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Secrets to Staying Fit
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St. Catherine's Court
Meet James Keach
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Remarkable Changes
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PHOTO ALBUM
Just Jane

GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Ten | Chapter Twelve

Chapter Eleven: Romantic Settings

Our house in England could hardly be more romantic: wood-paneled library, croquet lawn, a sense of history, and peace. It lies in a valley near Bath, in Somerset, dreaming of the past.

Find your own romantic dream house and turn it into a sanctuary for your children and family.

An English friend of mine fell in love with a beautiful Long Island beach house. She couldn't afford it. Indeed, she could hardly have afforded one room of the place.

Instead of hankering after the American house she couldn't afford, she searched maps, the newspapers, real estate agents, advertisements for somewhere by the sea, imagining at best she'd find a seaside terraced house, but hoping for more.

Her determination paid off: just a short distance from London, in Essex, she came across a tiny, secret colony of beach houses in a spectacularly beautiful bird sanctuary.

None was for sale.

But she talked to a man walking along the beach and discovered that someone was thinking of selling theirs. It has just two bedrooms but a huge terrace overlooking the sea.

She bought the house. It's much smaller than the Long Island one, but it cost her well under $20,000 as opposed to over $500,000. And it is on the beach, a secret private beach, which only the birds and she and the other owners of the fifteen or so beach houses know about.

And what she had so loved about the Long Island house she had at her small Essex house: the solitude, the sea, the closeness to the elements, the beach, and the sense of open space. What makes her place exclusive is not the price but the bird sanctuary that prevents other people from using it.

There is always a way round any problem. A dream can come true. Dreams do come true. Again, and again, and again.

Find your own romantic setting.

My friend now huddles by the open fire in her beach house and watches storms in winter, goes running over the empty beach with her small daughter in summer, watches the sun rise and set. You don't need to be rich to find perfection.

St. Catherine's is our ideal romantic setting; the beach house is hers. Discover your own. Search for it. It's there-somewhere. To find it requires thought, imagination, determination.

Like our friend, we wanted to bring up our children close to the natural world. This is important for all children. They are more comfortable among birds and dogs and flowers and trees, the old timeless world, than among the office blocks and cars of our modern civilization. St. Catherine's Court has dogs and horses and cows and natural beauty. It is a very beautiful place for a child to grow up. What is more, there is room for all our family there. Among the many things we have lost this century is a sense of family. I want to be able to share my life with my parents, at Christmas, in the summer, eating together, having parties together, exploring the countryside together. A house should be somewhere you can share with those you love.

The atmosphere of a place is its most important ingredient, and the atmosphere of St. Catherine's is that of happiness and the family. You have to work at an atmosphere.
It's the atmosphere that makes a setting romantic. The writer Jan Morris actually leaves beautiful music playing in her Welsh house when it is empty, because she feels it affects the mood of her house, makes it welcoming, as though the walls soak up the music. Similarly, happiness gives more atmosphere to a home than all the fine furniture and paintings in the world.

Make sure your friends and family come to your home, make it somewhere warm and welcoming for you and for them. In the midst of all the rush and bother of this century, your home should be your sanctuary, somewhere to be at peace, somewhere you can feel sane again, can talk easily to your friends, can contact your family.

St. Catherine's Court is somewhere we can re-create an old-fashioned world based on romance and the family. We don't play at being lords and ladies of the manor, but we do escape into a better, older world, close to the children, to nature, to our family. It is something we all need to do if we're going to cope with the demands of our fast modern life. Here, all over the soft stone, grow ivy and flowers. I love the animals and crests on the crumbly walls and the way the leaves of the mulberry tree press against the window of the drawing room. Everywhere, it seems, there are leaves pressing against the leaded windows: the leaves of yew trees, fir trees. The windows throw squares of sunlight on the wooden floors, and we keep fresh flowers on the white window sills.

There were no gardens here when we first came, only weeds. But it was still ravishing. We could imagine what it had been like, what it could be like. We discovered steps that had been buried for years in weeds and brambles. There were no fences. We had to cut away through masses and masses of nettles. We cut away and cut away and discovered two fish ponds with natural flowing water. The previous owner didn't know they existed. They were completely overgrown.

The whole place was falling apart. The top floor, which is now the nursery floor, hadn't been touched for decades. It was a warren of small rooms, where the servants used to live.

For us, renovating St. Catherine's was paying a debt to the past, and expressing a hope for the future. I think that creating a home, in particular renovating an old house, is always a positive act. You are creating your own world, with respect for the past. If you do it well, it is a great achievement, and one that provides great comfort. In this modern age we are too often cut off from the past. Oddly enough, one reason we were sold the house was because the owner was a re-headed Catherine. And when she saw another red-headed Catherine-little Katie-she felt that it was right, and we had it. Those kinds of connections are important, because connections-a sense of the past and the future-are necessary to the romantic life. None of us lives alone; we live with others, within time. A romantic setting is nothing without atmosphere.

Always find out about the place where you live: discover hits history, its legends. Even if you live in a modern house, the land upon which it was build was there in the nineteenth century, in the eighteenth. Make it your business to know its history, to care for its past. Remember you too are a part of history. St. Catherine's has a long and rich history. It was given by Henry VIII to his beloved illegitimate daughter, but before that it was owned be Benedictine monks. There has been a church here since then called Katerina or St.Catherine's. Parts of the kitchen date back to 950.

We try to bring the past into the present: sitting up above the main doorway is a stone effigy of Bungie, the Elizabethan owner's faithful dog. But your dream house, close to nature, close to the seasons, doesn't have to be expensive or big or costly to run.

Either look for the house of your dreams or turn wherever you are into a romantic setting.

I try to make wherever I am romantic. In my job I sometimes have to move from one dreary hotel room to another. It's essential not to give up, not just to accept that it's dreary. Never be downcast by your environment. If you don't like it, change it. The whole atmosphere of a room can be changed with just a few inexpensive touches.

Switch off electric lights, which show up the orange walls a avocado bedspreads of the hotel room, and replace them with flickering candlelight and the lush smell of scented candles instead of the smell of vacuum cleaners and detergents.

Buy fresh flowers, add your own lacy pillow to the bed, have some of your favorite books lying around, and bring your loved ones with you by having tiny picture frames to put by your bed.

Turn on some music, or bring your own favorite music, and in about twenty minutes that dull hotel room will be your own individual room.

Don't put up with living in gloomy places. Anywhere can be beautiful. It simply needs a little thought and imagination.

You are unusual, you are unique. Be true to your own tastes, however outlandish or odd they might seem to others, and you will create something as unique as you are. Frame your grandmother's patchwork quilt, cover a wall with hats, spend all your money on one beautiful painting.

At home as well as when you're traveling, you must be yourself. You mustn't accept someone else's vision of who you are or what is right or wrong. A strong sense of self is the secret behind excellence in every field-whether it's giving a good, unusual dinner party of decorating a roomin your personal style. You must project your own fantasy of yourself not what you think someone else wants you to be. Sit in your living room and say: "Is this my room or is this the neighbor's room? Is this the room I've built for other people or is this the room I've built for other people or is this the room I've built for me?" Only by developing your own vision will you furnish and decorate a room with flair.

Think about lighting first of all. A beautiful room can be spoiled by poor lighting. Place candles in the fireplace, lights behind plants, hurricane lamps on the floor. Use lighting that flatters, but can also be altered to provide good lighting for reading and writing.

In the tiny apartment where I stayed when I first came to Hollywood I lived on the floor because I couldn't afford a sofa. That was fine. I lived Japanese style, with cushions on the floor, picnics on the floor, a low coffee table, plenty of simple flower displays and plain colors. My luxuries were the occasional old plate or piece of cut glass bought at sale to add color and variety. I love deliberately mismatched old plates used together; they have an air of drama and the past that a perfect dinner service can never achieve.

When I could finally afford to buy a sofa, I still lived on the floor!

The New York loft where I stayed while acting in Amadeus was very start-so I filled it with flowers. Fresh flowers every day.

Give your room, apartment, or house a particular atmosphere. Instead of buying a boring chair, think about putting in a small stained-glass window or buying French lace curtains or a big picture that transforms the room. Wherever you live, whatever your finances, don't play it safe. Go for the exotic, the marvelous, the outrageous, the beautiful. Don't make do with looking average. Spend that bit of extra time and trouble. Hang your collection of straw hats in your hall instead of smart wallpaper, have a cluster of old vases all on one table, pick wild flowers, buy or make embroidered cushions, fix kimonos to the walls instead of paintings.

It is easy, once you become used to your home, no longer to notice it. But it should be somewhere that interests you and pleases you every second you spend there.

Nothing need be expensive. In our house, St. Catherine's, we have a superb romantic bed, with pink and gray drapings hanging from the ceiling. It is not difficult to hang material from the ceiling to make a draped fabric canopy that falls around the bed, giving it the effect of a fourposter.

At the other end of the room is a small sitting area, and I recommend this idea to anyone who has the space: it is an excellent way for husband and wife to have their own private escape area for reading and being together.

The bedroom should be the best room in the house, somewhere you want to spend time, for loving and living. The problem is that his ideas and yours about what is a romantic bedroom are likely to be quite different. Women usually favor floral, flouncy rooms, whereas men like plainer, harder colors. Make sure you choose something that suits you both. A bedroom is where you should both feel comfortable, sexy, and happy.

A good idea for transforming any bedroom into an exotic place is simply to extend long curtains all the way around the room so that when you go to bed you draw the curtains and the room changes from a daytime area to a romantic, draped room. Use velvet curtains, oriental cottons, or any material you like.

Have old unmatched linen pillowcases-linen that has been washed and washed until it feels like silk. You can buy freshly laundered antiques linens in flea markets. Fresh fabrics, real cotton, feel good against the skin, and a romantic bed should be sensual, luxurious, beautiful.

Bathrooms are nearly as important as bedrooms for the romantic. They shouldn't be just functional rooms. They should be places to bathe together, talk together, relax together. Inn a bath you can just soak away all the worries and troubles, and feel them put away with the water down the drain. Plenty of bath essence, hot water, a bottle of champagne or chilled wine, the right music, the right man. It's my idea of heaven. Let him give you a facial massage as you bathe, or you give him one. The way to become an expert masseuse is simply to think what feels good to you, and then do that to him. Massage the forehead, the neck, the head, let him feel all those anxieties being smoothed away.

Put together a tape of your favorite music-Vivaldi, La Boheme, the Beatles, whatever it might be-so you don't have to keep getting up to change the music.

Use tricks, use your imagination, and keep altering your environment as you alter and develop.