When It Comes to Decorating, Plastic Is Out, Money Is In

Ask interior designer Rita St. Clair what’s in and what’s out these days and she’s hard-pressed to answer.

Then after much consideration she replies: “What’s out is plastic, even in places where it should be, like countertops in the kitchen and in the bathroom. Countertops used to be plastic laminate--Formica. It was the normal top. Well, it still is. But those who can afford granite and marble are never going to put plastic in again.”

Why?

Because spending money is in. “There was a time when it was gauche to spend money, but people are obvious about it today,” she sighs. “They’re not apologetic about having it.”

Syndicated Columnist

St. Clair knows of such things as founder and head of a Baltimore-based interior design firm with commissions across the country and as author of Designing Woman, a syndicated column appearing in 165 newspapers around the world. Last weekend, she received the Designer of Distinction Award from the American Society of Interior Designers, a professional organization of which she is a past president, when the group held its national conference at the Century Plaza.

What’s in and what’s not, however, happen to be the last of her interests. Of course, she knows what the most popular choices are today; in her opinion, they continue to be the classically inspired, formal European interiors and the country look. (It can be any country, she points out, including French, English, American, even Japanese country. “I’m not kidding. It’s called mingei. “)

But St. Clair is less concerned with tracking trends than with what she sees as a demise of the avant-garde in American design. “We were manufacturing furniture in the ‘50s that was probably the most avant-garde we’ve ever been, and nothing’s been done since. People were seeking new solutions in the ‘50s. But there is no such movement today. There is in Europe, particularly in Italy, but you don’t find it here.”

One explanation, she says, is that today the average middle-class person thinking about decorating a home is more concerned with the “surround” of a room (wall finishes, floor treatments, and countertops) than with what goes inside.

Shrinking spaces and the trend toward town house living have given rise to multipurpose rooms, which must be able to serve double and triple duty. Yesterday’s living room is today’s media room, dining room and perhaps also its playroom.

With the exception of maybe one “conversational piece,” such as an armoire, possibly an antique one, the furniture being used is as functional and multipurpose as the rooms it sits in. What’s missing is style, she believes.

“Interior design, architecture and the arts are really a mirror of our society,” St. Clair says. “We have a very, very conservative mind-set. You’re not going to have people looking for avant-garde design in their homes when in every other aspect of their lives they’re conservative. I’m not making judgments--it’s what I see. You cannot have our philosophical and political environment and have modernism. They’re diametrically opposed.”

Even what she calls “the new rich”--the people whose homes you see on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and in magazines such as House & Garden and Architectural Digest--who could afford to experiment with the cutting edge aren’t doing it. “They have other interests,” St. Clair says.

The real trendsetters, often media stars, whether in fashion or music, are the people “who are living in lofts, doing black lacquer walls, neon lighting and buying Memphis (avant-garde Italian) furniture.” But they are so few in number, she says, that “they don’t need to be talked about.”

High-Powered Profession

The interior design profession has changed a great deal since St. Clair, who graduated with an art history major from the University of Iowa, answered a want ad that read: “Interior decorator. Must have no experience.”

“Everybody who studied art history either went to work in a museum or became a decorator,” muses St. Clair, a stylishly dressed woman in her mid-50s with over-sized jewelry and henna-colored hair. But today, not only has the field become a specialized “high-powered profession,” but the word “decorator” has been dropped from the vocabulary.

“It used to be mostly matching fabrics, bringing in fabulous furniture and doing elaborate window treatments,” she recalls. Now an interior designer’s work encompasses space planning, lighting techniques, drafting and “being able to really create rooms out of spaces.”

In addition, designers are now involved with safety and health concerns, including fire prevention and accessibility for the elderly and handicapped in public spaces as well as in kitchens and bathrooms where even the fixtures must be considered for easy usage.

St. Clair went into business for herself in 1957 when she was newly married with one small child by working out of her house and doing mostly domestic interiors. In 1968, she formed her own company, which is now 20 designers strong.

Creative Outlet

But St. Clair says that in recent years she has looked away from the private home for creative outlet. Five years ago she segued into hotel interiors because as conservative as people are in their homes, “they use another side of their brains” when they go on vacation. Although the decoration must appeal to people “whose sensitivity is not too avant-garde,” she explains, “people who go to a hotel expect a fantasy. They want to fantasize about being perhaps someone else. They want to go to the stars, the moon. You can do the craziest things in the world in hotels. You can use theater lighting, you can be a little vulgar, because you have to make a show. It’s the closest thing to theater, but instead of the audience being passive, they’re active participants.

“It’s amazing what happened with hotels in the last five years,” adds St. Clair, who is currently at work on the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, the Boston Park Plaza and the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami Center. Her firm recently completed the renovation of the Netherland Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati and the Peabody Court Hotel in Baltimore.

“The owner’s wife is no longer going to be able to decorate her husband’s hotel. There’s too much competition today. Everybody’s restoring hotels that couldn’t be used. Now there are 10 hotels in a city that used to have two, and they’re no longer owned by one or two people. They’re usually owned by a syndicate that knows if they’re going to attract people they’d better have more than a good mattress.”

Shrinking Lobbies

One of the biggest changes in hotel design, she says, has been a move toward smaller lobbies. “They’re no longer a large traffic passageway to the elevator and the registration desk. At practically every new hotel in America, lobbies are being broken into satellite areas, including one for cocktails or tea. It’s an old concept that was really abandoned. The Century Plaza is one of the pioneers at changing that. It has an area two or three steps down where guests can sit and watch the parade of people coming in and out.”

Another change is in the hotel coffee shop, which is no longer relegated to the basement and “lit as if it were nighttime. They don’t do that anymore. People would complain.”

Then there are the bathrooms. In new hotels, the bathrooms have doubled if not tripled in size. Studies have found that people spend more waking hours in the bathroom than in the bedroom, says St. Clair, “so that bathroom has become a luxurious space.”

And you’re not likely to see much plastic inside them.

“In the last five years,” St. Clair says, “there has been more marble brought into this country to satisfy the needs of hotel bathroom requirements than there has been in all the marble importing for hotels in the last 50 years.”