Design Through the Decades: The 1980s
Postmodernism and other forms of maximalism are found in the period’s architecture and interiors
This series looks at the stories behind iconic designs from each decade, starting in 1900. This installment touches on the work of postmodernists including, Michael Graves and the Memphis Group, and trends such as floral chintz window treatments.
Pomo, jumbo, faux: No matter where you stand on the 1980s’ postmodernism, McMansions and decorative paint finishes, you have to admit that design in the decade didn’t play it safe. Whether it was with their hair, shoulder pads or homes — which expanded 12% as lot sizes decreased 4% — Americans took it to the max.
Previous: Design Through the Decades: The 1970s
Pomo, jumbo, faux: No matter where you stand on the 1980s’ postmodernism, McMansions and decorative paint finishes, you have to admit that design in the decade didn’t play it safe. Whether it was with their hair, shoulder pads or homes — which expanded 12% as lot sizes decreased 4% — Americans took it to the max.
Previous: Design Through the Decades: The 1970s
Photo from Marsilio Editori
Baltimore-born architectural theorist Charles Jencks (now a landscape architect in Scotland) named the style in the 1970s, seeing improvisational and historical strands. By 1980, postmodernism dominated the first Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy, where 20 leading figures in the field were asked to both represent themselves and reference the past by designing facades for a hypothetical street called Strada Novissima, seen here.
Read about other must-know modern homes
Baltimore-born architectural theorist Charles Jencks (now a landscape architect in Scotland) named the style in the 1970s, seeing improvisational and historical strands. By 1980, postmodernism dominated the first Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy, where 20 leading figures in the field were asked to both represent themselves and reference the past by designing facades for a hypothetical street called Strada Novissima, seen here.
Read about other must-know modern homes
Les Espaces d’Abraxas. One of those Strada Novissima contributors was Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill. Three years later, he incorporated postmodern principles in Les Espaces d’Abraxas, the classical Greek-inspired apartment complex outside Paris seen here, which paradoxically looks futuristic enough to serve as the Capitol in the recent dystopian sci-fi movie The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Although the buildings appear to be made of stone, they’re actually constructed of less expensive precast concrete.
Find out why postmodernism still matters today
Find out why postmodernism still matters today
Tigerman-McCurry weekend home. Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman, another Strada Novissima contributor, who passed away in June, and Margaret McCurry designed this 1,000-square-foot postmodern weekend retreat in Lakeside, Michigan, for themselves and their two children in 1983. The vernacular-style, corrugated-steel main structure and its outbuildings evoke both a farm (with barn, shed and attached granary) and a church (with basilica, narthex and adjoining baptistery). Clerestory windows illuminate the double-height great room, which is overlooked by a pair of sleeping lofts.
Find an architect near you on Houzz
Find an architect near you on Houzz
Photo by Marc Averette
Atlantis. Like Vanna Venturi’s house, the five-shades-of-pink house that another architect couple, Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia, designed for Spear’s parents in a Miami suburb drew instant attention in the late 1970s. Their fledgling architecture firm, Arquitectonica, followed it up in 1982 with its first large project: Atlantis, this waterfront Miami condo building immortalized in the opening credits of the trendsetting 1980s TV crime series Miami Vice.
The 20-story slab building — mirrored on one side, blue-gridded on the other and topped with a red pyramid — makes an exuberant statement. Its pièce de résistance is the multistory-high, 37-foot-wide and off-center cube cut out of the building to form the so-called sky court. Featuring a whirlpool, a red spiral staircase and a palm tree set along a yellow wall, it oozes glamour with just a hint of danger.
Atlantis. Like Vanna Venturi’s house, the five-shades-of-pink house that another architect couple, Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia, designed for Spear’s parents in a Miami suburb drew instant attention in the late 1970s. Their fledgling architecture firm, Arquitectonica, followed it up in 1982 with its first large project: Atlantis, this waterfront Miami condo building immortalized in the opening credits of the trendsetting 1980s TV crime series Miami Vice.
The 20-story slab building — mirrored on one side, blue-gridded on the other and topped with a red pyramid — makes an exuberant statement. Its pièce de résistance is the multistory-high, 37-foot-wide and off-center cube cut out of the building to form the so-called sky court. Featuring a whirlpool, a red spiral staircase and a palm tree set along a yellow wall, it oozes glamour with just a hint of danger.
New Urbanism
Two other founders of Arquitectonica, the husband-and-wife team of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, left in 1980 to found their own firm, DPZ, to focus on replacing suburban sprawl with neighborhood-based planning. That year, a Florida developer hired them to design the Gulf Coast community of Seaside, pictured, which later became famous as Jim Carrey’s too-good-to-be-true hometown in The Truman Show. Through their work on the project, they began to develop the guiding principles of New Urbanism — a move toward sustainable, pedestrian-oriented and mixed-use communities that have a defined center and that encourage residents to interact with one another and their built and natural surroundings. To that end, the building code required the homes to have front porches.
Discover the elements of the classic Southern porch
Two other founders of Arquitectonica, the husband-and-wife team of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, left in 1980 to found their own firm, DPZ, to focus on replacing suburban sprawl with neighborhood-based planning. That year, a Florida developer hired them to design the Gulf Coast community of Seaside, pictured, which later became famous as Jim Carrey’s too-good-to-be-true hometown in The Truman Show. Through their work on the project, they began to develop the guiding principles of New Urbanism — a move toward sustainable, pedestrian-oriented and mixed-use communities that have a defined center and that encourage residents to interact with one another and their built and natural surroundings. To that end, the building code required the homes to have front porches.
Discover the elements of the classic Southern porch
Partnering with prominent New York postmodernist Robert Stern, architect Gary Brewer blended classic and vernacular style on this Seaside house. The beachfront home conforms to the town’s strict guidelines governing height, roof slope and materials, yet it carves out its own identity with the surprising gable atop a single Ionic column.
Read more about the pioneering town of Seaside, Florida
Read more about the pioneering town of Seaside, Florida
Chippendale Chair, Venturi Collection
Venturi and Scott Brown argued in their anti-modernist writings (including Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning From Las Vegas) that the past has a place in design and that ornament can communicate meaningful ideas. Their first foray into furniture design was a collection of nine chairs produced by Knoll in the early 1980s. The chairs’ traditional shapes, from Queen Anne to Art Deco, were rendered in flat laminated plywood, both borrowing from the past and breaking with it.
New York architect Michael Haverland incorporated the collection’s Chippendale chair in this bedroom in the Hamptons glass house he designed for himself and his partner. The screen-printed Grandmother pattern — pairs of black Jasper Johns-esque hatch marks on a pastel floral background taken from a beloved chintz tablecloth belonging to a colleague’s grandmother — also found its way onto ceramics by the upstart New York housewares firm Swid Powell.
Venturi and Scott Brown’s work in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s garnered a Pritzker Architecture Prize for him in 1991 but none for her, fueling an ongoing debate about sexism in architecture.
See some findings from the 2018 Equity in Architecture Survey
Venturi and Scott Brown argued in their anti-modernist writings (including Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning From Las Vegas) that the past has a place in design and that ornament can communicate meaningful ideas. Their first foray into furniture design was a collection of nine chairs produced by Knoll in the early 1980s. The chairs’ traditional shapes, from Queen Anne to Art Deco, were rendered in flat laminated plywood, both borrowing from the past and breaking with it.
New York architect Michael Haverland incorporated the collection’s Chippendale chair in this bedroom in the Hamptons glass house he designed for himself and his partner. The screen-printed Grandmother pattern — pairs of black Jasper Johns-esque hatch marks on a pastel floral background taken from a beloved chintz tablecloth belonging to a colleague’s grandmother — also found its way onto ceramics by the upstart New York housewares firm Swid Powell.
Venturi and Scott Brown’s work in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s garnered a Pritzker Architecture Prize for him in 1991 but none for her, fueling an ongoing debate about sexism in architecture.
See some findings from the 2018 Equity in Architecture Survey
Photo by Sailko
Zabro Chair-Table
Italian architect Alessandro Mendini also created a famous chair that looked to the past. His 1978 Proust armchair, a carved rococo confection hand-painted all over with hundreds of colorful pointillistic dots, proved to be so popular that it has been reissued over the decades in various materials, including green polyethylene.
A member of Milan’s avant-garde Studio Alchimia and a key figure in postmodernism, Mendini embraced ornament, symbolism and craftsmanship. He designed many works more for artistic pleasure than commercial success. They include this hand-painted wood-and-pink-leather Zabro chair, whose backrest folds down to form a tabletop, produced in 1984 by Italian manufacturer Zanotta.
“I think that besides being functional, an object must have a soul and express friendliness,” he told Architectural Digest not long before his death in February at age 87.
Zabro Chair-Table
Italian architect Alessandro Mendini also created a famous chair that looked to the past. His 1978 Proust armchair, a carved rococo confection hand-painted all over with hundreds of colorful pointillistic dots, proved to be so popular that it has been reissued over the decades in various materials, including green polyethylene.
A member of Milan’s avant-garde Studio Alchimia and a key figure in postmodernism, Mendini embraced ornament, symbolism and craftsmanship. He designed many works more for artistic pleasure than commercial success. They include this hand-painted wood-and-pink-leather Zabro chair, whose backrest folds down to form a tabletop, produced in 1984 by Italian manufacturer Zanotta.
“I think that besides being functional, an object must have a soul and express friendliness,” he told Architectural Digest not long before his death in February at age 87.
9093 (aka Whistling Bird) Teakettle
The accoutrements of everyday life fascinated Mendini, who for the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale curated an exhibit on “the banal object.” In the early 1980s, he spearheaded Italian housewares manufacturer Alessi’s Tea & Coffee Piazza project, asking 12 internationally known architects who had never worked in industrial design to create silver components of a set — teapot, coffeepot, sugar bowl, creamer and tray — and arrange them as a kind of town square. Venturi gave each piece a different historical style. Jencks’ set featured classical columns and ram’s heads. Tigerman’s had trompe l’oeil fingers serving as tray handles. And the pieces by Michael Graves resembled fluted watchtowers capped with fanciful turquoise balls.
The project was a folly — some of the limited-edition sets, priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, were still unsold decades later. But it gave cachet to Alessi and publicity to the architects, and it led to a long and fruitful relationship between Graves and Alessi.
In 1985, Graves designed his iconic 9093 kettle, seen here in a Northern California kitchen by Danenberg Design. The stainless steel number, with a cool blue handle and a hot-to-handle-signifying red plastic bird on the spout that whistles when the water boils, is still one of Alessi’s bestselling products.
Graves subsequently included a $25 version of the kettle in a collaboration with Target, becoming a household name. A milestone in the democratization of design, this was the first of more than 175 partnerships with well-known and emerging designers that the U.S. retailer forged over two decades. They’re detailed in Target: 20 Years of Design for All, published by Rizzoli this month.
Shop for teakettles on Houzz
The accoutrements of everyday life fascinated Mendini, who for the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale curated an exhibit on “the banal object.” In the early 1980s, he spearheaded Italian housewares manufacturer Alessi’s Tea & Coffee Piazza project, asking 12 internationally known architects who had never worked in industrial design to create silver components of a set — teapot, coffeepot, sugar bowl, creamer and tray — and arrange them as a kind of town square. Venturi gave each piece a different historical style. Jencks’ set featured classical columns and ram’s heads. Tigerman’s had trompe l’oeil fingers serving as tray handles. And the pieces by Michael Graves resembled fluted watchtowers capped with fanciful turquoise balls.
The project was a folly — some of the limited-edition sets, priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, were still unsold decades later. But it gave cachet to Alessi and publicity to the architects, and it led to a long and fruitful relationship between Graves and Alessi.
In 1985, Graves designed his iconic 9093 kettle, seen here in a Northern California kitchen by Danenberg Design. The stainless steel number, with a cool blue handle and a hot-to-handle-signifying red plastic bird on the spout that whistles when the water boils, is still one of Alessi’s bestselling products.
Graves subsequently included a $25 version of the kettle in a collaboration with Target, becoming a household name. A milestone in the democratization of design, this was the first of more than 175 partnerships with well-known and emerging designers that the U.S. retailer forged over two decades. They’re detailed in Target: 20 Years of Design for All, published by Rizzoli this month.
Shop for teakettles on Houzz
Memphis Group
Whereas Mendini seemed content with his art-for-art’s-sake approach, his Studio Alchimia colleague Ettore Sottsass longed to put his postmodern ideas into practice on a less theoretical basis. In December 1980, Sottsass called a meeting of about 20 like-minded architects in Milan to propose a new direction that challenged traditional ideas and flouted conventions of good taste. Playing in the background that night, Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again lent its name to their new collective. The Memphis Group’s vision combined Art Deco geometries, candy colors and midcentury kitsch. It reveled in abstract pattern, asymmetry and irreverence. (Think of MTV and Pee-wee’s Playhouse and you get the idea.)
By the time the Milan Furniture Fair rolled around in September 1981, the group was ready to show its first collection, with each piece of lowly plastic laminate and wood composite furniture, such as Sottsass’ Carlton bookcase-room divider and Graves’ Plaza vanity, ironically named after a luxury hotel. The crowds flocking to see the exhibit were so thick that Sottsass’ taxi could barely get through to the opening.
The Memphis Group flamed out early, disbanding in 1988. Few people had the guts or means to furnish their homes with Memphis pieces, but some — fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, musician David Bowie — pursued them with a passion.
Photographer Dennis Zanone was smitten from the moment he first saw the furniture in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the first stop on its inaugural U.S. tour in 1984. His living room, pictured, has no curtains or carpets to distract from his comprehensive Memphis collection. Sottsass’ stick-figure-like Casablanca bookcase-room divider, in the corner, has upswept arms ready to hold wine bottles, and laminate fronts reminiscent of the Formica boomerang patterns of the 1950s. Other pieces include Sottsass’ Holebid coffee table and Ashoka table lamp, centered on the mantel, and Los Angeles ceramist-designer Peter Shire’s Big Sur sofa, in the background, and Bel Air armchair, on the right.
Whereas Mendini seemed content with his art-for-art’s-sake approach, his Studio Alchimia colleague Ettore Sottsass longed to put his postmodern ideas into practice on a less theoretical basis. In December 1980, Sottsass called a meeting of about 20 like-minded architects in Milan to propose a new direction that challenged traditional ideas and flouted conventions of good taste. Playing in the background that night, Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again lent its name to their new collective. The Memphis Group’s vision combined Art Deco geometries, candy colors and midcentury kitsch. It reveled in abstract pattern, asymmetry and irreverence. (Think of MTV and Pee-wee’s Playhouse and you get the idea.)
By the time the Milan Furniture Fair rolled around in September 1981, the group was ready to show its first collection, with each piece of lowly plastic laminate and wood composite furniture, such as Sottsass’ Carlton bookcase-room divider and Graves’ Plaza vanity, ironically named after a luxury hotel. The crowds flocking to see the exhibit were so thick that Sottsass’ taxi could barely get through to the opening.
The Memphis Group flamed out early, disbanding in 1988. Few people had the guts or means to furnish their homes with Memphis pieces, but some — fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, musician David Bowie — pursued them with a passion.
Photographer Dennis Zanone was smitten from the moment he first saw the furniture in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the first stop on its inaugural U.S. tour in 1984. His living room, pictured, has no curtains or carpets to distract from his comprehensive Memphis collection. Sottsass’ stick-figure-like Casablanca bookcase-room divider, in the corner, has upswept arms ready to hold wine bottles, and laminate fronts reminiscent of the Formica boomerang patterns of the 1950s. Other pieces include Sottsass’ Holebid coffee table and Ashoka table lamp, centered on the mantel, and Los Angeles ceramist-designer Peter Shire’s Big Sur sofa, in the background, and Bel Air armchair, on the right.
The apartment of Simona Pizzi and her family, in the stunning Bosco Verticale residential towers in Milan, contains several Memphis pieces, including Italian architect Michele de Lucchi’s painted wood-and-plastic laminate Flamingo table …
… and Sottsass’ Tahiti lamp. The enameled-metal duck shape, with a pivoting head and a halogen bulb in the beak, rests on a base laminated with the late architect’s Bacterio print, manufactured by Italy’s Abet Laminati.
Read more about this apartment and the leafy Bosco Verticale skyscrapers
Read more about this apartment and the leafy Bosco Verticale skyscrapers
Still, the Memphis Group wasn’t just a flash in Matteo Thun’s nonstick Madura Plus pan, which the founding Memphis Group member went on to design for German cookware maker Zwilling J.A. Henckels. Imaisdé Design Studio recently referenced Memphis style when decking out this Spanish apartment. The lively paint and furniture colors and the stick-on graphics and affirmations are meant to inspire and encourage the three students who share it.
Find a local interior designer
Find a local interior designer
A Profusion of Patterns
For those on the cutting edge, squiggly black-and-white Bacterio was the defining pattern of the ’80s. But if it wasn’t your cup of tea, the decade offered a host of other choices — English breakfast, perhaps?
Romantic florals. Laura Ashley’s eponymous textile firm is synonymous with the English country look. Frustrated that she couldn’t find flowery Victorian-style fabrics for her quilting projects, the young mom and self-taught designer started silk-screening her own in the kitchen of her London flat. The scarves that she modeled after the one Audrey Hepburn wore in the 1953 film Roman Holiday were a hit. So too were the flowing cotton garments Ashley designed in the ensuing decades, after the family moved back to her native Wales.
By that point, Ashley’s company had just launched its first full home collection and was anticipating the publication of The Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating, which explained how to get the flouncy look. One key was that everything had to match, right down to the lampshades.
This Summer Palace motif by Laura Ashley has been going strong since its debut in 1988, appearing in different color combinations on fabric, wallpaper, pillows, bedding and curtains. It was inspired by the Chinese tree of life design on an Edwardian chintz curtain and chair cover that the company purchased from Christie’s auction house in 1984. Tragically, the designer never lived to see it come into production. She died in 1985 at age 60 after falling down the stairs at her daughter’s Cotswolds home.
Browse floral cotton fabrics in the Houzz Shop
For those on the cutting edge, squiggly black-and-white Bacterio was the defining pattern of the ’80s. But if it wasn’t your cup of tea, the decade offered a host of other choices — English breakfast, perhaps?
Romantic florals. Laura Ashley’s eponymous textile firm is synonymous with the English country look. Frustrated that she couldn’t find flowery Victorian-style fabrics for her quilting projects, the young mom and self-taught designer started silk-screening her own in the kitchen of her London flat. The scarves that she modeled after the one Audrey Hepburn wore in the 1953 film Roman Holiday were a hit. So too were the flowing cotton garments Ashley designed in the ensuing decades, after the family moved back to her native Wales.
By that point, Ashley’s company had just launched its first full home collection and was anticipating the publication of The Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating, which explained how to get the flouncy look. One key was that everything had to match, right down to the lampshades.
This Summer Palace motif by Laura Ashley has been going strong since its debut in 1988, appearing in different color combinations on fabric, wallpaper, pillows, bedding and curtains. It was inspired by the Chinese tree of life design on an Edwardian chintz curtain and chair cover that the company purchased from Christie’s auction house in 1984. Tragically, the designer never lived to see it come into production. She died in 1985 at age 60 after falling down the stairs at her daughter’s Cotswolds home.
Browse floral cotton fabrics in the Houzz Shop
Two Pierres — Frenchman Moulin and American LeVec — peddled the sunny floral prints of Provence through their Pierre Deux home furnishings stores and books on French country style, whetting appetites for A Year in Provence, British expat Peter Mayle’s bestselling 1989 memoir about renovating a farmhouse in the south of France.
Interior Styles decked out this Atlanta home with dining furniture from Pierre Deux. The chairs are upholstered in a selection of indiennes, colorfast cotton fabrics that came to Marseille via India in the 1600s (painted initially, then block printed and now mostly factory-printed) and that have been identified with Provence ever since. The Pierres and their shops have passed on, but century-old French textile manufacturers such as Souleiado and Olivades continue the tradition.
Read about an American chef’s adventure renovating his Parisian apartment
Interior Styles decked out this Atlanta home with dining furniture from Pierre Deux. The chairs are upholstered in a selection of indiennes, colorfast cotton fabrics that came to Marseille via India in the 1600s (painted initially, then block printed and now mostly factory-printed) and that have been identified with Provence ever since. The Pierres and their shops have passed on, but century-old French textile manufacturers such as Souleiado and Olivades continue the tradition.
Read about an American chef’s adventure renovating his Parisian apartment
Preppy plaids. “Everything I do comes from my life,” American designer Ralph Lauren told Forbes. “When [my wife], Ricky, and I were creating our first home, we couldn’t find the things we were dreaming of, not just the colors and textures, but the quality of things like pure cotton sheets.” So he got to work and presented his first home collection in 1983, to the delight of The Official Preppy Handbook followers everywhere.
The kid born Ralph Lifshitz to Jewish immigrants in New York’s Bronx borough today straddles the casually elegant styles of baronial, nautical, equestrian and safari. But he’ll be forever associated with the menswear plaids and stripes with which he got his start in fashion design in the late 1960s.
Interior designer Marlene Wangenheim decorated this mahogany-paneled home office in New Jersey with a plaid valance and wallpaper from Ralph Lauren Home. She layered the fringed valance over floor-length cashmere drapes on a substantial fluted rod. A timeworn Serapi camel hair rug completes the old-world look.
The kid born Ralph Lifshitz to Jewish immigrants in New York’s Bronx borough today straddles the casually elegant styles of baronial, nautical, equestrian and safari. But he’ll be forever associated with the menswear plaids and stripes with which he got his start in fashion design in the late 1960s.
Interior designer Marlene Wangenheim decorated this mahogany-paneled home office in New Jersey with a plaid valance and wallpaper from Ralph Lauren Home. She layered the fringed valance over floor-length cashmere drapes on a substantial fluted rod. A timeworn Serapi camel hair rug completes the old-world look.
Zippy zigzags. Italian fashion house Missoni also branched out in 1983 to put its famed flame stitch pattern on home furnishings. Founders Ottavio Missoni and Rosita Jelmini had met over lunch at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. He was an Italian hurdler who had designed his team’s knitted tracksuits; she was from an Italian family that made sheer black shawls favored by grieving widows. Soon after their marriage, they pioneered machine-knitting techniques to create the jubilant, lightweight, space-dyed sweaters that define the Missoni look.
Interior designer Victoria Sanchez tapped Missoni Home for the pendant light, pouf, carpet and fabrics she used to create this vibrant teenager’s retreat in a show house in Washington, D.C.
Learn how to identify three popular zigzag patterns
Interior designer Victoria Sanchez tapped Missoni Home for the pendant light, pouf, carpet and fabrics she used to create this vibrant teenager’s retreat in a show house in Washington, D.C.
Learn how to identify three popular zigzag patterns
A Surfeit of Soft Furnishings
Designers lavished these patterned fabrics on windows, pillows, bedding and tables — perhaps no one more visibly than Mario Buatta, decorator to the stars and the Prince of Chintz. Born on New York’s Staten Island, he gleefully adopted the glazed floral cottons, collected-over-generations clutter and other stylistic idioms of the British Isles.
“With some tassels costing hundreds of dollars each and fabrics hundreds of dollars a yard, curtains in a Buatta room might cost $12,000 in today’s money by the time they were hung,” The New York Times said in Buatta’s obituary last year. “And painting a Buatta room, which could involve six or seven coats on a canvas wallcovering, plus stippling or staining and finally glazing, could easily come to the equivalent of $23,000 today.” Fortunately, Buatta tended not to charge for his time.
Patricia Altschul of the reality TV series Southern Charm asked Buatta a few years back to freshen up her 1850s mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. In the library, pictured, ocelot-patterned carpeting from Stark grounds the tiger-stripe velvet by Brunschwig & Fils on the bergère chairs and the abundance of chinoiserie fabric around the windows. The gilded 18th-century mirror once adorned Scotland’s Keir House.
Designers lavished these patterned fabrics on windows, pillows, bedding and tables — perhaps no one more visibly than Mario Buatta, decorator to the stars and the Prince of Chintz. Born on New York’s Staten Island, he gleefully adopted the glazed floral cottons, collected-over-generations clutter and other stylistic idioms of the British Isles.
“With some tassels costing hundreds of dollars each and fabrics hundreds of dollars a yard, curtains in a Buatta room might cost $12,000 in today’s money by the time they were hung,” The New York Times said in Buatta’s obituary last year. “And painting a Buatta room, which could involve six or seven coats on a canvas wallcovering, plus stippling or staining and finally glazing, could easily come to the equivalent of $23,000 today.” Fortunately, Buatta tended not to charge for his time.
Patricia Altschul of the reality TV series Southern Charm asked Buatta a few years back to freshen up her 1850s mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. In the library, pictured, ocelot-patterned carpeting from Stark grounds the tiger-stripe velvet by Brunschwig & Fils on the bergère chairs and the abundance of chinoiserie fabric around the windows. The gilded 18th-century mirror once adorned Scotland’s Keir House.
Tres McKinney designed the tufted headboard and sumptuous bedding in this traditional San Francisco master bedroom. The mix of 10 fabrics (seven on the bed alone) in similar hues adds interest while still being restful, she says.
“The fabric on the chair balances the curtains by bringing fabric to the opposite side of the room,” McKinney says. Decorative paint finishes on the walls, custom cabinets and furniture complement the fabric and unify the elements in the space.
Find a local decorative painter
“The fabric on the chair balances the curtains by bringing fabric to the opposite side of the room,” McKinney says. Decorative paint finishes on the walls, custom cabinets and furniture complement the fabric and unify the elements in the space.
Find a local decorative painter
A Flurry of Faux Finishes
In this bathroom in another San Francisco home, McKinney designed the overall look of the vanity, which was realized by a host of talented artisans. A custom sink by Country Floors matches the Precious Cargo wallpaper by Scalamandré. It’s set in a Carrara marble countertop fabricated by Fox Marble. Contractor Paul Silvestrini constructed the cabinetry, which was finished with decorative paint treatments by Peggy Del Rosario.
Faux finishes — which mimic the look of plaster, stone, metal and wood to give texture, depth and characterful age to walls and furniture — got a big boost in the 1980s, thanks to Jocasta Innes. A well-traveled, Cambridge-educated mother and writer with a bohemian lifestyle and a string of lovers, Innes spun her resourceful, money-saving ways (foraging nettles, making stencils out of cereal boxes to brighten her daughters’ rooms) into cooking and crafting guides. Their modest success allowed her in 1979 to put down a deposit on the first real home she could call her own: a decrepit Georgian townhouse in a former brewery in the then-rough London neighborhood of Spitalfields. As she began restoring the house, its walls became the canvas on which she could experiment with the color washing, ragging, sponging, stippling, marbling and graining techniques she described in her 1983 bestseller, Paint Magic. She also fell for the modernist architect next door, the late Richard MacCormac, her partner for the last 30 years of her life. Her interior doorway to his house hid behind trompe l’oeil stone blocks above a faux granite wainscot; his hid behind a pivoting fireplace wall.
Discover how to create a secret doorway behind a bookcase
In this bathroom in another San Francisco home, McKinney designed the overall look of the vanity, which was realized by a host of talented artisans. A custom sink by Country Floors matches the Precious Cargo wallpaper by Scalamandré. It’s set in a Carrara marble countertop fabricated by Fox Marble. Contractor Paul Silvestrini constructed the cabinetry, which was finished with decorative paint treatments by Peggy Del Rosario.
Faux finishes — which mimic the look of plaster, stone, metal and wood to give texture, depth and characterful age to walls and furniture — got a big boost in the 1980s, thanks to Jocasta Innes. A well-traveled, Cambridge-educated mother and writer with a bohemian lifestyle and a string of lovers, Innes spun her resourceful, money-saving ways (foraging nettles, making stencils out of cereal boxes to brighten her daughters’ rooms) into cooking and crafting guides. Their modest success allowed her in 1979 to put down a deposit on the first real home she could call her own: a decrepit Georgian townhouse in a former brewery in the then-rough London neighborhood of Spitalfields. As she began restoring the house, its walls became the canvas on which she could experiment with the color washing, ragging, sponging, stippling, marbling and graining techniques she described in her 1983 bestseller, Paint Magic. She also fell for the modernist architect next door, the late Richard MacCormac, her partner for the last 30 years of her life. Her interior doorway to his house hid behind trompe l’oeil stone blocks above a faux granite wainscot; his hid behind a pivoting fireplace wall.
Discover how to create a secret doorway behind a bookcase
Photo from Gene Sasse
American Studio Furniture
Sometimes, though, you want real wood that’s hand-rubbed to lustrous perfection with nothing more than a blend of linseed oil, raw tung oil and semigloss urethane varnish. Something like the Sam Maloof-made rocking chair, which in 1981 became the first piece of handcrafted contemporary American furniture to enter the White House collection.
The self-taught Maloof was part of a long line of independent and individualistic woodworkers that began in the first decade of the 20th century with Gustav Stickley and includes Wharton Esherick, Phillip Lloyd Powell, Paul Evans, George and Mira Nakashima, Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie.
The California-born son of Lebanese immigrants, Maloof produced about 5,000 handcrafted furniture pieces from the 1950s until his death in 2009 at age 93. In 1985, he became the first craft artist and woodworker to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” American crafts received further recognition when President George H.W. Bush designated 1993 as The Year of American Craft and a selection of 75 contemporary works in wood, glass, metal, clay and fiber by Maloof, Dale Chihuly, Albert Paley, Nathan Youngblood, Ellen Kochansky and other luminaries went on display at the White House.
See Sam Maloof’s home and studio
American Studio Furniture
Sometimes, though, you want real wood that’s hand-rubbed to lustrous perfection with nothing more than a blend of linseed oil, raw tung oil and semigloss urethane varnish. Something like the Sam Maloof-made rocking chair, which in 1981 became the first piece of handcrafted contemporary American furniture to enter the White House collection.
The self-taught Maloof was part of a long line of independent and individualistic woodworkers that began in the first decade of the 20th century with Gustav Stickley and includes Wharton Esherick, Phillip Lloyd Powell, Paul Evans, George and Mira Nakashima, Wendell Castle and Judy Kensley McKie.
The California-born son of Lebanese immigrants, Maloof produced about 5,000 handcrafted furniture pieces from the 1950s until his death in 2009 at age 93. In 1985, he became the first craft artist and woodworker to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” American crafts received further recognition when President George H.W. Bush designated 1993 as The Year of American Craft and a selection of 75 contemporary works in wood, glass, metal, clay and fiber by Maloof, Dale Chihuly, Albert Paley, Nathan Youngblood, Ellen Kochansky and other luminaries went on display at the White House.
See Sam Maloof’s home and studio
West Coast Studio Glass
What Maloof was to wood, Chihuly is to glass. As an interior design student at the University of Washington, Chihuly wove glass shards into an award-winning tapestry. That helped him win a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Harvey Littleton had recently established the first studio hot glass program at a U.S. university. Littleton, a ceramist, and Dominick Labino, a chemist, revolutionized glass as an art form in the 1960s by developing the technologies that allowed glass to be blown in a studio instead of a factory.
Littleton’s students spread the studio art glass gospel far and wide: Sam Herman to Britain and Australia, Marvin Lipofsky to California, Fritz Dreisbach and Chihuly (by way of Rhode Island) to Washington. By the 1980s, the Seattle area — where Chihuly, John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg had founded their influential Pilchuck Glass School — had emerged as the capital of American art glass. The city needed a new downtown art museum and hired Venturi and Scott Brown to design it. As part of his inaugural exhibit there, Chihuly grouped works from his swirling 1986 Persians series into his 45-foot-long Venturi Window installation; nearby was an installation of 33 works from his speckled 1981 Macchia series.
For the Dallas home of art-loving clients, Mary Anne Smiley designed discreet shelves to hold six Macchia pieces and flank the artwork by Jangmee Park over the fireplace. She also had an existing bronze-and-glass coffee table refinished in silver leaf and antiqued mirror.
Share: What designs from the 1980s would you highlight? What are the standouts of the 1990s and the current decade? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments.
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What Maloof was to wood, Chihuly is to glass. As an interior design student at the University of Washington, Chihuly wove glass shards into an award-winning tapestry. That helped him win a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Harvey Littleton had recently established the first studio hot glass program at a U.S. university. Littleton, a ceramist, and Dominick Labino, a chemist, revolutionized glass as an art form in the 1960s by developing the technologies that allowed glass to be blown in a studio instead of a factory.
Littleton’s students spread the studio art glass gospel far and wide: Sam Herman to Britain and Australia, Marvin Lipofsky to California, Fritz Dreisbach and Chihuly (by way of Rhode Island) to Washington. By the 1980s, the Seattle area — where Chihuly, John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg had founded their influential Pilchuck Glass School — had emerged as the capital of American art glass. The city needed a new downtown art museum and hired Venturi and Scott Brown to design it. As part of his inaugural exhibit there, Chihuly grouped works from his swirling 1986 Persians series into his 45-foot-long Venturi Window installation; nearby was an installation of 33 works from his speckled 1981 Macchia series.
For the Dallas home of art-loving clients, Mary Anne Smiley designed discreet shelves to hold six Macchia pieces and flank the artwork by Jangmee Park over the fireplace. She also had an existing bronze-and-glass coffee table refinished in silver leaf and antiqued mirror.
Share: What designs from the 1980s would you highlight? What are the standouts of the 1990s and the current decade? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments.
More on Houzz
Pop Culture Watch: 12 Home Trends From the ’80s Are Back
Browse more decorating guides
Find a pro for your home project
Shop for home products
Postmodern Architecture
Postmodernism can be hard to pin down, but in general it was intended as a warm, witty and engaging reaction to the sober, functionalist and minimalist approach of modernism, especially as represented by the International Style of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, for example, in the 1920s and ’30s. It traces back to the late Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi, who declared that “less is a bore” and who, with wife and partner Denise Scott Brown, in the 1960s designed a little house for his elderly mother, Vanna, that had a monumental facade, an interrupted gable and a purely ornamental arch.