Charm School | Emma Bazilian and Stephanie Diaz
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Emma Bazilian: Hi, I'm Emma Bazilian.
Steph Diaz: And I'm Stephanie Diaz.
Emma Bazilian: And we are the authors of the book Charm School, The Schumacher Guide To Traditional Decorating For Today,
Suzy Chase: You both work at Frederick Media, which includes Schumacher, a storied brand that was founded in 1889 and Frederic Magazine. Could you kick things off chatting a little bit about the history of Schumacher and Frederic Magazine and what you both do there? Steph, can you start?
Steph Diaz: Yeah, so as you said, Schumacher has been around for over 130 years and there's so much history. I think that was one of the things that I was drawn to when I first started working at Schumacher, learning about collaborations with Dorothy Draper, Cecil Beaton, Frank Lloyd Wright, and having our product in places like Radio City, Metropolitan Opera House and The White House. There's so much history. Having our archives is just kind of amazing and it's a household name, and we've always stood for style and quality. It's just been amazing to work at a place like Schumacher. I started about eight years ago, so I've been around for a really long time and I've seen just how much it has grown and from where we started. We have so many brands now, Patterson Flynn, we have Backdrop, and it's just kind of been amazing to see how much we've progressed.
I was a part of the original team with Dara Caponigro, our creative director, and we worked on the first Schumacher Bulletin, which eventually became what is Frederic Magazine right now. That was really exciting because the first time we did it was a marketing collateral for the Miles Red collection and it was supposed to be a one-time thing. We up ended up making 10 issues and now it's Frederic Magazine and we're an actual magazine. Emma's on our team and we have this team and we have the magazine, and we're working on volume nine right now, Emma. We've done books. S is For Style, which was our first book, which was really amazing. That feedback was really great. Then now Charm School. So we have video, book or magazine. It's just been really exciting to see how much we get to work on and we get to inspire people with the things that we are inspired by. So it's just been a kind of amazing to see all of that happen.
Suzy Chase: And how about you, Emma?
Emma Bazilian: So I joined Schumacher a little more than two years ago. I had been an editor at a Hearst Design Group and House Beautiful. So I sort of came into it as both from an editorial background and also just as a big fan of Schumacher, honestly. I grew up with Schumacher Fabrics. My mom was an interior designer, so I was always just kind of in that world and just obsessed with Schumacher. They always had the fun florals and the fun designer collaborations. I remember reading the Bulletin when it came out and just being totally blown away by the quality of it, especially for what Steph was saying, it was originally marketing collateral. So when Schumacher really started building this editorial media team a few years ago, they had already assembled this great group of names that I was familiar with, Tori Mellott, who had been a traditional home.
I remember when she went over to Schumacher, I was like, this has to be a big deal. Obviously Dara, who had been the editor of Veranda, was one of the founders of Domino. So they had this really, really impressive editorial framework in place. When I started talking to Dara about moving over there, I realized that this was not necessarily going to be a kind of marketing job for Schumacher. It really was going to be an editorial job and we were going to create this incredible magazine. So yeah, it was really exciting. I think I joined right as the first issue of Frederic was coming out. So I did not work on the first issue, but I was lucky enough to be around when it officially launched, and just the reactions were incredible.
In a world where so many brands are kind of scaling back on their media budgets and editorial is kind of in a weird place right now where the legacy brands are trying to figure out how to balance digital and print and video and a million other things. It was really exciting to see a company that was so excited to invest in this really beautiful, luxurious print product and hire editors who really knew their stuff to produce it.
Suzy Chase: Charm School is a feast for the eyes. It's page after page of inspiration. So can you just talk a little bit about the process of creating this book? Did you do it in the midst of the pandemic? Also Steph, I've heard you say you balance each other out.
Steph Diaz: Yeah, we sure do. We worked on S is for Style right before the pandemic hit. That launch during the pandemic, and that was such an amazing book to work on. That was my first book I art directed and I worked really closely with Dara. That was Dara's book and that was so amazing and it was such a great book. After that, I think we were having a lot of conversations about what our next book would be, and Emma joined and then we all kind of knew that she had coined the grandmillennial term. So I think we kind of felt that maybe that could be our next book. That's when Emma and I were paired together and it was the first time that we actually had worked together. So it was really interesting because I think we had a lot of conversations about what the structure of this book would be and how we would put this book together.
It was a really great process. We wanted to focus on just making sure we got the best Schumacher images. Ultimately this book is a Schumacher book. I always say it was a labor of love. We did a lot of photo research and I think that's where Emma and I, I always say, we balance each other out. Emma was always pulling the most intense photos with florals everywhere and creepy glass dolls and so much needlepoint. We would have conversations back and forth and I would say, well, I don't really know if that fits or we could try, but I don't think it's going to work. I would reign her in, but she would push me. So it was just, I don't know, it was a really great balance.
Emma Bazilian: It was fun. Steph was a very good tempering influence because I love this style and the aesthetic and some of the stuff that I am drawn towards is a little bit maybe more out there. A lot of the process for this was doing research in old magazines and just old books that I have. You can find some really fun crazy stuff. It was nice to have a voice of reason saying, okay, this is fun, but maybe we'll scare some people if we have too many Victorian dolls in a wicker carriage and a dark room covered in Laura Ashley.
But it was really great though. I just had so many images of rooms and projects that I had saved over the years that I kind of instantly knew these are the designers that I feel like really fit this and these are the projects that I love. A lot of them happened to feature Schumacher, which was great. Then also it was really fun actually having access to, not only the projects that had featured Schumacher over the years, but just the photo shoots that the brand had done. Because there's some really ... the Vogue collection, some of the collaborator collections, Miles Red, Mary McDonald, there was just some really fun photo shoots that had happened around those that were the aesthetic of the book.
Suzy Chase: So Emma, in 2019 as an editor of House Beautiful, you wrote an essay titled The Rise of Grandmillennial Style and coined the term grandmillennial. I must have read this piece five times. Could you talk a little bit about that essay?
Emma Bazilian: I am still in shock at the response to that piece and will always be in shock. Our editor-in-chief, Jo Saltz, and I were always kind of joking about how I was this weird 30 year old, old lady who was obsessed with needlepoint and chintz and Laura Ashley, and kind of every spare moment that I could find, you'd probably find me huddled in the House Beautiful archives looking at issues from the seventies, eighties, nineties, which was honestly one of my favorite things was doing archive research there. I remember thinking, this is definitely not mainstream, but there are other young women and men, people that I know who are into this style and who are collecting antiques and samplers and needlepointing heirloom folk art graphs and into this kind of design. Especially, I feel like there were so many designers in the South and a lot of British designers who were kind of reclaiming this country floral look.
Even in fashion, I remember seeing on the runways like Batsheva and Erdem and Emelia Wickstead and all these fashion designers that I loved were putting out these long sleeve high-neck, ruffly floral gowns. Gucci kind of was on more the maximal extent of things, but they were really kind of spearheading this granny chic revival and published the article and it just went crazy. I think there were so many people who kind of felt seen by this, who were like, oh, I'm kind of like the weirdo who needle points and wears vintage Laura Ashley. Yeah, I think it spoke to a lot of people and it was nice to have a name to attach to it.
Suzy Chase: I think that was the best part was that, yeah, it was grandmillennial. Now we have a name.
Emma Bazilian: For me, it really was kind of the second generation really loving my grandparents' houses and their style and kind of a teenage rebellion against my mom's very tasteful white linen. Going back to the things that she was like, oh my God, I can't believe you like that.
Suzy Chase: For me, it takes me back to growing up in Kansas City and my mom's aesthetic and my grandparents and my mom's fabulous friends, and one of her best friends was Kate Spade's mom.
Emma Bazilian: So cool.
Suzy Chase: When I got married, she goes, put your monogram on your sheets. And I was like, thank you, June.
Steph Diaz: Yes. Oh my God. I love that.
Suzy Chase: So I love that Charm School is really a masterclass on how to achieve the traditional look in our modern times. What are some traditional elements included in the book?
Steph Diaz: Some of my favorite interiors in the book are when you just kind of see glimpses of it. It's not an entire room filled of florals and checks and stripes, but when there's a detail and there's like a striped lampshade or there's a John Stefanidis room in our book where it's a really paired down neutral room, but then you kind of see these little bows on curtains. I think that's the amazing part. It's not just about making everything traditional, but about it could be something really small in the room or it could be an entire room. I think that was the most fun thing, I think. I think for me, it was so exciting to be able to pull imagery that way and not just think of an interior as everything is this.
Suzy Chase: Instead of quiet luxury, quiet grandmillennial.
Steph Diaz: Exactly.
Emma Bazilian: I think just in terms of the topics we covered, and that was one of the earliest conversations we had about the book was how to structure. Do we do it by room? Do we do it by era? But we really did end up going by decorating technique really, or by material. So you have wicker and rattan, you have chapters on stripes and toile and chintz and florals, chapters on skirts and bed hangings and slip covers. But I think the ones that really spoke to us were the ones, especially you find this in the vintage and antiques and collecting where it feels ... I think that's really part of this whole style is that it feels so personal. It's not like you're kind of tailoring your style to fit a certain aesthetic where you want everything to be very modern farmhouse, or you want everything to be very transitional and you're kind of buying things and editing things to fit that.
But more the idea of, you have this collection of-
Suzy Chase: Dolls.
Emma Bazilian: Or plates that you've inherited from your grandmother, or great-grandmother, or just things that you've picked up at flea markets or consignment stores and how do you build an interior about things that you have and that you love and making this eclectic mix of things. I think that's a lot of what traditional decorating is, kind of filling your spaces with personality and finding pieces that you love and just making them work.
Steph Diaz: I think that was the most important, livable, and I think that was what we were looking at when we were looking at this imagery, but it felt personal to whoever had decorated the interior, and I think that was one of the most important elements.
Suzy Chase: So the first chapter is chintz, and I find it to be polarizing. You either love it or you hate it, and I adore it. This might be a really stupid question, but what's the difference between chintz and a floral?
Emma Bazilian: So if you're talking very, very technically in terms of fabric, a chintz fabric is one that has a chintz kind of glazed. I think we kind of use it interchangeably with floral because that's how it's kind of entered the popular vernacular now. But yeah, the origins of the fabric were actually kind of Indian hand prints and block prints in the, I want to say, 16th century that made their way over to Europe. So a lot of these fabrics that we see really originated in India and were kind of then recontextualized through British and French and then later American eyes. They've evolved. They feel like, to people, very eighties and very, they were once trendy, but these fabrics are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and I just think that's really cool that so many of them have a really interesting legacy behind them.
Suzy Chase: When I first moved to New York City from Kansas City, I had this beautiful chintz sofa that my grandma gave me. It was really nice. I got an apartment on Perry Street and they couldn't get my sofa up the stairs.
Steph Diaz: Oh my God.
Suzy Chase: So I had to leave it at the Chelsea self-storage or something like that. So someone got a really nice sofa.
Steph Diaz: Oh my God.
Suzy Chase: Isn't that awful?
Emma Bazilian: That's awful. I guess, Did they have the sofa doctor at that point?
Suzy Chase: I was fresh off the U-Haul from Kansas, so maybe, maybe not.
Emma Bazilian: Oh my gosh.
Suzy Chase: So someone has a really nice chintz couch somewhere.
Emma Bazilian: Oh, lucky them.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, good for them. So how can you mix and match chintz patterns without overwhelming a space?
Emma Bazilian: I think it depends on your definition of overwhelming.
Steph Diaz: Yeah. Well, I also think this is where Emma and I balance out. So we have rooms where you have floral chintz everywhere, and I think they're amazing. But there's also rooms like the Ruthie Sommers interior or there's a Robert F. Kennedy room where the pattern is just on a chair or a sofa and that makes the room. It's neutral rooms, and then you have this chair covered in a chintz or a floral one and it looks amazing. There's also an Allison Caccoma image in here that I really love, where she uses the same floor on the headboard and the curtains, and I believe a chair. Then she has a wicker light fixture with a wicker chair. I don't know, it looks amazing, but then you have the all over and that looks great too. So Emma, I don't know.
Emma Bazilian: I think there are really kind of different ways of going about. You do kind of all over matching curtains, wallpaper, upholstery, that very what we think of as a decorating, no-no, kind of going all out with one textile, which I think with the right textile can actually be kind of fresh and modern and cool just because it is so taboo.
But then you look at the, I think that room you're referring to, Steph, it's Jenny Holladay who works with Summer Thornton, her living room in Chicago. She has this really kind of overscale blue and white chintz wallpaper and then a chintz chair. But I think that what makes it work is that she really varies the scale of things. So you can have a really large-scale chintz on the walls, but then if you have a mid-scale on a piece of upholstery or even a really tiny small-scale ditzy floral on a lampshade or a pillow or something like that, it kind of balances each other out. Keeps things from battling for your attention in the space.
Steph Diaz: You can do it in so many ways. It's just a matter of these amazing decorators, just kind of really thinking about what they use and the patterns and the scale. I think that's the most important.
Emma Bazilian: The most successful spaces are the ones where it doesn't look too studied or too intentional, where it feels like ... and regardless of whether or not this is true, it feels like when you bought this house, it already had this antique wallpaper and then you added this headboard that you found at auction or something like that. And where it feels collected rather than very precisely studied.
Suzy Chase: In the book, you talk about how the stripe is a chameleon in the design world. One of the best things about stripes is that they're versatile. Dorothy Draper love dramatic stripes, pairing them with oversized florals. Talk a little bit about stripes.
Emma Bazilian: So I was lucky enough actually to go to The Greenbrier for the first time a couple of months ago, and I had never been there. It was absolutely mind-blowing and incredibly inspiring and just seeing the way that Dorothy and later Carlton had-
Steph Diaz: And Rudy.
Emma Bazilian: ... used these. And now Rudy of course, who was our host for the weekend, and it was so fun to see him in his element, but kind of watching the evolution of these rooms and how she paired these really ... It was all about scale and it wasn't about doing a ticking stripe with a small floral. It was about these really bold statements and these wide stripes and these massively tall ceilings. I think what really made her work so exciting was that there was a really theatrical, dramatic element to it that wasn't necessarily worried about taste. It was just what it was, and it was kind of in your face and happy and exciting, and it just felt really bold and new and really, really modern. It still feels really modern because of the graphicness and the boldness and just the willingness to throw crazy pattern on top of crazy pattern and having stripes as the backdrop.
I feel like it adds this interesting art element to florals and the colors and everything. You kind of feel like you're engulfed in this whole world when you walk into one of her striped spaces.
Steph Diaz: I think what Emma was saying, they're so versatile. The scale, small scales, big scales. I think there's so much to play with. I think just having, like Emma was saying, that we have archival image, a Dorothy Draper image and just the bold stripe on the walls makes a space. I think there's so much that you can do with stripes too. We did a story in Frederic Magazine about stripes on the bias, and there's so much that you can do and it doesn't necessarily have to be on the walls. It can be anywhere. I think they're just an element that is so fun to play with.
Emma Bazilian: A ticking stripe is essentially a neutral to me. If you want to do a solid, but you don't want to do a solid because solids are kind of boring, a ticking stripe is a way around that, the kind of little bit more flavor. But I mean honestly, what does a stripe not work with?
Steph Diaz: Exactly.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, I have blue and kind of off-white ticking curtains in my living room. It's better than just cream.
Emma Bazilian: Yeah, it adds a little bit of movement. I think just that kind of linearity is such a great backdrop for, obviously I'm going to say florals, but kind of all sorts of patterns.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. I think one thing that immediately elevates a room is a skirt, whether it be on a round table under the bathroom sink, kitchen sink. It hides a multitude of sins and you call the ruffle the ditzy cousin of the skirt. That cracked me up.
Steph Diaz: It's funny that you say that it cracked you up because reading some of the texts that the copy that Emma wrote, I would laugh. She would send me copy and I would read it and I would laugh, and this was one of the ones. But I honestly would have to say I was not a huge fan of skirts before this book, but after putting this book together and seeing all these images, I love the idea of dressing the table, adding a pretty pattern or having a space that you need for storage and hiding it, and picking a pattern and putting a skirt on it. I think it's such a fun idea. I think we've even had conversations about trying to find images where you would skirt things that you normally wouldn't. I think Emma, you had mentioned a ping pong table. So I think this was a really fun one because, like I said, I thought at the beginning before this, I thought I was a little fussy, but it's so fun.
Emma Bazilian: I think some of the skirts that I love the most from the chapter, obviously a floral skirt and dressing table will always be my go-to because I had one growing up and it was kidney shaped and I loved it. I'm still mourning its disappearance to this day. But in the chapter, I think in the opener, there's a bathroom that David Hicks had done that is a skirted sink vanity area, and it's just a plain white fabric.
Steph Diaz: The bathtub.
Emma Bazilian: Oh yes, and a skirted bathtub.
Steph Diaz: Yes, the bathtub. I think that was amazing.
Emma Bazilian: Yeah, kind of it's modern day counterpart, which is the dining room of the designer Lilse McKenna old place in Brooklyn. gain, it's just a little bar area that's skirted with this beige and white ticking stripe. I think just the way that it can feel really, really fresh and unexpected when it's done in a solid fabric or when it's just kind of box plates versus really tightly gathered, and it's a really nice way of adding softness to a space. And also just I think the potential for storage, especially when you're in the city, is endless and always needed.
Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?
Emma Bazilian: Obviously Schumacher is on Instagram, on Pinterest online. Honestly, and I say this as someone who thought this before I've ever worked for Schumacher, but the Schumacher for Instagram is just so fabulous and beautifully curated. It's super inspiring. So if you're not following that, you obviously should be. But then also Frederic Magazine, our Instagram has been really growing and is a great mix of pieces and images that we've run in the magazine and designers that we love. So definitely follow us on Instagram and YouTube too. We're doing really, really fun house tours and videos on YouTube that are definitely worth checking out. A lot of designers own homes, which is cool.
Suzy Chase: This has been so much fun, Steph and Emma, thank you so much for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast.
Emma Bazilian: Thank you for us so much for having us.
Steph Diaz: Thank you for having us.
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