Jamie Drake is the kind of decorator who can’t help noticing the curve of an armchair in a Fred Astaire movie or the elaborate tufting on Scarlett O’Hara’s bedroom furniture in “Gone With the Wind.”
A connoisseur of glamour, he’s always looking for new ways to imbue his rooms with the luster of satin, the gleam of gold and the sleekness of curves – classic Hollywood elements that he believes are ripe for a comeback.
“People desire glamour now,” says Drake, whose clients include Madonna and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Glamour is the perfect antidote to the bland design of the ’90s.”
Fortunately, a millionaire’s budget isn’t a prerequisite for interiors that are sophisticated and soigne. As Drake explains in his just-published book, “Jamie Drake’s New American Glamour” (Bulfinch, $45), creating a glamorous room can be “as straightforward as putting your lights on dimmers, lighting a few candles, using a beautiful scent and setting out at least one perfect lily.”
Once your lights are low – Drake is famous for keeping his wattage dim – think about using luster to illuminate a room from within. You might want to add sheen at the window with curtains of silk, satin or a metallic fabric. Or you could dress up your walls with high-gloss paint or Mylar wallpaper. Or add polish to your tables by topping them with marble or mirror.
Drake advises staying away from what he calls “the hard knock on the head” of a single glittering object like a crystal chandelier. While a chandelier is a great asset to a room, luster needs to be carefully choreographed and distributed throughout a room so as to avoid dead zones.
How should you spread the light? Subtly, with an upholstery fabric that has a metallic thread running through it. Or with crystal-beaded curtain trim or window sheers studded with a galaxy of tiny beads. Drake advises seeking out furniture, china and accessories with a Midas touch – a gilded rim, a gleaming pedestal, a gold-outlined curve.
Experiment with luster and you’ll find that it not only creates a mood of mystery, it also performs a useful decorating function. It softens the hard edges of a room.
“Because the light reflects as you move around the interior,” Drake says, “it blurs the perimeters of a space.” It makes a room mysterious, romantic and just a little bit bigger.
If you want to add to the illusion of space and up your glamour quotient in the process, try another of Drake’s signature touches: decorating with curves.
He loves chairs with spirals at the elbow, tables with a swoosh to the leg, and rooms that are centered on large, circular ottomans. Not only is traffic flow easier, but the absence of corners, particularly when you use a round table in a dining room, “helps create the perception that a room is larger than it is,” he says.
When decorating with curves, Drake happily mixes styles from Biedermeier to art deco. Because of the diverse pedigree of his furnishings, it takes a while for the eye to absorb that a room is based on the repetition of a single shape.
But that’s not the only thing Drake repeats in a room. Frequently he narrows his decorating palette to a single luscious hue such as kumquat, tangerine, turquoise or orchid. In his own bedroom, for instance, he used chrome yellow everywhere – on the tall, undulating curtains, on the lacquered bedside chest, on the quilted bedcover, on the walls and even on the ceiling.
What makes it work is that different materials reflect and absorb color differently. Yellow looks quite different on lacquer than silk or porcelain or cotton. The result is a room with a beguiling subtlety of shades.
Glamour, of course, is not for the timid. It takes bold thinking to decorate with a single color, a single motif or a single-minded devotion to luster.
But read Drake’s book and you might just decide that the debonair, the dapper and the sophisticated are right for you. If you do, keep in mind MGM’s famous motto: “Make it big! Do it right! Give it class!”
