DAN'S PAPERS, July 25, 2008 Page 93 www.danshamptons.com
House/ home
Photos by S. Galardi
The Demise of the Decorative Deer?
Tiny Deer Head, and ceramic with gold acccent Bambi Figurine, both from the Netherlands, available at Maison 24 in Bridgehampton; right, Matt’s mailbox. your next-door neighbors might indeed launch an utterly justified stealth attack on such statuary. A jury of their peers, used to having flower bulbs and tree bark plundered by ravenous fawns and does, might well decide to overlook any evidence. But rather than suffer the slings and arrows of your outraged community by installing a deer statue on your grounds, why not bring a deer decoy indoors? Having fun procrastinating at the New York Public Library while ostensibly diligently engaged in the meticulous archival research that underpins my work, I serendipitously stumbled across a very decorative domesticated buck. The May 1970 issue of House and Garden magazine has a feature about New York designer Richard V. Hare and his family’s retreat on Long Island, a shingle-style house originally built by a whaling captain. My eye was immediately captured by the photograph of the bright chintzfilled living room and its curious inhabitant, a decoy deer standing in the bay window. Back then, it would have been a most unique, but utterly appropriate, accent in a weekend home inhabited by an active couple, their young boys and a pair of Norwich terriers. (Since Dan’s Papers is a friendly magazine, I’ll leave to your imagination what OUR tiny terrier would have done with a stag statue in the living room. Needless to say, his antics would have led to some great cocktail hour conversation!) In any case, I say that if the deer motif is to be rescued from inevitable extinction, it should be revived through such stunning statement pieces, not fake trophy heads. It remains to be seen whether the innovative interior decorator and hapless homeowner might then have hoards of rutting bucks banging on the
glass at the sight of a decorative decoy! Now, perhaps you have had enough of deer munching on your carefully cultivated perennials and charging in front of your car to even stomach the sight of the creature in your home. Ironically, my impetus for this article came not from any of the various hoofed ruminant mammals of the family Cervidae, but from a giant white lacquer bunny I have espied numerous times through the windows of the McGuire furniture showroom on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Reclining on a table, this impressively monumental rabbit (at the equally impressive to the trade price of $4,767) has commanded the installation for months. Truly bizarre, but quite affecting, the unforgettable sculpture has captivated my imagination. It would take a ruthless sense of chic and a strong character to actually acquire this large white cottontail and make it the focal point of a room. Nonetheless, just one influential interior designer could cause a veritable population explosion! Shed the omnipresent antler chandeliers and deer heads of a departing decorating ethos and start a trend by adopting the Oryctolagus cuniculus as your massive mascot.
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By Mary Beth Karoll Trust me, to pen an article about a moribund decorating trend that has finally entered its painfully slow death throes. Wildly popular over these past few years, deer trophies have now come to the denouement of a downward spiral from the pinnacle of chic to being rather too common. Rather than real spoils of the hunt or the art of taxidermy, this passing fad includes faux deer head trophies made from white resin or even clear plastic. Ironically, given how deer are encroaching on suburban habitats, there is now an overpopulation of bucks and Bambi’s on the home front, at least according to some style hunters! In fact, deer as a dying decorating motif were noted, along with fading cowhide rugs, Chinese Chippendale chairs, human skulls, and baroque mirrors, in a New York Times article published in late December 2007, entitled “Flash in the Can: Designs Soon Forgotten.” Nonetheless, this June’s House Beautiful still finds a faux-trophy deer head bedecking a recently restored historic farmhouse in Greenwich decorated by an up-and-coming design team. You would think that the denizens of Connecticut’s Gold Coast would have had enough of the adorable creatures ravaging their roses and rhododendrons to invite them inside! So, deer still have legs, but how does one buck the trend with style? In March of this year, National Geographic Kids magazine featured a short, yet pointed article about the mysterious beheading of a deer statue. A certain Mr. and Mrs. Hesselink, proud owners of the decapitated lawn statuary, understandably yet erroneously believed at first that the culprits were human vandals. It’s not for us to decide whether these alleged perpetrators were actually well-meaning aesthetic arbiters intent on cleaning up the neighborhood of kitschy clutter. However, the actual culprit was acting on a more primal instinct. In a masterful feat of detection worthy of a CSI spinoff, local Oostburg, Wisconsin, police discovered nearby animal tracks as well as antler marks on the statue which led them to surmise the true identity of the offender. Mistaking the concrete lawn ornament for a live rival, a stag had expeditiously dealt with the threat to his territory. Looking for a laugh, or perhaps lacking the funds to replace the broken form, the Hesselinks put the headless deer back on display in their yard. Their belief was that the animal, having vanquished the impostor with a tussle of antlers, would not make another attempt at challenging his adversary. Nowadays, given the undesirable settlement of deer in postage-stamp sized East Coast suburban yards,
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