As the recession bites decorating people have it sussed and in publishing terms it is a boom time for thrift, writes ANN MARIE HOURINANE
FIRST OF all they said that we were too tired to go out, because we were all so exhausted from making our millions. Now they say we’re too poor to leave the house. Sometimes you have to wonder about all these confident lifestyle commentators, whom I suspect of having shares in B&Q.
They have it sussed, really, the decorating people. Fashion continues to sweep through the halls, stairs and landings of the nation, even as the recession is tapping on the windows and oozing under the doors.
In the good times we built cavernous kitchens (guilty) with strange unattached cupboards which were called islands (guilty again). There has to have been a direct correlation between the soaring sales of scented candles during this period and the fact that women didn’t have time to clean.
We were told that we should decorate our houses as if there was a buyer on the doorstep; all Farrow&Ball neutrals and a one- colour carpet throughout, and the kids with their bags permanently packed in case an irresistible offer landed on the mat.
In the bad times we are told that we must extend our houses because we haven’t got a hope of moving.
Although the extensions may also be imminent because the parents of older children know that they haven’t a hope of them ever packing their bags, and reckon that they may as well give them their own bathroom in order to avoid bloodshed. In the bad times you have to pretend that you are happy with your home.
The new lifestyle accessory is the Lidl carrier bag, and the garden is filled with Lidl’s steel chairs and bits of its iron archway. Blue and green are making a comeback for interiors, apparently, because they are so comforting. Let the grouting begin!
That excellent publication, Retail Week, reported recently that overall sales at Kingfisher, the company that owns B&Q, were down 6.8 per cent in the fourth quarter which ended on January 31st. But Kingfisher sales in France were up 2.1 per cent.
In Poland, interestingly, they were up a whopping 16.2 per cent and in China, sadly, they were down 31.2 per cent. Personally, I have no idea what any of this means.
In Dublin’s B&Q on the May Bank Holiday things looked pretty quiet. There were plenty of customers – parking was tight – but no queues at the tills. We shivered in the deserted patio section and had an argument in the lighting aisle (how can anyone object to chandeliers?).
In my admittedly rather limited experience home decoration and DIY both lead to furious rows.
In this way they resemble holidays: either the woman is in charge of them, and rules with an iron fist, or there is chaos.
Or nothing happens at all, and you live with a collection of fabric samples and squares of prospective colours painted on to your walls, like windows to alternative worlds.
But now, in the midst of all this decorating and emotional chaos, thrift has reared its sepia head. In publishing terms this is a boom time for thrift: the current edition of the London Review of Books, no less, carries a review, by Jenny Turner, of five books advising on domestic economies of all sorts.
These books concentrate on housekeeping and cooking, and two of them seem to be reissues of books brought out by the British authorities during the second World War, as in Make Do And Mend: Keeping Family And Home Afloat On War Rations, and Eating For Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking On War Rations.
It is enough to make you offer up a prayer for the housewives of yesteryear, particularly those who had to be clever with margarine even before the Luftwaffe arrived. No wonder they all looked so thin on the posters.
But thrift has hit decorating just as hard, and we have our problems too, those of you who are, in Marina Carr’s neat phrase, the housewives who don’t do housework.
For example, it's one thing being told that all you have to do is buy a few scatter cushions to update your sofa . It is quite another to be told that designer fabrics have come down in price by 15 per cent (see The Irish Timesproperty section last week) and that you are perfectly capable of reupholstering your own armchairs. Are you kidding me? I'd rather stick tapestry needles in my eyes.
There are many of us who would happily bring the Lidl’s garden furniture into the living room before we tried to do our own upholstering. In fact, several stylish people have done exactly this, to the surprise and astonishment of their family and friends, who are tolerant of slatted bottoms.
There are always going to be people who are happiest stripping pine and sticking sea shells on to lamp bases.
And then there are the rest of us, who are happiest slobbing around in front of the television, or talking nonsense to our friends We’re the ones who never got round to painting the ceiling. We’re the ones who have to scrabble around in order to find our shoes. We’re the ones who cling to the traditional Irish view, that you decorate a house just the once .
This used to be known as common sense, but now is being called thrift. It’ll never catch on.
