There is no secret about my mission. I aim to sell you a Lake Geneva vacation home. It’s simple really, this goal of mine, but it is a benevolent goal. I want to share my lake with you, and have you understand that you could one day view the lake as I do now: as an invaluable component of my life. I might take all that back if you prove too irritating, or disloyal, or if I ever catch you water skiing while blasting music from your Malibu’s excessive speakers. The thing is, I’m not alone in my desire to see you in a weekend home by the water. After perusing my May 2011 issue of Pottery Barn it cannot be debated. Pottery Barn wants you to buy a Lake Geneva vacation home too.
I have long admired the simple stylings of Pottery Barn. Many people put down Pottery Barn, as if they sell an inferior product for the masses. That may or may not be true, but for my house, for me, Pottery Barn is sufficient. Even celebrated. When I built a home a few years ago Pottery Barn won my own personal furniture lottery, as I turned to them to fill some rather large rooms. While Restoration Hardware caters mostly to those outside of my financial stature, and has adopted the design philosophy that everything must be made out of shiny metal and that all things- chairs, desks, lamps- should be held together with rivets. (Just like the P-51!) Restoration Hardware wants to sell you lamps that look like they were plucked off of the foredeck of the Queen Mary and then wrapped in sheet metal that was stripped from a 1951 Pan Am aircraft. Pottery Barn just wants to sell you pillows with sailboats on them.
To trivialize Pottery Barn’s fascination with the lake home would be a shame, and to assume that they only want to sell you sailboat pillows would be a fine example of gross underestimation. They want to sell you anything and everything you would ever need to decorate your home, but if you think they want you to decorate your suburban home with shells and sailboats and lamps fashioned to mimic the crab pots of the 1930s, then you aren’t paying attention. Their Outdoor Collection, to which they have devoted an entire magazine, features plenty of furniture that might look nice in the city or suburbs, but if you’re positioning those white Adirondack-style chairs on the front porch of your Lincoln Park row house then you might as well continue the absurdity and paint your grass blue and cast lures off the front steps.
Pottery Barn likes to sell you drapes too. They can sell you heavy, thick ones that you can draw tight to keep the air conditioning frosty on July afternoons. Or they can sell you outdoor ones that flutter in the cooling lake breezes that meander regularly on late July afternoons. Either way, it’s your call. If I were to replace those silly Palm trees with a few Maples that photo down there might as well be a porch on the northern shore of Fontana. That image is important because if you can squint and see yourself resting on that porch, whiling your summer away, then we really are seeing eye to eye. You, me, and Pottery Barn.
You could, if you were the sort, cram all of these shell, fish, ship, and lake trinkets and images into your primary home. You really could. You could make that home feel light and bright and, well, lakey. I know it’s not a word but we all use it, so it’ll work in this application. You could put blue and white curtains and frame a few images of fish and put sailboats on hall tables. You could paint walls white and ceilings whiter, and you could stain your floors dark and hang blue and white awning stripe drapes, and you could be content. But if you swing open those drapes and look at the brick wall of the neighbors home, or look to a plush suburban back yard that can feel more like a green prison cell, are you really achieving the lake look you’re longing for? Or is the whole thing just a ruse to help you imagine you’re at the lake when you’re really a mere 55 or 80 miles away from there you know you want to be?
When your next Pottery Barn catalog comes, which may be today since they seem to come bi-daily to my mailbox, flip through it. Try to pretend it’s not working in concert with me to call you to the lake. Sure you could just buy a few ship lanterns and place them on your front porch. You could also glue white-painted 2×6’s to your concrete sidewalk, and paint your lawn blue. That would certainly sell the lake look. Or, you could place your next catalog order and have those lanterns shipped directly to your lake house. Either way.
Images from Pottery Barn, and no I didn’t get paid to write this!