The Allure of Charleston | Susan Sully
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.
Susan Sully: I'm Susan Sully, and I'm the author of a new book called The Allure of Charleston: Houses, Rooms, and Gardens.
Suzy Chase: So, Susan, when you moved back to Charleston four years ago, you found yourself wondering what makes Charleston Charleston, a place like no other? This book answers that question. Could you please read the first paragraph on page nine?
Susan Sully: So this comes in the introduction called Defining Charleston's Style. "The moment you step into the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, you know are in a place unlike anywhere else. Something about its street scape of pediments and porticoes, white porches, sun aged plaster, and gardens glimpsed through wrought iron gates is particular to this locale. But what makes it so distinct from other antique cities around the globe? Certainly, there are individual features that can be compared with corresponding things elsewhere. A Georgian-Palladian portico, a Federal fan light, faded pastel plaster like that of the Caribbean. But Charleston looks like neither Bath, nor Boston, nor even Bermuda. The reality is that its streets, architecture, interiors, and gardens speak a language all of their own, marrying elements from many times and places to define a stylistic dialect specific to its unique history and character.
Suzy Chase: I recently read somewhere that you ran into Charles Duell the former president and CEO of Middleton Place. And he asked you why another book on Charleston?
Susan Sully: Yes. Well, this is my third book on Charleston in 22 years. And Middleton Place has been in all three of them. And so I was downtown during the lockdown, taking exterior photographs of the houses, because it was a great opportunity to take pictures of houses with no cars in front of them. And so I ran into Charles Duell, and he saw what I was up to, and said, "You're not doing another book, are you?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Why another book on Charleston?" And I said, "When can you ever say enough about Charleston?" And he just had to agree. And I have recently quoted the line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." And the way I count my love for Charleston is by writing books about it.
Suzy Chase: So as you were taking photographs during the lockdown, were you just passing the time taking photographs or did you think, "Okay, I need to do another Charleston book?"
Susan Sully: I had already decided to do the book before COVID came into our lives. And as you mentioned, I had just moved back to Charleston after four years away. And what I thought about recently is all three books that I wrote came as I either first moved to Charleston and was absolutely overwhelmed by its beauty, or 10 years later after I had moved away to New Orleans, and come back, and was once again seduced. And then again, after another sojourn away, when I came back and there was that beloved city again, somehow looking the same and yet different.
Susan Sully: So anyway, so during the COVID lockdown, I knew I wanted to write this book. I didn't even have a contract yet, but I thought, "This is a unique opportunity." So I enjoyed getting out there because there wasn't much else to do. So I stalked the houses that I wanted to photograph. And one of my favorite shots, which you could simply never have gotten any other time, was a long shot down the sea wall, parallel to Eastbay and the grand mansions of the East Battery. And no one is in sight, and it's just magical.
Suzy Chase: So at the outset, I think it's important to acknowledge the fact that the preservation of American history includes enslaved people. This book honors and recognizes the enslaved men, women, and children who gave their life to some of the historic masterpieces in this book. It is impossible to disentangle the beauty of the surroundings from the history. The enslaved who, stripped of their African names, performed a variety of jobs, from manual labor, to housekeeping, to skilled trades will be remembered as we examine this beautiful book. Their spirit, stories, and the lessons they hold live on. So this book is divided into two sections, the lexicon, and the houses and gardens. I'd love to hear about how this book is organized.
Susan Sully: Well, when I found myself asking that question, what makes Charleston Charleston? Why do you just know you are in a distinct unique place the minute you step into the historic district? I'm a writer. My first love is language, and then architecture, and then photography. So I do approach things from both a visual perspective and a verbal perspective. And so I started thinking about Charleston's architectural language and tried to break it down into individual, what could be called words, which would be a color or a specific shape used in an architectural feature. Phrases, which would be where those words are put together, like in a portico or a garden gate. And then sentences and paragraphs, the houses, the street scapes. So I was really playing with this idea and I thought, "It would be really wonderful to explore it with a visual essay."
Susan Sully: And so I broke the first section down into looking at these individual elements, color, craft, materials, and then looking at doors, and windows, and mantle pieces, and staircases. And doing photo essays on each of them. So that was establishing the language. And then when I got into the houses and gardens, I started with the first earliest houses and gardens where this language was put to use in Charleston. And then from there, I went to houses where it has been updated in new ways, because I wanted to demonstrate the idea that the language of Charleston is a living language. It's not a dead language.
Suzy Chase: Unlike many old Southern cities where white painted wooden brick buildings combine in a uniform palette, you write about how Charleston's tinted stucco homes deliver a spectrum of tones ranging from pale pink to deep ochre. I'm curious about how Caribbean street scapes came into fashion in Charleston. Now, was this mainly to keep the homes cooler inside? I think I read that somewhere.
Susan Sully: Not the colors, except that lighter colors would definitely keep it cooler. And stucco over masonry creates a really nice thick barrier between the hot street and the interior. But the colors, the pastel colors did come via the Caribbean. The first settlers of Charleston came from Barbados, where the English had sugar plantations and made rum. So they were coming from Georgian English colonies in the Caribbean where those colors were typically used. But then some of the other colors, the, what they call Georgian gold, which is a deep, deep gold, that came from England. It was a popular color there. So you really are seeing an English influence via the Caribbean in the colors. An interesting note on the colors is that when people come to Charleston, they always want to see Rainbow Row, which is a row of townhouses on the East Battery that were in completely ramshackle condition because Charleston was completely run down from the Civil War through The Depression, up until the 1930s, when the preservation movements got started. And a woman named Susan Pringle Frost bought those buildings to create almost a tourist attraction that would draw attention to the beauty of the architecture and its Caribbean roots. She painted them in these strong Caribbean colors. And it really succeeded. I mean, it is a tourist attraction today that makes people wonder at how beautiful the buildings are and what their history is.
Suzy Chase: I love her so much. Didn't people think she was crazy?
Susan Sully: Oh yeah. I mean that this woman was going around and buying up these houses and trying to restore them. And it was really a slum down there at that time. So it took an incredible amount of vision and bravery.
Suzy Chase: Now what's the story behind the color, Charleston Green?
Susan Sully: I cannot tell you it's history. What I will tell you is that Charleston Green is purportedly made by putting a drop of yellow into black paint. So it's almost indistinguishable from black. It just has a very slight, dark, dark, dark, dark green tint to it. I think what I like about Charleston Green is that it's not as harsh as black. And so, it looks much nicer, especially when you pair it with a white stucco wall or a white clapboard wall. So it's a slightly gentler color. And that's what I think of Charleston, one of its characters, its gentleness and its gentility.
Suzy Chase: Charleston has the largest historic district and more buildings on the national historic register than any other city in the country. I didn't realize the city was originally planned with only a few very, very large, deep lots that were then subdivided and divided again.
Susan Sully: Yes, and most people would never imagine that when they see the city. But when it was founded, the layout of the city was based on a Baroque plan, devised in England with somewhere around 12, very large lots, and a green in the middle. And Charleston was a boom town. It became very popular, very quickly. People were moving here from all over Europe. They were coming down from New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, and Rhode Island. And so there was just, quickly, a need for smaller lots. So these big, deep lots were quickly subdivided into narrow house sites. And then, of course, you needed little lanes to get from one house to the next. And there were all these creeks that laced Charleston, because this is the low country. And those would be filled in. There's a street called Water Street, where they literally just threw anything they could find into the creek to bring it up to a street level and turn it into a street. So now it has this very romantic meandering street scape that is overlaid the old large block plan.
Suzy Chase: What does the vernacular form most associated with Charleston look like?
Susan Sully: Okay. So the single house. The single house, and it's interesting because architectural historians debate a little bit about where it came from. And they say there's no proof that it came from the Caribbean or from Barbados. However, I have to say, when I was in Jamaica, I definitely saw houses with a very similar form. And I know that this form was devised to create as much comfort as possible in a very hot climate. Imagine a house that's one room deep, but instead of the wide face on the street, the narrow end faces the street. So they look like really skinny houses when you see them from the street. And then, they have a porch that runs down one long side of the house. So again, the porch doesn't parallel the street, it runs perpendicular. What makes it even more peculiar is that the front door typically opens onto the porch.
Susan Sully: So you'll see a very formal front door with a pediment, and you open it, you walk in, you walk up three steps and you're on a porch. And then you walk a little further down, and then you turn right or left, and you open the front door of the house, which is usually a center hall with entertaining rooms on either side. Those entertaining rooms have windows on all three sides. So they're getting the maximum cross ventilation. And the porch creates this boundary of shade for the house, keeping this direct sun out of the house. And it also makes it possible for windows and doors to be left open at night so that you can get that fresh air. But the front door that opens into the porch keeps it private. So that's the Federal house in a nutshell
Suzy Chase: I'd love for you to chat about a few of the homes in the book. First Middleton Place, home to the oldest landscaped gardens in America. The focus is on the incredible landscape design, a gorgeous 1700s plantation on 110 beautiful acres. Would you talk a little bit about Middleton Place?
Susan Sully: Middleton Place is one of my favorite places in the world. I love going there. Whenever I have anybody visit me, I tell them that they must go there. There's no option. They must go because it's just enchanting. What makes it so enchanting to me is that the original plan of the garden was developed in the 1740s by a French landscape designer. At least that's the surmise because they don't know the name of this landscape designer. But the style is very much in that manner of Versailles and the other great French chateaus of that era. It was a very large plan. It was very symmetrical and based on geometry. So it's based on a large triangle of allays that are formed by a canal with swans and a fountain in it, a long vista that goes from the entrance of the garden all the way through where the house used to stand, to the butterfly lakes, down to the river. And then the river forms the other access. So it's this thing where you're overlaying geometry on this very wild, natural, tropical landscape. And throughout you're aware of this, because there are boxwood gardens that are very geometrical, very, very topiary. And right beyond them, you see a huge Oak tree. There's a 1,000 year old Oak tree there called Middleton Oak that's just draped with Spanish moss and the river beyond. So it's just this wonderful contrast of order and nature.
Suzy Chase: I was fascinated by the butterfly lakes.
Susan Sully: Yes. One thing you have to remember about the plantations is that the only way to really travel to them from downtown Charleston was to come by water because Charleston is at the very bottom of a peninsula and it has rivers on either side, the Ashley river and the Cooper river. And the plantations were located up those rivers. And so these are title estuaries. And so people would take boats when the tide was going in the right direction. Their first impression of the plantation would be from the water, not from the land. So at Middleton Place, the designer obviously was aware of this and decided to make the very most of it by creating an extraordinarily grand entrance to the property. So when you would pull up to the landing, you would see these terraces, these curved terraces gently sloping up towards the house. And at the base of these terraces, four small ponds that together form the shape of butterfly wing.
Susan Sully: And this is an opportunity to talk about the slaves, the enslaved workers who made all of this possible, because when you think about there were no tractors, there weren't any of the kind of mechanized tools and machines that we have now that make landscaping possible. So they were grading this. They were digging up these lakes and carrying the soil up the hill to build these terraces. And it was backbreaking labor. Apparently it took about 100 slaves to create Middleton Place Garden.
Suzy Chase: So moving on to Drayton Hall, which was founded in the 1730s and is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the house has never been wired for electricity and running water. So it serves as more of a historical tapestry, offering a glimpse into an elite rice planting family. I would love to hear a little bit about John Drayton.
Susan Sully: So John Drayton was born here in Charleston, but his family was from England, and they were aristocrats from England. And like many of Charleston's aristocracy, Drayton was very aware of what was going on in England and Europe. He knew the latest architectural trends. He wanted to emulate them. He would've traveled to England frequently. And so, when he came to build his own house, he wanted to establish something that made him really appear to be a new world aristocrat. So to do this, he copied the style of the Palladian-Georgian houses that the English were building in the countryside and created this very grand brick house with a two story portico. Originally it had colonnades coming out from either side attached to smaller buildings.
Susan Sully: But what's interesting is people, for the longest time, were trying to figure out who the architect of this house was, because it's quite famous. And one of the things that makes it so interesting is that, while it is in many ways a direct quotation of the Georgian English architecture and the villas that Palladio designed in the Veneto in the 16th century, it has a unique feature, which is that the portico both projects from the building, but it's what you expect of a portico, that it will shoot forward a little bit. But it also recedes into the building, so that there are little brick bays on either side of it. And there's a recessed porch. So there's apparently nothing like this in England. There were no precedents. So I find it a good example of what I talk about with Charleston having a design language. It's not a dead language. It's a living language. Here, in the new world, John Drayton succeeded in creating a house that was both traditional and unique.
Susan Sully: And it's now believed that he himself was the architect. And this is because, at this time, gentlemen colonists were very curious, as I said, about what was going on in England and Europe. They would buy these design books. One of the most famous is actually more about furniture. It's Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman Carpenter. But these are books that were published, that had all kinds of architectural details in them that you could study. Also, there were books available on historic architecture of Greece and Rome. So several of the houses in this book, it's now believed that it was the owners themselves who designed so much of the details and the shape of the houses.
Suzy Chase: So after 1860, the Draytons stopped using this home as their primary residents. How come?
Susan Sully: Well, there was phosphate mining going on. After the Civil War, it was impossible to make any kind of a fortune. The enslaved workforce was gone, and the rice planting agricultural empire could not function without that. So the people around Charleston were trying to find other ways to survive financially. And one thing was that phosphates, which are a key component of fertilizer, were in Charleston's soils. So they started mining phosphates at Drayton Hall, and this didn't make it a very pleasant place to live. But it did stay under the family. And what I think is so fun is that, up until it was given to the National Register of Historic Places, the family used it as a country getaway and a summer home. And they had very few financial means at that point, so they weren't going to be able to do all the work involved in putting in plumbing and electricity. So they would come, and I call it, they would go glamping. It's like architectural glamping to go and live in that house. And so that's why it never ended up being set up for wiring or plumbing.
Suzy Chase: It was so interesting to me that a lot of these homes, most of these homes didn't stay in the family. A lot of them are owned by the historic trusts. How come they didn't just keep passing it down and keeping it in the family?
Susan Sully: Well actually, if you think about historic houses anywhere in America, rarely do you see a house that stays in the same family for more than a few generations. They decide they want to live somewhere else or they had to sell it for taxes. And there was a lot of that after the Civil War, during The Reconstruction period, there were just absolutely punitive taxes and many families had to sell their properties in order to pay off their debts and get by. So I would say that's a main reason, because Charleston families do tend to stick around, but they do move from house to house. And some of the houses, though, that are in this book, both Drayton Hall is an example of one that was in a family for many generations. Middleton Place for many generations. Miles Brewton House, descendants of Miles Brewton still live there. And actually at the Aiken-Rhett House, which is now a Museum of Historic Charleston Foundation, the same family lived there for probably four generations. So I think actually Charleston is unusual, in that it does have these properties that were staying in the families for so long.
Suzy Chase: So following in the footsteps of the grand homes of the English gentry, Drayton spent a ton of money on mahogany for his stairs, which he also had painted the most expensive paint color of the time, vermilion red. Now, why did he do this?
Susan Sully: Well, mahogany was definitely a status symbol because it was expensive to get it from the Caribbean to America. There was wood available here, called cypress, that was equally durable and was a termite resistant as mahogany is. So having mahogany was a status symbol. So you already have this very expensive wood and this is a large split staircase. And then, to paint it, it was just a wild gesture of showing off your affluence and just being at the very cutting edge of fashion. And this was the riverside entrance to the house. So it was definitely one of the first things the guests might see.
Suzy Chase: I was looking at some video on Drayton Hall. And so, people can't go upstairs, can they?
Susan Sully: No. At one point, in order to create a large entertaining room on the ground floor, one of the generations removed a central wall, dividing wall, not realizing that it was actually a load bearing wall. And they did that to create this huge drawing room, ballroom, up on the upper floor. The floor of that is very precarious, and they have decided you can go up the stairs and look into it, but you can't go into the room. But where you can go is the basement level, which is a race basement. And this is where slaves worked and slept. And you can see the incredible contrast between the elaborate architectural detailing of the areas set aside for the family and their guests, and where the slaves lived.
Suzy Chase: And I read they also actively encourage visitors to pay respects at the African American cemetery that's on site.
Susan Sully: Yes, they do. And Southerners hate to talk about slavery because it was just such a tragedy and such a crime against humanity. But in recent decades, we've grown up, and we've realized we have to talk about this. We can't hide it. And several of the museums do a great job of interpreting the slave experience. Middleton Place does, the Aiken-Rhett House does. There's some other places that have intact slave quarters. So we've really grown up in terms of saying we have to be honest about this. We have to tell their story.
Suzy Chase: Another great thing about Drayton Hall is they have an archeology department on staff. I don't know if it's exactly a department, but I think they have an archeologist or two?
Susan Sully: Oh yes, definitely. They're always learning new things about the property. And in fact, they've been trying to find evidence of the old slave quarters, because the basement under the floor, that was the place where workers would've slept if they needed to spend the night there. But there was actual slave cabins, slave quarters. And there's an old map that shows where they are. And so they're trying to excavate those. There's always excavation going on in any part of the property where there might be historic artifacts or something that will tell us about how people lived there.
Suzy Chase: Now at 48 Elizabeth Street stands the stunning Aiken-Rhett House, a great example of Federal style built around 1820 by a wealthy Charleston merchant, John Robinson. And later purchased by the Aiken family that later produced a South Carolina governor. The property was an urban plantation and the museum is part of the Historic Charleston Foundation, and is an example of the principles of preservation rather than restoration. I would love to hear about that.
Susan Sully: The Aiken-Rhett House is another one of my absolute favorites. I have three places I always tell people they absolutely must go, Middleton Place, Drayton Hall, and the Aiken-Rhett House. Oh, and the Nathaniel-Russell House. So what's wonderful about the Aiken-Rhett House is, like Drayton Hall, passed down through many generations, the final generations had very little money left, so they couldn't afford to change anything. So they just left everything the way it was. And this was a great thing because there's a lot of interesting architectural history there. And so this house was originally designed in the Federal style. And just 20 years later, new residents decided they wanted it in the stylish Greek revival manner. So they tore up parts of the house. They moved to the front door so they could create this massive double parlor. They put in new Greek revival moldings and ceiling medallions, which are very ornate and overblown.
Susan Sully: You can contrast these with the beautiful fluted Federal ceiling medallion that's at the top of the staircase. So you can see these two styles coexisting. And then there is a wing that they built later on to house the collection of art that they bought on a grand tour in Italy. And it's in the Italianate style with a Romanesque revival feel to it. So you've got three styles existing simultaneously. So the question happens when you have something like this, is should you restore it to a single period? Or should you allow it to stay the way it is so that all of its evidence is intact? And Historic Charleston Foundation decided upon the latter way of interpreting this house. So you walk in, you see all of these cracks in the plaster, and parts where... Well, there are some parts where the ceiling has fallen down. You see torn remnants of old wallpaper. And it's just ghostly and beautiful, and you can really feel history there.
Suzy Chase: I think this is a really great example of the global quality of the residents' lifestyle at that time. What gets me is how jet setting these people were. They were just hopping back and forth from Paris and Italy, and it was nothing.
Susan Sully: Yes. Well, back then in the time before the Civil War, these people were just phenomenally wealthy, and they really could afford to do whatever they wanted to do. And so there was an active transatlantic trade at that point. So it wasn't that uncommon to take a boat and go across to England, or Italy, or France. And it was actually a status thing to do. If you didn't get out and travel like that, you were thought of as being more provincial. And so to go across to Europe and England, and buy silver, and furniture, and art, and see what the latest fashions were for home décor, and come home, and integrate them into your house, that was definitely a way of indicating your status, as well as something that, as wealthy people, they could just afford to do.
Suzy Chase: Another thing is the grand double parlor that was so big it hosted a reception with 500 guests for Jefferson Davis.
Susan Sully: Yes. That's the room where, when the house was remodeled from the Federal style to the Greek revival style, a center hall was removed. Originally, it was two parlors with the center hall. And the Aikens took out the center hall and just created this huge room with pocket doors, and tall ceilings, and windows. They're triple sash windows that open from the floor up into the ceiling so that you can walk directly out onto this porch, which is also huge. I recently went to an art exhibition there by Cookie Washington, who's an African American artist here, who is making textile and quilts with all kinds of fascinating symbols from various places that the slaves were brought from. And it was a wonderful event. And I mean, there were probably 100 people on the piazza, as they call the porch here. There was a cellist in the double parlor. And to hear the sound of the cello in that environment with the old wood, and the plaster, and the high ceilings, it just was just the tiniest hint of what it would've been like to attend a party there.
Suzy Chase: The Aiken-Rhett House is very indicative of the Antebellum South Society. Could you talk a little bit about the enslaved quarters that are clearly visible through the windows of a library?
Susan Sully: Yes. So like Drayton Hall, Aiken-Rhett House has a very excellent interpretation about the slave experience. And on the lower level, you can see the kitchen and some of the work areas. But yes, the back of the house has two out buildings that project almost like wings. And the one on the left was the carriage house and stable, and it had slave quarters above. And on the right was slave quarters above, and cooking and laundry facilities below. And you can see these from a room in the main house that was called the library, which housed a large collection of books on the classics, probably books on architecture, great literature. And so, the Aikens could sit there and read. It was really a gentleman's library. So Mr. Aiken would sit there and read, and he could look out his window, and look right at the slave quarters where slaves were forbidden to read and write because that might abet slave rebellion.
Suzy Chase: Oh, that just breaks my heart.
Susan Sully: Yes. And the spartan nature of those slave quarters, when you see while so much attention was given to detail and to the creature comforts of the people living in the big houses, with huge windows and cross ventilation, you go into the slave quarter, there are only windows on one side, because if there were windows on the other side, they could look out into the outside world and might be able to communicate with others. Cross ventilation, they didn't care about that. The kitchens must have just been sweltering, the laundry. So it is, it's heartbreaking,
Suzy Chase: But I think that's why books like this are so important.
Susan Sully: Well, I really wanted to make an effort to include images of some of these slave areas, just so that people could witness that distinction and just feel it. I mean, I come close to crying every time I talk about it, because just being in those spaces, photographing them, feeling the history, just, it's overwhelming.
Suzy Chase: Now, moving on to the Nathaniel-Russell House, another one of your favorites.
Susan Sully: Yes.
Suzy Chase: It's another early 19th century home on Meeting Street, built in 1808 by a New England merchant, considered one of the finest Federal dwellings in America, but there is no known architect for the Russell building. Can you talk a little bit about how he combined decorative features published in English architectural pattern books with his own creativity?
Susan Sully: Well, first of all, I just had to say, it's an extraordinarily beautiful house. And it has a rectangular form with a big bay that projects from one side, an oval bay, which makes... Well, it's a semicircular bay, which makes it possible to have these two oval rooms in the house that are just gorgeous and breathtaking. When you walk into one of the parlors, if you look up towards the ceiling, the cornice moldings are about a foot deep, maybe even more. And they had several different elements that are mostly Greek and Roman and Palladian in their style, but there's also an element that's Gothic. And that was almost never seen. And people really puzzled over where that came from, but it turned out that Russell had visited a house in England that had an identical molding. So clearly, he saw something that he liked and he wanted it reproduced in his home.
Susan Sully: And yes, he is also considered probably the architect of the house. One thing to keep in mind is that these architects worked with master builders. They were like architect contractors, and they also were deeply knowledgeable about all of this. So they would come up with their ideas as well, and suggest ways to combine elements. So it could have often been a collaborative process between the homeowner, who had educated himself in architecture, and these master craftsmen. And then the master contractor had the craftsman who could actually do all the painstaking work of hand carving every single element of these elaborate moldings, or putting them in plaster and doing plaster, applying plastering in place to get these ceiling medallions. And I mean, the level of craftsmanship is just breathtaking.
Suzy Chase: I've heard people refer to this as the grandest house in Charleston.
Susan Sully: I mean, I would argue that it is not the grandest house in Charleston. There are some other equally magnificent ones. But they're, A, not open to the public. And B, they have not had the restoration that Nathaniel-Russell House has. So unlike the Aiken-Rhett House, where there were layers and layers of history and evidence from many different decades, the Nathaniel-Russell House never had any major changes. So it was an appropriate thing to do, to research exactly how it was in 1808 and replicate that as exactly as possible. And I think that's part of what makes it the grandest house in Charleston, because they have gone in, this is Historic Charleston Foundation. They received a grant from the Getty Foundation. They brought in what they call forensic architectural historians who would scrape down walls and study, look for tiny fragments of wallpaper and textiles to inform a complete do over of the house exactly as it would've been in 1808. And I tell people that, when you visit there, it feels as if Mr and Mrs. Russell have just stepped out for a moment for a walk and you're alone in the house. It is absolutely gorgeous.
Suzy Chase: I found it interesting that you included some newer homes in this book, including a 1930s bungalow on page 222.
Susan Sully: Yes. Well, as I said, I wanted to demonstrate that Charleston's architectural language is a living language, not a dead language. And so, in addition to showing some older houses, 18th century, 19th century houses, which have had interesting new decorating done by today's best interior designers working in Charleston, I wanted some things that were also newer construction. So the 1930s bungalow, although when you hear the word bungalow, you just think of some little two story, tiny house, a beautiful-
Suzy Chase: It's not little.
Susan Sully: It's not little. And when you step up to it, it's interesting because it has some Charleston elements, in that it has a side hall that then opens into the center hall. It has a porch, but the porch faces the front of the street. And the house, the wide side of the house faces the front of the street. So it's a combination of classic Southern with a Charleston twist. And then the woman who lives there is an interior designer who has brought her own modern twist on classic style to the interior, which was another reason I was interested, because it has beautiful English antiques, and the classic china, and crystal, and silver you would see. But then had modern elements, like a starburst, a retro starburst chandelier over the dining room table. So it's just showing how do you live in these houses and make them personal and fresh.
Suzy Chase: So I'd love to hear what you're working on. What is your next project?
Susan Sully: Well, during COVID another book occurred to me. I had been planning to go to Portugal prior to COVID and had to cancel the trip. And I had done a lot of research about the country, and its architecture, and was so excited about it. So I just kept doing armchair traveling, and talking to people whose work I found when looking through books and magazine articles. And I thought, "I want to do a book about Portugal." So this fantasy just kept me afloat during COVID. And I went back in September and started doing my own original research. So I'm hoping to do a book about Portugal, but I'm also toying with the idea of a sister book to The Allure of Charleston, which would be The Allure of Savannah. I have already written a book about Savannah, but as we know, I don't stop writing about places that I found. And then there's the novel that that keeps being put aside. So if, for whatever reason, I don't get around to these other books, then I'll write my novel.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Susan Sully: You can visit my website, which is susansully.com. My Instagram is @susan.sully. And my Facebook is susansully1. And I try to keep those up to date with either events that are happening, or things that I'm seeing, or new places that I'm falling in love with.
Suzy Chase: To purchase The Allure of Charleston, head on over to decoratingbythebook.com. And thanks so much, Susan, for coming on Decorating By The Book Podcast.
Susan Sully: Thank you, Suzy. It was an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Outro: Follow Decorating By The Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating By The Book.
