Author: Kirsten Major

I’m wearing yellow in honor of Jupiter,” declared design-cum-business maven Stephanie Odegard. The Minneapolis native was in her twelfth-floor studio in the New York Design Center, cosseted in a modest office near two large showrooms that feature her acclaimed carpets and furniture. Odegard Inc. has six sales offices in the United States, operations in Nepal, and twelve thousand employees worldwide. She pays her workers a living wage, sponsors schools, and is one of the forces behind Rugmark, a program that certifies carpets made without child labor. But the strong impression one gets of Odegard is not of a capitalist titan but of a metaphysical seeker. Odegard’s company earns more than a million dollars a month, yet she takes the time to don a yellow scarf in observance of Jupiter’s Day, which, according to ancient astrological tradition, is Thursday.
Although Odegard “craves color,” she describes herself as a design minimalist. Her carpets are quiet seas of aquamarine, cerulean, tanzanite, and scarlet, sometimes with dashes of black at the borders. When she does include patterns, they are often subtle, just shades different than the background hues. Her home is a 1,200-square-foot Soho loft that she strives to keep empty. “You have this impulse to say ‘Here’s an empty space, I should put in a chair.’ It’s easy to fall into that, but I don’t want a house that’s filled. I can’t stand kitsch,” Odegard said, with a shudder and wave of the hand. “I live in fear of people giving me little presents. I don’t like lots of small things.”
Yet her office, where she spends most of her waking hours, is filled with small things. This is where a secondary aesthetic comes into play: object as memento. There are many gifts on the shelves, including a miniature collection of brown clay houses and temples arranged like a Nepalese Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. On a lower shelf sits a set of four white ceramic cups from India, each painted with abstract, blue flowers. There are also ceramic, glass, and silver vases as well as many awards and a few framed photos of Odegard with the Dalai Lama.
Odegard came to design for unusual and idealistic reasons. She longed to see the world and make it better. In interviews, she often speaks not of design but of the need for people to be well nourished and educated. She travels the globe trying to accomplish these missions, creating jobs and buying materials. The gifts and oddities she’s collected—the spinning toy tops kept in a vase, the metal inlaid mirror of the Hindu elephant-headed god, Lord Ganesh—represent alliances, friendships, and business well conducted. Having them around creates an atmosphere of positivity. By her own account, Odegard travels so lightly that she often runs out of clothes, but you get the distinct feeling she would dutifully lug home a bag of bricks if they were given to her by someone she liked or attached to a meaningful event. Suddenly the paradox of the minimalist with an office full of things makes sense. To seek objects is noisome; but to reject what arrives is to court bad karma.

There are few things as merciless as office air conditioning. When I graduated from college and started temping in giant office buildings I made the grave mistake of dressing as if it were summer. Armed with a vague sense of professional attire and deep conviction that I had a cute post-collegiate bod, I had purchased a series of ill-advised (OK, OK, I mean “skimpy”) outfits. I was so cold I felt nauseated. In short course I learned to bring a sweater to work, and in shorter course I tired of selecting a different sweater every day, as if it were winter. There was no putting together of a proper outfit—heavy patterned-snowflake and Fair Isle sweaters looked uniformly bad with summer dresses and skirts. It was then that I joined the legions of women who keep a huge wool sweater, fleece jacket, or wrap at the office to keep warm.

Forget the thin, matching cardigans recommended by fashion magazines. If you are going to sit still in an office environment that’s cooled to the lower sixties, then you are going to need some serious warmth, with enough bulk to fit over whatever else you’re wearing. This will be your second-tier sweater. It’s about two years from being donated to the Salvation Army. In other words, in Yiddish words, your schmatta—literally the word meaning “rag,” it has also come to describe the shapeless article of clothing you throw on in a pinch.

The office schmatta is a career killer. As has oft been writ in those how-women-can-get-ahead-at-the-office books, nothing screams “unimportant functionary” like a rug-type thing worn over business attire. Can Kleenex up the sleeve be far off? Add spectacles on a chain and you have completed the thought for your boss that “Peggy is great at contracts” rather than “Peggy should be at the table for major contract negotiations.” Note that I am not equating doom with being secretarial. Powerful executive assistants at the companies I worked for were impervious to the chill, wore short-sleeved dresses in the latest style (this was in the early 1990s when there were annual styles and hemlines), dispatched the requests quivering junior professional staff, and seemed steam powered. If there were sweaters anywhere near them, they matched the dress and nevertheless were usually flung beside their work bags. Senior professional women, on the other hand, could combat the chill by wearing high-necked blouses and business suits of summer-weight wool, never poplin or linen. You also got the feeling that they were thinking so hard in their offices that their metabolism must have been boosted, unlike me, left shivering in my cubicle over dull spreadsheets when not making personal calls or sneaking peeks at Vanity Fair.

My years in the workforce have taught me that there are two solutions to prevent freezing in the office. One is menopause. Is it terrible that I feel envious of my colleagues in short-sleeved blouses with fans blowing on them as they sip ice water? I recently padded over to a retirement-aged coworker—“padded” because I had put on my gym socks after my toes, exposed by sandals, felt at risk for frostbite—and asked, like a piteous child out of Dickens, “What is it like to be warm?” “Oh honey, it’s something!” She laughed with furnace-like warmth.

The other solution is shameful, yet incredibly effective: The personal space heater. On top of the heaps of electricity that are used to reduce hot air to frigid temperatures, I add even more kilowatts by heating it up again. It’s so wrong, and yet so right—I leave my house sweater-less, dressed in proper summertime clothes, and I show up to meetings and walk the halls of my office looking perky and professional. I can leave behind the bedraggled sweaters and fleecy smocks. It is bad to waste our planet’s resources, yet when I contemplate the ultimate punishment for this all I can think is, I know, I know, I’m going to hell. But it’s warm there.

When I moved into my apartment, I inherited the previous owner’s leftover futon and threw a tapestry over it. But at thirty-eight years of age, I felt I was beyond tapestries and futons. I wanted a new couch. I decided that the only way to get one would be to unload the grubby futon. Because my boyfriend and I were spending our weekends writing and drawing together, I wanted to make this as efficient as it could be. Rather than selling the thing, I posted a sign in my building one Saturday morning. Some neighbors took it away for free; and I was grinning all the while, thinking how time with my boyfriend was worth a lot more than the fifty bucks I might’ve gotten for that futon.

He broke up with me later that night. I was trembling so hard I could barely get the key into the lock when I returned home at 2:00 a.m. Once inside, I sank to the floor to sob amid the dust bunnies. A week later, I dragged in an uncomfortable rattan settee that I found on the street; a week after that, I dragged the settee back to the street and made a $350 purchase at Upholstery World. At least it was a foam loveseat—a supposed step up from a futon. On the other hand, its cheap black fabric was a magnet for lint and crumbs—so much so that my fastidious architect friend Rafael refused to sit on it. But what really motivated me to buy a new couch was a romantic interlude in which I and another party leaned into a kiss that would have been so much better had I not slid off the loveseat and onto the floor.

I went to make the rounds at Crate and Barrel, which allowed me the pleasure of turning my nose up at all manner of contemporary sofas. Then I turned a corner into the very last showroom and my life changed, quite suddenly. I beheld the Petrie.

The Petrie is named, of course, for Laura and Rob Petrie, the fictional early 1960s “It” couple of The Dick Van Dyke Show. While everything else was gooey with thick, brick-shaped cushions, this was a firm, tailored couch—a long, white ledge with mid-century-style tapered legs. Those of us who came of age in the 1980s, with its recycled preppy tastes, respond well to such constructed forms. College housing departments fled the scene of college dorms and lounges during the sexual revolution of the late 1960s through the seventies, and only ventured back during the era that saw the return of Lanz nightgowns and ties at cocktail hour. While they planned massive renovations, there were old iron-framed beds, World War II-style blackout shades, and mid-century chairs, couches, and tables that lingered for a few twilight years, which were our years. Because of that, I had a compelling connection to this era’s style: In college we’d come back from class in our boxy oxfords, flats, and cropped tapered pants, light up ciggies, and flop down on a version of the Petrie. This sofa embodied my definition of beauty and possessed every creature comfort I’d ever known. It was perfect love, at last.

I forwarded a web link to my friends and took people back to Crate and Barrel to visit the Petrie. My friend Carla indulged me by lounging on the Petrie in the showroom and gabbing as if we were in my apartment. I prolonged my visits with less-intrepid companions by showing them color swatches and mulling over Fern versus Hydra. I had discussions with two salespeople, talked delivery. And then I started avoiding salespeople, who pretended not to see me, either.

I never really broke up with the Petrie. My visits to the showroom and to the website just trailed off. Once I had resolved to live within the boundaries of my take-home pay, I realized the Petrie didn’t fit within the scale of my economy. I had started saving to buy my own home; and after meeting with a mortgage broker, I realized how drastically a $1,500 couch (two thousand dollars with taxes and delivery) would affect my situation. So I let it go. Naturally, there was no point in shopping for a less-expensive couch: As with romance, choosing a second-best only yields sorrow. My love, however, will be remembered: I told my friend Thomas that I was writing an elegy to the Petrie and he said, “You mean the one you took me to visit? Do you think that maybe someday you two … ” I closed my eyes, shook my head no, and he sighed wistfully for both of us. —Kirsten Major