MAKING MERRY WITH BATH CUBES
the horrors of having your house photographed
A FEW weeks ago a photographer rang to ask if he might come and take pictures of outhouse. His request revealed that, with so many magazines now concentrating on houses and gardens, the barrel for finding enough to be photographed is beginning to be scraped. Our house, for instance, though rather an endearing Victorian fan- tasy with a tower and fine rooms, has not been touched since a major renovation when we bought it ten years ago. It is chipped, cracked, faded, thoroughly lived in: very agreeable, but hardly the stuff of Interiors, or even some lesser glossy pub- lication.
I explained to the photographer I was not one of those who had the slightest desire for their house to be in a magazine. On the only occasion I had previously succumbed (for a Serious Book on paint), eight years ago, it had been a horrific experience. The photographer and his 'stylist', apparently not satisfied with a single thing in our kitchen as it was, stripped it of all signs of life. Having removed everything from the large table they made a lone, central island of six eggs in its middle and (oh, the wit) placed six matching eggs on the floor in the fireplace. No wonder my reluctance ever to suffer such nonsense again.
But this photographer, friend of a friend, was sympathetic, and promised nothing like that would happen. He agreed that if you photograph someane's house, then it should be a .record of what the house is actually like, nbt What photo- graphers, editors and stylistg, with their superior taste, think it ought to be like.
With some misgivings.I bought chrysan- themums and tidied up. The photographer, a polite and charming fellow, appeared with what I imagined was his assistant. She was in fact a writer whom I shall call Penny. Versatile in her talents, she was also that dreaded contemporary being a 'stylist' (though this I only learned later). Penny was of the opinion that if you call someone by their Christian name im- mediately and often, it's the way to instant intimacy. Oblivious to the fact that this habit does not work on everyone, she called me Angela a great many times. 'I don't know if the emphasis will be on you or on the house, Angela,' she said. 'As a matter of fact I don't know anything about you, but I've asked your agent for a CV.'
I showed them the rooms I wished them to see and noticed a look of lively calcula- tion in Penny's eyes which I tried to ignore; after all, ,f had been promised nothing would be re-arranged. Later, I found them emerging from rooms I did not want them to see. How dare they thus intrude, I thought? But I said nothing.
Penny then gushed into tt). 'house with plastic buckets of flowers to augment our innumerable plants. They were not, I admit, city roses, but they were not the kind of flowers we'd ever have, either — vile-smelling stuff Penny (wrongly) called dill, and twigs of lacerating prickles. By now full of regret at my stupidity, I shut myself up in my study.
An hour later I ventured into the kitch- en. It was no longer our kitchen. Chairs moved, table stripped again of all its real life — ashtrays, butter dish, geraniums cast out. Instead, on its barren shore, stood a lone jug of Penny's hideous twigs. Why? I enquired, inwardly raging. 'Well, Angela,' she explained, 'a camera doesn't work like a human eye. It can't see round things, you know. So that's why we had to move a little . . If she had bothered to acquire my CV she would have known that I, too, had worked for magazines for 25 years and, as a one-time photographer, roughly under- stand how a camera works.
The photographer, sensitive chap, asked if they should stop now, and go. I should have said yes. But I felt a bit sorry for him. So on the promise that nothing else would be moved, I angrily left the house. They assgred me they would be gone when I got back. They were still there. 'Just packing up, Angela,' — hastily, before I could espy the economy of their assurances. The honk reeked of alien sickly flowers.
The photographs arrived: evidence of broken promises. Apart from altering things that are the essence of our house, Penny was as thoughtless as she was arty. In a spare bathroom she removed a shelf of bath essences, replacing them with empty Japanese pots (what for?) which she 'ba- lanced' with a daft little pile of bath cubes. But she did not bother to put a towel on the rail — some reflection on the hostess, that. In our bathroom she failed to straighten the armchair cover, but swop- ped a bold, upright plant for a dead and drooping one — off centre.
Off centre was her speciality. As for the drawing-room sofa, I happen to be one of those funny people averse to a fashionable line of cluttering cushions. Our sofa is comfortable, but bare. Penny decorated it with just two cushions, feet apart: not only did it look ludicrous — it gave the impress- ion of great meanness with cushions.
Naturally I forbade any word to be written by Penny, or the photographs to be used. Others suffering similar treatment (and there are many horror stories) have done the same. A friend in Oxford found her dining-room pictures hung in the nursery, and a bathroom radiator, 'moved a little', pouring water through the kitchen ceiling: no offers of payment for repairs. My guess is that the amount of candidates prepared to put up with such intrusion will diminish very fast, and 'stylists' will be 'forced back to the stuclio where they rightly belong. There they can make as merry as they like with little blocks of bath cubes and horrible flowers, leaving real houses undisturbed by their offensive improve- ments.
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