On happenstance

Of all the recent movies I have been to see, The Favourite is by far and away my favourite. Aside from the fabulousness of Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, who should all have been in receipt of Oscars in my view, it was the decision to dress the three protagonists in a monochrome palette that had me hooked. It took me a good fifteen minutes into the movie to realise that… oh… they are dressed in black or white, or black and white. Against the backdrop of their ornate surroundings and even more ornate costume, this restrained palette had a wonderful effect both of highlighting and containing the three women, the more so once Emma Stone’s character rose up in the world and shed her drab denim. I am inordinately fond of black, not to wear, indeed no, but in furnishings and wall coverings, this despite its allure for every white hair the Cat possesses. How fortunate to find myself in excellent company. Coco Chanel pronounced that, “…black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony.” Dredged from the recesses of my mind is the thought that Chanel also pronounced that a room should always have something black in it but I cannot find any reference to this anywhere. Still, it sounds like an assertion she might have made and so I shall persist in thinking it was she. My Mother too. She allows only blacks and whites and the occasional red past the front door. Her house is very lovely but it really isn’t me. When I moved out and got my own place, I went mad for colour, all and every colour. Except black. Black came later, once I had got over the need to have every colour around me and on me at one and the same time. I am not alone. Matisse spent “…forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black.”

If indeed you have read my previous Musing on how I came to live where I do, you will know that the Flat and I did not get off to an auspicious start. We were not intended for each other but were thrown together of necessity. We both languished for some little time, until something had to be done. At the beginning, and because I was renting out the Flat before I moved here, I had painted it off- white. This did little to dispel the Stygian gloom of the windowless internal hallway and really didn’t have the virtue of making the place feel welcoming or indeed clean and fresh, something at the very least white is obliged to do, even if it is a bit off. Happenstance happened as it often does. I was standing in front of a Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam wondering at his use of light when I had my epiphany. It was all there… the black and white floor, the deep, rich colour, the drama and the domesticity. Sometime later on returning home, there was the Baroque fantasy of a Dorothy Draper floor or the cutting edge cool of an Andrée Putman bathroom. Resistance was futile. The budget small. Onto the walls of the entrance hallway went black and onto the floor and stairs, black and off-white, the off-white behaving itself impeccably in its new situation. I painted the door red inside and out. My Mother is very proud.

This is where the resemblance between our styles ends. I don’t have the discipline to pursue such a restricted colour palette and feel too enlivened by the interplay of colour to eschew it. While I admire monochrome interiors very much, I view them as nice places to visit rather than somewhere I would live. I am definitely more of a Dorothy than a Coco. There is something however in the interplay between black and white, in their rigorous and timeless harmony, that appeals. This is why many of my designs have a black or white, or a black and white, or a light and dark colour way. And why every room in my Flat has something black and something white in it, which has the virtue of highlighting objects and colours with their sharp clarity. Just like in the movies…