Lou: I grew up in a deservedly forgotten architect’s nondescript West Orange, New Jersey home, decorated in my mother’s indecision with an all-pink master bedroom.
Sandy: The spacious home I grew up in the gracious Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit was of combined Tudor revival, Neo-Georgian and arts-and-crafts architecture with a healthy dose of hand-painted Pewabie tiles throughout. My parents furnished its spaces with a tasteful monotone assemblage of purportedly English antiques they were ever rearranging. Unlike the broad expanses of glass that made birdwatchers out of Lou and I, the traditional small-paned windows I grew up with largely limited my view out to mother’s manicured gardens and their beautiful peacock population.
Sandy: At the University of Michigan in 1953 when a friend fixed up a more-drinker-than-dater junior, liquid Lou Grotta.
Lou: With an as-much-as-she-wanted-to-be-popular sophomore, Sandy Brown.
Sandy: Frankly, no, My eyes were mainly centered on shopping and boys. I never ever got around to visiting Cranbrook until I was well into my junior year in Ann Arbor.
Lou: On a couple of occasions, my mother force marched me to the Metropolitan Museum to appreciate Rembrandt and company. I was duly impressed by the Museum’s soaring architecture but its contents never came close to replacing Ebbets Field in Brooklyn when my beloved Dodgers were in play as my favorite field of vision.
Sandy: It was at the insistence of many of our non-art-major Michigan friends that we signed up for a couple of Professor Marvin Eisenber’s “Introduction to the History of Art and Architecture” courses. His rollicking, illuminating grand tour from Raphael’s School of Athens to Edward Munch’s Scream, from the Parathenon to the Pantheon to Falling Water opened our eyes to wo lifetimes of great looking.
Lou: Not likely to appear on the cover of Architectural Record. It was a 30-year-old, center-hall colonial whose main attractions were its sensible layout, its proximity to my sister’s house, a very good neighborhood grammar school and its proximity to the outer limits of our budget.
Sandy: I wanted it done in the spirit of my parent’s home only, not as formal.
Lou: I wanted modern, with preferably contemporary Scandinavian furniture and no signs of pink in our master bedroom or anywhere else.
Sandy: Our mediator was Lou’s mom’s decorator, who well dressed it in a beige-backgrounded, proper-taste-of-the-time manner.
Sandy: In the early 1960s, walking out of the Museum of Modern Art, we stumbled upon the Museum of Contemporary Craft next door. The Museum’s exhibitions, many of whose objects were for sale in its store, caused a case of love at first sight. It quickly became a founding source of many craft purchases to follow. It was also the site of our initial sighting of the wonderful walnut wood word of Edgar and Joyce Anderson. Soon after we commissioned the first of what evolved into our becoming collectors of the majority of Joyce and Shorty’s limited output for the next 30 years. Beginning with their friends, Toshiko Takeazu and William Wyman, the Andersons were our bridge to other major makers in what we believe to have been the golden age of contemporary crafts and the impetus to my becoming our decorator, going to interior design school and entering the field.
Sandy: Just about everything. All of the wallpaper, molding, drapes, lamps, filigree and furniture went, as did our beige background, which I immediately brightened to white. The Andersons’ and friends’ fingerprints gradually appeared upstairs and down. A trip to Sandinavia with my father brought home a not as good-playing but far better-looking pano, the first of many Hans Wegner chairs and one of Kay Bojensen’s biggest monkeys. My love of Charles Loloma’s incredible jewelry launched me headfirst into the world of American Indian art, Southwest and Northwest, A far-off-the-beaten-path trip to Ariel, Washington led to our commissioning Chief Don Lelooska to carve an eight-foot-tall totem pole for our front hall. By the time we moved in 1989, our home was filled to capacity with wood, fiber and ceramic works, functional and non-functional, by many of the major architects, industrial designers and craft creators of our vintage.
Lou: Yes, but the finished product turned out far different than the way we pictured it. We always saw ourselves setted into a wood and irregular stone modern house on maybe a little larger lot in a nearby neighborhood designed by a very good architect not named Richard Meier. As it turned out, we wound up in horse county on seven-and-a-half acres. The only wood in our construction was its framing, totally concealed under 32-inch-square white, porcelain-enameled steel panels, and our stone couldn’t be more regularly shaped cinder block and slate. Our very good architect, when push came to shove, was the once were most comfortable with personally-my old late 1940s summer camp bunkmate better known then as Dickie Meier.
Lou: Our original settlers continue to make up a significant percentage of our expanded craft population, but they very well may not be located in the same place today or tomorrow. Through the years, change has been our constant for a number of good reasons. It gives a fresh perspective to individual pieces and their total environment, and it’s easy to seamlessly make that happen. Except for the color blue and a small wip of yellow, most of our things come only in their neutral wood, ceramic, and basketry colors. Barring a mismatch in scale, our things have a way of quickly telling us, appearance-wise and quality-wise, if they rightly belong in the company of their neighbors. Speaking of location, two of our major ceramic wall pieces- a subtle Paul Soldner raku and a large black rabbit plate by Ken Ferguson-could never be fully appreciated from a distance. Paul and Ken might not have been enamored by their present setting, but there is no question they are both best viewed staring straight ahead while sitting on the throne of our tight downstairs bathroom.
Sandy: Our son, Tom, started his contemporary fiber gallery about the time we moved into the house. His inherently great taste has changed the ratio of our media make-up dramatically in both scale and scope. The latest example being our recent installation of a never previously displayed 38-year-old, 10 foot tapestry by our great friend Mariette Rousseau-Vermette.
Lou: The closest the two came to collaborating was on a door handle design. It evolved from a postcard architectural drawing of the house that Richard transformed into a possibility that Shorty Anderson reshaped into wood maquette which Richard re-tweaked to be ultimately handcast in stainless steel. Throughout the house, there are a lot of things designed by well-known architects. It is easy and interesting to note the difference in materials and approach between den compared to Richard’s all encompassing wall-to-wall headboard in our bedroom.
Lou: Very few. Most noticeably the conversion of our front doors from wood to glass. In addition to letting in even more light, it dramatically expanded our entry view all the way through the house out to the architectural sculpture on the other side and vice versa. In the case of our back door, it did wonders for the visibility of our favorite tree. Mother Nature was always out there in our other homes, but it took Meier’s architecture to truly expose her full repertoire from lightning storms to spring flowers to sly foxes to an occasional bear. The weeping white pine tree between the house and the garage originally topped out at garage height. Over time it’s gracefully expanded to more than double in size. Not only does it look better, it’s become our birds favorite habitat and a beautiful don’t-have-to-move around umbrella for many of our most memorable meals. Even on the sunniest of days, we enjoy dining out off of the trays of our portable chairs that conveniently fold up and go away when we do, leaving our tree visually free of any man-made competition until our next meal. Coming up the stairs to the second floor, or looking back out through the many Toshikos in our master bedroom window, there stands an equally admirable dining venue-an allé of white birch trees well laid out by our long-time landscape architect Walter Carrell. Even when their restaurant is closed and their leaves have fallen, Walter’s bichers remain and outstanding presence.
Sandy: For most of our married life, my jewelry, if it wasn’t on me making me look good and feel better, went into hibernation, a lot of pieces comfortably secluded within the wood “chest of drawers” that the Andersons designed to house them. As a consequence, over time many of my smaller things suffered from being out of sight, out of mind. My jewelry revolution came the first time I hung one of David Wakins’ necklaces on a wall in the company of a number of my craft-media heavy weights. I instantly realized how well David’s creation more than held its own, as would the work of significant other jewelers led by his most significant other, his wife, Wendy Ramshaw. Although her individual pieces lacked the scale of David’s, her had-to-have line up of earrings and rings, each on its own integral Brancusi-like stand, reflected in the mirror of my dressing room table and never fails to put a smile on my face. When it came to displaying my bracelets, I turned to Thom Hucker, who did a tremendous job as he did on his off-the-wall, on-the-wall outing of my rings. His latest slant for Gerd Rothman’s YCHEJ necklace subtly conveys a long-time tenet of yours truly: You can’t have enough jewelry.
Lou: Rarely. Since day one, we’ve always been blessed with an amazing like/dislike simpatico. On the rare occasions we disagree, we honor the other’s veto power. It’s true, I do believe you can have enough jewelry, but when a must-have piece comes along, I invariably look the other way.
Originally appeared in “Interview with the Grottas,” The Grotta Home by Richard Meier: a marriage of architecture and craft (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, Germany, 2019), pp. 9 - 27.
