Movie Real Estate: House & Garden, The Movie part II

I know I’ve written about this in a prior post, but the topic of Nancy Meyers films just never gets old for me.

I STILL haven’t seen this movie, have you? There’s been so much dishing of the movie already I know I’m already behind in adding my humble thoughts so I thought I’d share some links to various excellent posts and articles around the web.

Over at The Remodelista (a new favorite hangout of mine), they have a couple of excellent “Steal this look” posts. On the kitchen and the garden (both below).

Jane's Living Room

Jane’s Living Room:

• Chairs in foreground: 1st Dibs, Calvin Fabrics
• Coffee table: Lucca Antiques
• Chair and ottoman: George Smith
• French seltzer lamp: Joseph Stannard Antiques
• Chinese ceramic lamp: Berkshire Home & Antiques
• Side table: Treillage Antiques
• Iron vessel holding firewood: Dessin Fournir
• 19th century settee: Cupboards & Roses Antiques
• Mantle Art (Mitchell Johnson): Film Art LA
• Matchsticks: American Screen & Window Coverings
• Pillow fabrics: Holland & Sherry, Donghia, C&C Milano, Nobilis
• Wicker baskets: Hudson Super Market

The french-inspired kitchen, very much like the one in the Julia-Julia movie.

Meyers movies are like traveling to Europe (on a $10 budget). You always get the consistency of the First World experience, a color pallette that is unique to that area of the world, specically France in the summer, and leave wanting to bring home a vase you don’t need. Someone, tell me I’m wrong.

Now a staple of Meyer's films, the french sink.

These sinks are doing me in. Every time I see one, I want one – in my stocking.

A perfectly equipped kitchen, for the pastry hobbiest.

I mean, Martha has one…why shouldn’t Jane?

The Norman Rockwell feeling made current.

There are many things in this set that one can get, dare I say…at Ikea. I don’t think that it has to be local pottery on the table and quite frankly, those hanging pots in the back could stand some blackness to them. While the sets are “aspirational” they shouldn’t be so posed. If Jane is supposed to be able to cook, than those pots should be seasoned…dammit. I paid $10 for this escape from my life! But if you must stretch my ability to disbelieve…

Jane’s Dining Room & Kitchen:

• Custom chairs: designed by Rubino, produced by Berkshire Home & Antiques
• Oval table: Lucca Antiques
• Cushion fabric: Donghia
• Island-antique iron table: Robert Ogden, custom marble top
• Dinnerware: Astier de Villate
• Hanging fixtures: Paul Ferrante
• Period ceramics & porcelain artichokes: Carole Stupell
• Small appliances & cookware: Le Creuset, All-Clad, Cuisinart, Kitchen Aid

As Martha Stewart, one of the first Queens of Aspiration, would have left it.

The still life of the Average American Housewife, with a BIG divorce settlement.

I can see the want ad now...single, divorced woman of ...49, seeks able-bodied male to stack wood (in California).

Now THIS photo made me laugh, truly. The wood pile, stacked so neatly-I can totally see Jane…place an order for that.

Maybe Jane's people know Martha's people.

Saving a seat for you,

Christine

Movie Real Estate: House & Garden, The Movie

See Jane juggle. See Jane tumble, into bed…and be the object of two men while in her 50s. Meyers creates the ultimate fantasy movies for women. Jane is a mom, girlfriend, garden hobbiest, mistress, gal pal, hostess with the mostess, owner of a thriving bakery, and therapy patient. Most of us can relate, mostly. Her balancing act reflects what most of us deal with: many roles. But Hollywood casts a sheen of sugar coating over all of it, and it’s like looking at a glistening sugared fruit bowl. You want to pick at it, even steal from it, but you know hers is a life of unattainable surrounding beauty that is just meant to look at.

The token photograph showing several of the luxury materials in Jane's environment.

Let’s start with the environment of perfectly chosen materials which create an aire of casual serenity, where barely a square inch of floor is ungraced with sisal, no window untreated with glazed linen. In the comfort of her rambling, terra-cotta-shingled ranch, Jane bathes in a claw-foot tub (which we love) and dines atop gray-veined Carrara marble. You want for her to find love, if only to have someone to admire it all with her. You hanker for one of her homemade chocolate croissants, afterall we believe she can actually make them. But something about Nancy Meyers films, I just wish I was holding a gift-registry scanner.

But Hollywood is Hollywood because they “do aspiration” so well.

Jane actually lives in the fictional space of It’s Complicated, the film starring Meryl Streep and directed by Nancy Meyers. Meyers’s movies (Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday) have earned her a cult following among the design-porn set; the Hamptons beach house from 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give was a sensation—it even inspired a headboard collection for Williams-Sonoma Home. But It’s Complicated sashays into theaters at a very different time. Before Home Depot closed its tony Expo Design Center, before “HGTV” became a slur for compulsive nest-feathering, Meyers’s Hamptons set was termed “aspirational.” Now a quarter of mortgaged American homes are underwater, and movie montages about cashmere sheets are an irksome reminder of how we can’t afford them.  This is our generation’s Hollywood glamour.

Gone are the glossy titans House & Garden, Vogue Living, Domino, Metropolitan Home, Southern Accents, and Cottage Living (for which I wanted to light a candle), all boarded up alongside the housing market. In fact, It’s Complicated appears in December’s Traditional Home, where a “real” home might once have been.

What has irked me as elitist and exclusionary though, attracts me as well and has turned into an asset, and not just for Meyers. A Single Man is like so many of director-designer Tom Ford’s glossy ad campaigns: it may be one page deep, but you almost don’t notice amid all the brooding, the sexual tension, and the va-va-voom ’60s ambience. Nine’s fizzy Fellini redux is Chanel No. 5, all-Marilyn musk, and Harlow ostrich feathers. Are these great movies? Unfortunately not. They are design porn. Their over-the-top tableaux distract the heck out of me (as opposed to serving narrative purpose, in the way MadMen’s visual experience leaves shadows for the viewers to bring meaning in the absence of a chatty script; true hollywood glamour). But it almost doesn’t matter. Escapism is all too enticing right now, and no one takes you out of your own head like Hollywood—witness the $10 billion record-breaking box office for 2009. For proof you can really take to the bank, look (yes, look) at Avatar. Even its most ardent fans dismiss the plot and writing—the bad guys are on the hunt for a rare ore called unobtainium. Wow. I would have loved to be in that pitch session. Yet this is a world built on flowing, gossamer, almost tactile beauty. Director James Cameron takes even the most ordinary hunk of blue rock (the über-literal unobtainium) and spotlights it in the manner of Ming porcelain.

It’s amazing what a little light can do. The destruction of the world never looked so good. When there’s less magic and Ming in our own lives, marveling at fantasy is not altogether unpleasant. It’s unfortunate though that we can only use our eyes and not our brains when watching though.

Saving a seat for you,

Christine

Movie Real Estate: The Holiday

Once again, Production designer Jon Hutman teams with Nancy Meyers to capture the lived-in feel her sets are known for. From researching the cottage in the film, which just about every friend I have fell in love with, I found out it was actually a fake.

{Insert diappointed sigh here.}

Once again, we were dazzled by the deep blue eyes and fake abs of the movie set versus the real thing – but that is a compliment to those who really pay attention to the details. Apparently the whole house was a fiberglass set built in a field in Shere (or Sheire or Shire), a village on the river Tillngbourn in Surrey, England. The interior of the house was actually constructed on a sound stage in Los Angeles.

What makes this film set special are the details: Ticking runners up the stairs, chintz fabrics mixed with plush velvet, and a tasteful, eclectic, beautiful incorporation of found objects. It is believable that Kate Winslet’s character acquired those pieces over time on what a copy writer might make (had she inherited the house from a dying relative), and that she didn’t just show up on set to read her lines.

One thing I home in on when watching a film is: on learning the career of the character, can they afford the home they are in given what their income is supposed to be? For me, it is the answer to this question that illustrates the authenticity of the set. If they are a struggling bookshop owner in a West End brownstone – I am not able to suspend my disbelief.

Here, the interior of the home looks affordable for the career the character has. The actual house is probably outside of her reach…a home with land outside of London – not bloody likely – but a shabby tea kettle, red wooden beads on the fireplace, books, comfy chairs…yes, she can afford that.

Rosehill Cottage, complete with cozy, sagging roof.

It seems hoardes of women (and men) didn’t know it was a fake, and called the town’s phone number asking about the house. The film caused such a to-do in the little village, they posted information for individuals wishing to visit the area and walk in Iris’s & Amanda’s footsteps on their website. (Gotta love something that creates surprise income for someone.)

The cottage in the movie appears to be patterned after this cottage in Cotswold, 95 miles, from Surrey, for about $1000, you too can live the fantasy.

Some interior shots courtesy of a German site I can’t understand…I’m partial to the cottage over the California house…

Nostalgic Elegance: Aristocratic plush with faded floral patterns

 

Proof positive that long bath tubs are appreciated.

Saving a seat for you,

Christine