The electrician showed up. He was a nice guy.

He’s worked in my building, in other apartments, so he knew what was what, and he was reassuringly calm about the whole thing, telling me not to worry, except about that mess by the phones, which he was careful not to step too near, treating it kind of the way you would a dead skunk in the front hall.

He was reassuring, except he kept using the frightening phrase, “that’s really gonna costya.” Of course. Now he wants me to make a list of the outlets I would like and which ones I would like to disappear (ie those boxes and the mysterious Electricity to Nowhere cords, so I did.

FRONT HALL

Get rid of one box outlet
Add 4-outlet where there is a 2 near kitchen door

KITCHEN

Get rid of 6-outlet thing attached to wall by microwave
Move outlets to behind stove and fridge
Make the two 2-outlets into 4-outlets, and lower down on wall

DINING ROOM

Get rid of box outlet
Make 2 into a 4

LR

Get rid of box under A/C
Make 2 into a 4

STUDY

Make two 2-outlets into 4s, and add one near the wall facing the garden

BR

Get rid of boxes
Two 2 s to be made into 4s

Once I made my list, it didn’t seem like so much.

Man Decor writes that style is subjective, and boy is this ever the truth. There is very little that everyone would agree upon when it comes to style and decor: I mean, just look at the popularity of plaid sofas. Or for that matter, look at how happily some men are in their bachelor pads. One of my great hopes for the Stylehound blog is to discuss these differences, and to try and determine if there is anything universal about what looks good—but the joy is in the process of discovery, not necessarily in the answer.

I’ve only been living in my current apartment for about six months, and it’s clear that I’ve got to do something about the paint color. Not to mention the radiator covers, the electrical outlets, the a/c or ceiling fan situation, and the fur accumulation (thanks to 30+ pounds of cats shedding all over everything). 

But I’m starting with the paint. The apartment now is white. Good old, boring, dreadfully dull white.

You know how for the past several years the popular colors—at least for amateur decorators like myself—have been rich reds and golden yellows? I love those colors, because they make me feel warm and happy and cared for.

But enough, already with warmth and happiness. I want something cool and modern, sleek and lively.  

So I’ve found myself a painter, who comes well-recommended and doesn’t charge so much that I won’t be able to afford the paint itself. And I’ve made my choices, after a good deal of agonizing—a pale, pale peach for the living room and, in a surprise last- minute switch, a turquoisy-blue for the front hall.  

When I stopped on the street at a dress sale recently (another advantage to living in hot, sweaty, smelly New York City is that there are frequently people selling fabulous little summer frocks, right there on the street) one of the women shopping claimed that her mother had been the first “personal shopper” and was the instigator of that particular profession. Well I don’t know about that, but she also said that turquoise is a color that looks great on anyone, as it complements any skin tone.  

I didn’t fall for it, even though I did pick up a great little brown, orange, and beige number. 

And in terms of wall color, I don’t know. Turquoise seems awfully risky. 

We’ll see how it turns out. 

I may not know a Queen Anne chair from a dentist’s chair, but I can tell if a room feels welcoming and happy—or if it feels as if someone has just died there.   

So, could we discuss for a minute the design of your typical police station? Talk about a place that feels as if someone has just died there. And, sadly, probably someone did die there, at some point. But even someone has died in a place, there’s no need to make the visitor feel that dropping dead then and there is the best alternative, which is how I felt upon walking into a police station the other night to report a stolen purse. 

Granted, a police station isn’t built for comfort, it’s built for speed. Oh, sorry, no, it isn’t built for speed either.  It’s built for the excruciatingly slow grinding of the wheels of justice, giving you plenty of time to saturate in the fluorescent lights, listening to the low hum of electricity, awaiting your fate, certain that any minute a rumpled detective will appear to take your mug shot and your prints. 

And that’s how you feel if you’re the crime victim when filing a complaint.  

So as I sat there with my stalwart friend who efficiently pulled out her cell and prepared to sit on hold with my credit card company, I had plenty of time to think about redecorating.  

Many decorators say you should start with the floor, but here I’d have to start with the lighting, because fluorescent lights just make everyone look terrible. Okay, maybe not someone striking and dark and gorgeous, like Barak Obama or Lila Downs. And fluorescent lights are excellent when used for tasks that require a steady hand and a clear eye—picking a lock, or dissecting a body for example. 

But for most uses, incandescent lighting helps everyone look better and feel, if not hopeful, at least a little cheerier. And that’s something you can really use in a police station, whether you’re victim or criminal. Even the cops would like it, I’m sure. 

Last week I went to a preview showing of a new movie, Susan Minot’s “Evening.” She’s the author whose name I was struggling to remember when talking to my sister recently. All I could come up with was that she’s part of that family of writers who all write different send ups of families—some that speak to each other and others that don’t, some that are successful and others that aren’t. And this Minot, Susan, is also known for writing a novel that entirely takes place during a particular sex act—a novel that doesn’t quite work, but sure is ambitious.

Anyway, I went to the film in part because I was so happy to have remembered the author’s name and partly because afterward there was a talk by Minot and Michael Cunningham, who wrote the screenplay adaptation. And I thought, great, this is why I live in NYC.

The movie, “Evening,” was fabulous. It features a dying mother and her flashbacks to being something of a bohemian artist amongst the WASPS in the early ‘50s. It was all a little too much the story of my own mother, and I pretty much wept through the whole thing, trying to sop up the tears with the one fragile little paper napkin I had in my bag. 

It was beautifully done, and terribly accurate. And by the way, everybody’s in it: Vanessa Redgrave, and Claire Danes, and Meryl Streep, and Toni Collette. You know. All those actors you love to watch.

So, what does this have to do with design? The house in the flashbacks of the movie was in Newport, Rhode Island—the Newport that is the summering spot of people who are richer than God. People who spend the summers reading fat novels, and having lawn parties to which they wear white dresses without worrying about grass stains, and who do a lot of, you know, sailing.

Thanks to the generosity of the Cushing family—that’s the Newport Cushing family—the movie producers were able use The Ledges, the Cushing’s “cottage” on the sea—it’s been in the Cushing family for the past 10,000 years, as Cunningham said. Built in the 1850s and perched on a cliff overlooking the blue Atlantic, it’s one of those picture-perfect houses that nobody can even buy. It’s that fabulous.

There’s a sweeping driveway that ends in a turn-around, a wide porch overlooking the ocean, a glassed-in porch between the outer porch and the living room, and then just one huge, polished, gracious room after another. Note in particular the colors of the rooms; they’re rich, thoughtful colors, evocative of the place and time of the movie. If you want to make your humbler abode appear richer, try painting the rooms in colors like these. 

And those paintings on the walls? Yep, they’re genuine reproductions of genuine John Singer Sargeants.

The movie, in other words, is worth the price of admission just to spend a few vicarious moments in those rooms. 

The whole movie was great—everything from the setting on. If you’ve ever seen someone die, or heard of someone who died, or who worried about death, you’ll be in tears for the good part of an hour an a half. 

So then, after mopping up the seat around me, I looked up to watch Cunningham and Minot (pronounced like “minnow”) come in…and waited…and waited… Finally they rushed down the aisle to the stage, breathless and giggly. “Sorry,” Minot tossed off. “We thought you might need some time to collect yourselves.” She laughed a golden laugh. There was, as Fitzgerald would have said, money in it.  

They told the story of the collaboration, which began, Minot said, at a wedding in Nairobi, when Jeff (Jack? Jason? Oh, I guess she means producer Jeff Sharpe) said to her, I loved your book “Evening,” has anything been done with it?” And she said, “Oh, ho ho—no, and now here we sit watching the movie, la-de-da.”

Cunningham was particularly full of himself. Kind of lounging back in his chair, tossing out bits of wisdom and trying to make funny little anecdotes at which nobody laughed. But then again, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist (for “The Hours,” also made into a movie) so maybe he’s allowed a boatload of arrogance.

The thing is, I did need time to collect myself, because it was such a searing and beautiful movie. And how could such unmitigated jerks have created such great art?

Welcome to Stylehound. 

If you’re thinking this blog will have something to do with style and not much to do with dogs, you’re right on the money. The thing is this: I love style, especially when it has to do with interiors.  

Put me in a room, any room at all, and I’m sure to have something to say about its style.  But while I have plenty of opinions about everything from the layout of rooms to the choice of wall color, I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to real design.  

I remain woefully disappointed in the style—if you can call it that—of my own home, and I’m constantly trying to find that one thing that will make it all magically fall into place—I’m lucky if I can just sit in the living room for an evening without consulting a decorating magazine. 

What is style anyway? Jackie Kennedy had style.  Or was that money?  Do you have to have more money than God to have style? 

So I figured I’d start this blog—everyone else seems to have one—and see if I can: 

• get a little help with this and

• even offer some design help to other schlumps who don’t know a valence from a Victorian from a Victrola. 

Because the one ray of hope I’ve got is that I know a few people who actually do have some design sense, and some knowledge about how to put things together.  People whose homes really look, well, you know, terrific.  I’ve already got promises from some of them that they’ll weigh in here and give us all some pointers, and maybe even tell us about things like design shows or new advances in color, or new styles of easy chairs.  It seems to be considerably easier to get people’s advice when you tell them they have a shot at being famous on a blog. 

So, welcome to Stylehound. That’s me.