Author: Michael Chappell

Although I endeavor to stay current, I’m always happy for information from my admittedly small cadre of loyal readers. A kind lady forwarded an article published in the October, 2007, edition of W hailing the rebirth of sleepy old Mount Street in London as a hotbed of fashion, with the primary focus the opening of a Marc Jacobs store. With the Connaught at one end and Berkeley Square at the other and Scott’s right in the middle, I’d hardly say that Mount Street was off the beaten path, and sleepy? Not even the most jaded urban somnambulist could call it that.

You might recall my own blog entry from precisely a year earlier, October 11, 2006, in fact, when I decried the death of Mount Street as an antiques venue, with the just then announced departure of Pelham Galleries, and the loss a couple of years earlier of Stair and Company. Although longtime dealer Kenneth Neame is still in place and was mentioned in the W article, none of the other surviving dealers- Alastair Sampson or Blairman and Sons- were, and Pelham, the former tenant of Marc Jacob’s new space was not, either. In fact, dismissal of dismissals, the author of the article said the new shop moved in to ‘a former antiques store.’ Hmmm…the ark of the Lord has fallen into the hands of the Philistines.

What fractures me is that, in a section of W identified as ‘Fashion’, what is reported is less a phenomenon of fashion than the effect of aggressive brand marketing. One can’t argue with the success of LMVH, the French multi-billion dollar luxury brands conglomerate that is the owner of Marc Jacobs, and Louis Vuitton, and Givenchy, and Donna Karan, and Thomas Pink….the list is extensive. And, of course, it is difficult to compete with the amount of capital LMVH is able to throw at the development of a brand, including the establishment of storefronts. Mount Street is all leasehold, with the owner in fee simple England’s largest landowner, the Grosvenor family, whose patriarch is the Duke of Westminster.  A leasing agent for the Grosvenor Estate waxed eloquent about the excitement associated with the arrival of Marc Jacobs, and a couple of other couture houses, and how this would revitalize Mount Street. Of course, His Grace needs to earn his daily crust, but I don’t really think Mount Street, or any other part of Mayfair or the West End generally, is in danger of becoming blighted.

But, as I think about it, ‘blighted’ might be thought a relative term. That the likes of Pelham Galleries are replaced by international, multi-outlet luxury brand fashionistas might be thought something of a blight. Of course, it isn’t like a McDonald’s or BurgerKing going on to Mount Street- but, then, those are international brands, too.

A geographic cataclysm has occurred in San Francisco and I wasn’t even aware of it. Apparently the high country of the Sierra Nevada Mountains has moved to within a short walking distance of the city. That has to be the reason so many people riding the San Francisco Municipal Railway are sporting backpacks that bulge as far to the rear of them as Aunt Tillie’s ass.

What can they have in those backpacks that, when moving to the right or left, function to knock down hapless passengers adjacent? My partner Keith McCullar and I use public transportation to commute back and forth and never carry any more than the occasional saleroom catalog or magazine to peruse at home, and keys and wallet on our person. Believe me, my wallet is never very fat, so doesn’t protrude far enough to ever be a danger to anyone.

Of course, none of these people are going hiking, in spite of their ostensibly packing survival gear. But a lot of it is sport, with a number of them presumably gym members packing their kit, and ample objets de toilette for afterward.

Mind you, I wouldn’t criticize anyone who sought to exercise to improve health and enhance one’s overall quality of life. Although swatted with backpacks I find a detriment to my own quality of life, it is a minor one, and anything that should eventually function to lower health care costs for the general population and eliminate the visual eyesore of the porcine from my field of vision is okay with me.

We did, Keith and me, not so very long ago spend a bit of time regularly at the gym. As Keith was about to turn 40, he was determined to lose a few pounds and get into better shape. Our physician at the time had counseled us both that losing weight at 40 is do-able, and nigh unto impossible at 50. Sage advice- a decade on, I can testify that our doctor clearly knew what he was talking about in the weight loss department.

Keith engaged a personal trainer upon the recommendation of an erstwhile acquaintance who, as it happened, trained with the trainer the hour before our appointed time. Keith and I dutifully went to the gym four nights a week- an hour to train and an extra 40 minutes or so to walk on the treadmill for cardio conditioning. We did this for the best part of a year. Grueling it wasn’t, but I can’t say that either of us ever got into it. That is one of the things that pass my understanding, how many people, particularly men- not just gay men, but it seemed as though the gym was replete with them, the storied gym bunnies- who make going to workout their whole lives. We couldn’t do it.

We would have been content to keep this regimen up, I suppose, but one day Keith happened to notice how our acquaintance was achieving some, not spectacular, but significant change in the bulk and muscle definition department. He was progressing quickly from the gym bunny to the muscle bunny category. Keith inquired of our friend, who we knew was working out no more than we were, what accounted for this, and was told that our trainer was juicing him with human growth hormone for muscle bulk and testosterone for muscle definition. No kidding. We were appalled and quit the gym, and the trainer, that very evening.

Since that time, what? four years ago or so, I suppose Keith and I have gained a little weight- no euphemism here, just a little weight. We walk about 2 miles a day or so, taking the circuitous route to the Muni station for the ride to and from work. Strength training? If you knew how often we move furniture in our galleries, you wouldn’t ask that question. And we both feel good. Oh, and we do get some exercise dodging the backpacks of the non-recalcitrant gym bunnies.

Are we in the midst of a bear market, generalized recession, or just a period of correction? I argue for the latter, as the drops we’ve seen in the worldwide financial markets are quickly followed by significant upticks. Trending downward? What constitutes a trend? As with so much else in life, any market cycle has to be experienced going forward, but can only be understood looking backward.

Amongst market analysts, though, I am sure the bears will always outnumber the bulls, except in the strongest and longest of bull markets. The why of this really has more to do with human nature than it does with any particular analytical expertise. This is what I would term the ‘happy to be wrong’ syndrome. A negative view expressed by anyone can always be tempered with the phrase, ‘I am happy to be wrong.’ Well, of course you would- ‘This plane is going to crash, but I am happy to be wrong.’ The fact is, the use of the phrase makes one right whatever happens. If, for instance, a company fails to perform, or an entire market tanks, the naysayer is looked upon as a sage. If nothing of the sort happens, as is often the case, everyone is overjoyed, and, in their joy, the marketplace Cassandra is forgotten. He’s happy, anyway, at least to have been wrong.

We’ve had an ongoing discussion about the housing market, battered if not necessarily in the market place, certainly in the press, and statistics about housing sales, housing stocks, and current market price declines are so varied it has been impossible for me to keep track of them. Moreover, in this sound bite world, nothing more than a statistic prefixed by a three or four word explanation is ever given. As statistics vary so wildly from time to time, I have to presume that different criterion have to be used in their calculation. As I am sure some of you do, as well, I closely follow a couple of particular real estate markets- not by reading about them in the newspaper, but by subscribing to a couple of research letters published by people I trust. Both are issued monthly, use base years and numbers as their constants in calculating statistical comparisons, and both cover a defined area with roughly 1 million residents and 750,000 housing units. And, both abstracts are, each month, in excess of 50 pages in length. As there are 300 million people in the United States, I would bet there are hundreds of similar reports published each month. Are these all read by any one analyst? As so-called subprime mortgage hedge funds were sold by the representations of third party rating services, I suspect that most analysts are deriving conclusions from the briefest of brief statistical abstracts. As the bull market in mortgage securities- so-called collateralized debt obligations- was driven by a limited understanding of the underlying investment, it seems highly unlikely that there has occurred any analytical spot-changing now. What we have, basically, is a preponderance of naysayers who are reporting selected statistics gleaned from others.

Perhaps a gloomy outlook is fashionable at the moment- it’s an election year, and economic gloom and dissatisfaction provides the most basic impetus for making a political change. Are we then in the midst of a manufactured market, with market turmoil engendered to ensure a political outcome that will return market stability? Cynical this sounds, and although this sort of thing has happened before, I am happy to be wrong.

I’m in the midst of reading Martin Wood’s terrific recent book about John Fowler, John Fowler: Prince of Decorators by Martin Wood- buy it, read it! If you are a Fowler fan and appreciate his country house style, I would recommend it. We’ve got plenty of books about Fowler, and by Fowler (and his research colleague and amanuensis John Cornforth), but the recent work is ever so slightly gossipy, giving one a few more glimpses into Fowler’s personal life, and his relationships with two redoubtable women, Sybil Colefax and Nancy Lancaster.

Of course, these ladies’ length of purse- well, longer than Fowler’s anyway- and social contacts certainly provided Fowler opportunities to broaden his range beyond the clever, though pretty basic, style associated with his first atelier in the King’s Road. Even with the assist of Colefax and Lancaster, the first 20 years or so of Fowler’s career proceeded through some astounding obstacles- the depression of the 1930‘s and war and privation that didn’t really end until England went off ration in 1954. What was available for use in interior design was in limited supply, and it was this necessity that was the mother of invention, witness old table cloths, for example, reused as loose covers on furniture, and elaborate window treatments composed of several types, colors and patterns of fabric- to mask the fact that there was insufficient supply of any one of them. ‘Shabby chic’ was, in large measure, born of this necessity.

Nancy Lancaster, with her flair and the experience of decorating her own homes, first of Kelmarsh Hall and then Ditchley Park, brought grandeur into Colefax and Fowler that allowed the firm, and Fowler, of course, to fairly quickly segue into the development of their signature country house style. What I always tend to forget, of course, is that for each family that had a country seat, they invariably had at least a pied a terre in town. Social and economic changes brought about by the war resulted in the decline in the number of grand townhouses, with the great and the good finding they now had to make do in oftentimes minuscule London accommodation. Fowler, of course, could call upon his early design experience in the King’s Road to make these small flats work for his clients.

I’ve often heard that Fowler himself was not a particularly happy man, possessed of perhaps a skin too few. His many contentious relationships included of all people, Nancy Lancaster, his closest colleague. Even so, Fowler’s style, even at its grandest, is fun without being fantastic, and inventive without being contrived. Well, maybe some of the window treatments are a bit too, too- but, then, if passmenterie is available, it simply has to be used, doesn’t it? If there is any criticism of Fowler, and there is always a revisionist view of any great man, it is that his interiors are insufficiently based on strict historic precedent. This, of course, ignores the fact that the canonical figures like William Kent, James Gibbs, and Robert Adam, into whose 18th century rubric Fowler sought to bring some modern restatement, were themselves great innovators. As Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is an homage to Mozart and not just imitative, Fowler’s work represents an historically inspired aesthetic, tempered, naturally, by his own experience in his own day and age.

Reading this morning’s stock market report on MSN, the Dow decline, a confluence of higher jobless claims, some lower corporate earnings, and a decline in existing home sales, yielded what the reporters termed ‘the perfect storm.’

This expression is apt so far as it goes, but the implication is that, as with the hurricanes in the late summer of 2005, these are rare economic events, as in the 100 year storm that will happen only once in a normal lifetime. As someone who attempts to avoid clichés, it appears that ‘the perfect storm’ as ‘once in a lifetime’ has come to mean ‘not typically seen’, or more accurately ‘not too often’- either that, or  perfect storms are more common and lifetimes have become significantly shorter than they used to be.

Is it, though, ‘the perfect storm’? The so-called housing crisis was made very much worse by developers who got plenty of money and built houses not strategically, but wherever they could get cheap land. Naturally enough, the cheapest land is the furthest from any existing development and urban infrastructure- by this I mean, where there is no public transportation and people have to drive long distances to work or find basic services. Big surprise, home buyers find car commuting an expensive proposition and want to find something close in. My nephew and his wife, looking to purchase a home to house their expanding family, are shocked to find a dearth of housing in Los Angeles with the features they want- a neighborhood with good schools, and close to work for a short commute to his job. The flight to even the closest suburbs is a thing of the past. The empty nesters who are selling their large suburban homes with huge gardens and a pool, to be replaced with an in-town condo of reasonable proportions, are not finding younger couples with growing families to take their place. In our own highly urban neighborhood of Jackson Square, a huge number of formerly small, and not so small, office buildings are being changed over into condominiums- and selling quickly.

It is difficult for me to feel terribly sorry for builder-developers whose ignorance of fairly pronounced demographic trends led them to build in places where no one really wanted to live. Not sorry, but not surprised, either: home builders are something of a one-trick pony- if they can get the money to do so, they build houses. So, in fact, banks and investors who provided capital are all in the same intellectual boat as home builders. It is seldom that our president says anything particularly apt, but he did the other day- apropos of the freely flowing capital into the home building and mortgage markets over the last few years, ‘Wall Street got drunk.’

Some, of course, of the fairly recently built houses in remote suburbs, either sitting empty or now bank owned will be sold, and sold at a discount. One wonders to what extent these sorts of declines are skewing existing house price and sales statistics. Even bearing this in mind, my view is that the modest declines overall from a year ago suggest a correction in the market and not exactly the cataclysm of the perfect storm. Unfortunately, present activity is generally compared to events over the last however many years, without any statistical consideration that the last five, with explosive sales and price growth, represented an anomaly that was, in an apt use of the cliché, something seen once in a lifetime.