Dan's Papers - May 23, 2008 - Making a Summer Rental Feel like Home

Ramshackle surfer shack or gracious Stanford White manse, a familiar cottage you've rented for years or a newly built McMansion with all the bells and whistles, your summer rental can be made a home without ferrying all your belongings, like the English colonizing India.

If you've spent the year in a crowded city apartment, a sparsely furnished summer home can be a breath of fresh air. But perhaps your rental is already overly decorated by a well-meaning landlord with a penchant for ditsy do-dads. Your first step might be to shift any knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, cutesy clutter, or other offending articles into storage. Then decide just how bare you dare to go and if you need to cover, reposition, or repurpose the existing furnishings.

Having made the case for clean, uncluttered living, lolling there watching the sunlight travel through undraped windows onto blank walls can be dull at best. Designer Giorgio Sant'Angelo, known in the 1970s for his sensuous knits, individualized his rented beach houses with fashionable flair. Batik and other patterned fabrics collected in his world travel camouflaged furniture and walls. Parasols, streamers, and most surprisingly, kites, added more verve to the inspired, portable decor. Why not occupy the kids, improvise some imaginative and colorful kites for the upcoming Dan's Papers contest, and use them to decorate your rental? So much more fun and inviting than a staid row of botanical prints!

Looking even further into the posh past, a popular 19th Century guide to roughing it in exotic locales, Francis Galton's The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, first published in 1865, presents a few time essential ideas for the summer renter traveling no further or wilder than Westhampton or Wainscott. After noting that Julius Caesar journeyed with wooden mosaic parquet to decorate the floors of his tent, the ingenious author lists some furnishings that are as indispensable for personalizing a sprawling shingle-style beachside behemoth or a simple surfer shack as for a tent pitched in the Serengeti. He writes, "The articles that make the most show for their weight, are handsome rugs, and skins, and pillows; canteens of dinner and coffee services; and candles ..."

Of course, rolling up existing carpets in your rental may be a necessity, especially if you have children and pets, and you don't quite trust that there won't be a hardened scum of sand, Funfetti icing, and dog biscuit crumbs that's impossible to clean from the owner's Aubusson or Tabriz. Otherwise, striped rag rugs are cheap and chic, and the colors can suggest a scheme for pillow covers and other accessories to spark up an all-white classic rental living room or pull together the mish-mash of leftover furnishings in your adorable rental cottage.

In times of yore, the haute crew who made the hejira out to the Hamptons had their servants crate whole sets of china in straw and box it for shipment to and from their summer and winter abodes. Your temporary beachside digs may be palatial and completely furnished with china and crystal, or your tumbledown rental cottage may offer a lovely jumble of mismatched plates and jam-jar glasses. Whether Melamine or Meissen, bringing your own set of dishes can be practical or rather grand, and if the latter, marks you as having incredible panache. Unless your coffeemaker is the barista at Starbucks, your own Bodum may also help make you feel yourself, if not at home.

Flickering candles in hurricane shades or in Moroccan lanterns add atmosphere, not to mention a bit of fragrance that can dispel that slight whiff of mildew! While the art of staging a home for sale demands that brighter bulbs be installed, as prospective homeowners look for light, the reverse is true for seeing one's way to survive the summer rental season. Low light will hide a multitude of preexisting decorating faux-pas, and it's always flattering to the complexion. Dimmers and lower wattage make for a more habitable Hamptons experience, as even the gloomy becomes glamorous in the glimmering dusk. But if you enjoy reading in bed, a good bedside lamp is a must, as the homeowner may have chosen lamps for their style, rather than utility. Another possibility is to use inexpensive round Chinese paper lanterns from Pearl River Mart, the bigger the better if a room is lightly furnished! An unsightly chandelier can be swathed in sheer fabric or netting to hide it from view.

Perhaps it's something of a cliché, but that intrepid traveler to fantastic and fearsome lands, Dorothy Gale, quipped "There's no place like home" when she found herself back in bed. Maybe your landlord wound a garland of silk roses around a canopy bed frame, as was spotted by the author while scanning the available Hamptons rentals on the Internet. To some, such charm might be cloying, and the idea of sleeping in an utterly uncluttered room, rather than a fancily festooned boudoir, is just what the doctor ordered for a stressless summer. To others, adding a cool white canopy adds drama and romance on the cheap. Mask ugly, bare bed frames with dust ruffles for a more coordinated look, or banish the bed frames to the basement and sleep with mattresses on the floor in bohemian chic.