Kitsch Doesn’t Have to Cramp Your Style

Is there a more content human on the planet than the appreciated eccentric?

It’s a tough station to attain. One can be eccentric and be considered an annoying loony, or one can be appreciated for being excruciatingly dull and colorless. But the person who can inspire admiration and respect for acting like a full-steam gonzo crackpot has got it made.

People like Robin Williams and Mick Jagger and Madonna know this. People would line up to shake their hands if they painted themselves purple and demanded a window-side table at Tavern on the Green. They are all stinking rich.

And Michael Jackson. He is mobbed by adoring throngs wherever he goes. He also sleeps in a plastic mummy case, owns everything that is left of the Elephant Man and has a chimpanzee for a best friend.

Yes, these folks have pulled it off. They have rejected convention, predictability and mainstream behavior and, as a result, have to hire steno pools to answer their fan mail and boxcars to haul their money around.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of us eat Wonder Bread, drive Chryslers and slink around in the undergrowth, hoping no one will notice us. And all the while we harbor a secret desire to go bungee jumping or run off to Vegas and play professional poker or skin into a Spandex jumpsuit and sing backup for Ray Charles.

Mary Jane Pool doesn’t look like the type of person who would readily understand this, but I believe she does. She is the former executive editor of Vogue and was, from 1970 to 1980, the editor-in-chief of House & Garden. She is a stately, well-spoken New Yorker who is pals with manners arbiter Letitia Baldridge. And she knows, absolutely, what gives a room great style--which was the title of a talk she gave Tuesday to a group of interior designers at Design Center South in Laguna Niguel.

She ran through a collection of 80 slides, which showed stylish rooms from Mt. Vernon to the Imperial Palace in Beijing. And it all would have left the average homeowner, who might still be making payments on the new couch, feeling about as stylish as lime green polyester if Pool hadn’t come up with one wonderful, all-embracing rule of interior design: if you like it, it’s stylish.

The cornerstone of this philosophy, said Pool, lies in looking at the home as “a kind of scrapbook of your life. It should reflect your own personality. It doesn’t matter what you have; there will always be a place for it.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should strew the den with spare parts from that Karmann Ghia you sold in 1974. The idea, said Pool, is to create distinctive style by becoming a kind of partner in the creative process: you provide the items that please your eye--furniture, trinkets, art, objects collected from travels--and allow a professional decorator to assemble them to their best advantage.

The key, she said, is organization rather than haphazard acquisition and display. To that end, she recommended the idea of collecting--deciding on a particular item, say rabbit figurines or old Vanity Fair prints--and organizing them for show.

“You get a wonderful lift from that sort of thing,” said Pool, “and it sort of channels your efforts. It’s much better than just going out and buying things.”

Clutter, said Pool, can be held in check with a bit of organization and homogeneity. It might be unsettling, for instance, if you’re a travel agent and you decide to pack a room with every souvenir you’ve acquired from every airport you’ve ever visited--an “I Love N.Y.” T-shirt here, an Oktoberfest stein there. You need a theme.

“It won’t be too much if it’s organized,” said Pool. “For instance, is there anything better than a small roomful of books?”

Though Pool ignored the obvious answer to that question (a large roomful of gold bullion), it was a setup for yet another designer’s revelation that should make the homeowner-on-a-budget happy: for some reason, she said, a small room with a lot of items in it, or a large room containing few items, seems to be pleasing to the eye and the psyche.

One’s friends can even be pressed into service as auxiliary decorators, albeit without their knowledge, said Pool. One decorator, she said, told her that arranging chairs in a large room was easy if you invited in several friends, let them sit in the chairs and eventually move them into conversations groups. Once the chairs were thus arranged, the designer said, they should simply be left as they were: perfectly arranged for comfort and good talk.

This was a heady concept as far as I was concerned. Still, I hadn’t brought up the acid test: my second bedroom, which I use as a home office. I swallowed hard and told her about how I decorated the place with the Bush-and-Gorby rubber doggy toys that squeaked, the plastic Shriner statue, the Santa device with the working jaw, the fake foam boulder, the picture of the 1990 Rose Queen in evening gown and big Ray-Bans, the “When the Going Gets Weird the Weird Turn Pro” bumper sticker.

She never blinked. “But it makes you happy, doesn’t it?” she said.

I had to admit that it did. And now I can hardly wait to hire a decorator to make some sense of it all.