Touring the Boulevard of Dreams
by Lucie Young, The New York Times
December 1, 1994
A GOTHIC tower replete with a rope of Rapunzel's hair. A home library with a carpet of Kentucky bluegrass. While it might be fun for designers to let their imaginations soar into the thin air of implausibility, are their idylls really of any more substance than peppermint creams?
Visitors will have the chance to decide how fruitful design daydreams can be at two very different exhibitions in Manhattan. Rapunzel's tower, a mere 26 inches tall, is one of 18 miniature rooms on display starting today at Christie's. The rooms will be auctioned on Dec. 5 to benefit the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club.
The indoor library with an outdoor feel -- it includes field stones and 32 birch tree stumps -- was designed by David Rockwell, the architect, with the English actor Jeremy Irons in mind. Along with six other designer vignettes, it is part of the newly opened Metropolitan Home "Street of Shops," a show and home furnishings sale at the New York Design Center, to benefit the Design Industries Foundation for AIDS.
"He hasn't let me touch a thing in our house in Oxfordshire in 20 years," said Mr. Irons's wife, the actress Sinead Cusack, as she and her husband previewed the room on Monday. "I am amazed he let anyone design anything for him."
The fantasy room is a complete break with the traditional wood-paneled library in Mr. Irons's Queen Anne home. "A romantic view of Victorian with a post-Freudian revisionist twist" is how Mr. Rockwell described his library-on-Golden-Pond. A pagoda of branches flecked with gold leaf surrounds a velvet feather bed and Alice in Wonderland furnishings. The wallpaper is flocked with upside-down trees, as one might see them reflected in a pool.
While flocked paper still has a certain cachet in America, "I was appalled," Mr. Irons said with a wince. "In Britain, it is still associated with seedy seaside hotels and cheap restaurants," he added.
"I didn't want to create something totally serious," said Donna Warner, editor in chief of Metropolitan Home, who commissioned the room settings. "But I do hope there are some lessons in these rooms."