How Fiction Can Inspire Wonderful Rooms
Novelist Sloane Crosley on how she goes deep into her imagination to conjure fictional interiors.
Novelist Sloane Crosley on how she goes deep into her imagination to conjure fictional interiors.
DURING MY SENIOR year of college, I took a literature class called The English Country House, which focused on dumbwaiters and dining rooms from Woolf to Waugh. The class is responsible for my fluency in oh, say, wainscoting. At the risk of belabouring the point? I went to a liberal arts school. But what appears to be a rarefied entry point into the literary landscape is actually a portal into the Great Hall of any novel. Once you start paying special attention to where novels are set—not just their country or cultural moment but the minutiae of where our heroines and heroes lay their heads—their narratives open up in new ways. After the characters have gone, you can still stroll from room to room, an unpaid housesitter grazing her fingers along the wallpaper.
So many of the canonical examples of fictional interior design really do come from the British, who like to inhabit etiquette minefields stuffed with generational trauma, class issues and chintz (“Bleak House,” “Howard’s End,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Remains of the Day”…Jane Austen takes the prize for Pemberley alone). Contemporary British authors are also unavoidably good on the subject (I’d gladly entrust Rachel Cusk, Alan Hollinghurst or Zadie Smith with my blueprints).
But there is no shortage of memorable interiors scattered across all literature. Both as a reader and as a writer, I have always gravitated toward fabricated design (by which I mean not just imaginative design but the actual, literal fabric of it; see also the Jenny B. Goode tapestry pillow that Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” clutches as he nurses a cocktail). I find such details, which purposefully but slyly speak to the time in which the characters live, move a story along as much as they pin it in place.
In the Glasses’ apartment in “Franny and Zooey,” “not only were the furnishings old, intrinsically unlovely, and clotted with memory and sentiment, but the room itself in past years had served as the arena for countless hockey and football (tackle as well as ‘touch’) games, and there was scarcely a leg on any piece of furniture that wasn’t badly nicked or marred.” This is no mere décor. It is, to employ a cliché, another character. The first image that pops into mind when I think of that particular book is of Franny, staring up at the ceiling. I can see the apartment as she sees it, fill in the gaps. Just like when I think of “The Great Gatsby,” I am struck less by Gatsby’s infamous green light than by the first sight of Jordan lounging on a sofa, curtains billowing behind her, “extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little.” I know that divan. I can run my fingers over the upholstery. I can also tidy the bookish disarray of “Giovanni’s Room,” ascend the crumbling steps of Manil Suri’s apartment block in “The Death of Vishnu” and feel the deep, deep anti-Craftsman sentiment of Maria Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”
As someone who spent her childhood sleeping in an 8-by-8 bedroom of a small house and whose current furniture is flush to the walls of her apartment as if being held at gunpoint, I come by this fetish honestly. I have now lived in New York City for over 20 years, and I still think the height of luxury is the exposed back of a sofa. Once you can afford a 360-degree view of your own furniture, you get to worry about aesthetics. Writing fiction gives a person such as myself the opportunity to imagine my way into whatever space I like with whatever budget I like. In short? It gives me the chance to really go to town.
My first novel, “The Clasp,” begins in a mansion in Miami and ends in a 16th-century French château. But for my new novel, “Cult Classic,” I did a full gut renovation, turning a derelict synagogue on the Lower East Side into a sleek cultlike club. The design details are not explicitly named, but I know that those are lighting designer Lindsey Adelman’s chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, Danish designer Jens Risom’s chairs and Scalamandré wallpaper in the bathroom. And because the synagogue is less a manifestation of my personal design dreams as it is satire, the tray of bottled water in the conference room is that of a “branding studio” where I once took a meeting. The drinking straws are striped. Very Instagrammable. And there’s a room with nothing in it, save for an amethyst geode, an image I swiped from a self-serious spa that I went to once.
But is this what I want people to take away from my novel? Danish side tables? Not really. What I hope a reader remembers is how the design unfolded alongside the plot. So much is kept secret from our heroine, her access to information and her access to space are intertwined. I wanted to create a feeling akin to the one I felt as a child, reading Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: “Five children and nine grown-ups pushed their way in—and oh, what an amazing sight it was that now met their eyes! They were looking down upon a lovely valley. There were green meadows on either side of the valley, and along the bottom of it there flowed a great brown river. What is more, there was a tremendous waterfall halfway along the river…” I, sir, am no Roald Dahl. But there is, in fact, a fountain in the lobby of my fictional club.
With few exceptions, writers must force themselves to reign in their descriptive tendencies, lest they wind up with five static pages about a claw-foot bathtub. The trick, especially when it comes to interiors, is in peppering signifiers without listing them. Too few? I don’t know where I am. Too many? Well, if I wanted to read a catalogue, I would read a catalogue. In the end, the visual impact of a space is not up to me but to readers. Readers who will set about correcting or replacing my images with versions of their own, with details of their own. Or, in the words of Maggie Smith’s famous poem, “Good Bones”:
“Any decent realtor,/ walking you through a real shithole, chirps on/ about good bones: This place could be beautiful,/ right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: Jun 01, 2022
Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
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Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.
OTTAWA–The nascent recovery in Canada’s housing market has become a casualty of the trade dispute with the U.S.
The latest national home-resale data are due out Tuesday, but early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month as many prospective buyers exercised caution.
The recent weakness in home sales has dimmed the previously brighter outlook for the property market coming into 2025, when buyers were encouraged by the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate cuts.
“The chills the U.S. trade war has sent through participants in the housing market are getting frostier,” said Robert Hogue , assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada.
Hogue said resales are down materially in a number of markets two months running, and home prices in several markets are coming under pressure as inventories rise. And although Canada was spared additional levies when President Trump unveiled so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries earlier this month, no meaningful rebound is likely so long as trade uncertainty lingers, he said.
Home buyers in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city and the country’s financial hub, aren’t turning up for the usual spring pickup in property-market activity.
Sales in the Greater Toronto Area slumped 23.1% in March from a year earlier, as new listings for the region jumped close to 29%, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. That marked the worst month of resales since 1998.
The board’s chief information officer, Jason Mercer , said many potential home buyers were likely taking a wait-and-see approach given the economic worries as well as a pending federal election. “Homebuyers need to feel their employment situation is solid before committing to monthly mortgage payments over the long term,” he said, adding that ownership has become more affordable and prices in the area fell about 3.8% year on year in March.
Uncertainty is also weighing on the housing market in Calgary, the biggest city in oil-rich Alberta. The city’s real-estate board said realtors reported a 19% drop in sales of existing homes from last year, with a similar trend of improving supply and a sharp increase in the average number of days that homes were on the market.
On the West Coast, home sales registered in the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia were the lowest for March since 2019, falling 13.4% on a year earlier and coming in close to 37% below the 10-year seasonal average, while active listings continued to rise.
There are some areas of resilience. The Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers said total sales in the province were up 9% year on year in March. Still, RBC’s Hogue estimated Montreal sales in March were down about 15% from December seasonally adjusted, effectively rolling back the advance since the end of last summer.
The most recent national data for the country, from the Canadian Real Estate Association, showed resales dropped 9.8% month over month in February, when homebuyers may also have been put off by harsh winter storms in parts of the country. That marked the sharpest fall since May 2022 and brought the level of sales to their lowest level since November 2023, snapping signs that activity had been picking up in recent months.
Rishi Sondhi , an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, in a recent report estimated the country was tracking toward a double-digit quarterly decline in Canadian home sales and a mid-single-digit drop in Canadian average home prices for the first three months of 2025. That is much weaker than a pre-Trump inauguration forecast made in December that projected a loosening in federal mortgage rules, lower interest rates and continued economic growth would fuel a modest gain in sales and prices.
Central-bank officials are set to decide Wednesday on monetary policy, but they have signaled a cautious approach to rates as they balance the prospect of tariffs stoking price pressures against the likelihood that they will dampen demand and weigh on the economy. That could mean the Bank of Canada will pause after seven straight cuts to its policy rate.
Housing is a hot topic for party leaders campaigning ahead of the April 28 election, with both the incumbent Liberal Party and opposition Conservatives proposing tax cuts and incentives to encourage buyers and builders.
The outlook for new homes has also dimmed with the tariff threat. The value of residential-building permits issued in February fell 2.9% from a month prior, adding to a retreat in January that took back some of the surge in intentions in the final month of last year, Statistics Canada data last week showed.
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The museum is taking the lead on re-evaluating its art and artifacts to determine where these works came from in the first place.