This week’s Home & Garden section of the New York Times makes me think the editors are acknowledging that this is the slowest news week of the year, so they’re running pieces that have been moldering in the excess pile for a while. Either that or they’ve just gotten lazy.
First, there’s a trend story about a revival in pink for bathrooms.
[All photos from NYT website]
I’m guessing that the reporter’s motivation for covering this was her discovery of Pam Kueber’s blog, which is dedicated to saving the pink bathrooms that seem to have been inspired by Mamie Eisenhower’s pinking of the White House and that were common in 50s spec houses. Many of these have been dismantled in favor of more gender- and prismatically neutral palettes. But instead of tracking down her own pink saviors, she just interviews two of the people who have posted pictures of their bathrooms to the website. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it doesn’t show a lot of originality.
What irked me a little more was connecting this with the Pantone company’s annual pronouncement of the “it” color of the year, and for 2011 it has tapped hot pink (they call it Honesuckle). [As a testimony to the company’s apparently well-oiled PR machine, it occurs to me that The Times seems to run a Pantone “it color” story every two or three years; so does the Weekend WSJ.]
But in the examples that illustrate the story
the only pink elements are the wall paint, cabinets and accessories. All the fixtures and the floors are white.
To me, a mid-century pink [or aqua or peach] bathroom is about the surfaces — the colored porcelain fixtures and the ceramic tile floors and walls. I think a campaign to foster their appreciation, either nostalgically or in terms of tastes, is well worthwhile. Anybody can paint their bathroom walls and put up a matching shower curtain and towels. But very little of it really speaks Mamie Eisenhower’s sensibilities.
On another, equally annoying, level was a story [actually in the Real Estate section, but with the Home pieces online] about a woman who had decorated her apartment in a 60s [70s?] building on Sutton Place in the style of a pre-war co-op.
When you move into a postwar building, you’ve just got to embrace the interior architecture, and work within its limitations. Here, she seems to be fighting it every inch of the way. The moldings, the built-ins, a grand piano — all make the place look kind of like a dollhouse with slightly too large furniture. And what about the mirrors? Nothing says pre-war co-op like floor to ceiling mirrors. It just doesn’t work for me.
I’m hoping the Home section editors will re-discover their groove in 2011.
