by Nate Berkus
(Illustration Credit 8.15)
I had three reasons for wanting to make over Dr. Ruth’s living room:
1. She’s given me so much more than she’ll ever know.
2. I wanted to show her a new way to live with her things.
3. She promised if I helped her out, I’d have great sex for the rest of my life.
If ever there was a candidate for floor-to-ceiling bookcases, Dr. Ruth was it. My solution was an entire wall of bookcases. We also found a freestanding cabinet with seven-foot glass doors—in the same classic style as the bookcases—which almost has the feel of another dollhouse. And speaking of the dollhouse, I had a stand built for it. My hope is that all these pieces will age as gracefully as the 84-year-old sex therapist … actually, my hope is that we’ll all age that well.
When you’ve got as much stuff as Dr. Ruth, your eye needs a place to rest. For her walls I decided on a neutral backdrop of pale gray (to pick up her amazing view of the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River, and the New Jersey Palisades beyond) with creamy white trim. But I also noticed that Dr. Ruth has a particular style of dressing—she’s always in black slacks and a bright blouse. Because this uniform works so well for her, I decided to take my cue from it and throw in several happy notes of emerald green, plum, coral, and shocking pink around the room. I even had her chair reupholstered in the hot pink because, like Dr. Ruth herself, it radiates joy.
(Illustration Credit 8.16)
I went with a simple burlap for the tablecloth and smoky gray linen for the curtains because I didn’t want a pattern to fight with all those book bindings. I reframed the precious pictures of her mother and father with wide ecru mats and simple white frames so that the photos have some breathing space and the sepia tones stand out. I used gold accents in the sconces and chandeliers because Dr. Ruth is European and a hint of gold suits her. I replaced her dark, heavy furniture with some lighter pieces. I got her a flat-screen TV from this century. I also found copies of the sculptures that sat on Sigmund Freud’s desk, though I suspect Dr. Ruth has a much better idea of what women really want than Dr. Freud ever did. And I couldn’t help but throw in the LOVE pillow, because that’s really what she’s about.
Dr. Ruth has told me that she goes out five nights a week; she loves to see friends and folk dance and attend events all over the city. But I can’t help thinking that she’d be much more inclined to stay home and maybe even have a few people over for dinner every now and then if her home was set up for entertaining. I designed three separate conversation areas, and made sure that the sofa is low enough to be comfortable for her. I wanted her to want to hang out.
(Illustration Credit 8.17)
I think we all have this misconception about our living rooms. We somehow got it into our heads that they need to be spare and formal, while the family room is the place that’s relaxed and playful and filled with our stuff. But there’s nothing grand about Dr. Ruth and I believe people should be able to do some living in their living rooms.
Earlier I said that Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer epitomizes the word amazing, but the more I went through her things and heard her story, the more I realized that word doesn’t begin to do her justice. The problem was that she had so many things that meant so much to her—that reminded her of how far she’s traveled—she could no longer see the forest for the trees; the things that mattered most had become a blur. I wanted to give a place of prominence to what was truly important. I wanted to take this jumble of parts and bring them back into sharp relief.
Here is a woman who’d faced brutality and cruelty and ugliness and chose to answer it with dignity and intelligence and optimism. As a child, the people and things she loved most were ripped away. I wanted her to be able to come home at the end of the day, kick her tiny shoes off, and really be surrounded by the signs of a well-lived life, the things that provided her perspective and comfort, and, for the woman whose attitude toward sex has influenced millions, nothing but pleasure.
(Illustration Credit 9.1)
(Illustration Credit 9.3)
She had me at “make tacos not war.” The string of six-inch-high gold letters sits above the ten-foot-long vintage cast-iron apricot-colored sink in the kitchen of Barbara Hill’s home in Marfa, Texas. A perfect marriage of salvaged materials, modernism, wit, and simplicity—from the French dining room table decorated with nothing more than a plain black bowl, to the Bertoia chairs scattered around the room, to the deep bathtub sitting three feet away from her bed—Barbara Hill has style to burn. I am completely obsessed with everything about this place.
Only a confident woman with a bit of life under her belt could create a space as cool and eloquent and stripped-down as this. For years, I’ve told people, “Stand in your threshold and guard what you allow in.”
Barbara has actually done it! She’s the Stuff Police, a ruthless editor who doesn’t hesitate to say, “This house isn’t big enough for the two of us,” as she ushers out anything that doesn’t make her happy or please her exacting eye. From her kitchen counter to her closets to her bookshelves, there is no surface in her space that’s not exactly the way she wants it to be. I can count on one hand the number of homes I could move into tonight, but this beautifully executed space makes me want to grab my suitcase and fill out a change-of-address form.
Barbara’s home began its life as a turn-of-the-century private dance hall (yes, Virginia, along with tumbleweed and gunslingers, there really used to be dance halls in the Old West). An interior designer, former Houston art gallerist, and, before that, Miss Texas of 1956, Barbara devoted a year and a half to creating a single, open, free-flowing, high-ceilinged space. She preserved the eighteen-inch-thick white adobe walls and added overhead steel support beams. The floors are made out of birch plywood, and the fireplace and bedroom ceiling are covered with sheets of charcoal-gray industrial metal. There isn’t a single drop of paint in the entire house. To preserve the spirit of life-as-it-once-was-in-Texas, she installed silver art-deco light fixtures on the outside porch. “They kind of reminded me of a theater, or a dance hall,” she says.
Most of our houses have so many overstuffed containers and cupboards and drawers and storage boxes that it comes as a shock to see the naked way Barbara showcases her things. Plates and dishes are stacked and laid out on the counter and the shelves below. A creamware pitcher holds Bakelite flatware beside an old white Kodak canister filled with wooden kitchen utensils. Two closets on skateboard wheels (because, really, what woman doesn’t want her closets on skateboard wheels?) keep her clothes and cowboy boots in order. Rolled-up towels fill a wicker basket beneath the bathroom sink. When our everyday stuff—plates, forks, knives, coffee cups—is arranged this matter-of-factly, we can’t help but look at it in a new way. It’s like “Home, Unplugged.” A spoon becomes sculpture, a silvery hanger becomes a fashion statement. Barbara cares about every little thing and its effect, down to the blocky bars of white soap in her bathroom. And while I’m on the subject, can you imagine getting it so together that pretty much the only things you need in your bathroom are a couple of bars of white soap and a toothbrush? Barbara isn’t traipsing down to her neighborhood superstore to buy Dixie cups and a plastic lotion dispenser, or replacing her flatware with eight gleaming new place settings.
WHEN I ASKED HER FOR THE ONE WORD SHE’D USE TO DESCRIBE HER SPACE … BARBARA ANSWERED, “POETIC.”
But you can’t arrive at the space Barbara is in unless you’ve reached a point in your life where you’ve pared away everything that is not essential or that you don’t truly love. I know there are some people who will look at Barbara’s home and maybe find it a little cold, but I would argue that the seeming austerity of her space comes straight from the heart. I call it “meaningful minimalism.” The thing Barbara has figured out, that most of us—myself included—still struggle with, is restraint. She understands that we don’t really need half a dozen different shampoos, conditioners, and hair gels, along with a set of towers to store them in. She h
as mastered the art of leaving well enough alone.
Seeing Barbara’s pristine kitchen, visitors probably don’t believe anyone ever eats there, but this woman likes to throw parties and, trust me, when she does she uses every single square inch of this space, even though in its off hours it still manages to resemble a stand-alone work of art. The counter features Barbara’s collection of gray and brown pottery made by the industrialist sculptor Russel Wright. Tilted against the wall beside the Bakelite flatware are two plastic pancakes enclosing an extremely tiny man and woman, a piece called Pancake Lovers that was created by San Antonio–based artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz. Prints given to Barbara by artists she exhibited in her gallery lean against the walls, unsecured, so she can switch them around whenever the mood strikes.
One of her most prized possessions is a photo album containing pages and pages of postcards created by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. “I got up at 2.02 p.m.,” one says. “I got up at 9.20 p.m.,” reads another.
There’s a story there. In the 1970s Barbara was one of only a handful of gallerists in the world to exhibit Kawara’s One Million Years, a combination sculpture-performance in which a man and a woman take turns reading aloud consecutive dates a million years into the future and a million years into the past. One morning during the show’s run, Barbara recalls, the phone rang. It was On Kawara, who was visiting Houston with his wife and wanted directions to Barbara’s gallery.
“When he got back to New York a few days later, he started sending me postcards with pictures of Manhattan on them,” Barbara tells me. “He sent one to me every day until— well—until he must have run out of postcards. I have sixty of them in all.”
Kawara’s work is spare; you notice his postcards as much for what is left unspoken as for the rhythm of his words. His pieces are all about where he’s been and where he is in this particular moment, and it makes perfect sense to me that at least an album’s worth of them found their way to Barbara Hill.
When I asked her for the one word she’d use to describe her space, I was prepared for just about any response. Raw, maybe. Or uncluttered. But, without hesitation, Barbara answered, “Poetic.”
She’s not just talking about the mood of her home; she’s talking about actual poetry. A few years ago, she commissioned a friend to create a series of white coffee cups featuring some of her favorite quotes from poets and authors, ranging from Emily Dickinson to Lorca to Pushkin. “Good Morning, Midnight,” says one cup, while another wonders, “Have You Heard the Whistle Long and Sharp of the Train, the Station, and the Farewells Left Behind?”
“That one is by Jean Cocteau,” says Barbara. “Here in Marfa, we hear the train every night at 4:00 a.m. All of us who live here love the sound of a train rolling through. It’s such a part of the Old West.”
Then there are the two matching chairs in her living room. Originally covered with brown cowhide, they were reupholstered in a heavyweight white cotton. Barbara, who likes to write offbeat poetry in her spare time, spent the next week composing a pair of pulp-romantic stories that a local T-shirt company then silkscreened onto the chair fabric. It’s not the first time someone in the design world has used writing on a chair, whether it’s a single word or faded copy off a burlap sack of grain. But the typewriter-like font Barbara picked out makes these particular chairs sing a song that’s both romantic and wry. One tells the tale of an imaginary cowboy pulling into a Texas town “on a dust storm,” with “the pounding rhythm of the ride vibrating in his well-worn jeans” and “hell in his holster.” The second imaginary visitor comes from back East. “She was going to take him for an art tour, but she took him for a lot more,” Barbara recites. One word is even misspelled, but that’s just fine—renegade passion doesn’t have to dot its i’s or cross its t’s in her home. Hanging off two black hooks in her bathroom are two small cowboy hats, one black, the other white, symbolizing two phantom visitors. “Those hats just make me happy,” she says.
The steel beam in the ceiling means overhead lighting is not an option, which is why Barbara installed an enormous floor lamp whose long curved neck hangs over the low, gray, extra-long sofa like an industrial grapevine. Visitors can hike their boots up on a French mail-sorting table she had cut down to coffee table level, or hang out in one of several vintage chairs sitting on the gravel-textured living room rug.
Barbara’s white oval bathtub sits at the foot of her bed like a parked car. When I asked her why she loved the shape so much, she told me it reminded her of the old tubs cowboys used back when people would bathe in the middle of a room. “I can just picture a Clint Eastwood type of guy sitting in there with his boots hanging over the side,” Barbara says. The bottom of the tub is so shiny it looks wet, but it’s simply reflecting the charcoal ceiling above it. And if Barbara ever wants privacy from the pack of wild turkeys hanging out on her porch, she can turn the big weathered gray sign reading “Crews Hotel” into a door by sliding it across the space between the two walls.
The bed is pure Barbara—just a slab of raw Texas pecan. Once again, she has whittled away anything even remotely extraneous. I mean, what more do you really need for a bed other than a piece of wood, a great mattress, a soft pillow, and a set of clean white sheets?
On a side table Barbara salvaged from a falling-down office building in Houston sits a silvery 1960s lamp and three grainy rocks she brought back from a Marfa farmers’ market. On another table is a homemade sculpture Barbara herself created using a small white car and a chunky rock. “Let me position it right so you can get the full effect,” she says, placing the rock over the front fender. “There!”
Anybody who has ever driven a car through the American West will immediately understand the meaning of the crushed car. “If you drive through the Rockies, you’ll see signs that say, ‘Danger—Falling Rocks,’ Barbara says with a laugh. “But really, what’s a driver supposed to do? Back up? You can’t back up. I thought it was hysterical.”
My favorite little touch is the tiny pair of scuffed cowboy boots on the mail-sorting table. Barbara wore them when she was three years old. “I did some trekking in those boots, and probably some dancing,” she says, “based on the look of the heels.” My mother had my baby shoes bronzed, and I’ve been trying to scratch off the metal ever since, so it’s all I can do not to jam these in my coat pocket and make a run for the border.
“The tub in the middle of the room isn’t for everyone,” Barbara says, explaining why she added a bathroom and separate shower to the original house. Above a vintage Irish stool—“Was it used for sheep-shearing, or shoeing horses, or tanning leather? I have no idea, which is why I like it”—hangs a movie still of a young Rock Hudson, a gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, and a huge black stallion rearing up on its hind legs (the James Dean classic Giant was shot in Marfa). On the other wall is a vintage photograph of Barbara, along with forty-nine other smiling women wearing one-piece white bathing suits, shot during the Miss America pageant of 1956. She may not have won, but I like to think she was voted most likely to turn a crumbling dance hall into an amazing place to live.
I called this book The Things That Matter because if it is about nothing else, it’s about how the prints on our wall and the rough-hewn rocks we swiped from the Marfa farmers’ market give our everyday lives shape, texture, and a sense of who we are, who we’ve been, and where we may be heading. But the appeal of editing down our stuff to what we really need and love, and nothing more than that, is another fantasy I find myself indulging in now and then. Being able to pick up and go at a moment’s notice without wondering, But what will I do with all my things? is a notion I find genuinely liberating. In the end, we all come into this world without stuff, and we depart without stuff, too. In the meantime, because we’re human, we fill our shelves and our lives with objects that we love and treasure, and few things on earth could be more meaningful than that. But what would it be like to create a space as portable and no-frills as Barbara’s?
(Illustration Credit 9.18)
> One of the reasons I love this home so much is because I haven’t yet reached that stage in my life. Right now I’m too drawn to beautiful things, too invested in spending whatever free time I have combing antiques malls and flea markets, too addicted to the pleasure I get discovering something incredible at a really good price. At the same time, Barbara’s interior reminds me that less can be more. Sometimes I wonder: Would I appreciate the things around me more if I owned, say, one alligator picture frame instead of the three that currently sit on the table across from me?
You won’t find what Barbara has done in a design magazine or a website devoted to minimalism. The iconic interior she has put together may look easy to pull off, but believe me, it’s not. Decades of experience, of comings and goings and beginnings and endings, and thinking and rethinking, have gone into the choices that determine what she has permitted into her home, and what she has chosen to leave behind. The stuff that remains is a pure, clear-eyed representation of exactly who Barbara Hill is. I’m pretty sure that if somehow I found myself sitting in her house, and she strode through the front door with a large crowd of people, I could pick her out in an instant. The hair, the cowboy boots, the jewelry, the dark glasses, the smile—they somehow belong with the concrete, steel, wood, and plaster. “That’s you, right?” I would say. “And this is your house.” And isn’t recognizing yourself, and having other people recognize you for who you are, the goal of celebrating the things you live with?
There aren’t a whole lot of people whose entire lifetime is reflected in the things that surround them. And by entire lifetime, I mean the triumphs and the sorrows, the fat years and the lean years, the great vacations and the ones that got rained out, the babies, the politics, the poetry, the postcards, the tiny trinkets, the old books, the sweet friends, the days you couldn’t wait to be done with, and the times you wanted to last forever. Because we’re human, it’s sometimes tempting to forget who we were way back when, and to edit our story and our stuff down so it celebrates only our successes.