Art director Raymond Waites used showmanship with a purpose in his town house living room. He was confronted with a nonworking fireplace that was already painted when he took the apartment and an old radiator that detracted from the room's symmetry. His alternatives seemed to be either to box in the radiator and remove the mantle from the fireplace (both of which would have meant altering rental property) or, in effect, to paint them out. The diagonal black stripes effectively mask both the distractions. Waites used a large triangular cardboard cutout to set the angle of the diagonals from the floor for each of the stripes and then methodically plotted each one across from the first.
Knowing when to stop with this kind of graphic is at important as having the courage to start. Waites now has two walls painted, but when he tried a third, he said it "was like living in a candy box."
Photo by Richard Freedman and text by Egon von Furstenberg, scanned from The Power Look: Decorating for Men, 1980.