Design Statement Is a Bit of Fowl Play

For those of us who own rubber chickens, vindication is always sweet. Too few people appreciate the rubber chicken as a decorator item and tend to look upon those of us who do as wayward. Why, they will wonder, would a person want a rubber chicken instead of an antique needlepoint ottoman?

My personal rubber chicken is hanging, by the neck, on the door handle of my home office, in my second bedroom. It is there for the same reason that the bendable, pose-able Pee-wee Herman action figure is on top of the bookshelf with his head in the mouth of the rubber shark. It is there for the same reason that the inch-high chorus line of plastic hula dancers is on my computer printer, the plastic Mardi Gras necklace is hanging from the spine of my copy of Masters & Johnson’s “Sex and Human Loving” and the gray rubber replica of a human brain is resting next to my world globe along with my matched set of “Klutz” brand learn-to-juggle beanbags.

The reason I keep all this junk is twofold: It tends to cheer me up when I get depressed (which happens whenever I am doing work, which is what the office is for); and it tends to personalize my home (who else, I figured, would have a Pee-wee doll and a spare brain in the same house?).

Now Lou Gropp tells me that my taste in office furnishings places me on the sharpest cutting edge of the current trend in interior design while at the same time wildly violating it.

Gropp is the editor-in-chief of 95-year-old House Beautiful magazine which, under his direction, has just undergone a kind of design overhaul. Much is made of the fact that the magazine’s name on the cover is now entirely lowercase and, Gropp said, that is a direct reflection of the turn American interior design has taken at the end of the 20th Century.

The logo, he said, “is very symptomatic of what we find now, a kind of new attitude in home design. We feel the ‘80s got a little out of control. It was the idea that too much is never enough. In the ‘90s, people are simplifying and editing on the home front as they reorder their priorities.

“It’s definitely a move in the minimalist direction, where things are just cleaned up a little bit. Suddenly we’re seeing a lot of white, colors are getting more primary and brighter, and there are fewer accessories. And in architecture we’ve gone through the post-modernist period, where a home became a pastiche of elements here and there, to a cleaner and more classical modern mode. There’s more space, not necessarily in terms of more footage, but space where there’s not so much clutter.”

However, Gropp said, the new era of lowercase design is making ample allowance for individuality. In fact, he said, the personal touch rather than the slicker appearance of homogeneity has become the rule.

“There are lots of sources for interesting design and sometimes people can find things from within their own collections,” he said. “A lot of people have things--botanical prints, architectural drawings, blown glass they pick up at crafts fairs, odd articles at flea markets. Editing those things and putting them on display makes a decorative statement that is uniquely theirs.”

In the September issue of House Beautiful is a feature about a Long Island couple with a passion for fishing “who have these wonderful antique wooden fishing lures,” Gropp said. “It was something they collected and now they’re beginning to see its potential as a decorative accessory in their living room.”

Decorator items in the brave new ‘90s need not come from artfully lighted magazine ads, Gropp said, (although it’s a cinch he’d sleep a bit better if a lot of them did), but can appear as fixer-upper items at the Salvation Army or Goodwill stores, at a garage sale or in a forgotten corner of the basement. The only criteria for this New Design is that the item be stylish, interesting and personal, and not clutter up the room.

“What really makes a room come alive,” Gropp said, “is when you inject a new steel chair or an interesting mirror or something almost funky like a painted piece. Then the room takes a step out of the ordinary. It’s like a rather straight suit with a great tie.”

If you don’t think this sounds scary--in fact, if you think it might be kind of fun to install a set of Burma Shave signs in the hall--you can consider yourself a bona fide child of the ‘90s, Gropp said.

“Today,” he said, “people really are somewhat more at home with themselves and they are willing to take a few risks. They don’t care quite as much what the neighbors think. They think: ‘What do we want our home to be like?’

“Everyone is kind of looking at their lives and saying: ‘What do I want out of my life?’ If it’s music, or photography, or time to work in the garden, or be a better cook, they’re trying to organize their lives around the things that enrich them.”

That made me think. Am I enriched by my rubber chicken? I ticked off a few imperatives. It is certainly a design risk, I definitely didn’t find it in some Corona del Mar boutique, it is, in some circles, considered funky and--no doubt about it--it makes a decorative statement that is uniquely mine.

So yes, by golly, it is enriching. Now all I have to do is get rid of all the non-trendy clutter in the room and turn it into a minimalist office (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and tell Gropp to fetch one of his photographers out here.

It may not make the cover, but at least I’ll have more room to juggle those beanbags.