The True Southern Design Book
Prologue
Quite a few people raised in the South try to forget, or ignore, what they lived and knew when they were growing up. It’s not just dropping “ya’ll” from their dialog. They seem lose both their accents and their sensibility. To them, to be southern means to be a hick, a bigot, an uneducated trailer park fool. Shameful background… It juxtaposes well with the new found wealth of retirees who move south and within a few months of relocating, begin crusades to teach the great unwashed how to read and speak properly.
On the other hand, being southern can be a money maker because of the ever-perpetuated stories of the genteel southern gentleman, plantation life filled with parties and Scarlett O’Hara’s, and the ill-conceived belief in some kind of slowed pace of life. That oh so mythical genteel lie is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by them what’s not from here. That kind of fabricated crap just won’t go away. It sticks in our country’s collective consciousness because it makes money.
Ahhh, to be southern or not to be southern… that is the question.
Perpetuate the myth and you’ll become a true design darling. Convince your clients that you want a room’s design to “look lazy” like the south you once lived in. An example of this just smacked me in the face as I read the current House & Garden. Now, I’m not such a backwoods idiot as to think this magazine reflects mainstream middle-class culture or decorating — I mean, hell, I do know a pig in a poke when I see one. These opulently profiled residences are for us to admire and to attempt to emulate, aren’t they? Isn’t that why we have these diy programs? The shows where they instruct us how to match the chic nouveau look of a Manhattan co-op by creating, from scratch, cement salt and pepper shakers? Okay, that’s off-track, let me turn this truck around and head it back in the other direction. This turnip truck, I mean, the one I just fell off of. [shut up -- I know not to end a sentence with a preposition...]
Back to being and speaking southern. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with losing them double-negatives, saying “in the evening” instead rather than “of a night”, or using Splenda instead of sugar in your sweet tea. It’s even totally acceptable to leave the trailer park for a brick home with central A/C, hook up to cable instead of a 10 ft. diameter satellite dish, and put your dogs on a leash. That’s bringing yourself up in the world.
But if your mama raised you in Richmond, Virginia, now matter how rich and successful you’ve become off of Wall Street, it’s still not okay to let people say things about your house like: “rich bronze Fortuny fabric hangs in swags with the decadent droop of a wine connoisseur’s lower lip”.
Seems to me, someone needs to write the True Southern Design Book. I claim the right and begin today.
A southern window treatment design discussion? “Them rayon sheers we got at the Kmart look damn good with them mini-blinds your mama gave us, you know, the ones what was in her bathroom in the old double-wide, the ones your uncle threw up beer on. I got ‘em real clean with bleach and the water hose.”
I’ll obviously have to edit and refine this idea. This has only been some stream of consciousness bullshit, but I think I can go somewhere with this —
Maybe format it like:
What They Say –What We Say
or
Like a Peanuts cartoon on TV — the blahblahblah of the grownups and the words of the kids. Blahblahblah being un-southern design elements and words being true southern design dialog.
I’ve already written about Southern Yard Art. Seems to me I need to bring this hound dog in out of the yard and clean it up a bit.