Interiors Interrupted

Look at a room and find the metaphor

In that grimly entertaining Woody Allen movie, Interiors, it takes us about a moment to get the metaphor: the chilly white walls, bereft of comforts, offer no security to the people in them. In the movie, everyone's room has been stripped of furniture and life and the domestic carpeting that mutes our passage through time.

This idea fascinates me: look at a room and find the metaphor. Sometimes, as in this room I snuck a photograph of here, the metaphor might be stopped in time. This is a mid-century room from yet another mid-century house on the market — and, oddly, another mid-century house sitting on lots of acreage on the top of a mountain, a solitary one-level, late 1940s house. The living room was, clearly, carefully arranged and at one point, probably very hospitable and warm looking, with its spring green silk sofas — set facing each other, and a slightly exotic little coffee table with a Chinese flair — modern, but not off-putting. This was a room designed for conversation — for "And what do you think of Eisenhower?" or "I just love what you've done with your hair," or "And how's your new job in the sales department at Acme Plastics?"

The walls, here smudged with decades of fireplace dust, were originally white, to brighten the room against the mountainside lack of light, and there are just a few objects to catch the eye, each one picking up an idea from another object. The lamp is blush pink and pale green (hello, sofas, hello dish on the coffee table). The clock is rich reddish wood (hello, console). The console has a burly profile but slender legs (hello, coffee table). Behind the sofa, what you can barely see is an alabaster Chinese statue of a dog, the same pale hint of color as is on the lamp base, and picking up the chinoiserie theme of the coffee table.

That's how they did things then. The couple who lived here, however, are gone. The house is for sale. They were in the middle of the last years of their life when they left, and they left the house as is. This is the third house I've seen with this feeling to it: as if there's a brand-new Pontiac in the garage, the trunk packed with new Samsonites. As if they were interrupted the morning of the first day of their vacation by some tidal wave of fate.

Retro and deco and all the "o" decorative phrases we all toss around are a little bereft of real meaning these days. But think of it this way: it's 2008. Long ago, in a culture not that far away, there were people who carefully arranged their living rooms around little thematic agreements. They left us evidence of this coffee-and-cake life. If only we remember to notice it as we're planning our own takeover of their ex-house.