Everybody knows in-laws, children, money and sex cause trouble for married couples. But interior decorating? Behind every beautiful room, there’s often a domestic drama or squabble.
It doesn’t matter if you, like most people, rely on your amateur design instincts, or if you bring in a professional decorator, or even if you’re a design pro yourself.
Creating a home for two can be painful when both parties have strong opinions and a love for personal items.
“After the clothes that you wear, the house you live in is the most personal style statement you can make,” says Elaine Griffin, who has seen feuds erupt between couples during design projects. “More often than not couples do clash. It makes perfect sense.”
When it comes to decorating, Griffin believes the home should reflect the tastes of everyone who lives there. Compromises are inevitable. She also believes there are fundamental differences between the sexes. For starters, they don’t agree on the purpose of furniture. While a woman may envision a delicate open-armed antique chair adding a stylish touch to her living room, her husband can’t picture himself sitting, let alone watching TV, from the chair.
“Men are obsessed with comfort,” Griffin says. “Men will not pay for uncomfortable chairs. But then not all chairs have to be comfortable. There’s a learning curve.”
A native of Georgia, Griffin worked as a fashion publicist for years in Paris before pursuing a career in home design. She describes her style as eclectic with Continental flair. Living alone for years, she had free rein over her apartment’s décor. Then she met Michael McGarry, a psychoanalyst. They clicked immediately.
“By our fourth date, we knew we were headed to the altar,” says Griffin, 45, who was also relieved to find McGarry lived in a sparsely furnished apartment on the upper East Side. “I knew I could marry my husband when I saw he only had a studio,” she recalls. “That’s what I call the ideal fiancé – furniture-less.”
They got engaged two months after meeting and wed three months later. Just as she does with clients, Griffin convinced her husband they could save a bundle of money shopping at the flea markets in Paris. Things went smoothly until they started merging their things in their first home, a rented brownstone in Harlem. Thinking like a decorator − and a woman who hadn’t lived with anybody since college − Griffin sized up the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment and mentally assigned a spot for every stick of furniture and accessory.
“Everything had a space except for her husband,” says McGarry, with a laugh. “She was thinking like a single woman.”
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