Cigarette Table. Barcelona! Barcelona!

An Eileen Gray "cigarette table" flanked
by two Mies van der Rohe "Barcelona" chairs

A long while back, before we found the wonderful interior designer who made our dreams come true, Joe and I interviewed several design divas with whom we did not click. Undoubtedly, there were too many divas in one room.

I believe I have decent taste but humbly admit I don’t know what I don’t know. I have learned immensely over the past twenty years from our friend and interior designer Mary Burkhardt, a sparkling creative professional who gives off Mary Tyler Moore vibes if MTM had worn a lot of black with occasional punches of color. 

One iteration of our
living room's floor plan

Pre-Mary, who ever heard of vessel sinks, doing floor plans, having patience, following a process, or my all-time favorite, “visual relief?” We just bought stuff we liked and put it where we thought it looked good.

Visual relief is just what it sounds like. If you pack too much into a room it starts to look like crap. It needs some visual relief, stat. If you get nothing else out of this post, remember visual relief. 

Mary also likes to tell us when a design approach is “the right thing to do.” This phrase is usually accompanied by a truth that is hard to digest, an expensive proposition, or a wait time in excess of three months. Oh, the weeks and months I have spent obsessing while I waited for furniture and other custom items to arrive! But delaying gratification was the right thing to do.

Our living room today

Before we met Mary, we cast about looking for the right match. We discovered that, like most creative people, interior designers are v-e-e-e-r-y sensitive and march to their own drummers. Some of these individuals have egos as fragile as eggs. Fabergé eggs. Designers cannot be rushed. They must be obeyed. In some cases, coddled. If you express impatience with the project, you will not only be scolded but the work will suffer. 

When Joe and I were interviewing designers for our first home together in University Heights, one legend in his own mind sent us a letter firing us as clients because we failed to gush over his extremely vanilla, unexciting portfolio. “You are both very lovely people,” he condescended in a typed letter. “I am sure you will find the right person to work with.” It irked me that I didn’t get a chance to fire him before he fired us. 

Then there was the designer out of central casting, a flamboyant individual who knew of my desire to incorporate a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair, an icon of modern design, into our living room. Like the famous Robin Williams "Martha Graham. Madonna! Madonna!" scene in The Birdcage, he paced the empty room and was having visions as he gesticulated wildly. Pointing where he wanted the furniture to go, he cried out: “Cigarette table. Barcelona! Barcelona!” 

This attack of inspiration struck us as hilarious, and to this day, Joe will look at me out of the blue and incant, “Cigarette table. Barcelona! Barcelona!” 

You need a sense of humor to embark on any design project. Without one, you will be in tears at some point. Yet another individual we worked with for a short spell told us he needed to take some time off because he was put off by an innocent comment one of our tradespeople made. With a pricy custom bar project in suspension, we did not see him or hear from him for six months. 

Saarinen "Tulip" Dining Table

More recently, there was the time that the marble-topped Eero Saarinen dining table that had spent half a year crossing the Atlantic from Italy made it to the driveway of our new home in Moreland Hills, only to be cruelly dropped on its side by a savage delivery person. I watched as the marble shattered into little pieces. Or the time that our diva headboard – the piece de resistance in our bedroom suite – proved too large to fit up our staircase upon arrival. In both of these instances, we had to start from scratch.

I am a better, more educated consumer of interiors and infinitely happy in our home today having acquired the forbearance it took to get through all of these chapters. The patience Mary taught me has also served me well in many other areas of my life, from gardening to self-care to the grocery store (with notable lapses).

Ironically, we never did end up acquiring those two Barcelona chairs, opting instead for equally iconic but better-scaled Le Corbusier sling chairs.

But “Barcelona! Barcelona!” will always have a better ring to it. 

Le Corbusier "Sling" Chair