The Secret Source Is Out

NY Times May 11, 2006
By KIMBERLY STEVENS

NOTE to Mario Buatta: The world as you know it is over.

Your clients may still value your expertise, but as far as access to exclusive sources of fabrics and furniture goes, they now have other options.

It is a development that Mr. Buatta, the high-profile decorator, has resisted.

"To-the-trade should remain to-the-trade," he said recently, speaking of a policy that has traditionally restricted such access. "All of a sudden everyone wants to get democratic and make everything available to the general public and open up the private world of decorating. It defeats the purpose. The reason the D&D exists is that I can go and get my clients special things that no one else is going to have."

Or not. In recent years, the Decoration & Design Building in New York and the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, Calif., the country's best-known decorating resource centers, have quietly bowed to the demands of the market and opened their doors to the public, albeit a public that is willing to pay an hourly fee to be chaperoned by an in-house consultant. And in January the P.D.C. went one big step further, creating and promoting a program to make even the most inexperienced would-be decorators feel welcome. Charles S. Cohen, the owner of the P.D.C. and other design centers, including the D&D Building, said that in introducing programs like this his goal was to "open the design centers and educate the public."

This affront to the interior design profession, as some see it, is one sign, among many, of a major shift in the way Americans decorate. New design businesses that would once have considered renting space only in a design center are starting retail shops instead, and formerly hard-to-find, to-the-trade-only products are becoming readily available online, allowing a growing nonprofessional customer base to eliminate the middleman.

Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, author of the decorating book "Apartment Therapy" and founder of a popular design blog by the same name, likens what is happening in the design world to what happened in the last few years with food and wine. "All of a sudden everyone knows what a pinot noir is," he said. "It's the same thing with design. People are educating themselves.

As home makeover television programs and shelter magazines have proliferated in recent years, Americans have become more sophisticated consumers of design, raising interest and demand. Everyone is now a self-styled expert, with a sense of entitlement to the resources - Scalamandré silks, Grange furniture, Osborne & Little wallpapers - that were once the sole province of the professional designer.

Domino magazine, which was introduced a year ago to cater to this growing demand, has quickly become a successful new title in the home category, selling more newsstand copies than most of its competitors. Deborah Needleman, Domino's editor in chief, said she never publishes a product unless it is available to everyone. "We're about accessibility, not exclusivity," she said.

Armed with knowledge and access, some enthusiasts have become so caught up in decorating and design that they are starting to muscle in on the professionals' territory.

When Cheryl Guibone, a former lawyer, set out to redo the 4,000-square-foot house in Southport, Conn., that she shares with her husband and three children, the last thing she thought she would ever become was a decorator. She still shies away from that label.

It started with the occasional friend admiring her newly decorated living room and asking if she would consult on the paint choice for an entry hall or give an opinion on how vintage chrome chairs might mix with an 18th-century dining table. Then she was host to an event for the parents at her child's nursery school, and was inundated with calls for help. Within months, Ms. Guibone, 39, had carved out a niche in a community that many would describe as overrun with decorators.

Even in a well-heeled town like Southport, she said, there are still people who are intimidated by the idea of hiring a decorator. "Not everyone can afford the high high end," she continued. "I'm not a high-end decorator, nor would I ever pretend to be. But there is room in this business for people like me."

Unlike traditional interior designers, who work on commission, she charges by the hour, and her clients pay her sources directly for any furniture, fabric or wallcoverings. She does not have a resale license, which would allow her unfettered access to the wares of to-the-trade-only establishments, and she is not particularly interested in hiring one of the in-house consultants that design centers like the D&D Building offer as an alternative. She prefers to avail herself of a wider variety of sources, including retail stores like Lillian August, whose 60,000-square-foot flagship in Norwalk, Conn., offers 8,000 fabric choices from companies like Scalamandré, Brunschwig and Fils and Cowtan and Tout.

Becca Hartmeier, a homemaker in Bel Air who is her own decorator, says she occasionally goes to the Pacific Design Center (she uses a friend's resale license), but it is certainly not the only place she shops. "I don't want my home to look like the lobby of a hotel," she said. "I really like the mix."

When she and her husband, Mike, moved into a 1936 Paul Williams-designed house with their four children, they hired a team of experts, including a decorator, to help them with the renovation. They fell in love with the architect and the landscape designer, but let the decorator go.

"I constantly felt overcharged," she said. "I felt like she knew we had the wherewithal and just took advantage." She and her husband went shopping one weekend along La Cienega Boulevard and bought close to a hundred thousand dollars' worth of furniture. They put it on hold and said they would purchase it with their decorator's approval. "She approved everything," Ms. Hartmeier said, in a single 30-second phone call that ended up costing them $30,000 in commissions. That's when she knew she could do it herself.

Ms. Hartmeier frequents small decorator-owned boutiques like Chapman Radcliff Home, an eclectic furniture and object store in West Hollywood where the owners have occasionally been generous about sharing their sources with her. One of her favorite sources is decoratorsbest.com , where she can get any fabric she needs. She recently purchased a Kelly Wearstler design she saw in a magazine to reupholster a pair of Lucite stools.

The Web site is one of many that make formerly to-the-trade-only fabrics and furnishings easily accessible to nonprofessionals. When Eric Roinestad, 40, an art director for Capitol Records in Hollywood, and Ranney Draper, 42, a high school English teacher, bought a 1930's Spanish-style house six years ago in Highland Park, a Los Angeles neighborhood, they furnished it with Monterey furniture, vintage frames and pottery. They completed the look with fabric and animal skins bought on the Internet. "The level of sophistication is unbelievable," Mr. Roinestad said. "When I go to some of my online sources I know it's people like me, and decorators and designers and dealers, all educating each other and sharing tips. There are amazing sites, like 1stdibs.com , where you can familiarize yourself with all the great designers. I've learned so much that way."

With so much out there, even established designers are feeling competitive pressure to cast their nets wider than they once did. "I would never just shop at the Pacific Design Center," said Jaime Rummerfield of Woodson & Rummerfield's House of Design, a showroom in Hollywood that is open to the public. "In order to keep everything fresh, it's important to mix it up with interesting new pieces and an eclectic variety of vintage and antique pieces."

Since interior designers have traditionally made their money by marking up prices on furnishings that they bought for clients, the abundance of newly accessible sources has meant not only keeping up with more outlets, but also rethinking the way they make a living. "We are not walking, but running away from the old pricing model," said Robert Wright, president of the American Society of Interior Designers in New York. "I encourage our members to charge for their time and expertise, not depend on discounted product to make their money."

He says that although there are still many professionals who abide by the old markup model, there seems to be an industrywide shift away from it, which he claims is a good thing: a way of affirming the value of a designer's work.

"The field of decorating and design has changed radically in the last 20 years," said Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest for the last three decades. People are much more sophisticated about design and architecture, she said. "It's much more difficult for designers today because people do know so much. There aren't any secrets anymore," she said, adding that it is frightening for a lot of people in the industry.

She acknowledged that the most established interior designers, like couture clothing designers, still have a longstanding and loyal clientele. "They swim in a different ocean," she said.

But even that ocean may be getting less exclusive.

"It's a whole new world," Ms. Rense said, "and you ignore it at your own peril."