Oldfields in the early light of a winter morning.

For many people, Christmas is a favorite time of year.  And for many good reasons – sparkling trees, shimmering lights in the winter darkness, hearing the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” sung by a single chorister, favorite foods, and the excitement of Christmas morning.  No matter what it is that one most enjoys, the full effect is possible only with much preparation.  As the saying goes, there’s the rub.  Who hasn’t endured the annoyance of bumps on the head while hauling decorations from the attic, of the tree that keeps falling over, or the dish that just won’t come out right for the important dinner?  The point is that it’s easy to have something of a love-hate relationship with certain aspects of the season, if not an outright fear-and-loathing response to the impending holidays.  But who remembers the knuckles bruised while assembling toys and bicycles at 3:00 a.m. while surrounded by shrieks of joy just hours later?

That’s just Christmas on the domestic front.  For those with responsibilities to an institutional Christmas, there are added dimensions – of preparation, of annoyance, and of joy.

Having worked in historic house museums ever since leaving graduate school, I have faced my share of rooms, halls, and staircases that need a little Christmas.  Different houses, different time periods, various degrees of historic documentation and accuracy.  When the Indianapolis Museum of Art decided to cease using the former Lilly residence as its decorative arts galleries and interpret Oldfields as a residence of the American country place era, there were implications for what would happen at Christmas.  For years, museum volunteers, many associated with local garden clubs, collaborated in an extensive effort to decorate the house using many different kinds of materials – live, dried, and artificial.  These were beautiful decorations, created with much talent and effort.  With the house’s rooms serving as a group of galleries with different contents and interpretive themes, their overall concept did not have to be integrated.  When interpreted as a residence, it made sense to make Christmas decorations at Oldfields relate in some way to the presentation of the property as a country place-era residence.

Oldfields’ architectural rhythms guide the placement of decorations.

But how to do that?  The Lillys, prominent as they were in the community, had left almost nothing in the way of personal documentation or ephemera to describe day-to-day life at Oldfields – no letters, bills, inventories, or snapshot albums.   The scant anecdotal evidence suggests that the Lillys’ Oldfields was never lavishly decorated for the holidays, nor was it the center of a whirl of entertainments.  At this point enters the tension between historical accuracy and emotional impact.  Personal experience demonstrated that perfect historical accuracy in Christmas decoration, if visually sparse, leaves many people unsatisfied.  Unsatisfied visitors are unlikely to return.  We settled on using the popular periodicals of our interpretive time period – focusing on the 1930s and ‘40s – to provide inspiration for the decorations.  In this way, the decorations retain a relationship to our interpretive period but are not limited to inferences about what the Lilly family may have done.  Specific historical documentation could have been a severely limiting factor, but a change in focus offered latitude to explore many possibilities – and to provide a more satisfying experience.

An early 20th-century Texas Christmas tree – proof that historical accuracy won’t always yield satisfying results.

The magazines from which we draw ideas – House Beautiful, Arts and Decoration, and House and Garden, for example – suggest that Christmas decorations in the first half of the twentieth century were sometimes self-consciously traditional in character, and sometimes deliberately modern or unusual.  Having some of both helps enliven a visit to Oldfields.  Trees, wreaths, garlands, and bows were never out of fashion; the architectural rhythms of historically styled interiors like Oldfields’ provide the perfect setting for them.  Curiosities like upside-down trees or suspended transparent bowls overflowing with ornaments can be just unusual enough to signal that one is looking at another era’s notion of holiday décor.

An upside-down Christmas tree was a big visitor favorite.

Tulle garlands stuffed with ornaments added a sculptural quality to decorations in the library.

We offer Christmas at Oldfields as a way to imagine the holidays in the decades just prior to the middle of the last century.  We hope that if offers delight, inspiration, respite, or, for anyone who finds more enjoyment in looking at decorations than in hanging them, an opportunity to see a decorated  house without having to go into the attic.

Sounds comforting, doesn’t it?  Pleasant, soft, warm, intimate, relaxing, playful…   We’d like to use the blog for a bit of pillow talk.  Care to join us?  Come on, we’ll keep your secrets!

Doris Day and Rock Hudson – perhaps the most glamorous of mid-century pillow talkers.

Well not exactly pillow talk, you know, that is, not talk over a pillow or in the midst of pillows or under the pillows.  Rather, let’s talk about pillows, which pillows, how many pillows, what color of pillows…  It’s about pillows in the Miller House conversation pit, and what to do about changing them for the season as winter relents.

The interiors of the Miller House have a lot of eye-catching elements, to be sure, but the biggest crowd pleaser has got to be the conversation pit, a 15-foot-square, 2 ½ -foot-deep exercise in below-floor-level decorative decadence.  It’s been touted as the very first conversation pit, but that’s a pretty difficult statement to verify.  There are certainly plenty of antecedents, as well as related interior features in houses of the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Houses of the Victorian and Arts and Crafts eras had inglenooks and similar areas of built-in seating.  And it’s not hard to find mid-century houses that featured floor level changes that also incorporated seating.  Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames created such designs for the Case Study Houses in California in the 1940s.  Whether the Miller House conversation pit is indeed the first is something of an exercise in architectural hair-splitting, but if anyone knows of an earlier pit of the same completely enclosed configuration, we’d love to hear about it.

Interior, Case Study House #9.

The “pit” in the Case Study House above shapes the spatial flow of the interior – down to the embrace of the fireplace and outward at the same level to the landscape beyond.   With interior designer Alexander Girard in the mix at the Miller House, the pit concept does something different.  Functionally, it achieves the goal of providing significant seating without the clusters of furniture that Saarinen so detested.  Being below the floor level, it provided nothing to impede the view to the west through the allée of honey locust trees.  By enclosing the pit on all four sides, with entry by means of a short flight of seemingly-floating padouk wood steps, Girard made the pit into a huge, discrete decorative object that balances the 50-foot storage wall and the marble-topped dining table.  It shouts for the viewer’s attention, rewards it with a lush display of textiles, and offers the novelty of looking down to something other than the floor.

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People who live in glass houses shouldn’t ….you know the rest.  But perhaps the old adage could be just as meaningful if slightly rewritten: people who live glass houses need good curtain systems.  Modernist residences often incorporated prodigious quantities of glass, which meant that their designers had to think about how treat all those windows.

When thinking about glass houses, the first that leaps to mind of course is Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut – a shimmering glass pavilion without curtains or window coverings of any kind – a bold statement indeed.  But having no curtains did not mean that Johnson wished always to live in a fishbowl.  For those moments when even he desired privacy, Johnson retreated to the Brick House, a nearly windowless structure just steps away.

The more ordinary homes built for those of us with less-than-Johnsonian daring must accommodate our desire to have both light and views, as well as enclosure and privacy, depending on the hour of the day or whether one wishes to move about the house en déshabillé.  The Miller House was planned as a fully functioning family home, making privacy and control of light levels at the windows components of the program that architect Eero Saarinen had to accommodate.  One of the most memorable experiences that the house provides is impact of the views of the landscape and gardens through broad expanses of ceiling-height windows.

These, as well as smaller windows all required curtains.  In addition, two interior spaces, the den and the dining room, could be closed off from the main living area with curtains.

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Every so often, it’s a good idea to count your blessings. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and others have given me this advice over the years – sometimes at moments when it’s the last thing I’ve wanted to do. That’s the point, after all – to slow down just enough to clear your head and get a different and – if the exercise is successful – more positive perspective.

Miller House & Garden.

The Miller House and Garden is a preservation project that has many blessings to count. I was reminded of this not long ago when I received a call from a gentleman in North Carolina who had become involved in efforts to preserve Richard Neutra’s Kronish House in Beverly Hills, California. Richard Neutra’s work is a defining element of California modernism – think of Julius Schulman’s photos of his Kauffman house in Palm Springs.  Unfortunately, the Kronish house is considered extremely vulnerable in Beverly Hills’ high-value real estate market and preservation-averse regulatory environment.

For the moment, it seems that the house has been granted a brief reprieve from demolition, which will allow Dion Neutra, Richard’s son, and others interested in the property to pursue a means to acquire the property and put it to a sympathetic use.  It will be a tremendous challenge, no doubt, but preservation is always a challenge, and each project presents its challenges in a unique fashion.

Richard Neutra's Kronish House (photo courtesy of Marc Angeles / Unlimited Style / August 1, 2011).

The Miller House and Garden project, in comparison with many others, almost seems to have had a charmed existence from the start.  While talking about the Kronish house with Dion Neutra, I became even more aware of the extraordinary alignment of stars that helped us along.

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