Emily Nedell Tuck

Last summer (2023), I decided to take an online “Fundamentals of Interior Design” class at Houston Community College, just to see where things might lead.

Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Forty years ago, I started out my academic career as an undeclared Interior Design major at The University of Texas, but due to some kind of accreditation snafu, the program morphed into “Interior Architecture,” where it remains today–everywhere in the US, in fact (Interior Design means something different in the UK), housed in Schools of Architecture. It seemed more like an architectural specialty, and I wasn’t even sure who hired Interior Architects. Couldn’t a licensed architect also do interior architecture, like, when he designed the outside of the building? From the presentation we went to, it also seemed dry, with the things I loved now trivialized by the new program director as mere “decoration,” rather than a vital part of our visual and material culture, and also an important source of pleasure for most ordinary people.

But it was what it was then, just as it still is today: “Interior Design” is not what people think it is, and it shares that in common with the Master’s in Library Science, the degree I currently possess. Interior Design today is architecture, space planning, building systems, public safety and codes, construction materials and designing environmentally with a small amount of what people think of when they hear “interior design.” In fact, it seemed when Interior Design went over into Architecture, things also philosophically (and aesthetically) changed. Textile design and art, all historically-inspired design, went out the window.  

I was still going to do it, though.

However, when I shared the change and my future plans in order to secure the necessary approvals to move from Liberal Arts / Undeclared to an Interior Architecture, my older-than-average father protested. “Architecture is a man’s world! Trust me, Emmy, you will never get ahead in that field! It’s not for you.” How about Interior Design? I was kinda going for that, well, at least initially . . . ” I hedged. “Oh forget it!” he said, exasperated and shocked at my naivete. “That is worse! Interior design is a gay man’s world, and you will never get ahead there, either!”

“It’s not for you” was among my parents’ favorite expressions when the answer was no, but they couldn’t explain to me why not in a way that I would ever agree with or accept. (“Can I have an electric guitar?” was another “It’s not for you.” Can I go to Camp Longhorn? Another “not for you.”) However the reader may feel about “Interior Design” or “Interior Architecture” as viable major for a promising AP / Honors student, it wasn’t completely impractical in my particular situation. I could draw remarkably well then, and having been raised on Dover books, dollhouses, Town & Country, Vanity Fair and Sotheby auction catalogs which I mined for inspiration for my dollhouse mansions, I already had an exceptional knowledge of art, architecture, historic interiors, pattern and antiques upon entering college at 17. I was handy with an exacto knife, wood stain and resin; I had drawers of min-wax stain, testor’s enamel paint, and 00 brushes, dollhouse electrical wire, beads, findings and tiny lamps. I made things, including miniature furniture to 1:12 scale. I was already very good at drafting. 

Apart from Dover books, my early art history education came also from checking out library books and copying the illustrations, or else studying the interiors to make furnishings for my period rooms (I made a Golden Dawn / masonic temple out of a wine crate, my favorite. The intricate floor tile pattern was copied from a mysterious painting by the Flemish painter, Jan van Eyck). Now, at the time I was pursuing ID at UT in the early 80s, my father acquired three high-end custom drapery stores which he had initially hoped to franchise, just as he had done with muffler shops in the 70s and transmission shops before that. But design trends, fabrics and fashion were definitely not his thing. Dad couldn’t tell a black from a brown sock. I don’t know why he ever got into draperies except to keep his close-to-my-age girlfriend entertained. During this time, I secretly hoped he was going to leave at least one those drapery stores to me, which was also partially spurring me on to pursue interior design; although thinking back, it was probably had more to do with the dollhouses.

At UT, I aced my two Architecture survey courses and “Furniture Appreciation.” I could tell you the likely provenance of any antique chair. 

That year, or shortly thereafter, he gave the three failing businesses to my eldest sister and her husband. “It wasn’t for me,” he said, referring to himself. He later explained that he gave the business to them because they both “studied Business” at UT, and they would know better how to run a drapery store than someone “like me,” his daughter who studied art–or interior design–whatever I was studying these days. But I was too young, inexperienced, and still in school. For my fashionable older sister and her talented husband (and his very creative, personable, very artistically-gifted retired father, who could man the store while they visited clients), it all worked out well, and it became a launching point for other, far more lucrative ventures in window treatments and home decor.

I changed my major to English Literature and Classical Languages, a perfect pairing. I had studied Latin throughout high school and continued with it in college, adding Ancient Greek to my repertoire. “Teaching is a good profession for a woman,” my father said approvingly. While he was not Catholic, he had often shared with me how he had benefitted from a Catholic education in high school, which he recalled favorably except for failing French three times. He respected and encouraged my passion for British literature, ancient philosophy, European history, Latin, Thomas Aquinas and Étienne Henri Gilson. We often shared books, like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. While I studied English, I still loved art and design, which to me was deeply rooted in spirituality. I still appreciate Augustus Pugin, William Morris and John Ruskin; even German idealist and Lutheran theologian Rudolph Otto, who wrote about architecture and its connection to the sacred in The Idea of the Holy. 

By the end of the 1980s, in addition to the drapery business becoming a kind of albatross around my father’s neck, my mother’s once thriving advertising agency, the only one in greater Houston, which had recently moved into the iconic deco Transco Tower, closed due to Houston’s oil crash (1986-1988). This is also when most of Houston’s landmark establishments closed. Her original Alphonse Mucha lithograph (I loved that piece!) and other art pieces were sold at auction, just as they had been acquired.

Dad moved out of the house to be with his close-to-my-age girlfriend. Only a short time after that, and after my mother was finally convinced that my father wasn’t coming back, she went from “clinically depressed” to “terminally ill,” perhaps from the stress of her loss. In the meantime, over and over, my father shared with me that he didn’t feel guilty. He believed that he had only a short time left on this earth with a heart that was failing, and being married to my mother was not good for his heart. Wasn’t he was entitled to happiness before he died? I didn’t take sides or judge, but I also couldn’t very well afford to. For most of the late 80s and early 90s, I was away at school anyway, busy with my studies, and fairly insulated from the calamitous changes that were happening back home. By the time I graduated from college, or maybe it was graduate school–it all runs together in my mind at this point, like looking though a keyhole–there was nothing left of home.

No art, no rugs, no antiques, no home at all to return to, not even a couch to sleep on. My drawing pads, my paintings, my journals from living with a host family in England at 16 and traveling through India at 17, my dollhouses and room boxes–my books! and I had some rare ones, too, at least OP, from Samuel Weiser’s in New York–and many handwritten letters from Immanuel Velikovsky to my best friend’s mother–everything was gone, except for a very thick file of photos of smooth fox terriers, other people’s dogs, which my father had kept locked in a mahogany Louis XVI style writing desk (my mother had bought the desk) to study bloodlines and plan potential matches. All I had were dog pictures, and they weren’t even necessarily our dogs.

After the death of my mother–on that morning, I was interviewing for a once-in-a-lifetime tenure-track faculty Librarian / Cataloger position at Bryn Mawr College (my Latin & Greek were pluses)–not sure why they didn’t wait until after my interview to tell me, but I suppose back then communicating with a traveling person was not easy–I flew directly home from Philadelphia and made a small pile of things I wanted from the house, my stuff and photos, nothing of any monetary value; all of my things were discarded anyway. Everyone was too busy with their adult lives to be bothered sending me my things. Being the youngest, 23, I didn’t own a house, or anything, and had no money of my own, having just graduated with my MLIS with an emphasis in Cataloging and Rare Books and Manuscripts (I thought it an excellent use for my Latin) and Technical Services from the University of Wisconsin. 

Now, my plan all along had been to get an academic library job and then continue to pursue my education wherever I ended up, so I would have a way of supporting myself through a doctorate. This strategy is called using the MLIS as a “hopper” degree, that is, to get the academic degree one really wants. Los of academic librarians do this, because universities often offer employees free tuition. Although just as many people, probably more, get a master’s or doctorate in a subject area, find they are unemployable, and then go back to get an MLIS for stable employment. To able to teach, or to be competitive as an academic librarian in the ever tightening job market, I would need a doctorate, or at least another master’s in a subject discipline. But a recession was on in 1990/1, the year of my graduation, and no one was hiring librarians. Moreover, that year, Columbia University shut down its School of Library Services, the oldest in the country, with a very distinguished Rare Book School, with the President justifying his actions by asserting in a public letter that library science was not a theoretical discipline worthy of being housed at a competitive research institution like Columbia University. Thirty or more library schools at top universities closed from 1990-2, including the one at the University of Chicago. Others became iSchools, emphasizing computing, search and information management in addition to traditional librarianship, a change that had already been underway when I got my degree.

Especially with the downgrading of the MLS from an academic to some kind of vocational or technical degree, competitive universities, those with graduate programs and/or special collections, only wanted librarians who already possessed a second subject MA for entry-level employment. One cannot very well manage academic library collections, provide bibliographic instruction, assist with research, or command the respect of the faculty without subject expertise. Because of my background in Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS), history and English literature, proficiency in Latin (especially Medieval Latin)–but lack of a second master’s–I concentrated my efforts on the independent libraries: the Morgan Library (everyone there had a PhD, I was told), the Newberry, the Huntington, the Rosenbach, the American Antiquarian Society . . . a small library at St. Olaf’s College devoted to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard . . . seminaries, Graham Arader, various auction houses, and the Library of Congress. 

The New York Historical Society invited me for an interview and instructed me to buy a round trip ticket to New York, but they went on a hiring freeze. Since I wasn’t going to be reimbursed for the ticket, I went to New York anyway, staying for free in a tiny interior service room of a Loews hotel arranged by my father through a family connection. I went to one of my favorite places, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where I knew that Madeleine L’Engle (Wrinkle in Time) had been a librarian. She was only a volunteer librarian, it turned out. Bruce J. Ramer, a famous New York antiquarian dealer, had offered me a position many weeks before when he came through Madison, sitting in a window seat in Amy’s bar, but as a condition of employment, Ramer wanted me to right away fly to Tokyo with him to an international antiquarian book show. I didn’t know what I might be getting myself into with him, and he had blown smoke in my face from a cigar, so I declined. In the late 80s and early 90s, everyone referenced and studied his exquisite catalogs. Maybe I should look him up while in NY? I thought about it. Desperation was sinking in. 

Weeks after a phone interview, the Center for Bibliographic Studies in Riverside, CA offered me a rare book Cataloger position, which would have been fantastic, but by then–weeks had gone by since that interview–I was moving to St. Paul for a job with a New Age / Occult publishing company who was interested in my Latin, Greek and tiny bit of Hebrew for editing books on kabbala and ceremonial magick (the “k” means that it is real magic, not slight of hand) for mass market/trade publication. The owners, who were Wiccans, were impressed with my knowledge of hermeticism and the occult. I was soon promoted to “Astrology Editor,” with astrological Sun and Moon sign books being the company’s bread and butter. My face appeared in a blurb in Publisher’s Weekly: “Emily Nedell, Astrology Editor.” I learned a great deal from that experience, more than I cared to know, but mainly that I couldn’t live very will on 18K in St. Paul. I supplemented my income from the publishing company by working at Goodwill. But it was all beginning to wear on me, the long hours, the cold, the poverty wages, and in all honestly, the extent to which the crowd I ran with really believed they could simply bend the world to their will despite what I would consider to be pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. 

My  boyfriend, a fellow editor at the company–also a celebrated author of ceremonial magic(k) books who studied music and philosophy at UCLA (and had trained to become a cantor, even written a thesis on ancient Jewish rituals of the high priests)–would dress up in robes, perform magic rites for our group (he did Wiccan ceremonies, too) and sing in the most amazing voice. I can still hear it, his voice had such a unique timbre. He would also play a variety of instruments–synthesizer, organ, theremin. He was very talented, a kind of performance artist and motivational speaker who really belonged back in LA. He could also do slight of hand magic on a professional level (was a lifetime member of an exclusive magician’s club in LA called the Magic Castle). On a first date, there was a heavy glass ashtray at our table which he made disappear by tossing it into the air. Poof! He knew all of the best entertainment spots and techno clubs. A few months into the relationship, however, he became furious with me for inadvertently setting an empty Jack in the Box drink cup down on a “consecrated altar.” To me, this altar looked like a black box or big speaker against the wall between two columns in his apartment. It was always there, just part of the furniture. Nothing was ever going on with it, not that I saw anyway. He was rattled by the cup, and there was nothing I could do to make things better. I was waiting for him to say, “Just kidding! Gotcha! Ha ha!” The cup was a turning point in our relationship. Once I realized that to him this wasn’t just a creative outlet, a ceremonial show, but something he really believed in–a side which he had concealed from me up until that point–I did not want to go out with him anymore. We had incompatible world views.  

I put in my year with the New Age/Occult publishing company, but I had to somehow get out of there, go back to school and get that second MA to get my career and life back on track. I did a deal with my father, who hated the idea of the magician boyfriend, by signing away claim to title to some property owned by my mother, a horse farm in Richmond Rosenberg (suburb of Houston), so he could sell the land to get money for a new business venture. I did not know I was actually entitled to anything, since no one told me I was. I was happy to have my education paid for and to escape that awful place. Seemed a good trade, and all I had to do was sign a bunch of papers renouncing claim to my mother’s estate.

I spent most of the remainder of the 90’s pursuing the second MA, as pathetic as this might sound. For two years, the two years my father paid for, I got stuck in a program at IU Bloomington which in 1992 was DOA. No faculty to teach graduate-level courses in Medieval and Early Modern European History (IU had a famous program) due to an early retirement incentive package intended to eliminate the tenured faculty. This, combined with a maternity leave and a one-year Sabbatical in Italy by two professors, meant there was no one there to teach graduate students in the year I arrived. I had gone to IU specifically, as I stated in my letter of intent, to study under Dr. Edward Grant, who went Emeritus in 1992. “You have come at a bad time,” the Chair, Ann Carmichael, said. “Things will get better.” I got my electives in Classics out of the way, as the Chair advised, and worked at a used and rare bookstore (not Caveat Emptor, but the other one) and a student job in the library fulfilling ILL requests to wait it out while forging connections with faculty in other departments across campus. Paul Vincent Spade in the Philosophy Dept, for example, was an inspiration to me. I had taken Philosophy of Language under Martinich at the University of Texas, so I was primed and pumped for a grad course in medieval logic and semantics, what Spade taught. Only the History Department would not let me take a class from Dr. Spade and count it toward my Master’s in History.

I didn’t understand the logic of that.

But gradually, over time, I could see that the interests of the remaining faculty in the History Department and mine were not in alignment. The Renaissance professor who returned from her year off in Italy was good, but she was a one trick pony. The few who remained specialized in women, gender, disease and something called “history of the body,” whereas I was focused on the life of the mind, scholasticism, literature, art, Thomism, and the influence of the Church on belief and culture. The past was a backdrop to understand the broad sweep of civilization, human intellectual and artistic achievement.

My best friends were seminary students (Who else studies Latin at the graduate level?). I lived in the library where I worked as student job, or at the used bookstore. I was like a monk, not by choice, either. I was an hour and half to the nearest city, “Indianapolis,” and IU didn’t have a well developed coffee house or bar culture like at UW, where people went out at night and socialized. I didn’t own a TV. I just read and wrote. But I always felt confident that there would be a place for me in the world, just as people believe in the concept of soulmates. There was a great job waiting for me at the end of all this. 

With the encouragement of a professor in Classics, which was my minor, I began working on a directed study/ thesis on the Contemptus Mundi tradition in Western thought and literature from Augustine through the Renaissance. “This is really you!” Ian Thomson said as he read my proposal. He had a Scottish accent from St. Andrews. Loved to play golf. Under his direction, I had spent hours in the library grappling with the Patralogia Latina, struggling to read poetic Latin written by Church Fathers. He was the one who put me on to Contemptus Mundi in the first place. But in many ways, yes, it really was me! It was a very useful framework later on, for teaching World Literature which I did for a few years. One really cannot understand Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet or Milton’s L’Allegro Il Penseroso or many works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods without the framework of Contemptus Mundi.

After a year or more, the History department hired a professor from the Toronto school, a beautiful pre-Raphaelite-looking woman, thin with long red hair, to fill the position Ed Grant had held–or no, actually, she was the maternity leave professor who returned; that was it, because I remember wondering how she could be so slender after having had a baby. She only wanted to do “Herstory,” as she put it, “divining women’s voices from the language of male denigration and misogyny.” Only, I didn’t want to set out to “subvert patriarchy” (aka, the Church) or attempt to “blur the distinction between the sacred and the profane.” I didn’t care about anorexic saints or lesbian nuns (nothing against lesbians or nuns. . . ). It was like oil and water between us. She didn’t do Latin, but Old French, which she insisted I learn so I could study “women’s voices.” “Herstory” was the very sort of thing which made me not want to pursue grad English, why I opted for History instead, which I believed was grounded in a more academically rigorous, evidence-based practice. I told her so in her graduate seminar, when she was having us accept at face value that all historians are biased and that history is just a form of storytelling. There is no escaping subjectivity, so we might as well embrace it! This was her justification for doing “Herstory.” I could take no more of this! I disagreed. Good scholarship is always objective, or strives to be. I mentioned what a wise philosophy professor told me:

“Objectivity is worth striving for, even if we may never know if it has been achieved. Just because a goal is not achievable does not mean it isn’t still worth striving for.”

Her insistence on calling the Church “patriarchy” was also cringeworthy to me, from a scholarly perspective. 

Eventually, I told her, and then the Chair, and then The Chronicle of Higher Education, that what she was doing was not History–but this all might not have bothered me so much, or come to that point, if after a year of hardly offering anything at all, the department would compromise just a little bit and let me count Paul Spade’s graduate philosophy courses toward my History degree, instead of saying, that isn’t History. So what he was in Philosophy. His specialty was the intellectual history of the high middle ages. Everyone in the medieval world knew him. The Department Chair, a woman, said she would only approve something interdisciplinary if it had to do with the study of women.

That was the last straw. Why would you allow interdisciplinary studies in History only for studying women? And isn’t that Gender Studies, not History? 

After the CHE rung up the Chair to confirm my allegations for their article, which was about bias in higher education against Christian students, the Department suggested I might be better off in Religious Studies. The dispute between the History Department and me was documented in First Things magazine after a professor at Notre Dame took note of it. I became a champion of Christianity. It was then referenced in a book on religious freedom in higher education, which I have on my shelf. Thing is, though, I never felt as if I were exercising my own religious freedom in any way; I was just trying to comprehend the beliefs and motives of those who lived in the past, especially people of influence who wrote in Latin, the language of educated people prior to 1800 and of the Latin Middle Ages. My own religious beliefs had nothing to do with it. Objectivity was the point I was making, not imposing my own religious views or modern cultural norms on the past.

Also to the point, was I wanted to make progress on my degree so I could leave, not spend a year learning French, or Old French, just so I could study women. 

Given that my electives had been Latin Paleography and more Latin, I applied to Classics (the dwindling department, which boasted two old Medievalists, was very glad to receive me), thinking it was the quickest path to a Master’s so I could leave with a degree and my dignity in tact. I would simply flip the major and minor. People do that all the time. I applied and was accepted into the program. But Classics didn’t have enough faculty left to support graduate studies, either, due to the same early retirement package. As I discovered, would take me years to get through taking only one or two grad-level classes a semester. At that point, I longed to attend a Catholic university, like “Catholic University,” where the faculty would not tell me I belonged in Religious Studies, or that my interest in Aquinas and intentionality was passe, or that I had to learn Old French because Latin wasn’t good enough to fulfill the language requirement for the history degree because women didn’t write in it.

No, I am sure they would never tell me that at Catholic University, or Notre Dame, or Fordham.

I applied and was accepted to CU, but couldn’t afford the cost of living in D.C. I went to D.C. to check it out, driving there from Indiana (Ohio seemed very nice!). In all honesty, I had wanted to go to a Catholic university in the first place. I thought that was where I belonged, where I would thrive, but my father vetoed it. The cost of the tiniest apartment was too much, and my father said he could not afford it. “Come home, Emmy, we will figure things out.” 

By then, too much time and resources had been squandered in pursuit of a second MA all so I could get an academic library job, so I could afford to pay for another degree, so I could either teach at the college level or become a curator of special collections.

It was like the old woman who swallowed a fly. 

What was left of my family back in Houston didn’t understand why I wasn’t advancing, why I kept changing my major, why I now wanted to change schools, why I was pursuing a second MA and not a doctorate, etc. “Just get a degree! Any degree!” my eldest sister screamed at me on the phone one day, baby crying in the background. I know from the outside, from Houston, the optics looked bad. None of them went to graduate school. Thing is, by then I had racked up a bunch of grad courses in History (A’s) and Classics (A’s) which wouldn’t transfer anywhere else, because grad courses never do from program to program. After the bachelor’s, there is no “transferring” credits. But it had become clear to me that the university wasn’t actually going to replace the faculty who retired. They were only hiring Adjuncts, and Adjuncts cannot teach the grad students. That’s the way it works.

It was also happening everywhere at public universities, as schools sought to expand their growing nursing, business and engineering programs at the expense of the humanities. It was all circling the drain. 

I got in my car with my two dogs and drove back home, or what was left of my former life in Houston from many years ago. I had wanted to bring my mission oak furniture and gothic church pew with me, but my car didn’t have a tow hitch or tow capacity, being four-cylinder. My heart felt happy, though, unburdened, especially as I rolled into Texarkana listening to the Indigo Girls with tall pine trees lining winding asphalt roads. By that time, Dad no longer lived in Houston, but in the nearby town of Brookshire, which is like a far out suburb with large parcels of ranch land; but he was always elsewhere that year, in Europe I think, just a disembodied voice, with a voicemail message which said in a terse monotone, “I am not available. Please leave a message.” If I ever did manage to make contact, he immediately put down the phone and made to speak to the my age girlfriend, stonewalling me. Maybe there was some guilt or shame on both our parts for being failures now. Long after he died, after I was married and had kids of my own, I learned what he had done to me, so he had some things to feel guilty about. Nevertheless, I had it better than most people in this life, so I have no right to complain about anything.

The year I returned to Houston was 1994, the same year as Reality Bites, a comedy filmed in Houston about a college valedictorian (Winona Ryder), trying to start a career in the real world of Houston. That was me. Except she had a family, where I really no longer did. Strangers I met out socially at art openings seemed to know of me. “You come from a good family,” I was told by a man who said he knew my sister and father. “What do you mean by that? What do you mean by ‘good’? In what way ‘good’?” Money good or morally good? Good to spend time with, or how exactly do you mean? People assumed I had money, or that my father did, and it annoyed me, as I was surviving on the complimentary bread at La Madelaine while working at Barnes and Noble in an apartment I could not afford, but it allowed me to keep my two dogs. I was forced by necessity to give them away, break my lease and move to a tiny studio.

I am still three classes short of a second MA at the University of St. Thomas, Liberal Arts with a concentration in History/ Art History. It isn’t a very competitive school, but it was Catholic, and it allowed me time to figure things out, overcome feelings of social isolation in a supportive community. My professors were impressed with me, telling me I needed to get my doctorate. I know, I know! I wish I could! They wrote encouraging letters to me on my research papers. Like an addict, I pawned my mother’s jewelry for a fraction of their value to pay for tuition again (Why didn’t you auction them at Sotheby’s asked my sister, astonished at my lack of business acumen), refusing to give up on my dreams of getting the second MA to get that academic library job, as silly as this might sound. The estate jeweler, Tannenbaum, glancing at me me and my last name, said, “Oh, you’ve been in here before. Aren’t you a dancer?” clearly confusing me with the close to my age girlfriend, by now his wife, who did resemble me–really my mother–just a little bit. “A dancer? No, I’m the daughter. These were my mother‘s.” Oh, I’m sorry, he said, looking down through the loop at a large diamond he had just popped right out of its setting to weigh. The Contemporary Art class I took was excellent, mainly because it filled in an important gap in my knowledge, as it was not anything I was ever drawn to. 

But by then, I’d left the school district and was working as an art/history Museum Curator, so it made sense at the time. I’m not sure the MA still does at my age, and those credits, as with all my others, have surely expired by now.

After my father lost his eyesight, I took his thick file of show dog photos and beautiful old hand-penned pedigrees from England (He had been invited to judge dog shows at Crufts, various English terrier groups, quite a rare honor for an American!) By then he had sold the antique desk for money to live on, the last thing of value he possessed, although it was technically mine, as were (it turned out) many of the other things he eventually sold, ruined, or gave away. In the end, there was nothing left but an empty apartment, couch, bed and small wooden chest of drawers. He went blind after the heart transplant, so he had no use for nice things. The close to my age girlfriend / wife wasn’t sticking around. She left town after he went into the hospital. The only reason he survived at all was because of her dogs; lucky for him, they were at a veterinarian’s office when he hit the floor, so oxygen was available to keep his brain alive. I don’t blame her for leaving, though. She was 33 years younger, and she had to figure out what she was going to do for money now that it was entirely gone.

One day, quite a few years later, my father called to share the good news that she was coming to get him so he wouldn’t need to trouble me for groceries or anything anymore. He was so happy she was coming. I was concerned, of course; but I had also been worried about his being alone, especially since my husband and I were moving to California again for a job transfer. He had already set fires in the microwave trying to cook frozen dinners and the apartment complex wanted him out. No one else was looking in on him. What friends he had, business associates, stopped visiting a long time ago. He was in dialysis four day/week which gave him some social contact, but everyone in my family hated him, each for their own reasons. His grandkids never came to see him. “What are they saying about me?” he always asked. “Dad, I see no one in the family. No one talks to me, either.” There I was, like Cordelia in King Lear. We went to see him off and help put his things in the car. She said she wanted to take his chest of drawers “to stage houses” since it was small enough to fit in her car. On the way back to Vegas that evening, she called and asked for a credit card number so they could stop at a motel and spend the night. I obliged, but only if I could give it directly to the desk clerk. Within a few weeks he was dead, since she didn’t take him to dialysis or give him his meds. “He wanted it this way,” she insisted, asking me for money to help bury him. 

Last year, when I was 58, because I had no family photos, and absolutely nothing of my first 17 or more years of existence, my older sister who lives in Boston sent me a photo of my mother standing in the kitchen holding a drink with a blurry profile of teenage me smiling in the foreground. I didn’t feel any warm fuzzies, only a vague sense of impending doom. 

Funny thing, I didn’t remember that we had Morris’ “The Strawberry Thief” for window treatments over the sink! How could I have forgotten that? The shades looked really crisp and great, as did the wallpaper, a perfect complement. I loved the juxtaposition of the traditional with modern to create a sense of warmth. 

At the end of “Fundamentals of Interior Design,” students are given two design challenges (one client per week) where they must design from scratch two master bedroom suites for two clients.

It is kind of fun, you know, to the extent that you are given a prospectus (one paragraph description) of each client and their needs, and then you knock yourself out for one week to search for each and every item to go into the room(s), from flooring to faux beams to window treatments and wallcoverings, faucets and fixtures, vanities and sinks, and put it all together into a PowerPoint.

Every surface and finish in the room must be accounted for, just like when I was making room boxes out of wine crates. 

In class, everything you come up with MUST be a real product capable of actually being sourced. If you have a vision, but you cannot translate that vision into saleable products and services to make your vision reality, too bad! It’s a lot of searching for products online, which is, I suppose, an important part of what an ID ends up doing, after they take 60 hours of Technical Drawing, Architectural Drafting, Rendering, AutoCAD, Revit, Sketchup, Lighting, Costing, Presentation Drawing, Kitchen and Bath, Textiles, and Professional Ethics for Designers, apprentice under someone and pass the NCIDQ exam. It isn’t all sitting around playing with pantone decks or making mood boards.

And it is a lot like being a librarian, in fact, which of course, I already am. It is a lot like decorating dollhouses, which I still do.

I can do this! And better, much better, I immediately realized, than my young classmates, who had no knowledge of the past. I should have done this years ago. My sails were turning and wind was filling them up!

My first client, Ryan Humphrey, wanted a bedroom suite (“suite” means it includes a master bath). He “collects vintage cadillacs and leans toward modern.” He races cars for a hobby. Mid-century modern was the obvious choice for Mr. H, a “confirmed bachelor,” but I mixed it up with modern Italian, a sturdy Nella Vetrina leather storage bed, so it didn’t look like a period room or too matchy matchy.

I hypothetically acquired a few original but impeccably restored pieces off of 1st Dibs (I learned about 1st Dibs from an acquaintance of mine, “Metro Retro” Joe Marcinkowski, who owns and sells the largest collection of authentic Mid Century Modern furniture in the US), including a low boy and Adrian Pearsall chairs, whose authenticity a collector like Mr. Humphrey would surely appreciate, as they were made around the same year as his vintage cadillacs. I also found some retro mid-century modern wallpaper, which was really not easy because even today, the major wallpaper design houses are British, and MCM was strictly an American design phenomenon. (The Euro equivalent of MCM is “Scandinavian design.”) Chevron tile in the bathroom echoed the cadillac V logo and its vintage upholstery.

I hit all the points for that project. 

My second clients in week 2 of the design challenge were Cindy and Rita Davidson, “two women expecting a baby,” same last name, so I inferred they were a lesbian couple in need of bedroom suite. It had to be “functional and relaxing.” There were other parameters involved with that one. . . they each have their own sleep and work schedules (clue: the space had to be designed for each to wake and dress without disturbing the other, so task lighting and a walk-in closet). The bedroom was outfitted with pocket doors and a bump out (I put them there, it wasn’t part of the specs) which could be used for a nursery and a home office. The couple like to travel. Not sure to where and I couldn’t ask them.

I chose an eclectic Southwest theme for them, finding a wonderful “Los Rios” fabric from RM COCO to use as the basis for the color palette and I spun everything off of that; plus a pinky “mink” color that is feminine, but not too feminine. They also got a corner fireplace and zellige tiles in the bathroom. . . a walk in closet, for two women would have a lot of clothes. . . a chandelier over the bathtub . . . glider rocking chair. . . art on the walls. I really got into it, eagerly crossing the line from interior design into decoration.

Putting it all together using PowerPoint was fun. As one moves up in the ID program, one learns software techniques for rendering which will be better than Power Point for project boards and making virtual rooms.

Now, the very first assignment in ID (we had less than one week to do this, but I had 2.5 days because I signed up late for the class) is to make a collage to explain “who you are as a designer.” I created this composite based on images I already had on my computer, things I had downloaded because I liked them or some aspect of them. I dragged them over to PowerPoint and voila! Assignment done.

and this:

But she didn’t like mine, particularly. She said (ouch!) it wasn’t enough of “me,” of who I am. Oh, but it is totally me! Ask anyone who knows me! What was I to do, put in pictures of my pets and favorite bands? 

She deducted 10 points for its “not being me.” 

The truth is, as time went and I got to see what she liked, I also think she saw my passion for historic decoration as socially irresponsible, or at least out of step with the ID program at HCC, opposed to her spare ethos and ideology of sustainability, which I associate in my mind with Western cultural decline and slipping into a Dark Ages. 

“Honestly, who wants to live in a container or pod?” I wrote in a three paragraph essay to demonstrate that I had read and understood the chapter about architects solving real-world problems. An old friend of mine in Dallas would be quick to call it “Cultural Marxism.” Interestingly, though, Cultural Marxists I am sure would would blame “Post-Capitalism” and greed for the state of things today.

Many Conservatives blame it on Neo-Liberalism and the loss of religious values, as if bringing prayer in school back would restore the middle class (I taught ELA in public school for a short while, and noticed many students no longer stand for the pledge–a public school teacher cannot say anything about it.). I would personally like to restore a lot of things, like leather, as in shoes and handbags. Companies want us to pay the same for plastic and claim on their hemp-and-cardboard hang tag that “vegan leather” is “better for the environment.” I seriously doubt that! Synthetic shoes take much longer to biodegrade than leather. And bring back cotton, not “moister-wicking polyester,” which isn’t a real thing anyway. Just try drying dishes with it. 

I try to take care of myself spiritually, which I do through in part by collecting fabric and wallpaper swatches. I have bins and binders full of them. They make me feel happy, as if they were postcards from old friends in nice places saying, “Wish you were here.” Each one has a personality, expresses a different mood, conjures different feelings and emotions. 

But, in my own defense, I have also recovered a few antique chairs at my house, am in the process of selecting draperies (for real now, not just pretend), and wallpapering a bathroom (that may be just pretend; I do not know how to hang wallpaper except in a dollhouse), so it is not completely impractical or irrational for me to have so many samples and swatches. I’ve even mounted some of them on scrapbook paper so you can see what it might look like against different wall colors.

It feeds my soul in a way I cannot explain.

I’ve been studying designer fabrics for so long I could literally pass an exam! What is the provenance of this sample? What is the style? What are its attributes? What might it be used for?

And of course, I am studying Interior Design now, after all, which justifies my indulgences in interior fabrics and wallpapers: $2-$5 for a sample is really no big deal. 

I order fabric samples (called “memo samples” because the source and ordering info is on a card on the backside), many of them (my favorites) from the UK, and one day, if the opportunity arises, I will be prepared to help someone else looking for just the right thing, that special fabric, e.g., a pattern perfect for, say, a Tudor Revival home, which will magically pull the whole room together, that wallpaper which you cannot buy in the stores or see anywhere else. But speaking from experience, it is always easier to start with a beautiful pattern, then two complementary patterns, and go from there. Wall colors are easy to change and color match, but finding patterned drapes (or comforters) to go with your existing color scheme, furnishings and rug can be an absolute nightmare. 

I like American and British Arts and Crafts, Glasgow School, Art Nouveau, and Vienna Secession. . . Roycrofters . . . . Greene and Greene. Whistler’s Peacock Room. Stuff like that. I like Edwardian-style, especially . . .  C. F. A. Voysey. Tudor revival. I like antiques, dark walls, natural wood grains, jewel tones, moody spaces, tonalist painting, rich interior fabrics and wallpaper. Chocolate, teal and mink. Purples and golds (my husband calls them “Methodist church colors”), olives and its complementary coral oranges; velvets and roughened silk. I like GP&J Baker and British-inspired designs. I also love the organicism and nouveau vibes of the 70s. I love prints, real prints with texture and dimension and actual works on paper; woven and embroidered jacquard fabrics, of course; real furniture made from real trees with fine wood grain; oil-based stains and paint, hammered metal, evidence of the handmade. I like darkness and warm lighting, intimate spaces. I do not like white walls and chandeliers without shades; I don’t want to look at light bulbs or strips. I hate LEDs. It is ugly cold, unnatural light. Hard on the eyes. The human eye and our mammalian brains have evolved to respond to warm, burning light (I have stockpiled incandescent bulbs, even for the Christmas tree. . . I want gentle glinting light, not glaring diodes!). 

I am obsessed with the Arts and Crafts Revival in all its forms, another reason I want the ID credential, even though this probably makes no sense. I feel as if I am a small part of the revival whenever I buy the magazine. 

“How do you buy a French chateau and hang grommet top draperies?” I overhead myself saying in a nasally tone to my best friend a few weeks ago. I despise grommet top drapes, but I suppose I sounded fairly obnoxious saying so. 

In design school, one must suck up criticism. It’s part of the design process. In the end, I made an A in the class, but I had to watch a movie on global warming and write an essay on sustainable design to get that A. 

In my retirement, or next career, whichever comes first, I would really like do so something more creative than be a librarian. It isn’t that I do not like being a librarian per se, but librarianship itself has changed. The academic library I knew and loved and devoted a large portion of my life to is gone now. I do not know about special collections being gone, but we don’t have them in Houston, so it is a moot point unless I am willing to abandon my family and run away from home.

The academic library was once a beautiful thing, the work of many hands, a cathedral to learning, a sublime experience, a form of scholarly communication–and to me, personally, a daytime cocktail party with interesting, self-actualized people coming and going (at least when I was working the desk and managing the collection, which I did for quite a few years, years ago, before they eliminated print and locked librarians away behind swipe card entry doors where we sit in a our prison house of learning)–with the primary service of an academic library being a collection embodying and perpetuating intellectual and cultural knowledge, celebrating the achievements of others and turning people on to things they might like.

It showcased things educated people ought / would want to know to remain educated, keeping them in the know. It was the essence of goodness and truth, academic achievement, the thing that justified the university (now the tables are turned and they expect us to justify ourselves to them!), an experience, what renewed academic commitments, and kept research interests from fizzling out. It was worthy of time and devotion, of self-sacrifice and the mediocre pay, in part because it was also permanent, or at least enduring. It stood for knowledge, the life of the mind, objectivity and the pursuit of truth. It fueled my fire.

But now, it is not that at all, but something else entirely, colorless and unimaginative, a search engine, and what once defined our very professional practice is gone, or regarded as vestigial and irrelevant to the wider world. What constitutes an academic library today is an aggregation of commercial subscription databases prefixed by a search box. EBSCO + ProQuest databases + database C, D, E, F, G . . .  commodities we activate, just set it and forget it, except for paying annual invoices.  We must proclaim this as progress in the field or else be accused of failing to evolve. The outside world cannot access our resources anymore, further diminishing their (and our) value.

Of course, people then say, “We have databases and search engines now, so why do we need libraries or librarians?” People always ask me that. It is pointless to answer them. Whatever a librarian says regarding librarianship is always suspect anyway.

I am no technophobe or Luddite. Technical Services is my “other” resume. For thirty years, I have ridden the wave of automation in libraries and museums, even sometimes been at the forefront of the wave, even working myself out of a job on more than one occasion, a bit too eager to demonstrate my value.

To be completely honest, I am not seeing too many waves these days. All I see are hospitals and clinics springing up all over all around me, and freeways and cars going nowhere. I have no idea why the traffic here in Houston is so bad (and why are people here so sick or clumsy that we need urgent cares on every corner?). The more freeways they build, the worse the traffic gets. Where is everyone going? “Probably to their second jobs,” my husband offered cheerfully. 

However, I was very pleased and surprised to discover, when I took my husband to the new UTMB hospital for emergency gallbladder surgery, that UTMB has pretty good taste in art. Throughout their new hospital, they have reproduced the paintings of Galveston artist Rene Wiley and painted the walls to enhance the experience of the art, just like museums do. I wandered the entire hospital admiring the art, hunting for more and more Rene Wiley pieces. I even took one son on a gallery walk around the hospital and he too was impressed with the art. UTMB’s medical offices also have surprisingly good art, too. I recognized reproductions of the work of commercial artist, Norman Wyatt Jr, at my own doctor’s office. Well done, UTMB! I could do that job, buying art for hospitals and doctor’s offices. 

I really do not know why anyone would get an MLIS today, but I run into recent graduates all the time. 

I got my MLIS degree before the Internet, during the high point of publishing, more than a decade before Google. No one saw it coming in the late 80s (Hot Tub Time Machine is one of my all-time favorite movies!). My expertise was in bibliographic metadata, special collections, historic prints and descriptive bibliography. English Lit. Art History. Rare books and Manuscripts. Latin Paleography, Medieval and Neo-Latin poetry (as mentioned, the Contemptus Mundi tradition, pastoral fantasy; and, above all: the influence of Christianity on British literature, art, and various design reform movements . . . the Anglo-Catholic Movement and Gothic Revival of Pugin, then Ruskin, and his disciple, Morris, who influenced Stickley, who influenced Frank Lloyd Wright . . . ). I also learned Unix. Also Perl. C++, too. VB and VBA. SQL. JavaScript–all that stuff was once needed for library technical services, where now our systems are hosted, managed for us.

Ancient Greek too, for reading Homer, the Gospels, Plato and Aristotle. I loved Greek, and also teaching ecclesiastic Latin to elementary school students at a private Catholic school, as intriguing as that sounds. I developed a graduated curriculum for all grades, infused with personal mottos (every child in my class had one, with a coat of arms), Harry Potter, certamen games, the Latin Vulgate, Catholic doxology and traditional songs (like Adeste Fideles, a.k.a., “Come all Ye Faithful”). I taught Art and Art History there, too; one very successful project was a Vanitas collage (I let my kids cut up my Connoisseur magazines for images of luxury items); another was a Mary crayon-resist watercolor wash for Mother’s Day. When the school closed, and a few times before then, I was told I was the best Latin teacher the school had ever had. It helped that I have a collection of rare books which I acquired back in the day, and a large classics library consisting of discards from libraries at universities who no longer teach Classics. The school specifically requested ecclesiastic Latin (which is medieval Latin).

In library school, I specialized in descriptive bibliography, a.k.a. “Cataloging,” which is where were learn how to properly describe a bibliographic / intellectual object. Museums have a similar, but less descriptive record which is called a “tombstone record” (as in, what basic information is preserved in perpetuity on a tombstone or epitaph). A number of years ago, the Getty Research Institute, who publishes the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, tried to advance a new, more descriptive cataloging standard for art museums, similar to what libraries use, which would also necessarily make their own vocabularies more purposeful. I worked on this grant-funded project at the MFAH, although many curators, the modernists mainly, there were ideologically opposed to description and “labels” (It isn’t a label, it’s metadata, I explained again and again). “Description is interpretation.” they said. “Who are we to interpret a work?” Um, I thought that is what Curators did, no? No, that is what art historians do. We want to be able to spin a work way and that. We don’t like “labels.” I was undeterred. I mined MFAH and art history publications for metadata to allow for a good CCO/CDWA record and an apt descriptive title in the absence of one. The project was a success, the Curators loved it, but the grant ended and my boss jumped over to the Menil, leaving me a lose ends in the Registrar’s Office. 

Years prior, I helped to launch the Americana Exchange, now the Rare Book Hub, an online auction site for collections of Americana started by Bruce McKinney, whom I met in San Francisco. I had been driving up and down the California coast looking for a library job, since Houston was tapped out of library jobs. He invited me to his home to show me his collection of Americana and I went, although I was apprehensive about going to a stranger’s home (I Googled him and saw he was legit, and his pretty wife came to the door, which put me at ease). I became a “bibliographer” for AE. I returned to Houston. I wrote a few articles to create content and help promote the new site. Then I went to work for an Art Institute in San Diego where I set up both a new campus library and a design library to support their Interior Design program. On my salary, which sounded grand by Houston standards, I qualified to live in low-income housing (not Section-8, but a special program in California for salaried renters like teachers and librarians), which is what I did, living in hipster North Park and driving just a few minutes into posh Mission Valley for work.

Later, I had a fantastic opportunity and made good money, for me, when I went to San Francisco, but that software company closed two years later in the recession of 2008. One evening at a company party, I got to meet the “son of Adobe,” Christopher Warnock, who is a philosophy major and letterpress enthusiast. I do know a thing or two about letterpresses and traditional printing techniques. Did I mention I am a former Curator of a printing museum? I didn’t know “who he was” until my boss said, “Emily, do you know who that is you were talking to all night?” Glad I didn’t know, because had I known, I never would have talked to him. Honestly, I thought he was just some dude crashing the party, because that is exactly what he looked like to me. Some scruffy guy who came in off the street to get something to eat. California millionaires like to go around like paupers, disguised as homeless people, it’s a thing.

After the Great Recession of 2008, a time when angel investors divested themselves of start-ups and start-ups companies like mine shut down, my husband and I returned to Houston because Obama was offering 8K for first-time homebuyers and by then we had two kids. We couldn’t afford to buy in the SF Bay Area anywhere where the schools were above a 2 or 3. We  tried and tried, even going out to less desirable areas, like “Stockton.”

While in California, my husband and I traveled around and took photos of old mission-style churches and a few historic homes, which I loved. I even wrote an article for American Bungalow, a historic home being converted into a bed and breakfast I discovered in Napa. I delighted in the Arts and Crafts antiques in the stores around Ocean Beach in San Diego. We discovered a stone church from 1894 with original Tiffany glass on Coronado and tried to photograph it, but we really needed a tripod in that dim light. Later, we went to salvage yards around Berkeley and discovered wonderful old doors, windows, hardware, ornament and stained glass, some from old churches. We vowed to one day return with a truck after we had a home of our own. When we went back to the Bay Area (no truck, but better camera), I couldn’t get near the most significant example of the Mission Revival style in Berkeley, St. Mark’s Church. Too many homeless were there that day, it was like a zombie apocalypse to get to the front doors. I walked toward the door, but they rose up out of the grass to approach me for change or else because they thought I was one of them, and it was time to go inside the church to eat. I fled back to the car. While in Berkeley that same day, we swung by Serendipity Books, a famous used and rare book store, only to discover it was closing for good.

What was happening to my world? 

One of the philosophers I studied in school was Hegel, who believed (I think all 18th-19th century Germans did, just part of their Zeitgeist) in an invisible force or presence called the Zeitgeist (discussed in Phenomenology of the Spirit and elsewhere). By the way, this force is the same thing as Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or where he got the idea from. Also, Karl Marx’s dialectic, same Idea. It applies to libraries, too. Through collections, organization and display, the library served as a mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, the collective unconscious which gives rise to culture. Culture is always a collective, and really collections are the only way for the Spirit to make its presence known to us–not to be materialistic. Librarians once organized titles into visible collections so that culture, the Zeitgeist, could be expressed and experienced by others, much in the way pagan ceremonies attempt to manifest deities in smoke from burning incense, without which, the spirits cannot take shape. Collections are about context, meaning, the broad brush, movements, the big picture, not just “access to” books or information. Meh! That is such an uninspired view of our professional practice. 

And presumably, these days, no one is needed to organize anything for anyone else because we have search engines. And despite our best efforts to preserve texts and the records of them for the future, the books are all gone. They are not online either, as many people assume. 

They are all at my house, because I took them home when my library got rid of its collections.

I brought home books on the history of interiors and design, art and art history, including some beautifully illustrated books with engravings and chromolithographs for plates. (I was certain that they would be worth something some day, but now I’m really not so sure.) I have collected books on illustration, historic design and art as long as I can remember, often drawing from the pages or incorporating decorative motifs and patterns into my paintings. Architects who became successful illustrators and artists have a place of honor on my shelves. Many designed textiles, wallpaper and furniture. Stickley gets way too much credit. It was the work of American architect Harvey Ellis who designed the pieces which are most sought after today by collectors. I have a rare book on Ellis and a CD of every issue of American Craftsman which I think I got from the HRC in Austin when then they were digitizing them. I remember now, I drove to Austin to see them and they kindly gave it to me, professional courtesy. 

I am also fastidious in my own way, just like a real ID would be. I recently ordered two Hinkley light fixtures and was bitterly disappointed, just as any real interior designer would be. I want my antiqued bronze fixtures to look like antiqued bronze, not black. Black is not “antique bronze.” Is bronze the new black? No! I told Hinkley so, that their descriptions of color online are misleading, but I kept the black light fixtures out of sheer practicality, meaning I liked them better than anything at Lowe’s or Home Depot. 

No, despite losing major points on my design projects at the community college, I think I would really make an excellent ID. I know the difference between “ecru,” “taupe” and “beige.” I can still draw. 

I used to be a whiz at furniture provenance (as mentioned above, I took a “Furniture Appreciation” course in my first semester at The University of Texas in 1979, but my years of dollhouses and Dover books gave me a real leg up in that class!). I am still a walking Grammar of Ornament, another Dover book I still own, along with Speltz’s The Styles of Ornament, and Projective Ornament by Claude Bragdon, so mysterious and beautiful! Not like those Wayfair people who insist on lumping everything with a pattern or more than two colors into the fake category of “boho.” I know suzani and ikat, for example. And Jacobean. Not that I can define these necessarily, but I definitely know them when I see them. I know the provenance of patterns, even certain color combinations. Of course, I love British-inspired design most of all, and most things built, written, published, created or designed ca. 1890 to 1925. I collect illustrated books from that time period as well. 

Another challenge–or an assignment with a short deadline–I had in that class was one where we had to research two architectural design companies in Houston who hire IDs, one commercial and the other residential, and compare them.

My prof hated my choice of David Weekley. . . she took off major points for that. . . but it isn’t like she provided the class with a pick list. I myself live in a DW home. Everyone in my neighborhood does, too. She said that David Weekley is not an architectural designer of residential homes. I don’t know why not. He hires architects to design his homes, I would assume. He (it is family-owned, there is indeed a “David Weekley”) sometimes hires Interior Designers, as I showed on Indeed.com. I thought that was the whole purpose of the assignment, to identify where we were potentially going to work after design school. She also asked us to “describe the culture” there, too, but I didn’t know how to do this because Glassdoor was forcing me to rate my current employer before I could get in to see the reviews, and I didn’t want to do that. What was I supposed to do, call up random people at David Weekley and Gensler and say, “Tell me. How do you like working there? What’s it like? How do you like your job and your co-workers?” 

Right. No, I wasn’t going to do that. . . She counted off more points! 

Gensler was my commercial AD. I know of Gensler only because they design and build libraries. But I suspect from their website that Gensler hires only beautiful people to work for them. My presentation is below.

Also during this class, I had to design a kitchen. That was the first project, actually.

I loved the kitchen I designed on paper because of the rippled opaque glass in the upper cabinets which would add fire and movement through reflected light, but I was uncomfortable not knowing how to calculate the amount of light needed for the space because my walls and finishes were dark, like a small playhouse theatre.

The kitchen was an intimate, cave-like space with slate (porcelain emulating slate, because we know real slate has durability issues) floors, and an island in the middle for cooking over fire with glinting, reflected light in the glass and copper. The palette was green, charcoal and copper with some ivory tan enamel trim. I haven’t taken lighting yet, so I wasn’t sure how many recessed lights, pendants and central fixtures were needed so the eye could discern that the color of the island was a dark green, not charcoal grey or black, and that there was enough light on the countertops. I wanted a warm, burning light, not soupy and diffuse LEDs, with their notoriously poor CRV (Color Reflective Value). That year, we still had a choice of lamps (now all alternatives to LED are banned). That people see the true color of the island was important to me. I’m sure there are algorithms for light which can be applied in these situations. Or maybe designers use software like SketchUp and the algorithm figures it all out for them.

I asked my professor, but she did not respond to my email about methods for calculating the proper amount of light needed in a room with dark finishes. I haven’t taken “Lighting for Interiors” yet.

I got dinged on the light fixtures, not because I didn’t put enough in, but because I couldn’t source them. I broke a cardinal rule of design class. I tried, and in all honesty, I deserved to be dinged. But they really made the space! I offered alternatives, but this prof doesn’t like choices.

“Don’t provide me with your choices! Present me with your vision!”

My greatest interior design challenge will be to get on with a company with a product or service I love. I am ambitious, but I have been known to chase unicorns.

That is also what I like best about me, however. I consider it to be my best quality, in fact!

For example, I have written to a few companies who sell historic wallpapers and textiles, companies I like, asking them if they could use a Sales Rep. in the Houston area.

Most of the companies whose products I like are headquartered or have showrooms in Dallas, not Houston. RM COCO and Loloi are not here, for example–I need to go to Dallas to see their stuff, but I have no excuse, no legitimate business justification for driving four hours to go there just to look at fabrics I cannot buy because I am not a member of the trade. I like Graham & Brown wallpapers, although their custom draperies leave a lot to be desired, quality-wise. I love many of the carpet designs by Momeni (I purchased three when Robert’s Carpets near me was liquidating their rug gallery), an overlooked source for Arts and Crafts / Revival rugs with a modern styling. One company I discovered a few years ago which you probably haven’t heard of is Bradbury & Bradbury, in Benicia, CA. 

Bradbury & Bradbury is so great! They even make dollhouse versions of their historic wallpapers, which of course, I have. 

Even though they are not open to the public, I’ve been inside of the B&B workshop where wallpaper is still made by hand through an elaborate silk screen process. I have seen this with my own eyes because we used to live in Vallejo, next to Benicia, and I showed up there one day with my family (standing way in the distance just to not be in that particular photo) and knocked on the door. We were treated to a demonstration. One color is put down at a time, carefully moving frame by frame, to make a wallpaper frieze.

At the end, it looked like this:

We loved the tour and seeing the beautiful samples on their walls. They have many lovely designs, and the silkscreen process gives their wallpapers a sense of dimension. Some patterns are complex, requiring layer upon layer of perfectly stenciled silkscreen to get it right:

Historic neighborhoods which have Victorian homes and bungalows would make excellent B&B customers.

Maybe one day I could represent Bradbury & Bradbury or Morris & Co., or even boutique firms who have reproduced historic wallpapers from archives of the V&A Museum. In my gypsy caravan of samples, my collection, of everything good from everywhere in the world–and I know, for I keep up with these companies despite American Bungalow magazine folding–Arts and Crafts Revival hasn’t, I bought a copy yesterday–I could travel to St. Pete where there is a new museum dedicated entirely to the Arts and Craft Movement!

And as I discovered to my great delight when visiting St. Pete, there are historic neighborhoods full of bungalows all around there. Who even knew bungalow homes were in Florida? Step this way to order museum-quality reproduction wallpapers, friezes, window treatments and interior fabrics! I might think to put postcards or sample books in Sherwin Williams locations, because, astonishingly, SW is the only place left in many cities to actually see any wallpaper sample books.

For a start, if I had my ID credential, I could meet clients and sell right out of Sherwin Williams. That’s right, Sherwin Williams. 

This is another unicorn scheme of mine, but really it is more about Sherwin Williams than me. I’m convinced that Sherwin Williams retail locations, which are everywhere, could sell more paint and compete with Lowe’s and Home Depot–after all, Lowe’s now sells Sherwin Williams paint, so why does anyone bother even going to SW?–if they pushed wallpaper and window treatments, a neighborhood design center, right there in their stores, becoming a one-stop shop for interior design and DIYers. Many locations in Houston, including the one by me, even have a coffee maker and a large table seemingly designed for looking through oversized wallpaper books, an excellent start. They just need the vision, the marketing, the sample books, and someone to manage them.

Also, along the same lines as this, I don’t understand why the Amish furniture store in Houston sells mission furniture and not soft furnishings and lamps to go with Arts and Crafts style. That makes no sense! The Amish are missing out on potential sales by insisting on being so plain. (Historically, you know, the Amish had nothing to do with Arts and Crafts style! Shaker was always their thing. But I suspect their furniture is not handmade, either.)

From what I have seen in Houston, there are many designers who cater to the 1% who can afford Schumacher, Thibault, Lee Jofa, Scalamandre, Carole and GP & J Baker. We are talking, hmm, $300 to $500 a yard or more. Well, at least $150. . . It all depends on the fabric, of course. Even their fabric scraps on eBay are exorbitant. Who is buying them off eBay, I ponder, as I myself browse remnants and samples for black market sale. Rich quilters? Frustrated decorators?

And how many others like me are there out there, I wonder, as I see GP&J Baker memo samples with gromets in them selling on eBay for ridiculous sums. 

Maybe lots of people, perhaps most people, like what I like! 

Houston has no shortage of lux showrooms, which is surprising to me, since most of the city is a slum, at least compared to how Houston used to look when I was growing up here. (People above a certain age refer to what used to be here as “Old Houston”. . . . ) I know the term “slum” is pejorative and that there are “some nice areas,” as if I didn’t know about Bellaire, West U or River Oaks! Here is one person’s more eloquent description of Houston on Quora: “Houston presents a dramatic example of high-poverty neighborhoods radiating out into the suburbs, sprawling alongside America’s now fourth-largest city. Meaningful reductions in poverty have only occurred in the downtown core of the city. Elsewhere, high levels of poverty have persisted in many close-in neighborhoods, while suburbs and exurbs, especially to the east of downtown, have seen increasing poverty take root in areas that were once comfortably middle class.” I read recently that Houston has more newly poor neighborhoods than all of Detroit. 

Indeed, this makes me seriously question the viability of Interior Design as a career choice for the next phase of my life, but I wouldn’t necessarily hang out my own shingle, even though I would love to.

Ideally, I’d work for a vendor. They have “Resource Librarians.” 

Thing is, if I do work for a vendor, I’d have to like their fabric, or whatever it is they sell or procure. I would want to believe in it, not just pretend to like it.

It will likely be my last job, the cherry, what will make my whole life up until now make sense. I want to make it count. I believe in Kravet, not so much “Holland and Sherry,” for example. I realize, though, when placed in certain contexts, almost any fabric can look good. It just has to make sense in the context of the room. And I want to talk to people, not sit in an empty room of bins or stuffing envelopes. That’s just sad . . . but maybe if they offered me a good discount, it might be OK. . . And despite my own aesthetic tastes and preferences, I’m an intellectually curious person, open minded, eager to discover what are your colors? What is your style? What do you like about that? Maybe you will see something in it that I haven’t seen before to better appreciate it myself. I would be the sort of person why would say, “if you like this, you’ll probably like that,” maybe (if it were allowed) sending them a few more samples than what they asked for. 

Houston also has a Design Center open to “members of the trade.” I went in anyway, no one stopped me. I wanted to see other Arts and Crafts-inspired wallpaper books by GP & J Baker after I came across one intriguing memo book at High Fashion (which I think is closing, or are getting rid of interior fabrics?). But, apart from my calling Houston a slum and hating grommet-top drapes, I am more a woman of the people. Or more realistically, I have no desire to sell what I myself could never myself conceivably in a million years buy (like Roche Bobois), which I suppose is a bit limiting from a Design Sales perspective. But Sherwin Williams already has the store locations where the 99% live. I think I know the product lines in the price point of the people who shop at Sherwin Williams. Middle class DIYers whose home is all they have. RM COCO and P. Kaufmann (do I use a slash or a period after the P?), another favorite, not Lee Jofa, not Mulberry, not GP&J Baker. I doubt people around here are spending over 4K for two custom draperies by Carole, whose books you will find at Ethan Allan, and one other place I know, a spritely widow who runs a legacy drapery store who these days mainly sells motorized blinds (You can stand outside her shop and yell “Good morning!” at the windows and the motorized blinds will go up). With rents being so high now, she had to close her location in Friendswood where she had been forever and move into a strip mall next to a “vape shop.” I hope she is OK. I fear dropping by if I am not buying.

There is another lady in Galveston with a shop open by appointment only (I went in anyway, I had to pee, and luckily for me, she was was expecting a very important client that morning) who deals only in Fabricut/ Trend, which is really strange to me with all of the historic homes down there. Seriously, you’re showing Fabricut/ Trend to the Bishop’s Palace? I wish I had a store on the Strand. . . or Post Office street . . . specializing in historic wallpapers, fabrics, lighting, tile, art, salvage and hard to source architectural elements for historic homes.

I would be great at that!

For interior fabrics, I wouldn’t just carry one or two product lines, like my competition, but have a whole resource library in a variety of price points so people could sit, have coffee, go though the many sample books at their leisure, even check them out to see what the fabric looks like in their home. 

Getting back to price points . . . I know exactly who would be in that middle class sweet spot of $30-65 / yard. I’ve studied it. I know I would do a whole lot better–well, just about anyone could–than the back few rows of interior fabrics at Joanne’s. What is Joanne’s problem anyway? It’s like they are not even trying! Not only is their selection of interior fabric boring, it never changes, I mean for years; and there they force you to lift the whole heavy wide bolt off the rack and carry it up (well I know they have those tiny carts) to the cutting table, no samples allowed. I tell women I meet there–and I have met many since at Joanne’s, one is forced to stand in two excruciatingly long lines–one for cutting and one for paying–just go down to Fondren and spend the day. I know it is far away, a 40-mile round trip, and the area is now seedy–bring a friend with you–but especially after you have hit Sunny Road (What an asset to Houston! Her store is better than the Design Center!) and Interior Fabrics (I’m not a fan of that place, but you can at least get in and out in a minute, easily seeing all that they have tacked up on their walls), Perfect Window is a real treat: all interior fabrics are $15 /yard (as opposed to $150 / yard across the street) and they let you bring in scissors to cut your own samples. You can wander around that dark opium den of interior fabric bolts and cut away; you can find some really nice jacquards there, the sort you flip over and the colors are completely different on the underside (How does that even work? How is one side red and other blue?). When you are ready to buy yardage, someone will kindly carry the bolt to the front for you. It is a high point of my trip down there, so I save it for last, like the bottom of a fabric flume ride!

Due to an unfortunate accident with an upstairs toilet at our house, I can also tell you all the very best tile showrooms in town. If you have already visited Floor & Decor, everyone’s starting point, then the Daltile and the Emser showrooms on Fuque–I find personally objectionable Emser’s ersatz ink jet prints of photos of marble and wood on tile–and Design Sales consultants, please do not insult my intelligence by telling me that 12 x 24 porcelain planks will make my tiny bathroom seem bigger, because we all know it doesn’t work that way. After that, there is Keystone (five stars, excellent showroom! Well worth the drive. . . candy bowls, too), Stone Source (never been, but I like what I see on Linkedin). . . and more. You can tile crawl for days on end here in Houston, burning a lot of gas and never reaching the end. You will probably end up back at Floor & Decor buying that blah gray plank flooring and white subway tiles (well, mine are technically Artisan Oyster and they have some movement to them with deckled edges to resemble something hand-made) even though you told yourself when you started that you were not going to do that. Thing is, if you live in a house like mine, and I think most people do outside of Houston’s inner loop, slate and marble just don’t look right, especially for the upstairs family bathroom. I have learned tough lessons with my remodel. If I had to do it over again, I would not have selected a JM Vanity–my husband wanted it–but allowed the USAA approved remediation specialists to do built ins, which would have saved a lot of money and eliminated the unsightly gap between the countertop and the wall we have now with a standalone vanity. I just didn’t trust their taste in cabinetry after how they did the wall texture, which I had to take a sander to. I asked for orange peel. No one wants “pimples” on their bathroom walls! 

For some reason I haven’t been able to figure out, Houston is a tile and stone slab mecca. Why so much stone and tile but no interior fabric or rugs? Makes no sense. On the high end is Pomogranite, which has good artisan tile. If you want a stone listello for your bathroom or mosaic tile backsplash, that is the place (They carry New Ravenna!) By the way, don’t go to Ferguson for vanities. I know a discount outlet out on Hempstead Hwy where you can pick up authentic James Martin Vanity and other designer bathroom vanities for a 1/3 the price. I know good sources for quality doors, too, a family-owned business, son goes to Texas A&M but works in the store summers to help his aged parents, arthritic store dog, quality solid-core mahogany doors; but also in another awful part of town with tanker trucks barreling down on you. You’ll pay the same price at Lowe’s for fiberglass. 

And I know this workroom, a little rundown place never open on Saturdays and which always looks closed whenever you drive by even during the week, because for some reason they blackened their windows with film. They never answer the phone, I think because they do not speak English. You just have to go and try the door. They are a best kept secret in Southeast Houston, Pearland actually, since the other workrooms on our side have closed. They have racks of memo samples nobody has ever seen before. It stumped me even, and I really know my sources . . . next time I go, I’m going to use Google image search to get to the bottom it. When I asked the guy, I think he is Vietnamese (not that it matters), he said “Magnolia” (as in Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia?), “That all Magnolia fabric!” but I don’t believe him. Jo puts her name on everything. 

Calico does the same thing–white labeling with their own names and numbers–to keep you from buying the fabric from an online discount outlet and making drapes yourself, or taking them to a workroom like to that guy above, which is exactly what I would do, because, to my great frustration, I am not a “member of the trade” so I cannot buy from fabric direct wholesalers with a trade discount; but I can almost always figure Calico’s out. It’s pretty obvious to me, probably to most people in the trade (or anyone with Google image search on their phones), and sometimes on a roll the name of the designer is right there, printed on the side: “P/ Kaufmann.” I know my GP&J. I know Scalamandre (Who wants zebras on a red field, or zebras at all? And why the arrows? Who would hunt or hurt a zebra?) You can spot Ralph Lauren a mile away, it still looks like the 80s to me. But there are always good things at Calico. Their buyer does a great job curating the store. I wish one would open in Clear Lake (I’ve suggested it a few times on their website), for we have no place to buy window treatments. Calico charges $100 for each lux memo sample you take home and they refund your card when you bring them back. One day, I left Montrose and drove back to Clear Lake with $1,000 in memo samples! All very, very high end, including GP&J Baker’s “Pumpkins.” Exciting, but I worried the whole way home and back: what if I get into a car wreck and the samples get ruined? Also wondering if dog hair would stick to velvet. I was really looking forward to seeing what such fine decorator fabrics would do for my home. However, they looked much better in the store, and frankly, what a great relief to have my desires for expensive fabric extinguished. 

Another workroom was in League City for many years next to the city library, an ancient Chinese couple who had a peg wall of Kast interior fabric books. (They tried to sell their business but it closed.) I’d never heard of Kast! What? Kast is local? I got very excited. I went to go see them because I wanted to find out if they had even more books I had not seen at the workroom, and if they designed their own fabrics there, or how did it all work? Maybe I could work there.

Kast used to be in Pasadena across from Metro Retro’s Furniture warehouse, in another gritty, razor-wired part of town. They were in that location on Preston, they told me, because a part of their business at one time was car upholstery. They didn’t sell to the public, they are wholesalers (but they were selling remnants that Saturday), so I suppose it didn’t matter where they were. Honestly, Kast had some pretty good interior fabrics, nice weights, small to medium scale prints, adventurous color combinations, and very reasonably priced. They also shared that for a long time, COVID prevented them from being able to fulfill orders for interior fabric since their fabric is made in China and they couldn’t get their containers into the ports. I never did find out who actually designed their fabrics, though. There were no designers there, or Apple computers, or drafting tables, just some bookkeeper ladies. They didn’t seem to know much. Now they are closed, or they moved to the far north side of town. 

I just love poking around places that are not technically open to the public. I’m really looking forward to exploring Dallas’ Design District some day. 

I could be really good at this, I think. I could really do something good here and help a lot of people, if only I had the chance and some ID credential to back me up! 

The store manager at the SW location by me, who looks like a scruffy John Goodman and sort of knows me by now, was skeptical when I pitched to him my concept for “Sherwin Williams Neighborhood Design Centers.” In my idea’s defense, I said, “Hey, if I bought my ‘Dover White’ paint from you for almost $100 a gallon because it perfectly coordinated with the A Street ‘Anemone’ wallpaper I found in this wallpaper book in your store, other people will do the same.”

No one but you ever looks at those books, he informed me. Most other stores have gotten rid of them (true, one day I went around to all Sherwin Williams stores in my area to see what wallpaper books they had). People just come in and buy paint. No, I said, explaining his business to him. Contractors are buying your paint. But guess who is picking out the paint colors and telling the contractors what to buy? Whenever I come in here, more and more wallpaper books are missing (Did you know your Vincent Van Gogh wallpaper book from BN wallcoverings in the Netherlands is gone? Some A Street books are gone, too.) and they are always all flopped over. Clearly, other people are using them. And no one else has them in Houston but SW! Lowe’s doesn’t have them! No one else in Houston who sells paint has wallpaper sample books. But guess what? Now Lowe’s is now selling your paint. So, you should at least put out a sign letting people driving by on Hwy 3 know that you also sell wallpaper. Get more books in here. Then, branch out into widow coverings! Offer a samples /resource library. Make this area into a neighborhood design center! You will sell more paint!

He couldn’t see the potential of an in-store design center, and it probably wasn’t his call anyway.

He walked back to his post behind the paint counter and vacantly gazed out the store front, cars whizzing by on Highway 3, a road to Galveston lined with tank farms, vein clinics, auto repairs in total disrepair, bail bondsmen, dog kennels, halal fried chicken, Asian massage, and boat storage places. Anyway, I could tell, and not just from this conversation, that he wanted nothing to do with wallpaper or home décor, or that little corner of his store which made him feel just a bit uncomfortable. If ever a customer headed in that direction, he would bark defensively, “If you need help with wallpaper, call the 1-800 number! I can’t help you with that!” 

I really wondered what he really thought about Lowe’s now selling Sherwin Williams paint. If I were in Cleveland, I might walk into their home office and make my case for Sherwin Williams Neighborhood Design Centers.

I fell in love with that idea. 

“But what would you get out of it?” my husband inquired, meaning, as always, how would it benefit us financially. He is an accountant/CPA, and always asks those kinds of practical questions, completely ignoring the big picture. “I don’t have the details all worked out yet,” I reassured him, even though, as with many of my unicorn schemes, money had absolutely nothing to do with it. I was, as always, lamenting the degradation and loss of our material and visual culture (like why cars today all look the same and are only black, white, gray; we used to have a wide range of color choices, like chocolate brown, mist green, teal and powder blue . . .) and thinking that a library with wallpaper and drapery sample books, a design resource library inside of Sherwin Williams, would be a great resource for our area.

Something nice for a change!

But I live in Houston, and realistically, I, a 59-year old librarian taking an interior design class at a community college, can only do just so much to keep our visual, intellectual and material culture from completely. . .  slipping . . .  away. And yet, I still feel there is a place for me in this world where I can do good.