Mr Call The Way I Remember It
MR CALL FAKE
There was a neighborhood of white houses rising near us in Gig Harbor. Columns. Symmetry. A little Tara without the South. I needed one. Total, reckless wanting — the kind I hadn’t yet learned how to ignore.
My parents could not afford Tara. They bought a log cabin in the woods instead. Afternoon sun on the terrace. Open French doors. Chopin. The scent of incense. It was beautiful. That was beside the point.
When I questioned my mother about the white houses, she gave me a piece of advice. “If you can’t do the real thing, don’t do a fake thing. Just go in the opposite direction. It’s much cooler.”
I did not want her wisdom. I wanted columns.
Mr Call EARLY
I traded Gig Harbor for Seattle and, at twenty-one, helped Wolfgang Puck open ObaChine as the maître d’. I wasn’t doing it for love. My dream was strictly financial.
The waiters were clearing three hundred dollars a night, a sum that sounded to me like real money. The maître d’ role, by contrast, was an hourly slog. Worse, they put me in a suit. It was my first. Not my last.
I complained to Wolfgang. I wanted the floor. I wanted the adult miracle of leaving work richer than when I had arrived. He listened, then asked what I actually intended to do with my life. “I want to be an architect,” I said — a claim that was true, despite having no idea how to become one, beyond having loud opinions about buildings.
“Be remembered for them needing you,” Wolfgang told me. “That is what opens doors.”
He was talking about access. The table that didn’t exist until I found it. The small fixes that made powerful people feel the world was still arranged in their favor. A maître d’ is not a host. A maître d’ is a gatekeeper with a seating chart. I stayed at the door. I memorized every name of consequence in town until they had my number. I courted them, and they courted me back, just enough to keep the room humming and the right people feeling recognized.
The waiters kept the cash. I wore the suit. The suit was not a garment. It was a passport.
When the restaurant shuttered, the reasons were catastrophic. Barbara Lazaroff had decorated the place with a version of Asia the local community could not accept as a tribute. The conflict centered on a cartoonish poster near the host stand. There were protests. There were boycotts. The poster stayed. The restaurant did not. It was my first professional lesson in interior design: get the room wrong enough, and the room will take the business with it.
I crossed the street into the next phase of my education: Mario’s. High-end fashion. Canali. Prada. Narciso Rodriguez. They wouldn’t let me sell; I was, and remain, a terrible salesman. Instead, I became the Women’s Assistant. I poured champagne, ordered lunch, managed the emotional weather, and discussed design while others took the commission.
One afternoon, Jeannie Nordstrom and Melinda Gates came upstairs. They were in the middle of building a compound — an underground bunker topped with a log cabin. “I grew up in a log cabin,” I offered. It was my only credential. A childhood in wood.
They asked why I wasn’t in school. They told me to walk over to Cornish at lunch and apply. I did as I was told, being the sort of young man who took life direction from women in fitting rooms. It sounds charming looking back. At the time, it was simply a man with no plan being gently pushed toward one by women with better tailoring.
Mr Call LATE
I stood before a heavy wooden door tucked under a stone arch on Capitol Hill and knocked. The registrar appeared, and I informed him I was there to apply. He looked at me with tired patience. Classes were set to begin in a week.
“How fortunate,” I replied. “I’m early. I’m never early to anything.”
He explained that Cornish was among the most selective design schools in the country, then asked to see my portfolio. I told him I didn’t have one — that was the whole reason I wanted to enroll.
Then I mentioned that Jeannie Nordstrom and Melinda Gates had suggested I stop by. His expression shifted into something almost spiritual. He coughed. The air in the room suddenly changed. “Our benefactors? Come back tomorrow with something. Anything.”
I spent the night in a fever, taking apart glossy magazines. I cut out faces, fabrics, landscapes, and architecture. I had no formal training and no existing work, so I put together a picture of where I thought design was headed. It wasn’t a portfolio. It was a manifesto of my own obsessions.
He saw it. He smiled. I was in. I know how that door opened. Someone mistook my nerve for promise. I spent the next several years trying to become the person they had accidentally let in.
Mr Call MAROONED
I arrived in New York in the wake of 9/11. The towers were gone. The site was still smoking. The air tasted of burnt rubber. Not a great atmosphere for someone trying to design, given that the entire world had stopped building.
I settled into a converted tenement on Orchard Street, in a Lower East Side that hadn’t been cleaned up yet. I shared the place with a friend from college. Two bedrooms, narrow hallway, kitchenette in the corner. We never cooked. She used the kitchen as an extra closet. The oven was reserved strictly for shoes.
She was the most terrifying roommate I ever had. Ruthlessly thin, blonde, leggy. Illegal habits and a few mental illnesses — some diagnosed, some not. She was, in every way, perfect. My rent was twelve hundred a month. I scraped it together waiting tables on Rivington Street. Between shifts, I carried my portfolio everywhere. A heavy fake-leather binder filled with plastic sleeves.
I knocked on the door of every design firm that would have me. No one did. I had crossed the continent with a collection of student work, only to find myself in a city that suddenly had no use for beginners.
It felt like exile. A castaway with a roommate out of a magazine, a waiter’s apron, and a portfolio nobody opened. I wasn’t making it in New York. I decided that meant I couldn’t make it anywhere.
The city did not care. That was its first useful gift.
Mr Call UNSOLICITED
I’d grown up looking at Diamond Baratta in magazines — flipping through Architectural Digest in my bedroom in Gig Harbor. I thought their work was dated and weird. I almost hated it, which I’ve since learned is usually a sign that something is about to become important.
Then one afternoon I saw a room of theirs in person at the Cooper Hewitt, and I realized every single thing I’d thought was wrong. The photographs had been hiding the point. Scale. Color. Proportion. Their stylist and photographer had spent years making the work look like something it wasn’t.
I could see the gap between the work itself and the way the world saw it.
I went home and wrote them a letter. Unsolicited. Not a fan letter — a diagnosis. I told them to fire their stylist and fire their photographer because no one was seeing their work right. I told them they were modern artists, not just interior designers.
This is not how you are supposed to look for a job. You’re supposed to be polite and humble if you want to get hired. I was none of those things. They called me in.
Tony restored Colonial furniture. Bill was a colorist who had worked for Jackson Pollock. They were artists who specified rooms. They hired me for twenty thousand dollars a year on Lafayette Street. I had insulted the presentation of their life’s work and been rewarded with a desk. It was another failure upward.
I thought I had been hired for my taste. I had mostly been hired for my mouth, which has always been both the gift and the bill.
Mr Call HAZED
Bill and Tony walked me to the back of the studio to meet Misha, their lead architect. Misha had wiry hair, glasses halfway down his nose, and crumbs on his shirt. Tony told him to hire me. Misha just said, “Okay, Bill and Tony,” in a thick Russian accent, as if he were accepting a package he hadn’t ordered.
Then he looked at me and asked for the dimensions of a brick. I told him it depended on the kind.
He lost it. He started yelling about how a brick was the most basic measurement in all of architecture — going all the way back to the Greeks — and how kids these days didn’t know anything. He went to a back office and returned with a red clay brick. He put it in my hand and told me to keep it. “That is architecture,” he said.
Then he pulled a Robsjohn-Gibbings chair into the hall and set it on the carpet. He told me to draw it to scale. Once I did that, he said, I’d have the job.
I worked on that chair for thirty days. No pay. Just me on the floor, erasing and tearing off paper and starting over while the actual designers walked past me. I was in the building, but I wasn’t in the profession yet.
One night after the office closed, Misha sat next to me, licked the tip of his pencil, and drew the chair to scale in a single motion. He told me about his own mentor in Russia who had given him the same test when he was fourteen. Misha had lasted ten days before he gave up. He hadn’t gotten the job.
He said he was proud of me for making it thirty. He told me he’d tutor me, and that I’d be his assistant. That was how I got the job I already had.
I still keep the brick on my desk.
Mr Call STARSTRUCK
I first saw Shawn Henderson’s work in House Beautiful. Every room looked like it had been photographed through a soft cloth. There were no loud statements or frantic patterns. Just materials. Forms. A kind of quiet that made everything else look like it was trying too hard. If Diamond Baratta was an Academy Award epic, Shawn was the indie film you actually liked. I decided I had to work for him.
His studio was near Union Square. He couldn’t afford new floors, so he had sheets of industrial MDF cut to size and laid them down. The furniture was black. The walls were his signature creamy white. He’d take a black iron window and paint the inside of the casement to match, then add a solar shade in the exact same hue. Three separate elements became a single, solid thing.
He did that constantly — small, obsessive corrections that changed the entire feel of a room. It was quietly radical.
Shawn was young and kind, with a devilish sense of humor that made Tony and Bill look like monks. I would have swept those MDF floors for free, which isn’t a workable business plan, but it pretty much sums up my twenties.
Then 2008 happened and the industry collapsed. Shawn had to let me go. I had found the work I wanted to do, only for the economy to remind me that I just wasn’t enough.
MR CALL TELEVISED
I’d lost my glamorous interior design job and landed on a television set, which felt less like a next step than being shoved through a service entrance into a wind machine. My job was to design the rooms, source them, install them, fix them, and then hand them over to Sabrina Soto so she could present them on camera.
That was the arrangement, and I understood it. I had come from design firms, where plenty of work happens under someone else’s name. On television, the name was Sabrina. And man, could she do it.
The pace was obscene. We were designing, shopping, painting, installing, hiding crimes, and filming all at once. There was no elegant handoff, just a room, a camera crew, a producer counting down, and me leaning toward Sabrina before she walked on set, whispering whatever she needed. “Benjamin Moore Hale Navy.” “Vintage brass sconces.” “Custom slipcover.”
Then she would step into the room and sell it like it had come to her in a dream. People ask if I minded that she got the credit. I didn’t. The work needed a face, and Sabrina was the face. She would climb out of a white Sprinter van, throw on heels, touch up her lip gloss, toss her hair once, and suddenly the air in the room got more expensive. No script. No rehearsal. Sometimes no more information than what I had hissed into her ear thirty seconds earlier. One take.
I was in awe of that. Truly. It is a strange thing to watch someone do exactly what they were built to do, even if that person would barely speak to you once the cameras were off. The show was twenty-three episodes of chaos — a circus with a purchase-order system. It was ridiculous. It was exhausting. It was some of the most fun I have ever had.
And then, in the middle of all of it, while I was still in scrubs, still carrying bolts of fabric, still being treated with the general dignity reserved for an inbred production assistant who had wandered too close to the talent, someone on set emailed a cell-phone photo of a job I hadn’t released yet to Newell Turner at House Beautiful. I was furious. The job was not out. It had not been approved. It was not ready to be floating through the offices of a national shelter magazine like a loose napkin.
Five minutes later, Newell wrote back himself: “Who is Mr. Call, and what is his story? Send us everything he’s done.”
And there it was. In a place where I was invisible by design, Newell saw a person. Not a stylist. Not a producer in scrubs. Not the guy whispering paint colors into someone else’s close-up. A gentleman.
Everyone asks me where the name of my company came from. It came from Newell.
Mr. Call.
Mr Call Famous
That February, not long after the email I had been so furious about, House Beautiful named me Next Wave. I left television, opened my own firm, and Mr Call Designs was born. It began in 2010 with a referral, a single photograph, and a flood of press — exactly the sort of thing that makes a person confuse momentum with a business plan.
Then the phone rang. And rang. Elle Decor. The New York Times. Vogue Italia. 1stDibs. My work was on covers. My face was in print. Editors wanted quotes. Brands wanted appearances. Clients wanted whatever the magazines had apparently discovered in me. It was absurd and immediate, and I did not ask a single question. Questions are for people who are not being offered champagne.
Kenneth Cole called. Benjamin Moore. Brooks Brothers. Google. I was invited to stand near things and make them look more “designed,” which, as it turns out, is a real job in America. And I had it. The clients became a blur of Fortune 500 executives, venture capitalists, and Academy Award winners. There were town cars and assistants and lunches that became meetings that became projects. The invoices were enormous. I wore the suits and glasses every day until they became less of an outfit than a warning.
It was as if I had walked through the mirror and come out on the other side with a better table. Overnight, the whole arrangement reversed itself. The maître d’s knew my name, and not because I was working the restaurant. I was the guest. I was not producing television anymore. I was on it. I was not clipping magazine pages for a portfolio. I was in the magazine. People were no longer taking credit for my work. I had a growing staff, and I was taking credit for theirs. I would have pinched myself, but I was already wearing the suit, and one mustn’t wrinkle the evidence. Nothing about the world had changed, exactly. I had simply been moved to the other side of the glass.
Then Elle Decor called. They wanted to photograph me with Alexa Hampton — actual decorating royalty — at Starrett-Lehigh, a building with enough New York history to make even a freight elevator feel important. There was hair, makeup, lighting, champagne, and racks of bone inlay furniture shipped in so I could have opinions about them. An assistant followed me with a legal pad, writing down my thoughts. My thoughts. On bone inlay. I had never had a thought about bone inlay in my life. Was it even legal? It didn’t matter. I had another glass of champagne. I was a decorator.
I was in the makeup chair when Alexa yelled from across the set, “Mr. Call, get your ass over here!” She had the mouth of a truck driver and could decorate like an angel.
“I’ll be right there, Alex! I’m on a call!” I yelled back.
I called her Alex because, apparently, I had become unbearable. But the suit fit. The glasses worked. The phone kept ringing. Decorating royalty was screaming my name across a studio, and I was answering like I had been expected there all along.
In that ring of makeup light, looking into the mirror, I realized I had not just named the company. I had become Mr. Call.
Mr Call Failed
The office had been making a sound for months. I had not wanted to hear it.
The night before had been the Kips Bay President’s Dinner at Cipriani. Marble. High ceilings. People kissing each other on both cheeks. I stayed too late. I drank too much. I said the things you say at dinners like that.
The next morning I stood in the studio holding a coffee I wasn’t drinking. The staff was at their desks. Then they weren’t. They were standing. They were talking. They were talking to me.
They told me I didn’t know how to run a business. They told me I didn’t know how to treat people. They told me I was good at suits and pull quotes and dinners. They told me that was all I was good at. They told me what it was like to work for me. I had not asked.
I stood there and listened. Every sentence landed. There was nowhere to put any of it down.
Then they left. Two juniors stayed. The room had been full a minute earlier. Now it wasn’t. I stood in the conference room trying not to be sick.
I called the clients. I told them they deserved better. They did. I had a lease. I had a closet of suits. I had a lifestyle that had grown the way these things grow — quietly, expensively, while you are looking at something else. I had no one to do the work.
I opened the books for the first time in a long time. The only part of the firm making money was the part I had been embarrassed by. Student housing. I had a closet of suits and a Gramercy Park townhouse and a House Beautiful Next Wave on my wall, and the thing keeping the lights on was beds for twenty-year-olds.
I kept the two juniors. I called the developer. I said the words.
The suit had gotten me through the door. The work I had been ashamed of kept me from going back out through it.
Mr Call West Virginia
The developer sent me to West Virginia to look at a project and understand the students I had spent years being too proud to think about. So there I was, in a suit and glasses, sitting alone at a campus Applebee’s at ten o’clock at night.
I had been a New York decorator. I had been photographed. I had been rich, or at least rich enough to mistake it for a personality. I had taken town cars, shopped for antiques in Hudson, and billed people more in an afternoon than the bartender made in a month. Now I was at Applebee’s because the burgers were half-off.
When you find yourself overdressed in a West Virginia Applebee’s watching twenty-year-olds do karaoke, something has gone wrong. Or, if you are lucky, something has gone right.
I ate the burger, put my Amex on the bar, and told the bartender the next round was on me. Then I asked the room, “Who wants to show me what student life is like here?”
They did.
They took me to a Bernathon in a concrete church basement, where they had strung up bedsheets with extension cords and projected black-and-white films onto them. A DJ was spinning records in the corner. Lasers cut through the air. Parents had brought potato salad. There was a punch bowl. It was ridiculous and completely sincere, which is a combination New York spends a great deal of money trying to fake.
They had used what they had. They had not waited for anyone to arrive and approve it. I stood there in my suit, looking at this room they had made out of nothing, and the only thing I could think was: good job.
Then they took me to the alternative bar, which was a Hallmark store until six o’clock. After closing, the owner cleared the snow globes and ornaments off the counter, pushed the tables together, and sold liquor from behind the gift-wrap station. It was for the goths, the dorks, the fat kids, the shy kids, the beautiful strange kids — everyone the world had set slightly to the side. One night a week, under fluorescent lights and seasonal inventory, they were invincible.
I had been to SubMercer. I had been on a floor covered in pillows with Johnny Depp. This was better.
I had come to West Virginia for a paycheck — a down-on-his-luck decorator in a suit, doing dorm rooms because the rent was due and the old life had stopped returning my calls. What I got instead was a correction. These kids were not waiting for taste to arrive from New York in a black car. They were making rooms out of what they had: bedsheets, extension cords, church basements, punch bowls, a Hallmark store after dark.
And I liked it better than the champagne.
MR CALL REAL
My mother told me once that if you cannot do the real thing, you shouldn’t do a fake thing. You should go in the opposite direction. It took me a long time to understand what she meant.
As a kid, I thought the magazines were the real thing. The rooms. The names. The people who seemed to know exactly where the good silver was kept. Later, I got inside those pages. I got the press, the clients, the tables, the suits. I became the man I had studied from the sidewalk. For a while, that felt real.
Then student housing became ten years. Thirteen states. Forty-one million dollars of furniture specified for kids who would never know my name. The work I had once been embarrassed by became the work that saved me. It gave me purpose, structure, invoices, and a reason to keep going. I loved it. I am proud of it.
But work is still work. Even good work. I had mistaken attention for love, and then I had mistaken being needed for love, which is more respectable but not much warmer.
So I followed my gut west.
Fourteen years after Mr. Call began, I moved to Palm Springs. I bought a mid-century house with a zigzag roof. My parents live four minutes away. I met Christian here — an interior designer, which is its own kind of divine punishment. We live between San Francisco and the desert with laptops, opinions, and Billie.
I had spent years giving other people a domestic life. I knew the sofa, the table, the lamp, the glass. I knew how to make a house look like someone was deeply at home. I was less skilled at arranging that for myself.
Palm Springs made room.
For dinner with someone I loved. For my parents down the street. For Billie under the desk. For a garden. For a pool. Yes, a pool. There is no reason the truth should be under-furnished.
I still care about the glass, the chair, the pillow more than is socially healthy. But I no longer need every object to prove something about me. My sofa cost fifteen hundred dollars, and it is perfectly fine. It sits near a twenty-five-thousand-dollar painting, so I assume the law of averages makes me relatable.
The farther I get from New York, the quieter the old noise becomes. For the first time in years, I can hear myself think — though, unfortunately, I still think about furniture. Maybe that is where the reviews come from: the next use of everything I learned. The magazines. The townhouses. The dorm rooms. The beautiful things. The things that lasted. The things that absolutely did not.
Misha’s brick is on the desk. Billie is under it. I am fifty-two this year. There is no suit on.
My mother was right. If you cannot do the real thing, go in the opposite direction. I finally did.
I stopped designing a life that looked right, and started making room for one that was real.