The Comforts of Home | Caroline Clifton Mogg
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.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Hello, my name is Caroline Clifton-Mogg, and I am the author of The Comforts of Home, which is a book I wrote about thrifty and chic decorating ideas, making the most of what you have, which must be a good lesson for life.
Suzy Chase: Last year I had some blue and white wallpaper hung on the wall behind my bed. It was a very, very small change, but it made such a big difference in my bedroom. It changed the whole room. The Comforts of Home is all about the small changes that can make a big difference in our home. So how did you get into interior design and writing?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, looking back at it, which I was thinking about, I was the child who had the dolls house, when I changed it around every day or every week even when the furniture was the little match boxes and things. So there must have been something there. But professionally I got into it. I was working at Conde Nast in London and writing reports on shops. And Brides magazine had a new editor who was the wonderful [inaudible 00:01:26] who asked me if I'd like to have a go at writing about interiors. What an opportunity. I had no idea what an interiors editor did, but I realized I'd been given the best chance in the world. Then I went to a Sunday newspaper and then I went to Harper's and Queen where I had the unimaginable luxury of writing about anything and anybody I wanted to, as long as it was interesting. Dream job really. So that was how I got started.
Suzy Chase: I've heard you say you think interior decoration has become far more important in people's lives. I'd love to hear about that.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, in this country at least, interior decoration for a long time was considered rather like food was, rather bad form to talk about. You didn't go to a dinner or to somebody's house and remark on their pictures or their ... In the same way it was considered terribly rude to say that you liked eating it and how was their pudding made and so on. It was just there. After the war, interior decorators here had to go into grand houses through the servant entrance. And I think in the U.S., it was considered a smart and indeed an essential thing long before here. And now it is, which is great. But it was sort of almost [inaudible 00:02:40] really. It sounds odd.
Suzy Chase: You also talk in the book about the word comfort and how it's used lightly these days. But for centuries, and this is what I learned in your book, there was no such word. Now I feel like we're all consumed with comfort everywhere. In our homes, in our cars, in our mindset. Can you chat a little bit about the concept of comfort?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, when I said there was no such thing, the word comfort originally meant to add strength to console or to soothe and used as a noun in the sense of she was my comfort. And from then it slowly, very slowly developed into having this other meaning of, well, I think actually it's a bit to do with by the 18th century. The French had started to make comfortable chairs, which was in England, they were still making chairs with hard backs and so on. And suddenly the French started to make upholstered chairs. And if you look at those paintings of the 18th century, you see people reclining in chairs and reading in chairs. And that was as far as I can see, the beginning of comfort in the sense that we understand it now.
Thinking about comfort and thrift, they're not awkward bedfellows as long as you keep the original meaning of comfort in your planning because it's all about making people feel welcome. I think that's really important and inviting and warm, which isn't at all the same thing as being extravagant. And I think comfort equates with generosity, making those who come to your house feel comfortable so that when they walk in they think, oh, this is nice. Oh look, either something to look at or somewhere to sit. Just generosity. Which doesn't mean money.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. It doesn't mean a mansion.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: No. And it doesn't mean Dom Pérignon champagne, although how nice is that? It means somebody being pleased to see you. That's a sort of strange definition of comfort. But I think it's quite pertinent actually.
Suzy Chase: It's a feeling.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Yes, it's a feeling. It's a feeling. That's what I mean. It's a feeling of welcome. The house or the flat, the apartment is welcoming you. You relax as you walk in.
Suzy Chase: In The Comforts of Home, you wrote, "Home is always important. But during uncertain times when the wind seems to blow a little colder outside, people's thoughts often turn towards the idea of home. Sometimes a specific known place, but sometimes just a feeling, an image of somewhere that is always warm and safe with the curtains tightly drawn against the storm outside." So what does home mean to you? Did the home you grew up in inform the home you live in today in Nodding Hill?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Home to me is definitely a feeling of security and warm. My early childhood was spent in a house about an hour outside London on the River Thames, and there was a swing in the garden, apple trees, hens. And my parents decorated the house in what I now see as a very English styles, muted colors, linen, floral patterns on the chairs and sofas, but very nice ones, very muted, sort of pale colors everywhere. And I see now that I still do that in my flat in Nodding Hill, almost country in the city is my look now. And that definitely started when I was a child. Plus I loved doll's houses.
Suzy Chase: Do you still have your old doll houses?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, no. I don't have the one I had when I was little, but when we first moved to Nodding Hill in the early 1980s, I actually did persuade is the better verb, my husband to commission a doll's house of the house we then lived in, which was made by a man in Bath. Wonderful house. And I spent the next few years going to all his doll's house fairs and buying all, commissioning even, little pieces for it. I don't have it here because it's too large to get in this flat. So my daughter's got it in Buckingham. Sometimes I go and look at it and move the furniture around again. Great joy.
Suzy Chase: I love that so much.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well that doll's houses were originally designed in the 17th century, I suppose, to teach young girls who are getting married how to run a house. And they were sort of educational. I mean there's ones in the wonderful museum in Amsterdam. You can see that they were used to teach housekeeping skills. How the kitchen should be organized, how the bedrooms, and I think that's wonderful. Wish they did it now.
Suzy Chase: There are two sections of this book. There's one, the elements, and the other is the rooms. And in that section you write, "A comfortable kitchen is almost always decorative, not only because of all the fancy paint effects, but because of all the interesting and attractive things on view. Some that have practical function, others that are displayed purely for their charm. Really comfortable kitchens, even if they have been decorated professionally, tend not to look as if they have been thought out a great deal. Instead, they often give the impression that their owner has left out pieces, functional, practical, and decorative, that he or she really likes and takes pleasure and having around." I would love for you to chat about kitchens.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: We went through that. I don't know whether it's still in the U.S. I don't think it is. That phase where kitchens were designed to look like laboratories and anything that didn't go with the sort of streamlined ... or spaceships almost, was removed or put in a cupboard. And I found even at the time that very uncomfortable actually, the exact opposite of comfortable. I think that kitchens, what I mean about the pieces you have around, many, the bowl, the spoon. These are really old designs. They've always been there and they've always been, well, they haven't always been there, but they've been there since they were first made. And they were made for practical reasons, not for decorative reasons, but there's a great beauty in them. If you think about a wooden spoon or a mug full of wooden spoons or good solid bowls. I mean they're just beautiful on their own.
And so I think that that's the first element of having a kitchen that's good. I think the other element is to stop thinking about a kitchen as simply somewhere where you're cooking and which is simply somewhere where split, splat, slot. I think you should have pictures in it. I think you should have color in it. I think you should have flowers, obviously. I think you should have small lamps if you can. I think you should have a chair if you've got a big enough kitchen. Even better, a sofa. Even better still, a fireplace. Wow. So that the room becomes somewhere you actively want to be. And again, you enjoy the whole process of making, cooking and feeding, which is comfort again.
Suzy Chase: There is nothing I love more than small lamps in a kitchen, almost like a candle that's lit.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Exactly.
Suzy Chase: And you exactly pour yourself a glass of wine and it's just so nice.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Exactly. There is the trend now, thank goodness, towards making the kitchen more a room like another sitting room, like a reception room. And as more and more people don't have dining rooms and they eat in a kitchen or part of the kitchen, I think it's really important to make that room a room that is pleasant to come into. Not somewhere just where the steak is being fried. I've got several small lamps, actually. I can look through the door. I've got one, two, three, four, five lamps in there. But we do eat in there as well.
Suzy Chase: Oh, I love it. Now do the lamps match? Are they all different?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: No, no, no, no, no. Don't have matching lamps. No. But I think the odd pair, but I'm very keen on if you buy lamps by the pair, which sometimes one does, not necessarily putting them together, putting them around a room. So again, the eye is taken from ... It's not seeing the expected. It's seeing the unexpected. And I think that's very important.
Suzy Chase: I would love to hear the story about the time you went to the auction with a friend on a quest for two small bedside tables.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, I've never forgotten this because it really made a point in my mind. This friend rang and said, "I just haven't got decent bedside tables. I need two." And Christie's at the time had a sort of number two auction house in South Kensington where they sold the stuff that wasn't sort of super, super expensive. So I said, "Well, let's go look. There's a furniture sale this weekend. We might find something." So we went and there was nothing there or it was too expensive. And she has a little house in Primrose Hill, which is a very pretty area of London and it's on one of three floors. And I thought, and there's a lot of stuff in the house, a lot of books. She's a writer and an author. So I said, "Why don't we just check that there's nothing in the house?"
So we went back to the house, and we walked slowly up. And under one of the piles of books holding the books up obviously, was a table that was sort of hidden behind a door. So I thought, oh, that might work. And then we went up another flight and she had a guest bedroom and in the guest bedroom again, not exactly behind the door but in a hidden corner was another table. And I said to her, why don't we use these? We can always put the books somewhere else. And she said, "Fantastic. I'd never thought of that." And so we took them into the main bedroom, put them in, and they were absolutely perfect.
And it made me realize that you lose the ability to look around in your own place. It takes a new eye sometimes, but also your own eye. You don't notice. It's probably the same with you possibly that after a while you don't notice things, because you've put them there, they work, you get on with your life. But actually sometimes it's very worth going around, picking them up, putting them somewhere else and see how it looks. You can always move them again.
Suzy Chase: And I think you also need that friend with a good eye.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Yes, or just a different eye. An eye that is looking anew at something.
Suzy Chase: Another decorator's tip or cliche is that nothing rejuvenates a room quicker than new cushions or lampshades. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Well, I say it's a cliche because every decorator you ever speak to always says that. And of course it is true actually. I mean, replacing lampshades can be quite expensive, but putting new cushions in can be not expensive. And actually the same thing as we've just been talking about the tables. Quite often you can just move cushions from somewhere, pillows from somewhere and put them somewhere else and they completely change things. Or you can buy different covers and have winter and summer cushions, which I must say I do. I've got linen covers that I put on the sofa in the drawing room in the summer and then underneath those because I'm lazy and can't be bothered them all off, there are velvet covers, which come on in the winter and look very nice and inviting and again, comfortable. Lampshades. Yes, of course. But as I say, I think you need a much bigger budget to do that.
Suzy Chase: We live in a smallish apartment in New York City in the West Village, super cute. But I have all blue lamps, different shades of blue. They all have black lampshades on them. It's the black with the gold inside. So it kind of brings all of my lamps together. What is your favorite kind of lampshade?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Aha. Well, what I don't like ... Better way to go around. I don't like anymore those pleated silk or would-be silk ones in cream only because I think they've become so ubiquitous and again a cliche in themselves and I just think they're boring. So I like parchment lampshades or card lampshades or even those very nice floppy lampshades that you can buy now that almost look as if somebody's just thrown a handkerchief or a scarf over a lamp. I like that a lot. Anything actually that isn't pleated silk. I think your sound terrific. On a little dining table I've got, I have one with a gold painted inside because it's so nice, the reflection down onto the table.
Suzy Chase: Yes, I love that. The floppy one, I'm always afraid it's going to catch on fire because it feels like it's just sitting on the bulb.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: I know, I know, I know. But they're usually over a sort of card base or something up there. I don't think they'd catch on fire anymore than a sort of other aligned lampshade wood.
Suzy Chase: I have so many old quilts, and you have some clever uses for old quilts. I'd love to hear about that.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Quilts I use everywhere actually. I mean not quite so much now. It was a sort of, again, it was when Christie's in South Kensington had these wonderful textile sales, and of course a lot of things would be in job lots. And you'd go and rummage through and if you'd see a quilt that you thought you could afford, it quite often came in a lot with a lot of other things. So I'm sure you, I wasn't going to not buy the job lot. So I'd buy it and then think, oh right, I've got three quilts, five pieces of old shawls and not all of them in very good condition, but they were all very pretty. So I just realized that you can use, well first of all, of course you can use quilts for tablecloths, which I think are jolly nice and for picnic cloths, I mean to sit on. Much nicer than siting on a bit of wool.
Then I started folding them, the usual, putting them on the end of beds. And then I thought, well maybe I could make windows. I got a window seat in the bedroom and I thought, well an old quilt on that would be really nice. So I did that. And so that was more or less the quilts. But then the bits of material, I started using them on cushions again actually either as a whole cover, or if they were quite fragile, putting them through cheat, really cheating because I can't sew anyway, cutting them out and then sewing them onto the front of the cushion cover that existed. And that worked really well, actually. It was nice.
And then the other thing you can do with them is to have sort of chairs that are covered in more than one textile, which used to again be very fashionable, I would think, beginning of the 1900s or so. So you have the back of the chair as one material and then you have a piece maybe that runs down the front back of the seat and underneath. And then you might have even the arms different. And if you've got old scraps of things, that doesn't sound great, but I promise you it can look absolutely wonderful actually.
Suzy Chase: I never think about the idea of comfort when it comes to the bathroom. But you remind us that comfort is a long soak in a warm bath with a soothing hot drink and scented candles. You recommend instead of the regular metal bathtub rack we use a made to size wooden board. The wood adds such warmth and depth, and I have never thought of this.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: It's true, isn't it? I mean I think the best sort of bath, if you're lucky enough to have one, is a bath that has a ledge beside it. So the bath is relatively close to the wall let's say. You've got a sort of ledger and then you can have everything and just leave it. But if you don't have that, it's pretty uncomfortable being in a bath without something to put things on, including a glass of wine or a cup of, not a cup of coffee probably, but a glass of or a drink. And also it's really nice to read in the bath. And I think wood fits that.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: You can't. Sorry. Just because I haven't got around to it. I mean you see it, the trouble it's been for me to come on Zoom. Everybody keeps saying. Maybe I'll do Instagram. My daughters both keep saying I should do that. But I haven't done it now. Sorry. I've got one. I occurred to me when I was getting up this morning, getting ready to do this. I know you say you live in the West Village. I don't know if this comes interest at all, but we lived in the West Village in the '70s for a few years, which was just wonderful. We loved it.
My godmother was a very talented artist, and she was staying with us. And she and I were walking down. We lived on Perry Street and there was ... you have horizontal shutters quite a lot, which we don't here. And there was a horizontal pine shutter that somebody had put out for the garbage. And we sort of looked at that and my godmother said, "Wouldn't that make a nice bedhead?" And I said, "Yeah." So we carried this horizontal pine shutter back to the house and she painted it using inside the panels, she painted sort of exotic birds and all around she painted flora and then we varnished it. And that was in 1976 or 1977. And I still have it. I had it expanded as we had larger beds and it's just sitting in my bedroom now. And I thought that is a classic example actually now I think about it, of using something that didn't seem to have any further life in it and making it something that still brings enormous pleasure.
Suzy Chase: I love that so much. Oh my gosh. Where did you live on Perry Street?
Caroline Clifton Mogg: We lived at number 43, which had been a marbler, a sort of master marbler's house. And so it was a tiny house with the little bathroom was on each floor. And he'd done each of these little bathrooms in a different sort of marble. So one, I mean, floor to ceiling, everything. So one was sort of that brownie white marble. Another was that deep pinky one. Another was the black and white one. It's extraordinary. And it had been apparently a house with a stable at the back before that. I mean it was great little house actually. Which street do you live in?
Suzy Chase: I live at West 10th and West Fourth.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Oh, very close to Perry.
Suzy Chase: Yes. And I first moved here from Kansas in 1996, and I had a job in Soho, so I said, "I need a place close to my job." I knew nothing about New York City. So this real estate agent showed me a place on Perry at 129 Perry.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: Right.
Suzy Chase: There were no lights on. It was completely dark. And I said, "I love it." I just felt it. I said, "I don't know where I am. Is this safe?" And he laughed. He said, "This is so safe."
Caroline Clifton Mogg: It is. I mean, we loved being there because for me it was like Europe, because the butcher was Irish, the green grocer was Italian, the show mender was Polish, and the shop around the corner selling bread and so was French. So everybody understood without saying that everybody else was European, if you sort of see what I mean. You didn't feel you were in, I mean we had a lot of friends who lived high uptown. And I just felt so at home in the West Village. And I remember that was the one year there was the great blackout, and I was uptown. I think my husband was away. And so I had to get back to Perry, and I did. And there was the janitor from the next block, which was apartments, sitting on her step with a torch, because obviously, she knew nobody would have torches with them because nobody expected to be blacked out, so you could see your way home. And I thought, wow, but this isn't happening uptown, and of course it wasn't.
Suzy Chase: No, I don't even go above 14th street.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: No, we know quite right not to.
Suzy Chase: Oh, well this has been so wonderful. I cannot thank you enough for coming on my podcast- Decorating by the Book.
Caroline Clifton Mogg: No, my great pleasure.
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.
