Graceland

Hello my fancy friends and thank so much for tuning in today. I am on a mission to demystify interior design, and one my favorite ways to do that is through the review and analysis of media depictions of designers and architects. Sometimes  TV shows and movies have main characters that seem to lead exciting lives as interior designers, but how realistic is the big screen compared to real life? So far we’ve looked at everyone from Ted Mosby to Julia Sugarbaker, but today we are peering into the world of one Grace Adler, owner of Grace Adler Interior Design and best friend to Will Truman on the TV show Will and Grace. We are going to break down everything from Grace’s office, to her design style, and find out if this show would be a good Pyramid clue for things that are realistic.

But first, let’s talk about the Color of the Week. If you’re a coffee drinker in the Northern Hemisphere and a fan of autumnal vibes, our season has arrived! Fall beverages are plentiful, things like apple cider, hot toddies, and cinnamon hot chocolate can be found featured prominently at every local eatery. But none of them are quite as iconic as the Pumpkin Spiced Latte, or PSL as it’s come to be known. This seasonal sip was popularized by Starbucks in 2003, using not so much pumpkin, but the blend of spices used to typically season pumpkin pie - cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. This milky concoction is just ever so slightly more orange than a typical latte, and that’s why Pantone 721 is our color of the week. When isolated from its usual accouterments of whipped cream and images of autumn foliage, this color’s caramel warmth toes the line of being a neutral without being bland. The great thing about this color is it makes jewel tones pop. Try pairing it with teal, earthy moss green, golden citrine, blush, and light to medium woods like oak and ash. You can’t go wrong with the application on this color, use it for sofa upholstery, wall paint, tile backsplashes, area rugs, bedding - whatever you heart desires. It will give any room a warm, toasty glow that will make you want to drink it up!

Will and Grace premiered on NBC in 1998 and ran in two sections, the first eight seasons concluded in 2005, and another three were ordered 12 years later as a revival. The show is many things, including the single most popular TV series with gay lead characters, but today we are looking at it through the lense of Grace’s stated profession - interior design. Out of all the pieces of media I’ve look at so far, from The Brady Bunch to The Haunting of Hill House, Will and Grace seems to care the least about convincing us that the lead character is an actual designer, and we’re going to look at the many missed opportunities this show had to get it right, as well as the handful of things that managed to hit the mark.

As I was re-watching many of Will and Grace’s episodes, I saw that the characters spend the majority of their on screen time roasting the living daylights out of  each other. Will and Jack are in a constant state of banter, Grace and Will are always bickering in the name of caring for one another, and then of course there's Karen, who we will talk about in a minute. So for this episode let it be known, this is also a roast. There is so little in the show to grab onto in terms of accuracy in Grace’s work life, but there is so much to critique.

Let's start at the beginning. In the pilot episode, we meet Grace Adler, a residential interior designer. She owns her own firm and has one employee, her assistant Karen. Karen is the wife of a successful, wealthy man, and works for Grace to affectively keep herself entertained and away from the doldrum of home-life. The word “assistant” in residential interior design is very specific, its equivalent to the role of Junior Designer in a commercial design office. When home designers have an assistant, it is almost always a young, newly graduated interior designer who hopes to one day have their own interior design practice, and while they do handle administrative work, they also take on more aesthetically focused assignments; like picking up samples, drawing floor plans and elevations, writing purchase orders for furniture, and spending countless hours finding the perfect backsplash tile. Having someone as seasoned and sassy as Karen fill this role certainly makes for a better TV, but it’s a very unusual set up. 

Karen rarely does her assigned tasks, but she is well-connected to high society heavy hitters, and Grace effectively uses her as a business development point of contact. That’s what Karen's title should have been from the get-go. Rather than expecting Karen to accomplish everyday tasks like answering the phone, it's obvious her role in the company would have been more effective if it had been honed in on networking and socializing. This would have been the exact same position that Suzanne Sugarbaker had on Designing Women, and no one would dare throw paperwork at Delta Burke. Successful businesses play to employees strengths. But, the tension between Grace and Karen, with Karen never doing her job properly, is fodder for many jokes and punch lines.

Together, Karen and Grace work in the historic Puck Building in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood. When the show premiered in 1998, this neighborhood, a compound word short for “North of Little Italy” was turning a corner and becoming much loved by artists and young professionals, which made it feel perfect for a young designer starting out. Grace is 31 at the beginning of the show, which in the world of interior design is quite young to be on your own, although not impossible. We know Grace studied at FIT and Columbia, both of which are reputable design schools. Her office is small but colorful, one single room with an industrial freight elevator that opens right into the space. There’s a mini fridge behind Karen’s desk and a coffee pot next to the door. Grace is often seen working at a standing height table, covered in fabric samples and drawings. She has huge bolts of fabric leaning against a wall, laminate samples, an wall of inspiration images, and a chalk board where she write motivational quotes like “more is the new less” and her to-do list. The set for her office is by far and away the element that the show does best. It’s the right size for a two-person firm, it’s in a neighborhood with probably reasonable rent, and it’s a creative, messy, workshop. In retrospect, with the early Y2K style touches and nostalgic elements like a landline phone with a mile long, curly cord, the office is a vision to behold.

In Season 1, episode 18, we see Grace is working crazy hours, and Will even teases her that there’s no such thing as a design emergency - which is true, and yet this sense urgency is prevalent in the interior design industry. I loved seeing Grace have to balance the affects of being a small business owner with her personal life. This is a real dilemma that many designers struggle with. We are passionate about getting the right look, at the right price, in the right timeframe - and that’s no easy accomplishment.

In terms of Grace’s abilities as a designer, the show seems to go out of its way to make it hard to take her seriously. This may be part of a larger theme of many jokes being at Grace’s expense. The show often paints her as goofy, awkward, uncoordinated and incapable. She is often seen forgetting major components of her projects, loosing samples, and in Season 2, Episode 22, she even forgets her portfolio for a high profile job interview. When she talks about stylistics ideas for projects, they are often random mash-ups of irrelevant ideas like a bathroom that’s themed “Moroccan Meets Rubber.” When she’s designing the new apartment for Will’s ex, every room has an entirely different aesthetic and they all sound incompatible and overwhelming.

Season 4 episode 21, we see Grace teach a class at The New School. This is one of the most bizarre depictions of an interior design class I have ever seen. The course she teaches is for non-majors, called “Introduction to Interior Design,” a three day class. Rather than being a champion of the industry, and explaining complexities of the world where substance meets style, she over glamorizes it, saying it’s a world of upscale clients, magazine covers, and six figure commissions. Then she goes on to get completely lost in insignificant details of ancient history, speaking very little about actual interior design. She is unable to hold her students’ attention, who interrupt her to ask questions about celebrity homes, and they abandon the class during the first break. I was left wondering if Grace actually knows what interior design is after this episode.

Season 3, episode 4, Grace hires an intern, played by Russian Doll’s magnetic Natasha Lyonne, who is fascinated with Grace and wants to watch her design process, which ends up consisting of wiping a green felt tip marker randomly on piece of paper and attempting to order soup for lunch.

In Season 2, episode 16, Karen wants to get more involved in the design process, but Grace is hesitant to delegate, and rightfully so! She compromises by letting Karen design a single chair. This makes no sense. That isn’t how design projects are organized, having one randomly designed chair in the middle of a room would stick out like a sore thumb. Ultimately, the two of them would have to collaborate to make sure everything looks coordinated. Grace would have been smarter to let Karen be responsible for a single repeating element in a room like pulling all the paint colors together or coordinating all of the wood tones. In the end, they have three chair samples sent to the office, and they aren’t even the same type of chair. We see two dining chairs and one over-stuffed lounge chair, completely different sizes and functions. The vision for this piece seems so unfocused. Where is this chair going? What is it next to? How is it used? This might all seem hyper granular, but one of the reasons I feel passionately about details like this, is some people’s only experience with interior design is through network television, and when it’s portrayed this inaccurately, if that person wants to hire a designer or become a designer, their expectations are no where near reality. If there was any kind of professional consultant on the show, they must have been used sparingly, or maybe not at all.

In the end, this show is about the dynamics and quick jabs between the characters, and Grace’s profession is a mere blip on the radar of the show. It serves as a nothing more than a blurry back drop for the real action, which is banter and one-liners with attitude. Sometimes it feels like we’re watching an improve performance and one of the audience members yelled out interior designer as a prompt, but none of the actors new much about it. This is one of the worst examples on television of what life as an interior designer is like, so take with it a grain of salt, enjoy it for the laughs only, and don’t let it color your vision of the world of interiors.

And I hope you are letting yourself laugh today. I will talk to you in the next episode.