Roundabout

Homes Ancient and Modern

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN AN ideal home can mean anything from a mud-hut to a houseboat; in the oontext in which it appears every year at Olympia, it means simply a detached house of moderate size. Nine of these are on show at Olympia now.

There is the Berg house, dominated by a pretentious chimney, but full of ease and soft neutrals, and comfort inside : the room-divider, I am happy to say, is clamped firmly to the wall, where it is in no danger of dividing the room. There is the Unity house, where some cloth-happy builder has teamed a rough red masculine blanket with a pretty rosebud pillow. There is the Unity house, all looming colours, aggressive-looking plants and large dim glass lights hanging from the ceiling: its occupants apparently spend their time reading (presumably with a torch) a book called My Life With a Brahmin Family. First prize for femininity goes to Woman's Own, who not only have a rose floating in a brandy glass on the dining table, and rose prints under plastic on the dining chairs, but a constipating yellow rose sur- rounded by frills on the lavatory seat.

First prize for anything else would have to go to the Heal's Canadian' house. It is on three levels—four counting the garage—so that one moved from a functional ground floor to an airy and attractive drawing-room and up to the bed- room areas in easy transition. There are plenty of things wrong with it : too much space wasted in the hall, too little in the kitchen; a cramped feel to some of the bedroom space upstairs; and laundry appears to take place on a small landing on the way to the garage. But for all that it has got something. Most of the surfaces are in un- stained wood; and although some corners are cramped, the whole house breathes space and ease. It is a house for drifting around in; for wear- ing casual clothes in; a house for living in.

This Canadian house was not actually made in Canada; but the American house was built almost exclusively of American materials by a team of Americans. It disappointed me—probably be- cause I was expecting so much of it. One of the things not reported often enough about America is the excellence of the common or garden domes- tic architecture; and the house in the show looks most attractive from the outside. Inside, there are the expected comforts, the expected gimmicks— the cavernous fridge, the showers, the big closets; the central cooking island (with a cope for a tall girl to clock her head on), the .Lurex-threaded towels, the open plan, the carport.

But the past has an untypically heavy grip on the place—and the wrong sort of past, at that. According to an American friend, 'In the States it would be early American, not this.' Everything is in perfect, if rather stuffy, taste; but only in one small functional room is there any of that fresh- ness I remembered; that unselfconsciousness with modern furniture and modern surroundings that we seem so far from acquiring.

Apart from the houses, the exhibition provided a number of Rooms with a Future; from, they might have added, shops with a past. Not quite unpredictably, Peter Jones has a lot of white metal and a fur-fringed cushion, Heal's is austerely Scandinavian, including a fantastic copper overhanging chimney to its fire; it seems a bit too much of a coincidence that the hobbies of its owners should be collecting sculpture, glass and pictures. Maples is lushly vulgar with a scene that includes a table in frilly skirts, yellow and white satin drapes—and I do not mean curtains— and a chair covered in white fur.

But the centrepiece of the show is the Daily Mail's own house—and with it, you might say, the decorating trade comes clean at last about the ideal home of every Englishman. There it stands, in the middle of the grand hall: approached through flower-stuffed banks, flanked by attendants giving an impression of chauffeurs: red-brick Georgian heavily furnished in antiques new and old. The ideal home : 200 years old, costing £20,000 to build new.

`In furnishing the house,' reads the brochure, `we have chosen to imagine that it has remained in the same family since it was built, and that they

have retained'the means to cherish old possessions as well as acquiring modern ones.' Superfluous to

point out that any family that had retained such means and such a house would never find its way to Olympia : the point is that of the Major- General in the Pirates .of Penzance: `When I bought the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don't know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are now.' What every Englishman wants is roots, the prestige of an estate with ancestors. And with reason.

Few people, in visually inexpert Britain, choose any decor for itself alone, so much as for the impression, the character that goes with it. The more skilled sections of the rising generation are quite aware that to rise effectively it is necessary to come up into the established classes; they have noticed, also, that the young professional classes —who in New York and Stockholm and Paris would have all-out modern flats—do not, in fact, go in for modern furniture. Even people with colossal means and prestige stick to the antique : just think how absolutely staggered everyone would be if Princess Margaret and her fiancé were talking about building a modern house.

I once did a certain amount of research for an article on the subject 'Who Buys Contemporary

Furniture?' It never got printed (partly because I never finished it), but it left me at least in a posi- tion to say who does not buy contemporary furniture. Newly established doctors do not; or lawyers who wish to seem old and dependable; or business executives who, like the tycoons in Hutton House, spend a fortune on a modern building and insist on a Queen Anne boardroom. Nor do those young people who go in for what Hugh Williams called 'Regency striped wallpaper and Peter Jones antiques.' Even when good taste

keeps them away from chi-chi, they still produce a room which is substantially no different from the room their parents would have chosen. Nine limes out of ten a modern room, like a yellow tie, Implies that its owner is either a social dissen- ter or professionally connected with Art.

The reasons this up-and-coming generation of bright middle-class people have for sticking to the traditional styles are valid— up w a point. There is the obvious economy involved in taking °ver one's parents' chairs and the last tenant's f• and f.; there is the feeling of triumph all newly Married couples have in creating a real room— which means a room like the ones at home. ,And there is the supposed financial advantage in pick. 1118 up tables and chairs down the Portobello Road to sweating it out of the bank balance at Heals.

But the argument from cost, though compel- ling, is not. conclusive. For one thing. this Geor• Sian mansion is stuffed with priceless paintings. rare silver and costly hangings: and the flats of

SWI imply that kind of affluence even if they do not exactly imitate it. For another, the young professionals are no poorer than the ordinary working-class couples who buy all new furniture as a matter of course : they are only poorer relative to their expectations.

Another argument constantly used is that the antique furniture you can buy is in fact, better made than contemporary stuff. Which may well be true: but if it is, there is one i.eason alotie fot it.: that people of taste and means are not bother- ing to buy. and have made, and critically control the production of beautiful modern things. Chip- pendale would hardly have done as, well as he did if everybody in the eighteenth century had been nursing a sentimental fondness for Tudor. The Daily Mail has hit the nail on the head in parading the Georgian mansion; but the keynote of the idea it embodies is not the exquisite 'silver but the gold-braided Kleenex-boxes : modernity with an antique gloss.