Charlotte Moss

My love for Charlotte Moss has been on going now for well over 10 years. Since my computer is completely dead and it looks like there will be a new one on the horizon soon, any suggestions for what kind to get would be appreciated, it is impossible to post the pictures that I took last weekend that I promised earlier. In the mean time you can see some of the weekends pictures on Sheryl's blog http://friendshipcottage.blogspot.com/

Back to Charlotte. I can in no way compare myself to her but after reading her interview on http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/ this morning I can relate to her even more. She attended interior design school but dropped out after deciding that she couldn't draw well enough which is exactly what I did. She went on to study a new area and I studied business. She went on to Wallstreet and I went into banking. OK, so she was on Wallstreet and I was a new mother working as a bank teller, but hey it was banking ~ After becoming disillusioned with Wallstreet she went into retailing and opened her own shop. After the birth of my first daughter at age 25 my friend Pam and I opened our first shop. From there the similarities begin to fade. She went on to become a famous Interior Designer and author. I raised my three babies and dabbled in retail for the better part of 20 years and did some interior decorating for people when they insisted but mostly later regretted ;)

When her books first started coming out I became an instant fan. A Passion for Detail was first published in 1991 and it was love at first sight for me. I started collecting old books, looked forward to having a green stripped dining room with wallpaper like the paper on the back of the covers of the book, got a calico Caviller King Charles spaniel & planned on another, worked for Pat Wood who sold staffordshire lamps in her shop like Charlotte, collected old framed Victorian botanical prints, majolica, needlepoint pillows and silver.

Creating A Room came out in 1995 while we were decorating our home and cottage. Both of her books strongly influenced the decor of both. In Creating A Room, Steinmeyer's illustrations really brought Charlotte's visions to life for me and probably many others. I loved the collaboration of Charlotte the visionary with James the illustrator, both artists of immense talent.

Steinmeyer's illustration on pages 39 and 40 of A Passion For Details is still one of my favorite rooms. His work on A Sunny and Sophisticated Living Room form CAR is where I got the idea for the curtains in our house we were working on. With the book in hand,I approached a couple of gal's that had work for Laura Ashley in NYC that had moved back home to our area, to help me. My first choice for fabric was a Rose Cummings rose printed lined that turned out to be way out of my budget so we settled on a sweet Waverly chintz that I love to this day. The girls did a great job that turned out to be more difficult that we had planned. It was a difficult install, so difficult that when I had them resized to fit the house we are in now they totally botched the job and my beautiful Charlotte inspired curtains look more like something out of a bad Victorian reproduction job. Alas, I still love the fabric so there they hang in their lame interpretation.

Charlotte Moss will forever be one of my favorite designers and I am thrilled to see that she has become so successful and influential today with her classic design and books now reaching a whole new generation of devotees,even the ones that are so strongly devoted to the Domino style. Congratulations Charlotte and best wishes for future success.

I really wish I would not have cut up my copy of Creating A Room so much. Today these two books are selling on her site http://www.charlottemoss.com/ for $150 each since they are now out of publication. Even at those prices I would buy them again and look forward to her next projects.