Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Haven't you noticed that if there is something that really strikes your fancy, you find yourself using it throughout your entire house? For me, it's the color blue that makes appearances in every room in my home. For others, it might be Chinoiserie, porcelain vegetables, black and white photography, or...mirror. Yes, mirror.

My friend Jean loaned me her copy of The House and Garden Book of Classic Rooms last weekend, and while looking through the book I noticed several photos of the Paris apartment of designer Claude Vicario de la Iglesia. I like the apartment's high style look, but what really caught my eye was the designer's use of mirror throughout much of the apartment! (By the way, I think that exclamation point is warranted as it's not often that you see a home with this much mirror.) Even the bedroom was treated to it, though thankfully not on the ceiling.

I'm not sure what the explanation was for this copious use of mirror. The rooms seem spacious enough, so I don't think mirror was used to make the rooms appear larger. Then again, the rooms' perceived sizes might be the mirrors working their magic. I don't have an answer, but I do think it's interesting. See for yourself:




In the dining room/library, seen both above and at the top of the post, mirror lines the wall behind the sideboard as well as the wall that runs perpendicular to the bookshelves. Note too the mirrored panels on the doors.






The living room has all kinds of mirror, including a framed one over the fireplace as well as a mirrored wall along one side of the room. Even the door frame is surrounded by mirror.




Not to be denied, the bedroom too has mirrored walls both behind the bed and along the side wall, though that wall is curtained.

All photos from The House and Garden Book of Classic Rooms by Robert Harling.

Reflections on Corners

Corners of rooms can, at times, be tricky. Depending on the layout of the room and the furniture placement, one can end up with dead space in the corner. It's kind of like an awkward silence in a room.

It's an issue that I'm currently dealing with in my study. On one of the long walls, there is a sofa, and against the adjoining wall, there is a sliding glass door and enough wall space for a small chest. The result is that the corner looks empty and boxed in. Screens can be a great option for hiding desolate corners, but unfortunately there just isn't enough space for one in my study. I think that I found the answer to my particular problem. I plan to display a tall painting, one done by my sister, on an easel in the corner. Now the only glitch is finding a decent looking easel that goes with the rest of the room, but that's an issue for another post.

I suppose that because this design challenge has been on my mind lately, I've become attuned to how others have dealt with corners. And one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen is the use of mirror to obscure the corners altogether. The most common approach to mirror is to sheath entire walls in it. In the photo at top, designer Louis Tregre mirrored chimney breast and wall in squares of mirror and extended it to window. It worked well because it minimized the jogs of the chimney breast, niche, and support column, making the wall seem a bit more uniform.



I am absolutely smitten with this image of an apartment decorated by the late David Barrett. Barrett mirrored an awkward corner, then extended the reflective surface by placing a mirrored screen next to the mirrored corner. And if that wasn't enough, he used a mirrored cube table and a mirrored pedestal in this corner as well.



The late T. Gordon Little mirrored the support column in the corner of his Plaza Towers living room. To be honest, I don't think that the mirror really does an effective job at hiding the column (and perhaps that wasn't Little's objective), but I do like the way it looks. The mirror added some shimmer to what could have been a clunky corner.




A more restrained use of mirror is seen here in the London flat of Walter Lees. At first it seems a little odd to use two slivers of mirror to decorate a corner, but here, I think it worked. If Lees had not balanced out the mirror with drawings and sofas on either side, the mirrored corner might have seemed too forced and obvious.


Tregre and Barrett images from House Beautiful, January 1971. Little image from Southern Accents, Winter 1977.