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| Think Old Bold And Very European | Pool Your Resources To Save Lives |
| The Multiplex Is As Close As The Next Room | |
La Maison De Mme. Roth Shop Owner Madeline Roth, A Francophile At Heart -- And Home -- Thinks Old, Bold And Very European Story by Karen Klages To call it a living room would be anticlimactic. 'I wanted it to be more like a salon," explains Madeline Roth of her 25 by 36 foot main room that boasts 11-foot-high ceilings opposite walls of oversize windows and an arched entryway inscribed with a 19th Century wood apothecary from Portugal. She goes on: 'So I took my sofa out and just set it up with little seating groups. Almost all of this is French furniture except for these two pieces. These are American-probably from the 1940s-loveseats." Detail is important for a woman who has--as the French would say--a certain je ne sais quoi. Americans call it style. Roth is the owner of Pariscope, a pretty little boutique that opened four years ago in the Century Corners area of downtown St. Charles and deals in antique and vintage French furniture, chandeliers and interesting accessories, such as old wine barrels from the south of France and vintage (yes, of a certain age) French soaps and jump-ropes. Roth is a born shopper who has made it her business to run around Paris and the French countryside several times a year (seven in 1999) hunting up good stuff. But truth be told--and she tells it today from the toasty confines of her salon/living room where gas logs twinkle from a 19th Century Italian marble hearth and her black cat, Curtis, frolics in the potted willow branches, dangerously close to a 19th Century daybed from France--Roth cannot contain her continental passions. Nor can she stop shopping and tinkering. They spilleth over into her home life. "I have always collected antiques. Always. I have always been doing my own design work," laughs Roth, who built spec homes (except her new homes were made to look vintage) before opening Pariscope. She claims she just feels happier surrounded by "old." "It's a sense of comfort," she says. "And to me, it's just more beautiful. It's like you are going back to another era . . . and creating your own little world." The shell around Roth's little world is a spectacular specimen of Hollywood-like glamor from the 1920s, set down in Geneva. Built in 1921, the imposing white stucco house sprawls incognito inside 4 1/2 acres and behind a fence of tree-tall hedges. Up until six years ago, the 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom mansion belonged to one of Geneva's most prominent families. And then the 99-year-old widow Fauntleroy died. "This was the house I always loved," explains Roth, who had been living in nearby St. Charles with her husband, Gordon, and son, Alex, soon to turn 13, and had been eyeing the property for years. They snatched it before it hit the market. "The house was in very original shape, which I liked very much," she continues, adding the punch line: "It needed decorating." So, the home builder, shopkeeper, antiques nut and eager decorator gained herself a yearlong project. She masterminded the house's revival. Hollywood glam Down came the walls that closed in what was once a sweeping staircase and up went a new balustrade. Out went the small den that Mrs. Fauntleroy had carved into the front foyer, sacrificing a grand entranceway for a place to put her TV. Except for a few minor jobs that did not include installing an ultramodern kitchen (Roth had the existing metal cabinets spray-painted pink and she imported a refurbished vintage stove from Los Angeles to enhance the 1940s decor), most of the rest of the resuscitation involved Roth's decorative hand. That hand likes to reach back to the glam-girl days of the 1940s. It's about impeccable taste and cool restraint. Lauren Bacall would be the ultimate addition to any of these rooms. Roth balances heady antiques (finds from her travels through the U.S. and abroad) with a sense of lightness. This is no dank palace. Take the salon, for instance. Walls are pink because "it's my favorite color," explains the unapologetic decorator with the good sport of a husband. Not bubble-gum sweet, the dewy color wraps the room in a soft glow and becomes a neutral foil for the more flamboyant upholstery--clusters of bright pink, chintz-covered chairs scattered about the corners of the room; a pair of leopard-print velvet loveseats in front of the fireplace with a green silk ottoman between them; the lone 19th Century daybed situated middle-of-the-room. Then there's the matter of the 19th Century crystal chandelier that she picked up in France last year. It dangles like a diamond pendant over the daybed. The serious antique is actually pure whimsy. Roth never bothered to have the fixture rewired. Upstairs, the couple's bedroom makes beautiful mockery out of today's master bedroom behemoths. Roth sited their sleeping quarters in one of the smallest spaces in the house--but certainly the one with the best view. It's a former sleeping porch with windows on three sides. The couple's king-size bed (actually two antique twin headboards fused together) consumes nearly the whole room and seems cantilevered out into the hawthorn tree. From the ground up Roth's game plan for decorating all 5,000 square feet did not start with any particular room or object. It started underfoot, with the floors. "I knew that painting the floors would unify the house. That was an idea I had right off the bat," she explains. Indeed, there is not a covered floor in the house. And that, more than any other single detail, makes this house feel different. Roth hired artist Matt Donohue of Batavia for his skill with the decorative brush. He embellished the original quartersawn oak floors with lavish patterns and did decorative painting on some walls as well. His checkerboard in the salon and dining room turns the oak floors into chic, black-and-white, pseudo-marble tiles. His giant medallions bursting from a black ground in the foyer are noble. Many of these floor patterns were inspired by Roth's other passion--collecting decorating magazines and books. She got the idea for the medallions from a book on dining rooms and, in particular, the marble floor of a British hotel. A 1920s issue of House Beautiful offered the idea for the master bedroom's elegant black-painted floor trimmed with a gold-leaf, floral border. (That master bedroom floor is clever in another way too. It was not shod in quartersawn oak, like most of the rest of the house. Instead, the one-time sleeping porch came with carpeting over an old wood-board subfloor. Roth had the carpeting removed. Donohue then laid cement board over the existing subfloor and over that, poured a layer of self-leveling cement. "That was the cheapest floor we could put down," explains Donohue. "Once we painted it, it didn't matter what it was made of.") `Very European' Complementing the unclothed floors throughout the house are unswathed windows, except for shades in the bathrooms and bedrooms. "I really don't like draperies at all. . . . If I put draperies up, the light would really diminish in here," says Roth, who acknowledges that such bareness "is very European" and that she can go so gloriously exposed thanks to her generous property line. But Roth is quick to steer credit for the European-ness of the interior to the widow Fauntleroy, whom she has all but befriended--posthumously. Like all good antiques hounds, Roth loves good history, and she's done her best to unravel the intricacies of the house through the life and times of Mrs. Fauntleroy. It was Mrs. Fauntleroy, says Roth, who imported the European flavor and favored it over the house's Arts and Crafts lineage. It was Mrs. Fauntleroy who--somehow, someway--brought back the Portuguese apothecary and Italian hearth and worked them in. Roth continues to fill in. Today over that very Italian hearth hangs Roth's very French collection of tiny intaglios (vintage porcelain medallions). In the dining room, a 19th Century Italian triptych of birds stretches so wide and tall across a French blue-green wall that it becomes part of the architecture. So do the giant, ornate mirrors (one 8-footer, one 6-footer) that Roth brought back from France and hung boldly with nary a concern for overstatement. "The French have a way of doing things very differently with decorating," says Roth, taking a sip of coffee and unfurling a grin. "They take a lot of chances. I think I've done that." MADELINE ROTH DOES IT HER WAY Madeline Roth, owner of Pariscope in St. Charles and fan of all things French and antique, shares the key components of her style: - Bare, painted floors. "I like this look of the bare floors--the painted floors--and the antiques. It kind of has the look of a marble floor, but painted is the way to do it. I wouldn't have wanted to take the floors off. You don't get quartersawn oak like this. . . . It's been incredibly durable." - Bare windows. "If I put draperies up, the light would really diminish in here. I do have a lot of privacy, though. (For people who don't), shades in your bathroom and in your bedroom." - Antiques and other good stuff. "I am always looking everywhere . . . all over the country, not just Paris." Antiques shops, antiques shows, flea markets, estate sales. She bought old mattress ticking and used it as trim on a set of 1930s French chairs with new cushions done in pink chintz. She bought vintage floral drapery panels and used them to reupholster the side panels of a 19th Century daybed. "I figure if you love something enough, you will find a place for it" or a use for it. - Solid-colored upholstery. "I really like this more quiet look. I like things to look timeless. When you get into a lot of plaids or prints, it can be very dated later on." - Imperfection, on purpose. "For instance the chairs--the finish on these chairs (in the salon) is not perfect. I don't like to over-restore things at all. I could have repainted them, but didn't. I changed the fabric, but not the wood." - Pink. "I just like it. It's my favorite color. . . . It is a neutral. Think of what goes with pink. Black, yellow, green. Green and pink is beautiful. Blue and pink is beautiful. White and pink. Gray and pink. Turquoise and pink. Brown and pink is very good. It's just a good color." - Key people. Roth knows how to find the right people. Among her stable of artists and craftspeople are decorative painter Matt Donohue of Batavia and interior designer Paul Peroutka of Tinley Park. Donohue did the painted floors throughout the house along with some still life and trompe l'oeil painting on walls. He charges $4 to $10 a square foot for floors, depending on the process; $2 to $3 a square foot for walls; and from $10 a square foot for murals. Find him through his company, European Decorative Painting, at 630-761-1557. Roth used Peroutka to arrange and hang artwork. He laid out the arrangement for Roth's collection of 100 or more tiny intaglios and then hung them over the hearth in the salon using double-face tape. "We tried a couple different things, but that worked the best," explains Peroutka. He arranged and hung another collection of small, ornate Italian mirrors in the entry foyer. He figured out a system for hanging a series of French watercolors across the mullions of the windows in the salon. Peroutka charges $75 an hour for arranging and hanging artwork; call him at 708-633-4588. |
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Pool Your Resources By Mary Beth Breckenridge, Knight Ridder/Tribune
It happens quietly, without shouts or screams. Often there's only a barely audible splash. A child slips under the water of a residential swimming pool, and no one notices. It happens a couple of thousand times each year to children younger than age 5 in the United States. It happens even to careful families. About 300 times, the children die. Another 2,000 times the children are injured, some of them debilitated by brain damage. Swimming pools are just big, wet magnets to small children, who can't understand their danger. That's why safety advocates say it's important to take measures that thwart even the most determined child's access to a pool--and then thwart it again and again. They're called layers of protection, series of measures designed to buy time so an adult can discover a child headed for danger before he or she gets there. At Fran and Jack Doll's house in Bath, Ohio, the layers include a motorized safety cover they installed for their back-yard swimming pool. The Dolls are so concerned with safeguarding their 10 grandchildren that they don't even go into the house without closing the cover, Jack Doll says. "We paid a lot of money for it, but boy, it's worth every penny," he says. The Dolls also insist on swimming lessons for the
grandchildren, and they never leave the kids unattended. They put into practice the advice
safety advocates push: The most important pool safety tool is watchful adults. "We
always say the primary precaution is supervision," says Patty Hulbert, manager of
communications for the National Spa & Pool Institute. The layer that most safety experts cite first is a fence, preferably one that encloses the pool completely so it's separated from the house. "A lot of people put up a fence and just fence three sides ... so kids can wander right out" of the house, says Mark Harper, president of both the Ohio and Summit County Safe Kids coalitions and a public education specialist with the Akron (Ohio) Fire Department. A four-sided fence, on the other hand, safeguards the pool owner's children or visitors as well as the youngsters in the neighborhood. One option, particularly for homes with three-sided fences, is an additional removable fence such as the mesh version made by Life Saver Pool Products in Orange County, Calif. The fence surrounds the pool, its posts mounted into sleeves in the pool deck. It's designed so little feet can't get a foothold and children can't sneak beneath or between the fence sections, says company representative Salli Cline. All pool fences should be too high and too difficult to scale easily. The National Spa & Pool Institute and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission say a fence should be at least 4 feet high; the National Safe Kids Campaign recommends 5 feet. Individual communities often have their own regulations. The gate should close tightly, with no gaps that a child can slip through, Harper says. Self-closing and self-latching mechanisms can help ensure no one leaves a gate open or unlocked accidentally. In addition, pool owners should make sure tables, chairs and other climbable objects are kept away from the fence. Before a child even gets as far as the pool fence, though, you want to know he might be headed that way. That's where childproofing the house's exit doors and windows comes in. One method that safety experts recommend is a door or window alarm. The type of door alarm that Life Savers sells has a pass-through button, which must be pushed to keep the alarm from sounding within seconds of a door's opening. The button is mounted at least 54 inches off the floor, out of a little one's reach. Similar alarms are available for gates leading to the pool area. Door and gate alarms typically sell for about $30 to $90. Safety latches Other options are mounting a lock high on the door, installing two doorknobs that must be turned simultaneously--one in the usual spot, one high on the door--or installing safety latches that are similar in design to the latches designed to keep curious toddlers out of kitchen cabinets. The latches also are helpful for preventing youngsters from opening a window wide enough to crawl through. One of the last layers of pool protection is a safety cover,
which acts like a pool lid to block access to the water. The Consumer Product Safety
Commission recommends choosing a cover that meets the standards of the American Society
for Testing and Materials. That means it supports the weight of two adults and a child and
is designed so water doesn't collect on the cover--in itself a drowning hazard to an
infant or toddler, Harper points out. The convenience of the motorized cover made it worth the expense for the Dolls. Because it closes quickly, 1 1/2 minutes, and easily, the family uses it faithfully, Jack Doll says. Covers that are inconvenient or cumbersome are more likely to be ignored, which means they offer no protection at all, Cline points out. Pool and perimeter alarms are also available as protective measures, but safety advocates are divided on their use. Some recommend the alarms as one layer of protection; others say they're too prone to false alarms. Cline points out that alarms that float in a pool can be set off by anything that disturbs the pool's surface -- a fountain, the wind or even the pool's pump. "They give off so many false alarms that people turn the sensitivity down and down and down" to the point that they're virtually useless, she says. Perimeter alarms that operate with infrared light beams are effective, she says, but only under the right circumstances. The beams can't turn corners and must end in something solid; if not, they'll shoot off into the neighbor's yard, where any movement will set them off. Some perimeter alarm systems use laser beams instead, but those are easily tripped by birds or other passing objects, Cline says. The safety advocates also recommend having a poolside phone. Besides being essential in an emergency, it'll eliminate any temptation to leave the kids unattended to run inside and answer a call. Of course, equip the pool area with first-aid and rescue equipment such as ropes, lifesaving rings and shepherd's crooks--and just as importantly, equip your family with knowledge of how to use them, Harper says. When it comes to pool safety, there really is no such thing as being too careful. There's no substitute for supervision - Provide constant adult supervision. One idea is to appoint a "water watcher," an adult whose only responsibility is watching the children in the pool. - Require teenagers and adults, including baby sitters, to learn infant and child CPR. - Post CPR instructions and emergency numbers in the pool area. - Make swimming off-limits when a sitter in the early teens or younger is in charge. - Make sure children and others who use the pool take swimming lessons. However, don't let the lessons lull you into thinking your children need any less supervision. - Insist that children use the buddy system. - Keep toys, tricycles and other playthings that might attract tots away from the pool area. - Prohibit diving unless the pool is at least 9 feet deep, and make sure swimmers learn proper diving techniques. - Use only approved flotation devices that are the appropriate size for the child. Don't use them as a substitute for supervision. - Remove or secure ladders or steps leading to above-ground pools if they're not enclosed by a fence. |
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| The Multiplex Is As Close As The Next Room
By Maria Puente Millions more Americans are staying home to go to the theater these days and are spending major bucks on televisions, electronics, furniture and doodads to reproduce the experience of a real movie theater in their homes.
Want a popcorn machine that makes movie theater-style popcorn? You got it. A soda machine that dispenses cans of pop or beer? It's available. Electronic controls that let you lower the lights and close the curtains? No problem. A wet bar? Plush recliners? Stadium-style seating? Check, check, check. Just sign the check. And you will. The cost of a home theater can range from a low of about $5,000 for moderately priced gear you set up yourself in a renovated basement rec room to $50,000 to $500,000 for a custom-designed room in a suburban McMansion. It could even go into the multimillions for, say, a stupefying fantasy of the Paris Opera House built for gazillionaires with no sense of restraint. What is a home theater? One generally accepted description is a room with a TV screen of at least 32 inches, plus a surround-sound system. What do people get for the money they spend? Well, for one thing, cannon fire sounds terrifyingly real in Dolby Digital surround-sound as Marty Giles, a Richmond, Va., businessman, found out recently while watching the Civil War epic Gods and Generals in his new $45,000 (not counting furniture and construction costs) theater. (Related item:The building blocks for your own media room.) "When those cannons went off, my wife ran in here wondering what the heck was going on," Giles says. "She thought the house was blowing up." The appeal of verisimilitude is just one of the factors driving this explosion. The cost of the technology is dropping, the size of components is shrinking, and quality is improving. More homebuilders are including theaters, and more chairs and couches are being made to furnish them. More people are being exposed to the experience in their friends' homes and in stores. And more people just don't want to bother with going out to the movies. "People want to stay home. Cocooning has become burrowing," says Ray Lepper, president of CEDIA, the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association. His Richmond company, Home Media, designed and installed Giles' theater. Lepper says today's home theaters are more comfortable and have even better equipment than some of those rinky-dink boxes at the local multiplex. "You can get the cinema experience for a lot less money — half the cost — of the nicest car." And you'll spend a lot more time there than in the car. "You can recoup the cost of a home theater system in a very short time, and it's a great way to keep teens at home at night, for a family to bond," says Maureen Jenson, editor of Home Theater magazine, one of nearly a dozen periodicals that have appeared in the past decade. Plenty of people are bonding. From 2000 to 2003, Americans tripled their spending on home theater systems to nearly $1 billion a year. An estimated one-fourth of U.S. households have some kind of home theater; 37% have a 30-inch or larger TV screen. About 8% of new homes are being built with a home theater or media room. CEDIA has even published a coffee-table book, Home Theaters and Electronic Houses, devoted to eye-popping theaters. Many of these statistics were collected from marketing studies by CEDIA and by La-Z-Boy. The recliner king is responding to a surge in demand for home-theater furniture. In April, the company introduced a line called "Matinee" that features seven mix-and-match pieces, including right and left one-arm recliners with power reclining and ergonomic seating. "People come in and ask for 12 recliners for their home theaters," says Paula Hoyas, director of upholstery merchandising. "Usually the male customer is purchasing the electronics, but she's the one who's talking about the furniture, and she doesn't want it to look like she's at the movies. She wants to be comfortable; she wants wonderful everyday furniture she won't be ashamed of." Robb ReportHome Entertainment & Design, a lifestyle magazine covering the higher end of the industry (a recent article: "Please Be Seated: 38 Stunning Theater Chairs"), defines a home theater as a room with a front-projection TV, a projector hanging from the ceiling and a sizable screen that either scrolls down or is permanently mounted with curtains in front. "It's got to be a big rig," editor Brent Butterworth says. "You can do (the gear) for less than $2,000, and it won't be too bad ... but for a serious rig, the projector would be a minimum of $8,000 to $12,000, plus about $1,500 for a screen. A $30,000 projector is not uncommon, and neither is $250,000 for the highest-priced system." More typical, Butterworth says, is the $50,000 job — similar to what Giles spent. Giles' equipment includes a 52-inch screen, high-end amplifiers, a projector that drops down from a concealed slot in the ceiling beam at the touch of a control pad and an $8,000 custom-made 10-by-9-foot cabinet to hold all the electronics. When his house was being built last year, he hired Home Media to work with his architect and electrical contractors to design a theater in his family room. He has surround-sound built into the walls, with speakers in the front, overhead and in the back of the room. He can access music from the Internet or from CDs in his stereo system. He can control the lighting from his touch pad. "We really do like it," Giles says. "We're not big movie people; we'd rather buy a DVD and sit in our own house and watch as long as the sound is good. We're definitely spending more time at home." Butterworth says techies are blown away by the quality, which is so much better than it was 10 years ago. "People want to entertain, have all their friends over, like I did for an Oscar party last year. I have high-definition TV and blow it up on a 6-foot screen, a big sound system. Twenty-five people came over, and it was great." |
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