Around Waynedale, people often keep a few stray singles in their pocket. After all, they might want to pick up a fried tenderloin sandwich at a church fundraiser or toss some money into a collection can at a business to help a resident fight cancer.It happens “a lot.”
Someone walks into s’Wonderful Interiors, the quirky furniture and fabric store Dennis Floyd owns with partner Terence Bartholomew in Fort Wayne’s Covington Plaza, and names a movie or TV show.
“I want that,” the customer will say, referring to, say, a chandelier from “True Blood” or a mod-patterned chair fabric from “Cougar Town.”
People still use magazines and catalogs when it comes to choosing the pieces and looks they want in their homes, Floyd says. But more and more, they’re also wanting things from reel life to jump into their real lives, or at least into their living room.
Just ask Erin Magbee, marketing specialist with MASHstudios, an interior design studio and custom furniture maker with a showroom in Los Angeles.
A couple of times a week, she says, a group of women will come into the store and have their pictures taken by – or on – a bed flanked by a cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen, the heartthrob vampire from the “Twilight” saga.
That’s because the bed is practically a dead ringer for the one in the movie in which Edward claims his Bella – a bed that, minus the special effects, was also created by the studio’s furniture makers.
“It’s the exact same bed,” Magbee says. “Actually, the bed in the movie was a custom version because we built one with a headboard.”
The movie’s set designers liked the bed, she says, for its dominating presence – it’s a solidly rectangular platform with tall, square posts for holding a canopy to create a romantic otherworld on the mattress.
People who have bought the $4,400 bed – and the shop has sold “several” – have liked not just the design but the association with the movie, Magbee says.
“They want that fantasy element. … It’s a conversation starter,” Magbee says of the bed. “People think if Hollywood stylists chose it, it must be a cool piece. It becomes the ‘it’ bed.”
‘Pottery Barn look’
Pete Byal, sales associate with Fairfield Galleries in Fort Wayne, says he noticed the trend to copy what’s on movie and television sets years ago.
Customers, he says, began asking for “a Pottery Barn look” after Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel on the “Friends” sitcom bought furniture there.
“It almost became a style in its own,” he says.
Byal says the store doesn’t have “a lot of people come in and say they want something they saw in a movie or show,” possibly because it caters to an upscale market.
“I think that may influence some people, but I think it’s a general style, not a particular piece,” he says.
But for those looking to fulfill a fetish for an item inspired by a set design, there are online lifelines.
New York City blogger/stylist Amy Merrick has been providing decorating help with her “Living In” column at DesignSponge.com. Merrick picks a particular movie, or, occasionally, a TV show, and combs the world of commerce to find buyable items of clothing and accessories or home décor that would fit right in.
Last month, her subject was “White Christmas,” with its “mash-up of rustic and mid-century” Vermont Colonial ski-lodge kitsch, as Merrick put it – from an $1,140 antique Windsor chair to a $9 coffee cup-and-saucer set of heavy, green-lined 1940s diner-style dinnerware.
This month, “Downton Abbey” gets eyed for its palace-style “upstairs” elegance mixed with “downstairs” utility.
Other movies gleaned for their décor have ranged from “Fargo” to “Casablanca” and “Manhattan” to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
Across generations
Then there’s Cathy Whitlock, who blogs at cinemastyle.blogspot.com and is the author of “Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction.”
A movie public relations person turned interior designer, Whitlock got her idea of connecting set design and interior design when a client in Manhattan told her she wanted cream-and-gilt décor like she’d seen in “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
She recently told a writer for www.azcentral.com that she expects the interiors in director Woody Allen’s 1920s-set “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help,” set in the 1960s in Mississippi mansions, to lead trends.
Floyd says while younger people are often those who take decorating cues from TV and movies – perhaps because they haven’t yet defined their style or can’t afford to hire someone else to define it for them – that’s not always the case.
In fact, a frequently requested look is from a decidedly middle-aged romantic comedy starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, with a set design by James Radin that features bookcase-lined ivory walls, ivory-and-blue upholstered furniture and a white-tiled farmhouse-style kitchen.
“People want the summer house on Long Island from ‘Something’s Gotta Give.’ Of course, that’s probably a $20 million house in the Hamptons, but they love the look,” he says.
Mid-century mimics
Often, Floyd says, people are trying to mimic the look of a movie set because they’ve bought a house from a particular era – say the 1960s – and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” with its low-slung Danish modern furniture is what they know from that period.
TV’s “Mad Men” and, to a lesser extent, “Pan Am,” recently have spurred a spate of interest in 1960s-style décor items, he notes.
House Beautiful and Woman’s Day have featured articles on what’s being called “The Mad Men Effect” – along with photos of sleek square-backed chairs and skinny, goose-necked lamps. Some of the photos have been reprinted from actual early-1960s issues.
Floyd says he’s been able to locate specific pieces from some shows – including finding fabric from a chair on “Cougar Town” by checking with the website of the series, which had sourced the props and furnishings.
The shop then ordered 7 yards of the Brunschwig & Fils “Gran Umbelifer” fabric for the client.
“Oh my God, it was expensive! It was nearly $200 a yard,” Bartholomew says.
But there’s always that one thing Floyd can’t come up with.
“A lot of times people who’ve bought older homes come in looking for a queen- or king-sized bed for their master suite in a style to go with the period,” Floyd says. “Trouble is, they really weren’t made until the late 1960s.”
So Floyd resorts to referring to one of his favorite icons of TV décor – the old “I Love Lucy” show.
“I have to say, ‘Remember Lucy and Desi? They always slept in twin beds.’ ” he says. “I mean, they had rules about things like that back then, but it wasn’t just because they were on TV.”
