AZ-Lifestyle · page 71
Charlotte Moss: A Flair For Living
Charlotte Moss’ book, A Flair for Living, is also the perfect description for this award-winning designer, decorator, author and world traveler. While in the Valley to speak at the Independent Women luncheon held at the Phoenix Art Museum on March 6, I had the opportunity to meet with Moss for a candid interview.
Moss combines warm Southern charm and hospitality with New York grit and strength – not just in her designs, but in her life as well.
Decorating private homes and executive suites the world over, Moss blends her Southern heritage with European and Classical styles for looks that are “comfortable and informed.” Having designed everything from fabric to carpet, and from china collections to decorating accessories, the iconic designer also adds accomplished author to her impressive resume. Currently finishing her eighth book, Moss is a contributing editor for Architectural Digest and the Wall Street Journal Magazine as well as her website’s blog at www.CharlotteMoss.com.
She recently received The Timeless Design Award, given by the Royal Oak Foundation, Elle Décor’s VISION AWARD, and Traditional Home magazine’s list of the worlds’ Top 20 interior designers. This May, she will be honored with the Circle of Excellence Award from the International Furnishings & Design Association (IFDA).
Although she did not start out as a designer, Moss feels decorating is where she was meant to end up. “I never thought about design,” she says. “I think I learned somewhere along the way; that it was just what we did. This is instinct.”
Independent, fierce women in fashion and history inspire Moss, starting with the important women in her life. Her grandmother, she says in a recent article for The New York Social Diary, was always beautifully dressed and could make an incredible floral arrangement out of flowers she gathered from the woods. Moss learned from her grandmother that decorating was a “way of life” – art expressed in how you lived.
Moss’ own mother was an independent and decisive woman. “She was a decision maker. There was no dilly-dallying, no dithering, she was very strong,” Moss says. “My mother made a very simple but great house. We all participated; we all had responsibilities.” The oldest of five, Moss learned about caring for a house and others.
“I learned at a very early age that it wasn’t just my mother’s house, but it’s our house. We appreciated what we had. We learned to do things; we learned to set the table; you learned the difference between the weeds and the flowers.”
Moss married right out of college, but when the marriage ended, she decided to move to New York to work on Wall Street. A friend lived there, and Moss figured that it was the best place to work, and the best place to make the kind of money she needed to provide for herself if she never married again.
“I didn’t have that kind of background,” she says of her career in finance, but, doggedly, the young Moss worked hard. Starting as a secretary, she eventually moved up the ranks of the movers-and-shakers of Wall Street. But when her firm went through a merger, she found herself questioning what she wanted to do – if she wanted to start all over again in the field of finance with a new firm and new partners.
“A part of my mind was tugging and tugging,” she says. “So I went to the beach and made a business plan.” In 1985, Charlotte Moss began a career in design and hasn’t looked back since.
In the early days of her decorating career when she was doing interiors full time, she was on a plane every week and says that finding a balance, no matter what stage your career or life is in, is very important.
“I think we have to have a balance in life, of understanding when to push, when to challenge, and when to work with projects that are in our comfort zone,” she says. “We all need to feel a sense of accomplishment. We all need to feel good about what we’re doing.”
Moss looks for an open mind, honesty and comfortability in her client relationships and believes these qualities make any relationship successful.
“I want to have the kind of interchange with my clients, the kind of dialogue where they can say to me ‘Charlotte, that is the worst fabric I have ever seen, what were you thinking?’ and they’ll know I will take it with a sense of humor,” Moss states.
“The most important thing is to keep an open mind, it makes you a less rigid person,” she says. “Take your blinders off and go with the flow.”
Moss sees herself as a guide. She recently did a Master Class video lecture for House Beautiful magazine that is focused on observing what is around you, seeing is what her design is all about. “None of my books are instruction books; they are about seeing and looking and being open to what you encounter. That’s why none of my books say do it this way, do it that way. I’m a teacher, not an instructor.”
A teacher who plays as hard as she works.
“I’m a very high energy person, but when I am ready to power down, don’t mess with me,” she says. “You have to do something in your life to restore, restore, restore, and you have to give yourself permission to do these things.”
Puttering around her house in her pajamas is one way Moss restores and reconnects. Whether it’s watching movies with her dogs on her sofa or spending time in her garden – puttering and pajamas are part of her powering down routine.
She also scrapbooks. Yes, the design icon “scrapbooks.” But for Moss, scrapbooks aren’t what most people think of. For her they are memory books, filled with the things she has loved, enjoyed and which have influenced her. They are like her personal history books.
Although scrapbooking historically is “not cool,” as Moss wrote in her review of Cecil Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook (Assouline), in the WJS online, she hopes that people will think about scrapbooks in a different way.
“My scrapbooks are my photo essays, my menus, my wine labels. I catalogue them all.” But she can only do it when she is ready to hunker down for hours. She loves getting up early to enjoy a movie or PBS video, or her favorite, a TED lecture (she’s a self-proclaimed TED fanatic) in her pajamas with her dogs and headphones and scrapbooks. It is a relaxing pastime for her, and it’s restorative.
But in the end, Moss finds restoration of soul and spirit in solitude.
“Whether it’s a long beach walk or paddling in my kayak, it’s just me, me and my camera,” she says.
Success, recognition, successful books and awards – but in the end her style and her substance come down to the fact that “just me,” Charlotte Moss, is just incredible.
Text recovered from the printed pages; the scan below is the edition of record.
The printed page