New Draperies for Bunny Mellon's Dining Room: Design Banditry in an Historic NYC Townhouse

125 East 70th Street, NYC, photo courtesy Sotheby's

Ah, yes!  When I think of what it would be like to live in New York City, this is just EXACTLY what I picture. 

So, the Upper East Side townhouse that once belonged to Paul and Bunny Mellon has just come onto the market for a mere $46 million dollars (never mind that the current owners reportedly paid only half of that when they bought the property in 2006, and have not made any changes or improvements).  Baltimore design blogger Meg Fielding featured this property here on Pigtown Design a few days ago, and it immediately caught my fancy.

It's not that I wish I could purchase and live in this townhouse (although I'd graciously accept it if it were gifted to me!); I'd just like to do a little redecorating for the new owners.  This iconic French-inspired townhouse is 90% perfect for a modern family, but I'd like to inject a little more color and energy -- especially considering the home's connection to art collector and benefactor Paul Mellon and his father, former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who gifted the American people with the National Gallery of Art in 1937 -- donating his priceless art collection as well as personally funding the construction of the museum to house it.

I'm really smitten with the cobalt blue glazed walls in the dining room, but the painted floors, pale peach drapery panels and washed-out upholstery fabrics look tired and dreary to my eye.  Perhaps the colors have faded over time, perhaps they were deliberately subdued so the Mellons' art collection could take center stage, but in any case, it's ready for an update now that it's about to welcome a new family.

Thinking about the original occupants of this historic property and inspired by the blue walls, I immediately thought of one of my favorite Scalamandré screen print fabrics, "Stravagante."



Scalamandré Stravagante, $399 per yard

Listerine heiress Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny, is an art lover as well with a fondness for Mark Rothko's vibrantly colorful abstract impressionistic paintings.  A horticulturalist as well, Bunny Mellon also redesigned the White House Rose Garden for her close friend Jackie Kennedy, so this vibrant floral pattern flanking windows that overlook Bunny's garden would be an especially fitting tribute to the home's original owners. 



The White House Rose Garden in 1988, designed by Bunny Mellon, photo courtesy The Reagan Library




My Virtual Do-Over: What a Change of Fabrics Can Do

If you click on the picture, you can see more of the room.  In addition to hanging Scalamandrés Stravagante fabric at the window, I've also virtually reupholstered the arm chair and small bench in a (discontinued) Lee Jofa linen/silk damask.

Lee Jofa Linen/Silk Arundel Damask, $290 per yard, discontinued Flame colorway

...Because there's nothing that makes a fabric more desirable than knowing it's discontinued with no available stock, n'est-ce pas?  With an unlimited budget, we could have this fabric recreated just for this project.

You know, good clients are to be treasured, but there's something wickedly gratifying about a fantasy design project like this one, unfettered by the constraints of budgetary concerns, clients' opinions, and other nuisances.  It's a bit like designing for a show house, except that designers have to beg, borrow, and foot much of the bill themselves for a show house, working under ridiculously stressful time constraints.  No, this was more like Design Banditry -- breaking into a stranger's home, redecorating without their permission (without having to pay for anything or deal with any paperwork or logistical nightmares), and then scampering away into the night.  Great concept for an HGTV series, if they could only overcome the legal hurdles...

Don't Bug Me; I'm On Sabbatical

So, have you noticed that I haven't posted about my interior design business lately?  I wrapped up the last of the client projects I was committed to in January, and was feeling incredibly burnt out and uninspired after several years of working long, crazy hours and trying to "do it all."  It got to the point that, when my office phone rang, I felt annoyed, yet I still felt obligated to meet with every prospective new client -- after all, that's why I was investing in marketing, right?  To get prospective new clients to call me!  However, I found that I wasn't able to get excited about these new clients' projects like I used to, and I found reasons to turn down each of the new clients, with mixed emotions.  First and foremost, I feel that each and every client deserves enthusiasm, creative energy, and fresh ideas from their designer, and I have no business taking on anyone's project if I'm feeling uninspired, unmotivated, or even resentful about it.  But at the same time, I felt guilty about actively advertising for new business, and then turning away (rejecting?) people when they sought out my services.  So I temporarily postponed my direct mailings to give myself a little breather.

Then in February, I was sifting through the hundreds of emails in my in-box in an attempt to figure out what I was supposed to send to school for each of my sons' Valentine's Day parties, and I realized that I had only been getting emails about a party for my third grader, Anders.  I sent Lars's fifth grade teacher an email to see if I'd inadvertenly been left off the email list, and was shocked when she replied that they don't do Valentine's Day parties any more after fourth grade.  This was a punched-in-the-stomach, wind-knocked-out-of-me moment.  There have been so many parties I didn't attend or field trips I didn't chaperone because "now isn't a good time for Mommy; I'm too busy with work right now."  Yes, elementary school parties are all the same: snacks, crafts, and a few photo ops, with more scowls of embarrassment each year, but I had no idea, when I chose work over Lars's fourth-grade Valentine's Day party, that it was my last chance.  I went back through all of the pictures on my computer, trying to figure out when was the last time I went to a Valentine's Day party for Lars, and realized that I had missed every one of them since 2008:

Valentine's Day 2008, Lars is Back Row, 2nd from the Right

The painted rock in this photo reads "1st graders Love Mrs. Steadman."  The last time I showed up for Lars's Valentine's Day party was in first grade.  I missed second, third, and fourth, and now there aren't any more.  My February photos for 2009, 2010, and 2011 are all of other people's draperies and sofas and kitchen cabinets instead of pictures of my kid and his buddies making Valentine's Day doily crafts with pink frosting smeared all over their faces.  Robert Brault has been credited with saying "Enjoy the little things in life.  One day, you may look back and realize they were the big things."  At the time, the tedious classroom Valentine's Day parties seemed like such little things compared to the "important" work piled up on my desk, but now that it's gone and I can't get it back, it feels like a really big deal.

Around this time, I began taking a hard look at our financial situation: what was coming in, and where it was all being spent.  I talked it over with my husband (over and over and over again) and decided that we could get by without my income if I curtailed some of my extravagant spending habits.  Last month, I finally took the plunge and disconnected my business line and took down my web site.  My favorite existing clients can still reach me on my cell phone if they need me (you special people know who you are!), but I'm pretty much on sabbatical this year.  Many businesses offer their employees the option of taking an unpaid sabbatical leave once every seven years.  I've been in business by myself for over a decade, working seven days a week with very few vacations, so I'm way past due for my sabbatical!

I never decided what I wanted to be when I grow up, you know.  It's not as though I deliberately planned a career in interior design -- I just sort of fell into it, to justify the purchase of an expensive sewing machine (a long story for another day).  It worked out well in the beginning when the kids were little, because at first it was something I was only doing part time, occasionally, while the boys were in preschool.  This was supposed to be something temporary, while I was home with small children, and I was going to figure out what I REALLY wanted to do professionally at some distant time in the far-off future.  I have learned a lot (mostly the hard way, through expensive mistakes) over the past decade about the principles of interior design, about marketing and running a business, and I have had the opportunity to meet and work with so many wonderful people in this industry whom I otherwise would not have known.  I have enjoyed the challenge, the creative outlet, and the satisfaction of seeing my designs come to fruition, and have been blessed to work with the best clients imaginable who appreciated and valued everything I did for them.  However, I never in a million years would have deliberately chosen to be an interior designer.  I studied voice performance, secondary education, and majored in history in college.  I'm going to be 39 next month.  I think it's time for me to figure out what I really want to be when I grow up, don't you?  Right now, I just want to be Lars's and Anders' mom and Bernie's wife, go to the grocery store without makeup on, read a couple of novels, and finish that quilt!

I don't know how long my sabbatical will last, or what my next move will be professionally.  Maybe I'll start something new in a year or two that builds on my prior design experience, or maybe I'll strike out in a completely different direction.  Meanwhile, I'm exercizing, practicing piano, and signing up for quilting classes.  I have time to help Anders with Suzuki violin practice in the afternoon, and I have time to make Lars's favorite egg salad sandwiches for his lunch box.  My kids are both doing much better in school since I pulled the plug on my business and am able to take a more active role in homework supervision and communicating with their teachers.  Most importantly, I'm not constantly stressed-out and sleep-deprived anymore from working all night long after the kids go to bed, so I'm much more patient and deliberate in my parenting.  As Bernie likes to point out, "If Momma ain't happy, ain't NOBODY happy!" 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have just enough time to make myself a latte before it's time to pick my boys up from play rehearsal. 

Extreme Makeover, Web Site Edition: A New Look for Custom Interiors by Rebecca

Screen Shot of my New and Improved Web Site at www.CustomInteriorsByRebecca.com


My darling husband, who will be the first to tell you that he is not, NOT, a web designer, lovingly slaved away with something called Frontpage or FTP something-or-other about 12 years ago to help me create my first web site, back when just having a web site at all was enough to set me apart from other designers.  The site didn't do everything I wanted it to do, it wasn't as polished as what I would have liked, but it has served me well as a presence on the web, a place where prospective clients can find out more about what I can do for them and see photographs of my work.  Set decorator Casey Hallenbeck, who hired me to collaborate on window treatments for the sets of the NASCAR film Talladega Nights, found me via the web site, after all -- actually, that's a funny story, because when he called me and said he was working on a movie that was filming in Charlotte I didn't believe him, but I digress...

So, what was wrong with my old web site?  Well, for starters, Bernie had set the iPower account up for me using his own email and passwords, and I had no access to go in and make any updates on my own.  Changes could only be made from his computer, because he had the Frontpage software and I did not.  Every time I wanted to change photos or copy on my business web site, I had to wait until my husband was home and had time to help, then do some serious nagging for a few days (because he'd rather do just about anything else -- it was amazing how he'd hop up and declare that it was time to change air filters, aerate the lawn or patch holes in the wall when I mentioned working on my web site).  Then, once he finally sat down to work on the web site with me, neither of us could remember what the username or password were so we had to contact iPower and reset the password...  Big, giant pain in the butt!  Then I'd describe to Bernie how I wanted the site to look and feel, and he'd get frustrated because he didn't know how to do that using the tools at his disposal, and he'd grit his teeth and mutter "this is NOT what I do for a living!" Can you understand why my web site sat on the Internet, neglected and unchanged, for over a year and a half at a clip?

The biggest problem with my business web site that I'd noticed since getting my iPad a year ago is that the lovely Edwardian Script font we used for my business name in the site header was only visible on computers that also had that font loaded locally.  So my web site looked pretty good on my own PC and on my husband's PC, but on my iPhone, my iPad, and on anyone's computer who did not have Edwardian Script, the header showed up in ghastly Times New Roman and looked hideously unprofessional.  I should have taken a screen shot of the old site to show you the before and after. The web site that looked pretty good when it was created in 2000 looked amateurish and cheap to me by the end of 2011.  A makeover was long overdue.

Custom Wedding Monogram by Jennifer Alison Designs

So anyway, at the end of last year I hired Jennifer Alison Designs to create a new logo for my business.  I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the logo to look like, incorporating a script monogram, freshening up the branding I'd been using for my business, but similar enough that my previous and current clients would recognize that it was me when they got something in the mail with the new logo on it.  I chose Jennifer Alison Designs because the concept I had in mind for my business was very similar to the custom wedding monograms that Jennifer specializes in.  Her prices were extremely reasonable, she was great to work with, and the only difficulty was choosing between several gorgeous designs she submitted.  I highly recommend her.  This is the new Custom Interiors by Rebecca logo, created by Jennifer Alison Designs:

Now that I had the new logo design, it was time to tackle the web site.  I got the iPower account information from Bernie and then I shooed him out of my office -- this time, I was going to do the web site completely on my own so I'd have complete control and be able to make content changes or add pages to the site whenever I wanted to.  I discovered some deceptively easy looking Weebly drag and drop templates on the iPower site -- I say "deceptively" easy because it was not readily apparent to me how little I could modify the templates, and I wasted several hours working on a design based on a template that didn't have the features I needed in the right places, an error I discovered after struggling for awhile and finally calling for tech support.  Most of the templates have too much going on for my purposes.  I wanted my web site to be a background framing the photography, not something artsy or distracting.  I didn't want color, because a background color that looks great with one portfolio shot might look terrible with another photograph.  It was also irritating that I couldn't add a photo header to a template that didn't have one already built in, or that I couldn't change the color schemes of templates.  The tech support guy told me I could do some of that if I upgraded my account, and of course I could have invested a lot more time into learning to create a web site from scratch instead of using templates at all, but I was determined to use the tools I was already paying for and to keep the site as easy as possible for me to maintain.  It took me an entire day, from breakfast to dinner time, to get the web site looking the way I wanted it to, but it's finally finished and it was definitely worth the time investment to not only have a web site that accurately reflects my design business today, but one that I can tweak and adjust whenever I need to, from any computer with internet access.  I'm pretty sure I could even make changes to my web site from my iPad, although I haven't tried that yet.

 

My favorite things about the new web site are:

• My logo, which looks snazzy on every computer -- thank you, Jennifer!
• My slide show on the home page, instead of a separate portfolio page like I had before
• My Contact page, which I was able to customize with additional fields to include the basic information I want from every prospective client
• My new BLOG PAGE!  When I started writing Cheeky Cognoscenti, I intended it to be a personal blog where I'd write about my family and sewing projects, but design-related posts kept creeping in just as frequently.  Going forward, I'll be blogging on interior design topics over at http://www.custominteriorsbyrebecca.com/blog.html.  I still need to figure out how to add sidebar goodies like a design blogroll, links to preferred vendor sites, etc., but at least the "meat and potatoes" part is done.

Whew!  Revamping my web site was one of my New Year's Resolutions for my business.  It felt good to cross it off my list before the end of January!  If you have a moment, please take a look at my new web site here and then come back here and leave me a comment to tell me what you think.  Compliments are always nice, but I especially want to hear from you if you find a (gasp!) typo, or if something looks wonky on your computer that I might not be aware of.  Thank you!