Think Like A Decorator | Leslie Banker
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.
Leslie Banker: Hi, I'm Leslie Banker and I have a new book out called Think Like A Decorator, published by Rizzoli, which I'm super excited about.
Suzy Chase: You had me at the title. I am constantly trying to think like a decorator in my own New York City apartment. So chapter one is entitled Know Your Story. What does that mean And how can we tap into our own story?
Leslie Banker: What it really means is thinking about how you want to live and before you start thinking about what color I want my living room to be, or should I buy this sofa or that sofa, my suggestion is to do some deep diving into how you just really want to live. And there are questions like, do you want to throw parties? Do you want to have family dinners? Do you enjoy taking a good bath? Do you have pets? Do you expect grandchildren? Do you want house guests? Do you cook, collect, craft? And just go through everything you love doing. And it can be aspirational too.
Do you wish you had dinner parties? Do you wish you had more family dinners? And also just think about what your best self is like, are you glamorous? Are you simple? Do you just want to feel safe at home? And that's what I mean by thinking about your story. What is the story of your best life? We are a close-knit family who has extended friends who come stay. And I think that is the cornerstone of an interior design project because you can build to that and it is my belief you can help create this best story of your life through the design of your house, but you have to think about it at the beginning, not as an afterthought.
Suzy Chase: I love the aspirational part of that.
Leslie Banker: It's true, right? I mean, sometimes people say, well, I wish I had dinner parties, but I could never do that. And the point is you can, but you need space for it. And I say to people too, I mean, not everyone has a huge house or a huge apartment, and you could have a dinner party with four people or three people, just some friends over, and it honestly could be at a little table in the kitchen or it doesn't have to be super formal, it just needs to be connecting people and having people into your house. If that's what you aspire to do, you need to build the setting that can make it possible. I encourage people to dream about what is your best life.
Suzy Chase: That leads me to this part in the book where you talk about how you love working with colors and the creative part of your job, but you also say the job is part psychology. And I think that knowing your story lays into the psychology part of it.
Leslie Banker: It absolutely does, because whether you are a decorator helping other people design their house or you're a client or you're doing it on your own, you need to start with knowing what you want and having thought about what your best life is or can be. And in terms of it being designed and decorating, being about psychology, it's a service business. So you're really helping people and it's thinking about how you can help people the most. And sometimes a client isn't confident and has trouble making decisions, and if this is the case, you have to think about what you can do to help boost their confidence and empower them to decide what they want. Because as a designer, we offer a few choices and it's our job to narrow down the options to a few things we think will work and to offer our opinion.
And sometimes we make a decision and say, "This is really the way to go. I see this green sofa," whatever it is. But there are a lot of decisions in a renovation and a decorating project that a homeowner has to make, and you do need to have confidence. And that is part of the psychology of helping people find that confidence. And there are also other things. I mean, sometimes couples don't see eye to eye and the husband or one partner wants one kind of look and the other, another kind of look. And you have to be sensitive and help bridge that gap so that both people are happy with the result if everyone is living under the same roof. So those are some incidents where psychology comes into play, but at the end of the day, as a designer, an interior designer, you're working with people's homes and their families and it's deeply personal and it isn't just about colors, it's about family dynamics and lots of things. And so that's where I think psychology comes into play.
Suzy Chase: I was just talking to Tom Kligerman about the issue if the husband and the wife have different styles, and I said, "Oh my gosh, it must be so stressful." And he was like, "I love it."
Leslie Banker: I mean, it's like being a diplomat in a way to hear both sides and make sure that everyone's voice is heard a little bit in the design. I said somewhere in my book that, I said husband in this, in my example, but if your partner has some old poster collection and you really don't like it, but it's important to them to hang it, you need to give them that space to hang their poster collection. It could be near their closet or not some prominent spot, but you have to, I think, honor that wish. And then I think the hard part too is when you give a house toward your friends, you have to keep from rolling your eyes as you pass the poster collection and being like, oh, and just support them in the poster collection.
Suzy Chase: Or you could put them in some really neat old frames.
Leslie Banker: Exactly. You could make it work with what you're doing. And I think it takes an openness just to hearing what's important to someone else. And you can pick your battles, choose your hill to die on.
Suzy Chase: Isn't that the truth? So you've lived and breathed interior design for your whole life and co-authored two books that you wrote with your mother, Pamela Banker, The Pocket Renovator and The Pocket Decorator. Your mother passed away in 2013 and you made the decision to carry on her business. So when you were growing up, you always said you would never be a decorator, but your path changed when you received a phone call from your mom in 1999. I'm so curious to hear about that.
Leslie Banker: Well, at the time, I was a freelance writer in New York and I was writing about interior design and some other things for magazines. And at the most basic level, my income, as freelancers know, was up and down. So when she asked if I wanted to come work for two straight months, help her set up the office on the most basic level, I thought the steady paycheck sounded very appealing. And there was a deeper part to it though, which is my mother had had this career at a time when women didn't have careers the way they do now. All my school friends moms were full-time moms and my mom, which I was so proud of at the time, she had this office and people who worked for her and she was doing all these big projects, but she was gone a lot. She was gone during the day, she was at the office.
So I think at a really basic level, I was interested in a gig for a couple months with a steady paycheck, but at a deeper level, I really wanted to know more about what she did and what her business was and what her talents were and really what her world was because she was passionate about it and she had this whole community of friends in the design business and people who'd worked for her and clients. And I was curious to peek inside that and get to really know her better. And I'm really grateful that I had the opportunity to do that because I understood her in a totally different light after I went to work for her.
And then the kicker is of course, once I started working with her, because two months became six months and it went on and on, I realized that I really loved design and she and I have very different personalities, but I loved it as well. And it's such a multifaceted discipline. There's the actual decorating, but there's the business of it and the logistics and so many different sides to think about and work on and excel in. So anyway, I became a fan of interior design and being a designer and I got to know my mother in a way I never would have otherwise.
Suzy Chase: What's the most important thing your mother taught you?
Leslie Banker: Well, if I had to think of just one, I would say to keep it brief, don't over explain. Any email or communication from her was always very short and tight and professional and left little room for complication or misinterpretation. It would say, "Yes, proceed," or "No, stop." So that's one thing that I think was a very important lesson of just short, clear communication. She was extremely professional. You never heard at the office about her toothache or whatever it was. She was extremely professional and she had a very clear divide between personal and professional. One other thing I would add is people still talk about this to this day. On a job site, she knew everyone's name, she knew the plumber's name, the painter's name. You walk into the upholstery workroom and she'd say, "Hi, George." Not just to the guys who ran the shop, but to every guy standing working on a chair throughout the workshop. She knew all their names and they had so much respect for her for that, and she respected them. And I think that was a huge part of her success.
Suzy Chase: So a few years ago, you were moving offices and you found the notes from the original how-to book you started to write. How did it feel to unearth those notes?
Leslie Banker: There was a sense of relief because I knew they were somewhere and I couldn't remember where. And then it felt like sometimes something happens at the right moment, and not to sound cosmic, but we weren't ready for them when we first wrote them, and they resurfaced at this perfect time to use them and put them into, and I'd always stayed in touch with our editor from Rizzoli, and so it gave me an excuse to email her and say hi. And I found these notes and she wanted to talk. And so it just felt like they resurfaced at the right moment.
Suzy Chase: One brilliant tip out of so many in this book is that dressers aren't just for bedrooms. Tell me about your grandmother's chest and where does it live in your house?
Leslie Banker: Well, my grandmother had some really beautiful antique country furniture I would say. It's not too formal. It wasn't when she died, it was really when she had to leave her house and go to a nursing home. And I got a few pieces of furniture from that, and one of them was this chest and it's really beautiful and it's in our dining room in our house in Rhode Island right now. And the typical thing might be to put a sideboard or some kind of console table in a dining room, but this chest I really wanted to use. I thought it was beautiful.
So I put it in the dining room. It might have been more typical to use in a bedroom or a hall, but it's great in the dining room and I keep place mats and silver in the drawers and it works just fine. And it's a surface not as big as a sideboard, but it's a surface when you're having dinner. And I mean, that's something I mentioned in the book, and I would say to anyone, which is you don't have to stick by all the rules that a dining room needs a sideboard or that it's weird to put a chest in a dining room. If you have a piece and you want to use it, you can find a home for it in somewhere in your house.
Suzy Chase: Now you were talking about how you still use the surface as a sideboard, but do the proportions of the chest matter? I feel like a chest would be a lot smaller than a sideboard on probably a bigger wall.
Leslie Banker: So if you have something like a chest of drawers in your dining room, which is more narrow than a sideboard might be, you have to look at the wall and say, is something missing that is there now a lot of blank wall? And you can flank the chest of drawers with a pair of chairs. Or in my case, I have these two old perfume jars, which are about two feet high by two feet wide painted metal. They're purely decorative, but something to build that elevation and make it make sense. So it's not a chest of drawers alone on a wall.
Suzy Chase: I'm so hesitant about mixing patterns and you tell us not to be afraid to mix patterns. Can you just talk a little bit about that because I'm really afraid to mix patterns?
Leslie Banker: Yeah, no, I love patterns. I love the mix. I have a little bit of a maximalist attitude. I love the more is more, and that goes with color, but also with pattern. I say the key to mixing pattern is paying attention to scale. I wouldn't put two patterns that have the same large scale in a room, but if you have one large scale pattern, then you can have medium scale and smaller scale mixed throughout the room. And that's what we generally try to do in our schemes, even if the pattern is subtle. And another, trick I find is if you mix a floral pattern or a pattern that has wavy lines with a more geometric pattern with straight lines, that mix tends to click quickly. I also would encourage people to think about subtle patterns and textures. The tufting on a chair or a sofa, if the floor has a subtle pattern to it, the floorboards might be in a basket weave or maybe there's a brick floor and that introduces a pattern to the room.
So there are loud patterns and quiet patterns, and you can mix a really loud pattern with a tufted chair that might be in a solid color fabric but would have the pattern of the tufts. But to add interest and depth to a room, I highly encourage people to be brave and bold and just go for it as long as it makes sense. The colors need to speak to each other. If you're mixing patterns, they need to have some common denominator. Color is usually the common denominator. The key to mixing patterns is paying close attention to the scale and having a large scale with a small scale. And also I think a trick of the trade is to mix floral with geometric.
Suzy Chase: Lilly Bunn has a great example on pages 98 and 99, she purposely avoided having everything match in the living room of her cottage because she says it makes it easier to add things over time.
Leslie Banker: She's so right because there is a school of thought in decorating, and it is one I subscribe to, which is you don't necessarily want your house to look like everything's brand new and you just went out and bought everything. It's nice and it gives a place some soul if you have some old things in the mix, and they might be your old family things or things that you've carried around from house to house, or it might be things you found at auction, but not everything is going to match perfectly if you take this approach and it's really okay. And it gives depth and soul to a place when it looks like you have this collection of furniture of well-loved pieces that all fit in together, but maybe they're not perfect.
Suzy Chase: I love that you pulled in other decorators to tell their stories in vignettes called Ask the Expert. For example, I gained so much insight from iconic architect and interior designer Tom Scheerer's interview. He kicked off the piece talking about how it's important to establish the client's capacity for "decorating". Basically what they want to focus on, upholstery and fabrics or more of an emphasis on works of art and objects. I found that super interesting and I'm curious to hear about that approach.
Leslie Banker: Well, first of all, I was so grateful that these designers contributed to the book. I think it adds so much to have different perspectives, and there may be some little points where there's discrepancies where someone says, "I always use the rug as an anchor in the room," and someone says, "I don't use the rug as an anchor in the room." But that's in a way, the whole point with decorating is there's no one and right way to do it, and everyone develops their own approach and their own confidence. And in that regard, I was so happy with the idea to bring in other voices and other points of view into the book. And I was incredibly grateful that Tom Scheerer participated in it. I'm a huge fan of his work, and I have his books, and I often reference them myself as I'm decorating on projects.
So I was grateful for him to participate. And I love what he said, and it's true. What he's saying is it's important at the beginning of a project to establish whether a client really wants that decorated look where all the fabrics match and it's all super decorated, or is your space more a collection of art and objects and curated with what you may already have or collections you're building. And whether you're designing on your own or working as a designer, it's a good thing to think about or consider as you're starting down that road.
Suzy Chase: So you also have short case studies throughout the book, and my favorite is your parents' old dining room on Long Island. Could you please tell that story?
Leslie Banker: Sure. So my parents had a house when I was growing up in Locust Valley on Long Island, and it was an old barn, and my mother loved a renovating project. So they bought this old barn in Locust Valley and over the years turned it into what became a really a full house, but there were originally stables and stalls and hay lofts, and there was in what became the dining room of the house, a wooden column. It's a wooden pole that was right in the middle of the room and it was going to be expensive to put steel beam in. It was going to be expensive to take this wooden pole out. And so my mom just built the dining room table around it. So what you have is a pole with a round wooden table just going right around it. We had many Thanksgivings there and whatnot, and when you were sitting there, you didn't really notice it because I mean, the pole was probably, oh, I don't know, eight or 10 inches in diameter.
And she'd put all these flowers around it and in a way you could close your eyes and pretend it was like a tent pole and you were at a bigger party. And my point in the book in mentioning it and showing it is sometimes you just need to accept what you have and not go to extreme lengths to take this pole out and put in a steel beam if it's going to blow your budget. Sometimes you just need to be creative and work with what you have, and honestly it's okay. It'll be fine.
Another example of a similar thing is in our apartment in New York when we moved in, the kitchen is perfectly fine. It's great, it's from Ikea and it's great. There's some places where I feel like space is not used in the most optimal way. So I had this feeling of, oh, I wish I could rip the kitchen out and just redo it. But it was this huge relief in a way to just say, "You know what? I'm going to make this kitchen work because do I really want to renovate my kitchen?" And part of decorating is thinking about what you're going to change. But I think part of it is also thinking about what you're going to keep and creatively work with and make work for you.
Suzy Chase: I think my biggest takeaway from this book is to do what makes you happy. So I think if it makes you happy not to spend gazillion dollars and keep the kitchen the same, then that's great.
Leslie Banker: Exactly. I think if you're renovating, it can get stressful because it often gets more expensive than you think it's going to be because especially when you're dealing with an old house, things come up that you don't realize. And I don't know in the case of the hole in the middle of the dining room, it may have been that my mom assumed she could take it down when she planned this whole renovation. But at some point, she learned it was structural and that it couldn't just be taken down without elaborate engineering work going into having no support in the middle of this rather big room. So I don't know at what point she learned about this, and it could have been some crushing disappointment well into the project where they went to take the beam down and suddenly said they couldn't. But I do think flexibility is really important and creative thinking and being positive about the challenges along the way because they often lead to, well, like the pole in the middle of the dining room table, unusual solutions that can be unique but work just fine.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Leslie Banker: I am on Instagram, @lesliebanker, and I have a website, lesliebanker.com.
Suzy Chase: This book is a true delight from beginning to end. Thanks for writing it, and thanks so much for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Leslie Banker: Thank you, Suzy. It's been a real pleasure. I love talking to you.
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