Mexican | Newell Turner
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.
Newell Turner: My name is Newell Turner, and I'm really excited to be talking about my new book Mexican, A Journey Through Design, which has just been released through Vendome Press. It's about Mexico, interiors, architecture, but layered with cultural references that give you a better understanding of what you're seeing and where things come from in the design world.
Suzy Chase: You have such an illustrious background as the creator of the Hearst Design Group in 2012, an editorial director of Elle Decor, House Beautiful and Veranda. You won the coveted National Magazine award for general excellence, the industry equivalent of an Oscar. And now your latest book, Mexican is a journey through design. You've been compared to the legendary culinary pioneer, Diana Kennedy and what she did for Mexican food. I just love your take as the non-native discovering the country's design and cultural details that are the essence of Mexican style. You wrote about how your story is a classic expat story. Would you kick things off talking a little bit about your path from magazines to Mexico?
Newell Turner: Sure. First of all, that reference design at Kennedy are some big shoes to fill because before her recent death I spent decades exploring the nuances and corners of Mexico that in my mind are so really beautiful and amazing and rich, and it's an incredible cultural treasure in food. But equally, Mexico has this maybe even more important cultural treasure in design, the decorative arts, crafts, architecture, all of those things that relate to how we actually live day to day. And I believe it very firmly that there is so much more opportunity in a bigger, broader, more dynamic cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico. We are neighbors, but we oddly know so little about Mexico and there's so much to gain on both sides from more of that dialogue. I didn't start it for sure. It's happening. Food world, the art world, and now more and more in the decorative arts.
So it's just a wonderfully exciting thing that I'm now indulging myself in the latter part of my career with doing that deep dive that you get to do sometimes with things you feel passionate about. And I love Mexico. I've been spending more and more and more time. I've just come back from almost two years there. I had to return to the States for a few months to deal with some things and missing it, missing getting back to my city of Merida in Yucatan. Anyway, it's just a wonderful place. I spent so many years. I was in magazine publishing for 30 plus years across a number of great magazines, Metropolitan Home, House and Garden, House Beautiful where we won the General Excellence Award for the first time in that magazines over a hundred year history. I founded some magazines that were a chain of magazines in the Hamptons, Palm Beach and Connecticut, now also in New York.
But that passion then in my magazine career was always pursuing American design or design in the United States. And in that process I kept running across references because I love design history. I kept running across references or roots in Mexican design, clearly along the border states, but increasingly elsewhere in the country. And it just was always kind of on my back burner I would say of something that I really wanted to go further with. And now I'm doing that. I like to think this book is kicking off the next stage of my career.
Suzy Chase: While I was flipping through this book, I was wondering if, and I wanted to ask you, if more people traveled and they fell in love with a country, do you think they would in turn fall in love with the people, and that would basically eliminate strife and misunderstanding in the world?
Newell Turner: I believe that firmly. I don't have children of my own, but I have eight nephews and nieces, and I have this tradition with them that I've taken all of them on a trip to some part of the world to open their eyes even if it's just one time. But interestingly, it's led to them traveling much, much more around the world because I believe that very firmly that if we go out of our American shell and travel, we find that the world is not a whole lot different from life here in the United States. On a fundamental level, people are very similar, and design is a cultural treasure of humankind, I believe. And that sounds very grand, but it is. The cultural treasures of people around the world are the beauty of what humankind is able to create. I do think that Americans should travel more, and it doesn't have to be far.
Mexico is an easy destination, yet it's a world apart in many ways because of its cultural and historical traditions or legacy through colonialism and independence and monarchy and all these different things they've gone through in their struggle to become who they are today. And once you get to know people, it just changes your perspective on the world. I do think it's very important for people to travel and open their eyes to what is on this planet floating through space. It's just magnificent. It's all very grand speak, but it is. And getting to know people is a part of that. And there's always something to learn. You never see people the same way again or a place the same way again. We are all one people in the end, and I think the better we know each other, the less strife there would be in the world.
Suzy Chase: Stephen Drucker sent you a text that said "Are you working on a book?" Could you please tell that story?
Newell Turner: I will. Stephen Drucker is a very important person to me. He has been an incredible mentor over my career, and he's the only person I worked for in my career who I had a sort of symbiotic understanding of. I always felt like we could complete each other's sentences. We had such a understanding of what we both thought and how we saw things. It was one of the great pleasures of my career working with him. Then we went different ways, stayed in touch, and then suddenly I was at a point where I was parting ways with Hearst Publishing, and I started honing in on Mexico. I had been going to Mexico yearly for longer and longer stays, and I was doing posts on Instagram like everybody does when they travel. And Stephen noticed it. He sent me this message, he goes, "Are you working on a book?"
And I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I actually have a sort of visual proposal that I was putting together just as the pandemic broke loose, and it's just been sort of sitting here. I haven't done anything with it." And he goes, "Well, let me take a look at that." And his trust in me is, I don't even know how to describe how invaluable it is, but he has been the most amazing guide in this process of creating a book. It started with that instant message on Instagram asking if I was doing a book, and I had an idea of how I wanted to do it. It's a sort of visual narrative of my journey into Mexico. It's certainly not an academic or all-encompassing view of Mexican design, but it is a deeply informed view and a view from my perspective of knowing a lot about design in the United States and other parts of the world.
So I like to believe that I brought this sort of informed perspective to it. And Stephen got that immediately, I have to give him credit. It was his idea to structure the book by decorative periods for each chapter. And I didn't quite get that in the beginning, but then I realized as I got into it, it was just a very natural, beautiful way of organizing my journey in a way, instead of it just being this rambling narrative of my experiences. It gave it a beautiful structure and a way for people to dive into the book in different places. It's not something that you have to start from beginning to end and go from beginning to end. You can dive in here or there, and it works.
Suzy Chase: Susana Ordovás, is that how you pronounce her last name?
Newell Turner: Ordovás.
Suzy Chase: She gave you the highest compliment-
Newell Turner: She did.
Suzy Chase: ... when she wrote, "It is perhaps ironic that a foreigner, an American from Mississippi, has been able to capture with such grace and insight the complex essence of Mexico's style and design legacy. But this is a book that no one else could have put together." Were you ever apprehensive about creating a book about a completely different culture?
Newell Turner: I wouldn't be truthful if I didn't say I worried about things. As I said, the idea of the book and my proposal took shape initially right before the pandemic, and that sort of closed things down. And then I used the period, the first two years of the pandemic really doing a deep dive into the history of Mexico, cultural, political, religious, all of those things because I don't feel like you can really understand design unless you understand where it comes from and how it took shape. And that goes back to a degree that I have from the University of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. That program is a very broad liberal arts program that teaches you to study a region, a people, a place through multiple avenues.
So I had that sort of educational background that was focused at the time in the south, but then throughout my career in publishing, each magazine that I've worked for had an audience and you had to understand that audience and what they wanted or didn't know that they wanted and you had to understand where what you were putting on the page came from.
So I felt very confident in my ability to kind of observe. I'm an observer by the way, and I like to make connections between things and through different avenues like I've just said; geography, archeology, history, politics, blah, blah, blah. And so I felt pretty confident, but I have to say I felt a little nervous because I'm like, "Who am I, this gringo from the United States? Who does he think he is to come in and understand the culture of Mexico?" But the response already, in particular, the response I'm getting from Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States has just been really rewarding I guess it's just the best way of saying it because as I'm starting to talk to people that are seeing and buying the book, they get it and they are thrilled with it. And I feel like I immediately have their trust in that they realize I understood something or I wasn't coming at it from a very detached foreign perspective.
I was deeply in the subject and deeply in the culture, and so I was a little nervous about it in the beginning, but I feel more and more confident. I guess I was mostly nervous because there are a lot of experts on many subjects in Mexico, people whose work I admire greatly. But I think I accomplished it. And I say that hesitantly and humbly, but I think the response has just been great from people. And that response is not just like, "Oh, you did a beautiful book." It's like, "Oh, you got this and you understood that." And even Mexican Americans saying, "I didn't make that connection before." I think the book is working. Guess long story short.
Suzy Chase: I'd love to chat about a few styles in the book. And the first is Baroque. You write, "The Baroque style was particularly fortuitous for both the Spanish and the advanced civilizations in Mexico of the late 16th Century." How so?
Newell Turner: It was highly developed. The artistry was highly developed. They were doing things on par with the Egyptians, and language was very developed. The written language was very developed. Baroque is very exuberant, and a lot of meso American cultures were very exuberant. We see the pyramids today in Mexico that are really not fully restored to what they were at the time. Many of the pyramids were highly decorated with concrete or plaster, a thing called Chukum that they worked with in Yucatan in particular, and painted bright red. The Mexicans were, or Mesoamericans were, working with dyes that were highly prized in Europe, purples made from mollusk shells, greens. It was just a much more to begin with colorful world than we even imagined today.
And the carving work was extensive and beautiful, and so much of it is still being discovered. A lot of it is still being discovered, but so much of it is still being restored that we're only really now just beginning to see some of that beautiful work that existed. And so the reason I said that is the baroque was exuberant. If you would use one word to describe baroque is exuberant, and Mesoamerican decorative arts were exuberant in their own way. I think there was through that highly flourished design that created` place where the two cultures could find some commonality.
Suzy Chase: So next is Neoclassical. The second French empire from 1852 to 1870 had a brief and ill-fated monarchy in Mexico. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Newell Turner: Yeah. After Spain was losing control of their territory New Spain, the French tried twice to establish monarchies in Mexico, but they didn't last long. But at the same time, French design like it has really around the world, even in Asia, has always had a refinement that has appealed to people of many cultures, United States especially. And in Mexico, the timing of it was with the revolution in France and independence of Mexico, and a lot of that imagery got melded in Mexico. One of Mexico's longtime presidents/sort of dictator around the term of the 1900s-
Suzy Chase: Diaz?
Newell Turner: Yeah. He was a Francophile of the highest level. And because of that, a lot of his push in developing Mexico especially in building projects and things like that, had a heavily French influence to it. Even in my city of Merida, when he was planning to come to make a visit to the city, and again this was around 1900, they created this boulevard similar to the Champs-Elysees in Paris that was built and then it became lined with mansions that were the result of the henequen fortunes that were made all very in the French influence. Even my house in Merida, which is in a barrio called San Cristobal, it is a Spanish colonial structure, but iced, literally icing on the cake in French decorative arts. So all of the plaster work and things like that are very French neoclassical. The Mexicans use that as ways of symbolizing independence and all of that sort of fever of independence that happened with the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the revolution in Mexico.
Suzy Chase: So that brings me to Spanish colonial houses, and I'd love to hear about those.
Newell Turner: Well, I love them. Part of my fascination, big part of my fascination with Mexico, is the different European influence that happened there that came out of Spain, which for I think like a thousand years or hundreds of years had had a very peaceful existence. After the Moors were expelled from Spain back to Africa, their cultural influence remained, and Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in a more or less harmony before the inquisition. And that harmony, out of that harmony, came a very particular style that has cultural references that go back to Persia frankly, but through the [inaudible 00:19:07] out of North Africa. And that all came over to New Spain in the process of the Spanish colonizing. So that use of courtyards in particular I always for a long time at least wanted a courtyard house because I loved that sense of indoor/outdoor living and that sense of inward looking outdoor space. That's what I would say the big influence out of Spain is through that sort of convivencia, which was that harmonious period in the decorative world in Spain between Jews, Christians and Muslims. It's just a really beautiful rich period.
Suzy Chase: So moving on to art deco, you say the most fascinating contribution was a variation of art deco called Maya Deco. What's that?
Newell Turner: So it was fascinating to me, and it continues to really fascinate me that deco had, I would say, a much bigger impact on Mexico than even the United States because I feel like the Mexican craftspeople had traditions of working in stone and then cement plaster and other plasters. And that's all conducive to the construction and embellishment of deco architecture. Not to mention the sort of very geometric oriented design of Mayan traditions in particular were not so alien to deco that came from Europe. And what I find lovely is deco expressed itself at every level in Mexico and is still widely visible from big buildings to some of the most humble houses in neighborhoods that have deco facades. They might have a Spanish colonial interior, but the facade was updated, let's say, in a deco style. And because of that sort of geometric, let's just say, relationship between deco and Mayan traditions, they're evolved very kind of distinct.
I think it's maybe one of the few distinct branches of deco, it's called Mayan deco. And it manifested in patterns, decorative patterns on the buildings that are this sort of interesting melding of the two. Is it deco or is it Mayan? And then also in the relief work where deco might be... Deco in the United States and Europe was much more northern European in style. This was much more Mayan in orientation and embellishments, figurines and things like that were much more Mayan. And so it developed its own expression. And because it was so prevalent, there is a lot to see.
Suzy Chase: Moving on to modernism. When I think about Mexico, I think about ancient traditions, not modernism. Talk a little bit about the modernist movement.
Newell Turner: Modernism in Mexico is really interesting because the modernism movement was really in Europe and in the United States driven by machine made heavy precision. And in Mexico the history of Mexican design is very hands-on. Mexican expressions in modernism have a bit of softness that humanizes in my mind modernism and makes it much more livable. In Europe and the United States, modernists were always struggling with how to make their structures or their architecture softer in some way. And it was often through textiles. A lot of women in the modernist movement were relegated to bringing the sort of textiles to projects that gave it a sense of warmth and livability and just humanity and less so machine made. In Mexico, you have this wonderful expression through the legendary Barragan and all of his disciples in Mexico. The architecture school in Guadalajara at the time was a hot house of modernism and architects that came out of that in Mexico.
But in the construction methods that were traditional to Mexico, it's all very handmade, not machine made. And so that hand making of modernist shapes and expressions brought a warmth to modernism that just really made it livable. Instead of poured concrete, you'd have stone or terracotta tiles. Walls had a bit of texture and were not machine made and super smooth. And then Barragan's use of glass and vast expanses of a glass were unlike the United States in particular, which is structures are often outward looking. His use of glass was inward looking to the house compound and framing internal views, courtyards let's say, that created a sense of intimacy that often modernist architecture lacks in my mind. And in short, Mexico brought a warmth to modernism that I think we've all benefited from as we've looked to it. Also, I'm forgetting one important thing, color too. You can't talk about Mexico without thinking of color, and the architects working in modernism down there used color, Barragan again in his pink. But the use of color brought a humanity to modernism that I think it was lacking in that other architects around the world struggled to achieve.
Suzy Chase: It's interesting because it seems to be the only style in the book that you say is still evolving today.
Newell Turner: In the future, will we look back at this time and call it contemporary? Will it become a period of design? I don't know. I think of contemporary as what's now and evolving, but it may in retrospect in the future, it may have distinct parameters and elements that make it a very specific period. Who knows at this point. But modernism has and is evolving through contemporary work in Mexico.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so a little bit earlier you talked about courtyards, and I am always intrigued by homes, what you see in Mexico, because so often it doesn't look like much from the outside. And then you take a few steps in and enter a gorgeous oasis. And you always wanted a courtyard house and a historic renovation project. So you and Douglas Clarke, your partner, restored a circa 1900 house that had been converted into a small school and then abandoned. What about this place spoke to you and Doug?
Newell Turner: This is the kind of classic center courtyard, patio courtyard, meaning it's all paved with stone and our plantings. We have some palms in the ground, but the rest of it is with plantings and pots and things. What I love about it is the natural way you move in and out. My great-grandmother's house in Mississippi, one of my great-grandmother's house, her kitchen and dining room were off a wing of the back of the house. So to get to the dining room or the kitchen, you had to go onto the porch to get to them. And in my particular memory, I loved that experience in the morning of having to go outside to get to the kitchen for a cup of coffee or Thanksgiving dinner rolled in and out of the dining room onto the porch. You get that experience with courtyard houses, and I think that's why I'm so attracted to them.
My kitchen, you have to go outside to get to it. You can circumnavigate the house through rooms to get around to it if it's raining, but most of the time we're passing through the courtyard all the time between rooms. And I love that. I love the architecture of Northern Africa in Morocco, and I feel like our house is a lot like what's called a riad there, they're center courtyard houses. They look like nothing on the outside. Typically, you walk through a door and you're in this oasis paradise that is your own little world. And I love that idea. I love that idea in New York with my apartment by the way, of being in my own little world in the middle of this frantic, chaotic city. I just have more space in Mexico.
And then I have the outdoors too as a part of that experience. So I guess that's a little bit of my psychology of why I like that so much. We have one room at the end of the courtyard, the big walls open to the courtyard and center courtyard, and then the other side big doors open onto a courtyard behind the house where the pool is. And we love sitting in there with both of those walls completely open like a huge breezeway. And you can sit there at night, and you can watch the moon come up over the other end of the house. You can watch storms roll in from the Gulf of Mexico. You can sit there in a rainstorm, and it's like being in some deeply tropical place.
It's lovely. The courtyards, the American way of living and building domestic architecture was all about looking out from houses in the country, looking out to houses in urban developments. It's all about being inside and looking out. I like this really kind of introspective view on this very inner experience, and you get that with so much of the domestic architecture in Mexico. I love that. And I like having my own little world that I can control. I'm a Virgo, and so I like being able to have that little control of some little part of my life.
Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?
Newell Turner: So on Instagram, I'm TNT3, those are my initials, Thomas Newell Turner three. And on Facebook, I'm Newell Turner. You can find me in both places. I'd say I'm much more active on Instagram. Because the two can cross post, I typically post on Instagram and include it posting over to Facebook too. But I'm a very visual person, and I see things in a visual way, so Instagram has been really my place in social media where I like to share and explore all of my journey.
Suzy Chase: This is a stunning, stunning book. Thank you Newell for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Newell Turner: It was my pleasure. It's my pleasure. I actually love podcasts, and I think they're so useful in listening to them. There's always rich content, but also you can listen to them in all sorts of places and I love that. So thank you for having me.
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