Marcia Sherrill
Decorator Obsession
Move over, Paris and Nicole. The decorator and client are, like, the new BFFs!
BY
Marcia Sherrill
PHOTOGRAPHY
Steve Pomberg

Now, I have dealt with every variety of client in my long decades of design work, and I have recently noted that the decorator-client relationship has indeed taken a turn for the better (or the worse, depending on your point of view).

While other designers (silly them) may cherish their so-called “private lives,” “down time” or “personal space,” I am of the new breed of decorator-cum-buddy-slash-confidante—yes, Best Friends Forever! Knowing how symbiotic my relationships are with my current clients, I am now very, very careful about whom my next clients may be. Is it too much to ask them to take the Myers-Briggs personality test? I think not. 

For instance, one of my new BFFs (clients) came to me through another client. I arrived at midnight after she had a meltdown over a coat of paint one smidgen brighter than the paint chip. As she clutched her heaving bosom, all sobs and hiccups, I told her the Oushak just needed to be flipped so that the “light” side would show.

Crisis averted, she in turn introduced me to her artist friend, whom I was told was of the mindset that she “didn’t need a ‘decorator,’” but rather “someone with whom she could get into ADAC.” Yet after two years, 15 overnight stays at her apartments in New York and Atlanta, and 7,000 flight-miles later on her Baron, we are joined at the hip. It’s like the movie Stuck on You, but with a drapery tieback wrapped about us. We have been almost everywhere together and bought nearly everything. 

I should mention that this “I don’t need a decorator” client has a husband who was appalled that his wife had succumbed to a “designer,” so he avoided me for many months, although that wasn’t easy since his wife and I had that pesky tieback merging us into one full fabric- and furniture-obsessed design fiend. But then came “The Night.” 

It was a cold wintry New York evening and I was out at the soon-to-close rock/punk club CBGB in the Lower East Side when he called. I was ordered to get my tokhes to Birmingham ASAP, as the contractor had veered away from our French Provincial-meets-St. Tropez circa-1820 kitchen elevations to his apparently “better” version of an English pub in the style of Paul Bunyan: giant 18-by-10-inch beams crisscrossing what was most certainly a “smallish” 800-square-foot kitchen.

His wife was on the floor in paroxysms over the debacle and nothing less than an e-ticket—which they had thoughtfully purchased for a 6 a.m. Delta flight—would do (at least it was first class!). She could not be consoled, and he was rounding up their nearest-and-dearest for a design intervention. The Betty Ford helicopter hovered above (though they do not, to my knowledge, have a much-needed course in renovation-ism).

Marcia to the rescue! The contractor was summoned and his heinous timbers excised while another contractor loomed in the wings, happy to complete the kitchen in our style.

I have clients whose careers I have launched; for whose children I am a godmother; and whose wardrobes I have purged. I have tagged along for MRIs, been loaned Jaguars, attended weddings, churches and synagogues, and yet still I have friends and family who say, as the BlackBerry rattles at 2 a.m., “Why, why, why do you do this for a living? This is hell! All this craziness over a $15,000 TV cabinet?”

There are many answers, but with all the drama, the Sturm und Drang and the conniption fits, I have been bandaged, feted, prayed for and glorified in their lives and in their hearts. I have been greatly loved! It’s been my pleasure.