When you look at the pages of “House Beautiful” or “Architectural Digest”, the interiors of rich people’s houses are beautiful. They always seem to have tables around, covered with junk (“objets de’art”)-stuff like African primitive sculptures, classical busts, knicknacks of all kinds.
Is this a universal thing with the rich?
The richest people I know live in a house that cost over $6 million to build. Their house looks exactly like the ones in Architectural Digest. Including, of course, African primitive sculptures.
Yes. All rich people decorate in exactly the same manner. In fact, the purpose of the January issue of one of those magazines is to give them the blueprint for how to decorate their homes in the new year. In other news, all rich people dress alike.
A friend of the family had their house featured in one of those magazines many years ago.
The photographers had more furniture brought in. You had trouble moving around it all; evidently the camera makes things look far further apart than they really are, so a normal room has too much empty space to look good for the magazines.
I think those magazines are more a reflection of the current style of interior designers, rather than the style of the homeowners who might simply pay someone to fill up their rooms/house.
Some more modern homes have almost no nick-knacks and look sleek and rather empty (more my personal style), with perhaps just great views of ocean or mountain or woods in the background panorama.
I personally hate those overly full rooms, with tons of different kinds of pillows on every damned seat and sofa; dozens of different prints that don’t match; multiple styles of side tables and lamps - at some point, it doesn’t look like a room anymore, it looks like the showroom at the Ashley Furniture store with just everything dumped in there.
The only thing I have noticed when visiting homes of the super rich (and yes, I have visited a few) is they do indeed find room to showcase whatever collection(s) they might have. If they are into paintings, you will find walls covered with them; if they are into African sculpture, you will find pieces throughout the house. But this is no different that going to any house and down to the den to see perhaps the homeowner has gone overboard with stuff from his favorite team; painted in team colors, jerseys hanging on the wall, team logo everywhere, etc.
One “design tip” that I found great when living in Germany was the idea of having a central location in the room for a vase of flowers. So, for the price of a fresh bouquet of flowers each week, you could walk into anyone’s castle, house, apartment or studio and the first thing you saw was a cool vase with a splash of color. No matter how rich and grand your living situation, or how poor and drab that apartment, that one vase with fresh flowers caught your eye. A great equalizer in design.
My cousin’s house was once featured in one of those magazines. Except that it didn’t feature weird objets d’art and the like. They had antique furniture that matched the period of the house, and plants scattered around. They were Upper Middle Class, rather than rich, but I can attest that their home was remarkably normal and liveable. Nothing special was needed for the photo shoots except to make sure everything was neat and cleam. And they certainly didn’t photograph the rec room, where most of the actual living went on.
Hetty Green probably did not.
Many weathy folks entertain a lot and they want to show off the house, often as a reflection of their success or their interests. Sometimes the rooms are that way after interior decoraters stage them so. Sometimes they’re filled with items the homeowners have collected in their world travels.
Indeed I do.
Yep, similar to Cribs, the image is manipulated. Furniture is replaced/added/removed, personal knicknacks are typically not to be seen, and the place is professionally cleaned within an inch of its life.
Alternatively, some people compartmentalize. One branch of our family maintain picture-perfect beautifully decorated homes… until you get to their family rooms, where they spend 90% of their non-sleeping time.
Depends, if their money is old enough the antiques and objects d’art aren’t so much collected as inherited. I have an old money friend who loves to joke about being at the mercy of their ancestors hideous taste.
I went to a wedding of a very rich doctor’s son. The house had several living rooms…and one large open room that was set up like four individual living rooms in one space. Arts, high-end chotskies everywheeeereeeee.
My parents had to host various events for business. They have two gorgeous “public” rooms filled with beautiful furniture, rugs, artwork and objets. Because my mother loves arts and crafts fairs, most of the objets are not high-end gallery works, but pieces where she personally met the artist (and will be more than happy to share his or her story). She’s currently taking an Asian art class, and on Thanksgiving she went around the living room explaining the significance of the artwork and objets.
OTOH, the rest of their house looks like any typical well-lived-in suburban home.
Depends on what you consider to be “rich”.
I used to work for the marketing communications department for a high end building products company. We’d go into beautiful homes to take pictures of our products, and yes, many were decorated like you’d see (we’d select for that, we didn’t have the funds to bring in our own furniture or decorators).
But its is far from universal. I’ve been in the homes of wealthy people where you wouldn’t know they were wealthy - and in the homes of people who don’t have two dimes to rub together that are beautiful and covered with treasures (artist often trade art and have a great eye for “finds”- so some of the nicest decorated homes are owned by starving artists).
We had to put away our objets d’art when the baby started walking.
According to my photographer friend who has photographed many people for magazines shoots which have appeared in spread, often times the furniture, books and even on occasion clothes and jewellery is brought in for background. What exactly is selected to be shown depended on what the theme was supposed to be.
You want to project a wealthy, successful, well travelled, urbane and cultured individual in pictures, well you take photograph which put that forward. Showing “african primitive sculptures” etc does that.
The charcoal drawing of you that your daughter drew when she was 13 and which has pride of place in your study is ignored or removed, unless they want to go down that route.
The point is; you see those things because you were supposed to.
We have a vacation home in St. Croix that was in AD years ago. It’s a nice place, but open, clean, and simple, without a lot of knick knacks. We kept it as we bought it.
Our house here is crammed with not only my trinkets acquired over 30 years of travel, but my mom’s as well, since I can’t bring myself to box it all and store it. I don’t NEED a camel saddle by the fireplace, but there it is…
I had to do the same when we bought the leopard.
My experience as well.
Also, I’ve seen homes of 15-20K sq ft with only about 2500 sq ft actually being used daily. Go into the huge entryway, with a 3 story high (and vaulted) ceiling, make your way past the amazingly huge table in the dining area, go on thru the plush den with furniture that costs more than my car, go down that one hall, open the door into a regular, busy, and even unkempt daily living area. That’s what I’ve seen.