My Mother's Living Room

Abstract

E ach of fifteen houses she has occupied in last twenty years was decorated in collaboration with her favorite designer. This renowned California personality not only channels and shapes her unconventional vision but also functions as her confidant, an architectural alter ego with whom she likes to think that she performs an activity as creative...as singing or acting. In course of what she describes as a kind of artistic performance, they work in tandem to implement crazy ideas, push limits, and take risks, thus avoiding dreary monotony of suburban split-levels and ranch houses whose unadventurous styles of interior decoration she repudiates as safe. She does not like to feel rooted in one place-she likes change, which she requires to continually alter the way I relate to world, and hence nomadic existence of a woman who migrates from one house to next, lavishly redecorating each structure in which she resides until she strikes her tents like a Bedouin and moves on to next camp. Although many of her residences have been so monumental that they often looked as if they had been handed down from generation to generation through centuries, they in fact have a frivolously brief life expectancy and stand only a small chance of being occupied for longer than sixteen months. Before this period elapses, this frantic drifter inevitably wearies of her expensive new toy and seeks out another source of self-renewal, another environment in which she can recreate herself, experimenting with styles of decor much as other women experiment with shades of eye shadow. Not a trace of doom that hangs over her living room, of its builtin obsolescence, is apparent anywhere in its furnishings, which are frozen in time, existing in a state of absolute permanence like an eighteenth-century boudoir roped off in all of its rococo fragility from spectators at a museum, who must crane their necks past velvet barriers to see into corners of this Pompeii-like space. Even