Designer's Ho-hum-case

Each year the local Designer Showcase takes an overpriced mansion in some toney San Francisco neighborhood and allows a coterie of decorators to spew their insanity over the insides, each designer bitch getting an individual room. It is always one of my favorite justifications for my slogan “Eat the Rich.” Amazing how the lack of a budget limit or client disapproval forces these aces to display their addiction to bad color schemes, proportions that wildly miss and whimsy that absolutely grates.

The last few years the rooms all displayed colors that looked like designers who had been swapping their psycho meds with each other had picked them in a very, very dark room. A green taffeta sofa, some unlikely place between sea foam and lime, still haunts my nightmares.

This year, as seen  here,   if you’re bold enough to go look, they’ve all jumped on the tastefully restrained taupe-and-beige bandwagon. Any more monochromatic and snow blindness sets in, I’m sure. I know calling a place that features a shark skeleton as an accessory “restrained” is unlikely, but I’m not talking about the knick-knacks, that is, after all, how designers pay for their rent and rentboys. It’s the color palette throughout that seems astonishingly soporific.I can’t wait to go. I love to drift from room to room, my lips pursed, exchanging wordless glances with my cohorts.  Glances that say so eloquently "What the fuck were they thinking?" I always like to include at least one gesture I’m particularly fond of where I enter a room, stop abruptly and gasp “Oh. My.” And not in enthusiastic tones, I assure you. It’s the high point of the tour for me.