TO
LOOK DECORATED? OR NOT TO look decorated? In the so-called understate
nineties, that's the important question. "Some rooms demand
to look done, others don't have to," says Thomas Jayne,
a New York decorator who is known for thinking that anything
after the Renaissance is modern. So when he was asked to help
a young couple with their eighteenth-century house and its 1920s
cottage in Garrison, New York, he thought of the project more
as pulling together than as decorating.
--- "Instead of remodeling
or restoring the houses," adds Jayne, "my clients
conserved them as you would a painting." Conserving a house,
rather than restoring it, was an idea that fit him like the
proverbial |
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glove"I had seen a lot of old houses like these," says Jayne, who
studied American decorative arts at Winterthur in Delaware
and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before establishing
his business in 1990. "I knew both what they did look like and what
they could look like." Dowdy was a distinct possibility. "It is quiet," admits
Jayne, of the décor, "but definitely not old-lady."
In other words, there is nothing plain Jayne about the décor.
--- The forty-year-old Jayne likes
to "play off old and new, but not just for the sake of
it." Placing an antique cabinet in a modern room is not
enough: Jayne's juggling is less showy. "We used old things
and didn't polish them all up too much," he says of the
homespun rooms that are charming without being coy. "Every
room has its own character, but we avoided the red room/blue
room syndrome."
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