Live Colorfully | Amanda Sims Clifford
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.
Amanda Sims Clifford: I'll give you the rundown. My name's Amanda Sims Clifford, I'm the executive editor at House Beautiful and that was my role on this book, but what that really just means is I edited it. So the book is a compilation of different projects we've run over the years, plus a few that are new to House Beautiful. I was in charge of helping decide what was going to go in the book, editing the stories, repackaging the content to work in this format and really guiding things through the process.
Suzy Chase: So you are the executive editor at House Beautiful, formerly Architectural Digest, where you launched the brand's millennial focus blog called Clever and before that you were at Food52 where you launched the design department. As the executive editor of House Beautiful, you see a lot of different design styles. So here's the big question. What is your favorite?
Amanda Sims Clifford: Thinking about it in terms of this book is, the very first project, the Studio Shamshiri Project in Bel Air in California, it is in the earth tones chapter, one of my favorite chapters, because I am really drawn to the really rich, pigmented colors that feel like a handful of clay or a bushel of branches and designers that make those colors and those motifs from nature feel very in harmony with landscape, with the views outside, very easy to live in and there's color everywhere in this home. There's a mustard sofa, there's orange pendants, there's bright pillows. It's full of life, but it is soft and warm and enveloping. And I think there's a quote in here that it was meant to feel like a womb and I love a range of styles, but I care the most about that sense of comfort and connectedness and groundedness in a space.
Suzy Chase: And in that section there is a great tip on how to pair paints with wood, which when you think about it, that's hard.
Amanda Sims Clifford: It is because we think woods are almost like the blue jeans of an interior. You expect to see them and they are a so-called neutral in that way, but they're color, like they're different shades of brown and walnut, mahogany and all of that. They do require thoughtfulness when you're pairing with them.
Suzy Chase: Let's kick things off with a little history of House Beautiful. It was originally published in Chicago in 1896 to showcase the many beautiful homes in the area. It sold for 10 cents a copy and was targeted at the middle class. Eugene Clap and Henry B. Harvey started the first of the shelter genre publications and named it House Beautiful. Eugene was a civil engineer in Chicago who had an eye for home design and home improvement. He was an early DIYer and for financial help, he sought help from his friend Henry B. Harvey. They focused on interior design, architecture, and gardening. And then it was purchased by the Hearst Corporation in 1934, and is the oldest still published magazine of its genre.
In doing my research, I read this book. I went down a rabbit hole, I read this book called Women's Periodicals in the United States Consumer Magazines and an early editor said in the beginning it was purely house. It was strictly architectural and decorative. There were no recipes, no wine list, no babies or dogs, no people wandered through the rooms or appeared on covers. How has the magazine evolved for our modern times?
Amanda Sims Clifford: I was fascinated to hear that. I am not surprised having dug through the archives myself and I think a lot of our editors have done that. Our 125th anniversary was now a couple years ago. And so we did a lot of content, bringing things back from the archives. And I think that rings true. But I think what happened to House Beautiful over the years is it became beloved by a really wide readership and a lot of people who were interested in design but maybe didn't have access or used House Beautiful as their access to projects oft really good taste, great designers, and just seeing how to do design right. And I think what happened in that process is that it had to become more accessible. That's something our team who's been in place for the past four years, has really tried to shepherd as stewards.
The brand is relatability. Our readers want access to this world. They want to understand how to make their homes better for themselves. They want to understand how to work with designers and they want to see themselves in our pages. I've been looking at the book recently and trying to figure out what was my favorite project. And I think if you can't see yourself in a room, if it doesn't seem like a space that you can picture yourself jumping on the bed and taking your shoes off and having your family there, then it's really a two dimensional inspiration. And what designers really strive for now in even pitching their projects to us in photographing them and styling them is things that are a little bit more relatable than that. We think about it when we select projects, we think about it when we style them, shoot them, and certainly when we choose them for a compilation like this is, "Are they all homes where our readers can see themselves?"
Suzy Chase: For the book Live Colorfully, you spent years compiling the nearly 100 inspiring homes feature. How is the book organized?
Amanda Sims Clifford: What we did, we really tried to think about usability. We could have done a version of this book where we just simply chose all the most colorful projects that have run in House Beautiful before and put those together but in reality, that's not how people think about color on a personal level. If you spoke to someone who was thinking about decorating their home, you said, "What colors are you thinking?" They may not know. They may think, "Well, I really like using greens, but what does that mean in terms of the actual space?" And certainly not every room is going to be blue and greens. So what we did was think about colors in terms of color families. We tried to identify different color families that we see constantly coming through of our pages. And those are earth tones, primary colors, pale pastels, warm neutrals, jewel tones.
And we felt like those encompassed, certainly you could have split that a different way, but we felt like those encompassed these color families that people could really gravitate to and if you flip through the book, they're packaged together so you do start to land in the section where you're like, "Oh, that's me. I am a pale pastel person. This is me. I see myself in these pages." So we divided it up that way and then picked projects to fall into those categories. And then in between each one, we did do what we called mood boards or single colors, and those were more of the actionable service sections. So if someone is looking for, they're like, "Oh, I do want to use a blue paint, but I just need ideas for the right color or how to do it." You can flip to the blue paint section or it's really just blue in general and see different fabrics, wall coverings, tiles, paints, different ways designers have used blues as an inspiration for a room.
So there's two ways to access the stories in here, but both aren't geared at the reader and the experience of actually getting through this book and getting something from it.
Suzy Chase: In terms of decorating, when I think of color, the first thing I think of is paint. And when it comes to paint, you say we shouldn't limit ourselves to the standard colors we find in the hardware store. Talk about your clever 50% trick.
Amanda Sims Clifford: Well, I can't take credit for this. We got this from an interview with a wonderful designer, Phoebe Howard, who uses a lot of really bright, really saturated colors in her projects. And what she was talking about was, it's basically lightning or brightening a paint yourself. So there are all the colors on the different chips of the hardware store, and if there's one you really like, but it's a little too dark or it's a little too rich, but you love the color, you can cut it with white paint, you can cut it 50%, for example, or you can cut it 75% and that would get it even brighter. You can cut it 25% and it would just be toned down one bit. And it's a way to customize the color you really love without having to branch into a different pigment type. And in her case, I think she was pairing a brightened color with its fully saturated counterpart, two tones in the same room.
This is something a lot of designers do. We just talk to Phoebe about it in depth. And maybe the best known example of doing this is when designers, you maybe have heard the trick of if you're going to paint your walls one color, then you might do the ceiling with white with a few drops of that wall color to have them relate together, which would be cutting it almost all the way, 95%. But this is just a version of that, and it's a different way to think about leaning into a color you really love and realizing there's possibilities within that.
Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, "When you hear the word color, what do you feel? Thrill or trepidation? It's rarely something in between." For me, to be honest, it's trepidation. That's why this book is so brilliant because it takes the mystery out of decorating with color. What do you hear more from people thrill or trepidation?
Amanda Sims Clifford: I think people want to be thrilled by color. If you are confident in your design skills, if you are confident in your taste or your style or your designer, I think it's thrill, right. They can wield this tool to a certain end and they know how to use it. But I think for a lot of people, for the average person who's getting into designer decorating, it's overwhelming. I feel that way sometimes where I love color, but then I realize, once I start getting faced with color that I like particular colors and that came into how we laid out this book. To me, the best way to suss out what works for you is to see it done. To see a project where you think, "Oh, those color combinations and those colors with that type of style makes a lot of sense to me and I can see myself feeling comfortable and inspired there."
It's like you want color to bring vitality to a space, but you also want it to personalize a space and have it feel like you. You've got to flip through a project or projects until you find one that shows you or proves to you what color can be to you.
Suzy Chase: So jewel tones are inherently elegant. There's a whole chapter dedicated to jewel tones starting on page 201, and as you've done in every chapter, you take the mystery out of colors and color combinations. No one does jewel tones better than Corey Damen Jenkins, if you ask me. And one thing that struck me on page 244 was Corey pulled in an emerald green, velvet custom sofa in a very, very bright white room. Could you describe that room?
Amanda Sims Clifford: This room was on the cover of our magazine and I feel like we just could never get over it and didn't want to. I wholly agree with you that he is masterful about color and particularly jewel tones. And this space, it's got incredibly tall ceilings, it is a classical architecture, there's moldings on the ceilings, there is a real ethereal brightness to the room. The paint he chose on the walls is like a gallery white, it's really crisp, it is cool and it is just absorbing all of the sunlight coming through these huge windows. And it's almost like that sense that when you walk outside on a really, really bright spring morning and it's just electric, almost like white light, that's how this room feels. But then the furnishings are low, they're also very grounded. They feel sturdy and comfortable and it's this really nice balance with the grandness of the architecture and that sofa in particular, it's an electric green, it's beautiful.
But I think one of the things I really like about it is that I'm always coming back to how colors are from the earth. All these colors are from the earth in the end and it's shocking what colors can be from the earth. We talked about earth tones earlier, and this isn't even in that chapter, but jewel tones are from the earth too. They're gems, they're flowers, they're coming from this very grounded place and I think that's what this sofa brings is. It's almost like this is an outdoor room and we've paired it with some botanical patterns, some other clean silhouettes and it's just a piece of furniture in the room you want to run and jump on.
Suzy Chase: If we really want to push our personal color boundaries, where do you suggest we start?
Amanda Sims Clifford: I think, and again, I'm going to just be a conduit for what I've heard from designers here, but a small room or a room where you aren't in it every single day. If you're going to take a risk, which I highly encourage. It's just paint, you can always redo it. You might want to do it in a space where if you don't love it, if it was a risk, that you learn something from, you're able to close the door. If you do it in a bedroom, if you think, "Oh, maybe I want a really rich red room." So you paint your bedroom red, you still have to sleep in there every night. And if you don't love it, there's no getting away from it in a sense. So we see designers do some of the most creative, fun color applications in powder rooms, in bonus rooms, in kids' rooms. They go crazy in the best way. We hear time and again, how much fun designers have designing kids' rooms because there's just a playfulness, a willingness to break some of the other rules and try things that they wouldn't elsewhere.
Suzy Chase: Tell us about the latest issue of House Beautiful.
Amanda Sims Clifford: We just released our shopping issue. It is on newsstands for, I think about another month. This time we put a really, very color relevant story on the cover. It is the Novogratz's home on Waverly Place in downtown Manhattan and it's this huge, centuries old house they bought and renovated for their family of nine. They have adult kids, but several of them still live there. And color was, to me, one of the biggest plays in the house. They have these really vibrant wall colorings, they have really, really pigmented paints, the fireplace mantle in that cover image is this really just poppy, yellow. I think they matched to a Pantone chip. And it's all about shopping in a personalized way, finding... The whole home is a mix of high.... Like there's a Gucci wallpaper and then there's estate sale finds.
The Novogratz's have a variety of product lines, so there's their own stuff that's new from the various places where they have merchandise and it is a real lesson in mixing and taking risks and trying different things. That whole issue is really helping you shop for your home. There's a ton of shopping for flexible furnishings, furnishings that can do different things for you, that you've been move around and try in different ways. And thinking about accents that can actually improve your life if you stop thinking about them in the traditional sense. There's a section on table lamps and how you should use them in creative places. And it doesn't have to just go on a side table, it can go on your dining table or on your kitchen counter, and just thinking about lighting in this really constructive way so that you can shop more creatively and more effectively.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find House Beautiful on the web and social media?
Amanda Sims Clifford: Housebeautiful.com. And we're also on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all House Beautiful.
Suzy Chase: Thank you so much, Amanda, for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Amanda Sims Clifford: Suzy, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you so much for being a proponent of the book. I hope everyone goes and buys it. It is beautiful. There are tons of designers represented in these pages and they are so excited to be in it and to share it with readers.
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