Billie Brenner's Legacy

Designers could always count on the late Billie Brenner of the eponymous BDC showroom for a little lift. You'd just stop in her fourth-floor jewelry case of bath fixtures and there she'd be, rushing around. You'd plunk yourself down at the conference table by a luminous, voluminous white tub and wait to be seen. Then there was that moment she'd look you in the eye: “Don't go doing the same old same old,” she'd say. “Are you ready for the new—the truly new, not the trendy—I'm talking about what's truly new and what's truly great.” “Yes, of course, Billie: nothing else will do!” (Feeling better already just having uttered that refrain!). Design was never about stuff as far as Billie was concerned. It was about adventure; something spirit-tingling and exhilarating, like racing a horse along the beach. If you were willing to ride alongside you came away feeling great about design and whatever you could do to make great design happen.

Efficiency is on every designer's mind these days. Architect Dick Brown just had an energy audit performed at his Lexington, Massachusetts, house, an exercise that turned out to be marginally more thrilling than racing a horse down the beach. “They seal off the whole house and suck out all the air with this big blower placed in the door,” Brown explains. “The ensuing draft coming through the house felt like a hurricane. Then they have these infrared cameras—like night-vision goggles—you can just see the heat going out!” That's energy (read money), of course, that's going out, money that could be better spent on, say, Billie Brenner bath fixtures.

Sometimes the best design costs nothing. Manchester, Vermont–based designer Amy Thebault was driving down Route 30 with her husband when she spotted a square-backed, citron-upholstered Bergere chair lying ignominiously by the side of the road. “We have to turn around, right?” said her husband, knowing the answer as well as any well-adapted design spouse. Thebault had her prize “junktique” redone in a fabric with a hexagonally woven pattern of bottle green and chocolate and featured it at this summer's Southern Vermont Arts Council show house, where the orphaned chair received a standing ovation.

The spirit of anti-conspicuous consumption is prevalent these days, notes Boston designer Jeff Delvy, who says his high-end clients are “more accommodating to the spaces they have than making the space accommodate them. There's more respect for the original architecture. Now what we tend to do is accentuate a feature as opposed to gutting the whole space.” In the South End, for instance, for a remodel of a former servant's quarters with woefully skimpy crown moldings, he just built bigger ones over them. He also takes photos of the spaces before they're altered so that future owners can easily look back at what was there before.

Architect Carol Wilson of Falmouth, Maine, agrees with Delvy about the rising tide of architectural awareness. “Magazines such as Dwell and New England Home are doing a better job of educating clients,” she says. “Clients have more willingness now to take risks in terms of materials and use of space, a willingness that is counter-intuitive to the less flexible budgets you have now. Clients are willing to see what they might get when they hire an architect.”

Clients are not only becoming aware of design, they're becoming involved in the process, soliciting ideas as well as offering their own. “Sometimes clients figure they can go to the bath showroom themselves and you don't need to hold their hands, just give them some parameters,” says Dan Tibma of Tibma Design/Build in Needham. That's one reason why Tibma signed on with GuildQuality, an independent evaluator out of Arizona that thoroughly surveys homeowners in the middle and at the end of projects as well as a year after they've been completed. “Sometimes clients are just too polite to give you complete feedback,” says Mary Tibma who with her husband has completed more than 300 projects since 1997. Just in: the Tibma won a GuildQuality's Guildmaster Award for customer satisfaction.

One place homeowners do want their hands held is in high-tech home automation—especially when it converges with the latest green gadgetry. “Our clients are socially responsible,” says Brad Smith of Architectural Electronics in Newton, Osterville and Nantucket, Massachusetts. “They want to justify their purchases with green innovations, even if it costs them a fortune in, say, lighting controls. The advantage of being wealthy is that you can get all this cool stuff and not worry about return on investment,” says Smith. Smith and his wife, Bonnie, just went to a party at a client's home in Cohasset, he says, where the true star of the show was the automation, from the “listening room” (the client is a classical pianist) with its two-channel McIntosh Audio to the rest of the house with its solar panels, geothermal HVAC system, automated metal shutters that close at the hint of a storm and a water cistern so as not to draw too heavily on the town's system. “Now all my client's waiting for is his windmill application to go through,” Smith says.

One of Nashua, New Hampshire, designer Lisa Teague's clients serves on the board of the innovative Rift Valley Children's Village, which shelters the growing number of orphans in Tanzania. “I was getting tired of years of spending huge amounts of client's money,” Teague says. “I needed a change.” Next thing she knew, she was painting giant maps on the Rift Valley schoolhouse walls. “Two children came in just as I got there,” she recalls. “One had never seen a white person and was told whites would eat her. There's no word for blond in Swahili, so I was known as the white-haired woman. They wanted a mural of the world with Africa as the center of the Universe. I did Tanzania in a shiny metallic color. I can't wait to go back.”

Billie Brenner eschewed the same old, same old, and so do many of the visitors to GerrityStone in Woburn, Massachusetts. “With all their second homes, our clients are going on their fourth or fifth granite countertop,” says Gerrity's Dawn Carroll, the “rock star” who heads up the company's architectural division. “And since the material I'm working with is 400 million years old, I'm always hoping nature has something up her sleeve I've never heard of.” Carroll and her granite-weary homeowners are now antiquing their granite countertops, having their mottled surfaces beaten into mini-terrains curious neighbors can be guaranteed never to have seen before: torching, steel-brushing, drilling and gauging—everything but sanding and polishing.

The best inoculation against same-old, same-old design is vibrant art. Former environmental scientist turned artist Rob Hitzig, of Montpelier, Vermont, has a line of “shellac paintings” that animate just about any space. “I fell in love with natural grain and thought, how do I put a plank of wood on the wall and call it art? And so I started doing these two-dimensional sculptures, but as I went along it was the effects of the shellac applied in a kind of French polish method that got my attention, the painting aspect as opposed to the sculptural. You apply the shellac and then let it dissolve in alcohol; you do it again and again, one layer dissolving into another. The colors pop like nothing else.”

In a similar vein, frequenters of Billie Brenner's showroom may recall a series of vanity sinks hand-painted by a floral artist Brenner found in the Midwest. “I liked her work and so I asked her if she could do it, and she did,” Brenner said, with her characteristic resolve to keep design as fresh as the sprays of lilies and irises set adrift in the porcelain heaven of those basins.

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