Decorators' Choice

Interior decorators, both amateur and pro, have generally had to take what they could get from the designers of chairs, wallpaper and fabrics--and what they got was often unmistakably hideous. Last week the powerful American Institute of Decorators, out to put a little polite pressure on industry, awarded prizes to 1946's best designs, and hoped that industry would take the hint. The decorators' choices went on display in Chicago's Art Institute.

The prizewinning furniture, which would probably raise no cheers in Grand Rapids, was a plywood table and chair with rod-thin, chrome-plated legs. They were designed by California's solemn, earnest Charles Eames, 39, onetime pupil of famed Finnish modernist Eliel Saarinen. Eames, who designed molded plywood splints for the Navy during the war, is a man who believes that utility is beauty's only garment. He finds the kitchen and bathroom the most beautiful rooms in most U.S. homes. By the same token, Designer Eames explains, "when a chair is comfortable it becomes beautiful."

The man who made the year's prize wallpaper was from Copenhagen. His winning design was a hand-blocked strip of black & white leaves and flowers on a grey background. Judges also liked a busy strip of his, full of little men running like all get-out (see cuts). Bent Karlby also designs houses to paste his wallpaper up in. During the war he redecorated a Danish resort hotel, from chandeliers to ashtrays. When comfort-loving Nazis took it over, Karlby hurried home to print an underground newspaper in his cellar. The Nazis almost caught him, but he escaped to Sweden in a fishing smack. There his wallpaper designs made an immediate hit.

The winning fabric was a simple crossbar pattern woven by San Francisco's Designer Dorothy Liebes. She wove her winner with cotton, mohair and rayon. In other designs, she sometimes blends silk, bamboo reeds, lucite and copper wire into her fabrics. Every summer Mrs. Liebes disconnects her phone for two months, returns to the trade in the fall with hundreds of sample designs for machine production by Goodall Fabrics. Among her present projects: designing stage curtains for prefab theaters that Henry Kaiser plans to ship abroad, working up fabrics to redecorate Matson luxury liners, for Consolidated Vultee's new 2O4-passenger airplanes, and for 1948 Ford and General Motors cars.

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