images of the house through the seasons, and details of the conservatory, picnics, lunches, menus, and his prescriptions for orderly chaos.

There are ‘hand-held’ detailed images of his year’s of collecting, endearing flea market finds, treasures from boot sales, and lots of what he calls ‘soft furnishings’ meaning pillow designs, simple upholstery, curtains, chair backs, improvised lampshades and acres of slipcovers. 

Who is Nicky Haslam?

Nicky wrote ‘Redeeming Features’, a witty memoir, and now pens features for T magazine (New York Times) edited by the brilliant Deborah Needleman, as well as Vanity Fair, and UK House & Garden. He’s insightful, outspoken, highly erudite, and just a bit naughty. Refreshing! 

With Rizzoli’s publication of his new book, Nicky is out and about in Toronto and New York and London, signing with purple ink, greeting great long-time friends like Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, and earning plaudits and irony in all the London papers.

Readers will get more out of the book—which is in essence the most elegant ‘how to’ book—if they get to know him more. I’ve selected a kind of a Nicky Haslam Anthology for your entertainment and erudition. 

Here are two recent profiles on Nicky that I love. They have his same droll tone and knowing style.
This first one originally ran in the Daily Mail. It’s a very English insider’s view of Nicholas Haslam and ‘his crowd’:

“There can't be a gay icon of the last century that he failed to meet. He revived Mae West's career by running snaps of the old gal in Show Magazine, when he was art director.

He met Dietrich, photographed Zsa Zsa Gabor, watched Dorothy Parker get drunk, and saw Greta Garbo try - and fail - to dodge the train fare to Salisbury.

Joan Crawford took him as her date to the premiere of Cleopatra. And at lunch at a friend's house: 'I was astonished to find that the woman with wildly mascaraed eyes, rather loose teeth, and a flamboyant purple satin turban ... was Gloria Swanson.'

Nicky knew Mick Jagger when he was a builder; hired the sculptor and artist Anish Kapoor when he was an art student; had his hair cut by Vidal Sassoon himself; befriended the weird little illustrator who turned into Andy Warhol; happened to have as a downstairs neighbor a little-known comic called Woody Allen. (He complimented Allen on being a quiet neighbor. 'I only play Marcel Marceau records,' Allen said.)

When London was first Swinging in the Sixties, Haslam was there - hanging out with photographer David Bailey and model Jean Shrimpton.

When New York was in its Sixties pomp, Haslam was there, introducing 'the English look', art-directing Vogue under Diana Vreeland, discovering photographer Diane Arbus, yattering with Truman Capote.

When the canyons above LA were the place to be, Haslam was there, too.

--Sam Leith in the Daily Mail (UK) Nov 19 2009 when ‘Redeeming Features’ was published.

Nicky on Nicky 

From The Observer, London UK, by Stuart Husband, Nov 7 2003.

My personal style?
Either thrift shop, Topman, or Anderson & Sheppard. Most people dress appallingly, but if you go to Topman on a Friday lunchtime, the boys just look astonishing.

I don't smoke.
I gave up 10 years ago. But I love the smell. So I light up and just wave the smoke up my nose.

My hard and fast rule of decorating is:
Always listen to the room. It speaks to you.

I'll take hypnotism over therapy.
I adore being hypnotized – I went to Paul McKenna to stop smoking. With the best hypnotists, you don't even know you've been under. As far as therapy goes, I'm so dopey I don't think I'm complicated enough to make it worth the analyst's while. 

Some Recent Haslam Hits:

Now—in addition to singing (well, speaking lyrics in a dusty voice with orchestral accompaniment) in louche boites and nightclubs, Nicky Haslam is a very in-demand writer, profiler, and commentator. He writes with compassion and a little bite—and one of his best pieces was a recent essay on Lee Radziwill. It was the divine editor, Deborah Needleman who chose him to write this piece, and here is one of my favorite passages—Haslam at his best. 

LEE RADZIWILL PROFILE IN T MAGAZINE, NEW YORK TIMES (find the whole story in the www.nytimes.com archive.

Typical quote:
“The haunting voice and the almost ethereal figure are Lee Radziwill’s, and they have been a lifelong part of her enduring identity. But those characteristics are not nearly the whole picture. I am confronted by a subtly strong presence and personality, part wreathed in the glamour of the past, part intensely modern in outlook and awareness. Not for her any all-too-easy reminiscences of “those days.” She is, quite clearly, herself.”

--Nicholas Haslam, T magazine, New York Times in a superb cover story on Lee Radziwill, which includes an extraordinary video interview with Radziwill by Sofia Coppola. Must view! Must read!

And of course there is his recent best-selling biography, ‘Redeeming Features A Memoir’ (Knopf 2009).


CREDITS:
All images from FOLLY DE GRANDEUR (RIZZOLI) used with permission from Rizzoli. www.rizzoliusa.com

For more information on Nicholas Haslam and his blog and design firm, www.nh-design.co.uk 

Oh, Baby!

New Design Store I Love: Restoration Hardware Baby & Child 

Restoration Hardware debuts its new Baby & Child gallery in Corte Madera, Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from the new Resto gallery in San Francisco.

It’s chicer than chic, a childhood utopia of dreamy, aspirational gilded lanterns, plumped up duvets overflowing on antique-inspired beds and walls stocked with pristine white linens.

The Palladian-style gallery draws customers in through the arched interior doorways and galleries with shimmering Venetian-style mirrors, brilliant crystal scones, fantasy beds a la Polonaise, baby-sized and whacking-big chandeliers, graphic polyhedron lanterns, optical tests turned into wall graphics, and enough industrial-inspired desks and bunk beds to fuel teenage lust forever.

Love it. 

Resto opened the store a couple of weeks ago—and it is a profoundly bold statement.

A new RH design gallery is opening in Los Angeles in two weeks, followed by more Baby & Child galleries in Southern California. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Pink and blue, let alone any pastels, have been banished. This is not pretty-in-pink, My Little Pony or Hello Kitty land. Rather, it is a cohesive and cool taupe-walled dream of classic Libeco Belgian linens in white and cream. (Resto is said to be the largest retailer of fine Libeco linens in the U.S.).

The gallery, a down-sized version of the Palladian San Francisco RH gallery (originally Ed Hardy Antiques) is a rigorous plan of sisal-on-concrete floors, and a glitter of chandeliers and tranquil pale wood. Cribs are in white with all-white linens. Louis XV-style chairs are upholstered in pale natural linens. There’s no pattern, no gimmicky, no prints or frou-frou in sight. 

Gary Friedman

I can only imagine that Gary Friedman, head of Resto, called a meeting with his design crew and directed, ‘No pink, no childhood clichés, no bubblegum colors, no fear of spilled paints, just dream and make it elegant.”

Probably he was also thinking about what his twin girls might love—or at least his wish for what they should have. I can only imagine hordes of new mothers are going to follow. 

Interior designers are buzzing.

“It is so fabulous and thought-out,” said noted San Francisco interior designer Stephen Shubel, who attended the gala opening party. “It looks like a baby boutique you’d see in London or Paris. The concept is daring. They really pulled it off.” 

Some of the Baby & Child collections, shown in the store in complete vignettes, are mini-me versions of the adult-size furniture in the catalogs.

Restoration Hardware Baby & Child collections include the industrial loft bunk bed, Jameson and Flatiron desks, mini 1950s Copenhagen chair, Belgian linen bedding, grand mirrors, chandeliers and desks. 

And before anyone shouts ‘Axel Vervoordt’ let’s go over this 'Resto copied Axel' misperception once more. I corrected this canard in my earlier feature on the new San Francisco Restoration Hardware opening, (click here).

Axel Vervoordt is not a decorator. He told me so himself. He sniffs when he says it. “I am not a decorator. I don’t ‘decorate’. I’m an antique and art dealer.”

Nor did he invent, and nor does he own the natural Belgian linen/poured concrete floors/sisal rug/ linen-covered overscale sofa ‘look’.

Anyone who has been within miles of Antwerp or Brussels or Bruges would know that natural linen and bare floors and plaster walls are time-honored and ubiquitous there. It's practically a required national style. It’s a wonderful antidote to French gilded glitz and rococo Italian antiques.

Belgians like sober, unflashy and plain decor. Done! Resto pulls off plain hand-crafted plaster walls, lavish use of linen (it's the Belgian national fabric), and plain wood, with the bold scale and understated approach to interiors that is centuries old in Belgium. Page after page of interpretations are on display in Beta Plus design books (produced in Belgium) that decorators collect by the dozen.

Let’s get this: Restoration Hardware adopted a low-key, beiger-than-beige, natural linen aesthetic, but it is rather their antidote to elaborate gilded excess, not ripping of Axel.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject: a design editor reported to me from the latest High Point market that ‘everyone is ripping off Restoration Hardware now’. And so design goes. 

Design inspiration: Important to note that clearly much of this Baby & Child collection is created from re-imagined French and Danish and other European antiques.

Four-poster beds, curvy sofas and Louis XV-style are all familiar. Industrial-inspired chairs and desks and bunk beads are also part of the common contemporary vernacular. No-one owns that look, the tradition-inspired style, the pretty Frenchified curvy benches or the Flemish slipcovered sofas, all now following centuries of decorating history.

Industrial design, by nature, was mass-produced. Modern lighting, crystal chandeliers, and turned wood tables are in every High Street design shop. 

This is a great look applied to children’s rooms and newborns’ cribs.

Resto is totally upfront about copying or adapting vintage and antique pieces they find in Asia and Europe or around the US.

About that ‘copying’: Like most other designers who work in a traditional frame, they find and buy and pick and scavenge everywhere for inspiration. Flea markets, vintage stores, auctions, pickers’ lofts, dealers’ dens, design magazines, design books (mine, included), antique shops, are all sources for them and every other design firm.

That is how design moves forward.

Few, indeed, are true originals. Top fashion designers like Azzedine Alaia (hello, Mme. Gres), Marc Jacobs, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Givenchy (Balenciaga-inspired), have all looked to antique, vintage and historic styles for ideas.

Top California designers like Michael Taylor (wonderful and often derivative), and Frances Elkins (loved Roche), and John Dickinson (an admirer of Jean-Michel Frank), and Rose Tarlow and Barbara Barry and others have all found and appropriated and adapted and copied historic and existing designs. It’s no secret. So does Resto. 

I love the white linen, the downy beds, the generosity of the scale, and the glitter of glass-framed mirrors and little chandeliers. The hand-troweled plaster walls are divine. Taupe, yes. Poured concrete floors make a fantastic background for furniture and family life. 

A couple of quibbles on the new Baby & Child products and store.

That massive antique wood double propeller-turned-wall-hanging is terrifying and heavy-handed. Reconsider. Please take it down. Or mini-size it and use it for a desk display. Or not.

I see it hanging on the wall, seemingly by a mere rope, and imagine it plunging and slicing and dicing an innocent child. There is the industrial repurposed look (the great-looking desks, the witty bed on wheels fashioned after an industrial dolly) but there is also clever gone wild. 

The zinc pots with the overly aggressively fake clipped topiaries are not worthy of these chic interiors. Silly. Please banish them.

Wittier, would be carved wood topiaries either in bleached wood or painted wood, antiqued somewhat. The faux zinc looks a bit heavy-handed, too. 

Welcome the new Baby & Child. It is off and running. I can’t wait to see what develops next in the fast-growing world Restoration Hardware. 

Credits: 

All photography courtesy of Restoration Hardware.

Location: 

The Village at Corte Madera, 1700 Redwood Highway, off Hwy 101, Corte Madera, CA. It’s opposite the new Restoration Hardware design gallery.

The Baby & Child Gallery can be reached at 415.927.2659 and is open Monday through Friday 10am–8pm; Saturday 10am–7pm; Sunday 11am–6pm.

www.restorationhardware.com