Friday, March 10, 2006

TOLERATING INTERIOR DESIGN DIVERSITY

For our mega-lived-in living room, we are getting new carpet, a new couch, a new Daddy chair and ottoman, and best of all, an elegant new chaise. In Victorian days, the one-armed lounger used to be called a “fainting couch.”

Yes, you guess right what it’s being called instead, by persons unnamed in our cornpone household. But we’re having none of that in my new living room. It will be a place so uncharacteristic of me: it will be clean, it will be sophisticated, and it will have TASTE. Nobody’ll believe I live here.

I’m afraid I’ve passed my undiscerning eye for fashion on to my poor little daughter, though. As I was musing over the fun of having remodeled every room in this rambling house in the last six years, except her 1980s-looking bathroom, it suddenly hit me: now that everything ELSE looked so nice, the NEXT project would have to be Maddy’s bathroom. New paint, new fixtures, new tile: the works!

I told her so. She leaped in the air, arms forming a cheerleader’s “V” for “Victory.”

“AND IT CAN BE PINK AND PURPLE!” she exulted. “WITH HAPPY FACES! AND STARS AND HEARTS!!!”

I think I’m in trouble. Oh, well: decorated in Early Hideous, we’ll all feel right at home.

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