If you have been following my recent installment, Favorite Vintage Ads Friday, you will know how taken I was, and remain, with regard to the Atelier Martex ad campaigns of the 1980’s. Often employing well-known designers to conjure seductive atmospheres for a waiting clientele, each setting evokes a particular mood and place in time. The setting for this ad from 1983 evokes a grand French country house inhabited by someone of great personal style who is a lover of classicism, art, travel, and a dose of the unconventional, if not bohemian. I believe, as I think back, this may have been the first time I had witnessed a bed placed in the center of a room, and I loved the idea of it. It instantly transforms the room into a room for living as opposed to one reserved for resting.
The neoclassical four-poster bed is dressed with “Beaucourt”, an inspired translation of an exquisite 18th-century porcelain design cataloged at The Musée Des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. But, as with all the Martex ads I love so much, it’s the “art of the room” that draws me in: the tawny palette punctuated by an inky Aubusson and those dazzling sapphire blue silk slip covered chairs; and the unexpected pair of chrome-and-glass side tables cozied up to the classical bed. Pure atmosphere! For all its grand gestures it is an inviting, liveable room seen through the eye of an artist.