HOME TRUTHS
Design dynamo Sarah Richardson can't lay off
December 31, 2009
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Francine Kopun
FEATURE WRITER
Putting on best face for Sarah
Don't invite an interior designer into your home for work or for pleasure.
I did. It cost me $550 for an Ikea wardrobe, $80 for assembly, $400 on a coffee table, $300 for cleaning services, $150 in table linens and two Big Fights with my husband.
That's $1,400, for anyone without a calculator phone app. That's before the designer even walked through the front door.
It wasn't just any designer; it was Sarah Richardson, whose name is spoken with reverence in our 1952 Scarborough detached. We have been watching Sarah Richardson with rapt attention for five years, marvelling at her wit, style, charm and massive skill set.
It was my editor's idea to invite Sarah. "What if she can't help herself – what if she starts pointing out flaws in your home?"
What flaws?
My 5-year-old son does most of the decorating, using Lego, Playmobil and Jell-O. We have not one single closet on the main floor.
Most of our furniture is second-hand, mixed with cheap and functional Ikea pieces in various stages of decomposition, typically purchased as we're about to be crushed to death by lumps of clothes and stacks of books.
We have too much of some things (three couches, three dining room tables, mice) and not enough of what we do need, such as kitchen counter space and the time, skill and energy to keep a house in good condition.
Numbed by fatigue by the time our son finally falls asleep each night (and I'm not saying what time that is), my husband and I escape into Sarah's tidy, bright worlds of home and cottage.
"Guess who's coming to our house," I said to my husband after booking the interview through one of Richardson's minions.
"Santa?" he said.
"Even better. Sarah."
"Jesus! Why?"
Big Fight No. 1 followed a few days later, over whether we should spend money sprucing up our house in a recession, followed by Big Fight No. 2 over the fact that my husband was suddenly rushing around to impress Sarah – and when was the last time you rushed around like that for me?
To avoid Big Fight No. 3, we hired a cleaning service to sweep away the cobwebs and shovel out the dust from under the furniture. It took two people seven hours to clean 1,200 square feet. (In our defence, they did clean the blinds.)
It turns out we don't really have to paint our bedroom after all.
Before all you penny pinchers start emailing me about my profligate spending, I feel the need to point out that in the five years we've been in our house, we've spent a fortune on repairing the "unseens" – the boiler and the sewer pipes and removing the neighbour's tree that fell on our roof and the cursed Manitoba maples that keep cropping up in our yard.
The sum total of everything spent on what could be called decorating in the five years since we moved in is, well, $1,400. (I'm not counting the paint job two winters ago. That was medicinal.)
We were pleased.
Two days before Sarah's visit, we sat in a sparkling clean house with coats and bags stored in a wardrobe instead of scattered all over the house.
Pools of light bounced off the surface of our new aluminum coffee table onto the ceiling. A fire warmed the living room.
My son was sitting beside me with freshly washed hair. My husband was watching the Alouettes steal victory from Saskatchewan. It was the calmest, most satisfying evening I'd had in the house all year.
Things changed even more after the visit. Sarah's comments made me realize I shouldn't be afraid of getting rid of stuff that doesn't work – even if the stuff is beautiful and expensive.
I should take all the prints and paintings and ceramics and fossils from my world travels out from the closet where they've been sitting because I don't know where to put them.
I'm just going to try. And see what happens. After all, it's my house.
- Francine Kopun
It takes 56 minutes for Sarah Richardson to begin offering me advice on how to decorate my home.
She's sitting on one of my battered $25 Ikea chairs in my whatever-you-call-it room. (We really don't know what to call it. It has a piano, a wardrobe, a rug and a coffee table.)
We've been talking about her life and about design in general. To illustrate a point, she swivels right, away from the coffee table between us, and bends over to point at the colours in the $6,000 Persian rug my sister gave me the first time she redecorated her house.
"For example, if you love this rug, you could use it as the palette for the main floor," says Richardson, 38, the co-creator, co-producer and host of Sarah's House (ranked as the No. 1 show on HGTV Canada), not to mention Sarah's Cottage, Design Inc. and Room Service.
Sarah 101 begins shooting in January.
Inviting her into my home for an interview for a profile was my editor's idea. What if Richardson can't help herself, my editor wanted to know. How long will it take her to start making suggestions?
Nearly an hour, as it turned out. Only because Sarah is polite. I suspect she began redecorating my home in her mind's eye from the moment she walked through the door.
Once she starts, her advice tumbles out in long paragraphs about green and drama and Farrow and Ball and dead salmon – the colour, not the fish. She talks so quickly and ideas are flying so fast, I can't follow.
I think I hear something about a small can of paint and a Sunday afternoon. That's never going to happen in our house.
"Are you looking at my couch?" I ask her when she finishes.
"No!" she says.
She had to be. It's impossible not to look at it.
It looked great in my sister's ballroom-sized parlour but it takes up nearly half my living room. When I tell her it's another hand-me-down (from the second time my sister redecorated her house), she seems relieved and launches into more paragraphs.
"I would say, for a small house, if you measure from the inside of the arm to the edge of the roll, it's about 14 inches, and when you're in a small house, you've lost 28 inches overall to an arm, which is doing nothing for you, and it's hogging all the space so there's no room for a side-table or a lamp or something that could help you."
She tells me that I shouldn't let my furniture boss me around. If it doesn't work for me, I should sell it.
Then she throws me a bone.
"I bet it's comfortable, though."
The girl can't help herself. Design is in her head, her heart, and possibly her DNA.
Her father, Douglas Richardson, is a retired professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Toronto who took Sarah along on tours of England's old churches. She rolled her eyes at the time, but appreciates the experience now.
Her mother, Susan Cuddy, 67, was director of design and development for the old City of Toronto, a woman who loves fashion and design and, at one point in her life, made everything from winter coats to evening gowns.
"I was always on the hunt for wonderful fabrics," Cuddy says. The couple divorced when Sarah was 5.
There are Toronto fashionistas who hate what Richardson does. They blame her for the growing number of Toronto homes that look numbingly alike.
Sarah says she doesn't want sameness, either. Your home should be a place for personal expression.
"This season, we're trying to encourage people to create spaces that are unique and to resist the urge to create a space that is exactly like everybody else's," she says.
Her husband, Alexander Younger, runs an advertising and marketing agency he founded in 1992 called Design Lab. His firm handles Sarah's website.
Younger and Richardson both attended Whitney Public School in Moore Park where he was in her older brother's class.
"She was the cute little sister for ever and ever and ever. It wasn't until after university that I finally decided to do something about it," Younger says. The couple has two daughters, ages 3 and 16 months, and live in Toronto.
Younger is emphatic that Richardson is nothing like American design maven Martha Stewart, who has been accused of being cold and harsh off camera and who served a prison term for lying to federal investigators about a stock sale.
The only thing the two have in common, he says, is an interest in design.
But they do share something. Someone once said Stewart was the most completely competent person they had ever met. Richardson is universally competent, too.
"She dresses impeccably, her house is impeccable, her work for her clients is impeccable, the way she wraps gifts, the way she presents dinner on a plate is impeccable," says Andrea Lenczner, who has known Sarah since they were in Grade 2 together.
Richardson can even land Younger's plane. She just hasn't got around to getting her pilot's licence, he says.
Richardson taught herself to sew by the time she was 5. If she made mistakes, she started again. In Grade 4, she made a hopscotch the length of her street. She called a children's television show to interview her.
Her nickname in high school was "Mother." She was the girl you would call when you spilled red wine on the carpet during a house party. She would know what kitchen ingredients to throw together to get it out.
"I'd say she was not like other kids," Lenczner says.
"She was always sophisticated beyond her years. On weekends, I don't know what I was doing – stealing cigarette butts and smoking them. Sarah would be making duck à l'orange.
"My parents are sophisticated, too; I just never took an interest. She really took an interest."
She is nurturing, Lenczner says.
"When we were living together, when she started dating Alex, she would come home at the end of a really long day and she'd whip up this unbelievable dinner and Alex and I would sit there, waiting for our dinner to be prepared, and then we'd eat it and then she'd clean up. I would have married her," says Lenczner.
Lenczner is one of the designers behind the Toronto fashion label Smythe. The other is Christie Smythe, the sister of Tommy Smythe, Richardson's foil on the show.
Richardson wears their clothes on and off camera. She says she doesn't have time to shop.
Richardson began her television career managing props. As a favour to a friend in 1996, she did a guest spot on a show called Real Life. She did 50 more guest appearances before putting together a proposal for her first show, Room Service.
In Room Service, she was a skinny, sweet-looking kid doing assignments like a bachelor apartment for a schoolteacher on a budget using $20 curtain panels. She tackled the job wearing her own tool belt, with an electric drill and a pink tape measure.
The early episodes were sometimes corny and laboured, and her wardrobe consisted of clam diggers and white shirts and flats, but she had charm and girl-next-door sex appeal.
Now she oozes confidence and humour on camera. At 5-foot-8, in her stiletto heels, she towers above most of her clients, joyfully directing her staff and camera crew.
She has two shows in production; Sarah's House, and Sarah 101. She's working on a book. She has a furniture line (by appointment) and is hoping to launch a product line.
"Everybody else has a product line – Eva Mendes has a bedding line, I think, and I don't," says Richardson.
She has her eye on Oprah, on the American market.
Her friends and family believe there is no limit to her future – she's that capable, that energetic, that focused.
Martha's toast.
START WITH HONESTY, NOT PAINT
Your home should reflect your personality, says design guru Sarah Richardson.
Before you begin decorating a room, think about how you want to use it.
Be practical. Be honest.
Are you casual, clean or messy? Do you have a lot of kids, a dog or a cat
that sheds everywhere? How many people will you typically need to seat
in your living room?
Then build portfolios of what you like and what you don’t like. Rip pictures
from magazines. Study the pictures of the rooms you love. What is it
you like about them? Is it the shape of the sofa? The colour palette? Eventually,
you will start to see patterns in what you like and don’t like.
Keeping a portfolio of things you don’t like can be useful to a designer,
Richardson says.
“Being able to streamline the process off the top and say, ‘I can’t stand
this look’ is actually not a waste of time. It’s very helpful,” she says.
She recommends starting with something patterned. If you love the rug
you inherited from your grandmother, work from that. Come home with
fistfuls of paint chips to construct a colour palette, and you’re off.
- Francine Kopun
Toronto Star