Wednesday 27 May 2009

What's wrong in this picture?





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11 comments:

hello gorgeous said...

The furniture is up against the wall? There are columns? There are tapestry doohickeys hanging on the walls? There is a horse's ass facing the camera? The horse should be in front of the driver on the fireplace? Everything?

Rose C'est La Vie said...

Help, erm, er.. IS IT the Swatch watchstraps on the chimney breast? Is it the 'never have one of anything?' pairing of the table lamps?

An Aesthete's Lament said...

This is a trick question, isn't it? Okay, here goes (please let me be right, at least somewhere) ... (A) Nothing; (B) the column at right looks Photoshopped in, though it could just be the angle, which really looks odd to me; (C) could the cabriole-legged armchair bisected the by column really be that wide?; and/or (D) there's a drawer slightly ajar in the table in the foreground.

Pamela Terry and Edward said...

Ooh, I love questions like this.
Um...faux-painted columns??

mamacita said...

The flowers on the table are the wrong scale. Also the jumble of marble columns and arched doorways with heavy curtains and paneled doors. And I don't like the rugs.

But what do I know?

Rose Marie said...

There's no RED.

maison21 said...

aesthete nailed it- both on the photoshopping and the drawer ajar. i'll forgive the drawer, as it might be an antique that doesn't quite work correctly any longer...

everyone else has valid points too, and i'd like to add i find the fabric tossed over the table to the right of the fireplace is particularly offensive (i hesitate to call it a "table skirt", because that would imply intentional placement, and perhaps hemming it to the correct size if it was REALLY wanted there).

magnaverde said...

Well, I like the two-tone fabric on the walls, the substantial curtains & the scagliola columns, but the scale of the lamps & shades &the flowers seems off. Then again, lamps are always the first thing to date a room, and going by the overall colors & multiple patterns, I'd say this is a room that's 4O years old, so on the whole, I'd say it's held up pretty well. Then again, I'm not really that difficult to please.

An Aesthete's Lament said...

Magna, Is it 40 years old or a Robert Kime project?

magnaverde said...

Aesthete, either one is fine by me.

But your question reminds me of the time not long after I had moved out of a sleek Art Deco apartment building into the upper floor of an almost completely intact Victorian house, whose only flaw--as I saw it--was that its bathroom had recently been 'updated' with a dropped ceiling, the kind of plastic panels they used to use in mobile homes & brown level-loop carpeting on the floor. The other rooms were in decent shape & just needed paint (or to have their faded wallpaper reattached where it was coming loose) so I ignored those areas for a while & spent most of the first month yanking all the tacky new materials out of the bathroom, and creating an approximation of what I imagined the original 1890 room might have looked like if its simple materials had been allowed to age naturally for nearly a century like those in the other rooms. After I got the room back to the faded, forgoten feeling that existed in the rest of the house, I had a big open house for my pals & my co-workers in the engineering department at the Phone Company. It was a dark, rainy spring afternoon about like today, with all the lights on & all the curtains flapping in the breeze at the open windows, and the whole place full of the smells of wet grass & old wood & old rugs & old books & paste wax & my grandmother's vases full of flowers from the ancient peony bushes & the overgrown lilacs in the yard.

My pals knew what was what, but my innocent coworkers were all very tactful & circumspect in their comments, politely reassuring me that my new place it had LOTS of potential, except for one guy who approached me away from the group & said "This place needs a lot of work, but then you probably got a great deal, so you can't expect perfection in a place this old. The first thing I'd do, though, is fix up that bathroom, so if you need a hand with that let me know. I buy & rehab houses on the side, so I've got lots of experience with places like this. You'd be surprised what you can do with 'em."
All my efforts over the previous month became instantly worth it the moment I saw the look on his face when I said "Actually, I just finished that bathroom."

At any rate, I like that room up top. So what's the story, HBC?

none said...

The blue vase.