Dirty Nasty Decorators

Am I the only one that thought Fifty Shades of Grey was a new decor book? Instead it's cheesy romance style soft core with bondage and S & M that has taken over every best seller list (with mainly women readers).

Not my shade of gray, especially when the M in the S & M is always the woman. I read The Story of O when I was in my young impressionable twenties, and at first I laughed at how stupid the premise (and prose) was, because I was a young woman fortunate enough to live during the time the feminist movement was born. To me, no woman who had love and respect for herself would submit to bondage, spanking, and abuse as part of having sex. Sex was meant to be fun, not torture.

But I digress. My good old source, The New York Times published a thought provoking article about the shades of gray practiced by decorators and designers. I list a few from the article that I find hilarious:

• The two (decorators) were paid in cash delivered in Gucci bags for their work decorating the many homes of (the client)....when prosecuted for money laundering and warned by a federal agent that the client was a drug dealer, their lawyer said that, "We had an argument that they didn’t have to take the agent’s word for it that he was a drug dealer and that they believed (the client) had legitimate businesses. Of course, a guy who delivers cash in the middle of the night didn’t help their case.”  

• The decorator called to testify in the John Edwards case inspired this article.  The donation to Edwards is called Bunny Money, because the cash in question was provided by social icon Bunny Mellon. Mr. Huffman (the decorator) testified, “She said that we were awfully foolish with the ‘furniture business,’ ” referring to Ms. Mellon. “But we were having a wonderful time doing it.” 

• Mario Buatta, still feels guilty about designing a bedroom for the mistress of a man to match the bedroom he had already designed for the man and his wife. "I could never face the wife. I felt very icky.” 

• Mr. Buatta did turn down a job for a “pizza king,” who wanted the Prince of Chintz to design a kind of dungeon in an A-frame house on Long Island. As Mr. Buatta recalled: “I told him, ‘I don’t do this. I do English style.’ And he said, ‘What kind of a meatball are you?’ I heard later he’d been found dead in his car.”  

• “People hate sales tax,” said Noel Jeffrey, a gentlemanly Manhattan designer. Like most decorators, Mr. Jeffrey has had the occasional female client who will pay for things out of her own account rather than have the bills sent to her husband. 

• William T. Georgis, an architect who works mainly in the art world, said he never did a bondage room, but he does have a few panic rooms and gun rooms to his credit. Also shoe closets for “1,757 pairs of shoes,” he said. And vanity drawers to contain “350 tubes of lipstick,” and a round glass guest room for a voyeur. “He loved it!” said Mr. Georgis. 

• Decorators certainly see a lot — they can’t help it. “Decorators know where the safe is hidden,” said Celerie Kemble. “They know when someone is building a room under their house that might not show up in plans filed with the Department of Buildings. Or the hidden sex room. Think about ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.’ Someone had to design that room. And how many of those ‘wine cellars’ are really wine cellars?” People often choose their decorators for their discretion, she added. 

• The other Bunny weighs in:  Bunny Williams, the very traditional Manhattan decorator and chair of this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, said: “When you read this in the paper, and it’s ‘the decorator,’ I just get furious."

• Decorators going rogue, as it were, are hardly in the majority. But even some of the big names have had to turn down requests for, well, fudges. (VV here - Fudges????  Does fudge make fraud sound nicer?)

Go read it HERE.

This article is the real Things I'm Afraid To Tell You (the latest blogosphere chain letter going around).

Got any good shades of gray to add? Discuss.

One Thousand Shades of Gray the new decor book I think I will write

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