“I remember everything,” says Steve Starr. “Visuals I remember very well. I distinctly remember them putting up the wallpaper in the hallway, the gold squares.”
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The metallic gold-square wallpaper stretched the length of a 40-foot hallway connected to the four bedrooms. Paper on the foyer walls featured metallic gold clouds floating against a chocolate brown background punctuated by tiny white stars and coral unicorns. Near the front door, a white leather love seat sprouting winglike arms was flanked by two white Roman columns. The doorway itself was flanked by white plaster console tables shaped like giant scallops. Jungle-print fabric draped the walls of the living room, which was further adorned with such memorable pieces as a polished bird’s-eye-maple-and- cream-leather coffee table and a mahogany piano above which hung a painting of two elegant zebras leaping in tandem.
“My mother has really good taste,” says Starr. “She always tells people that I inherited the important thing, her good taste.” The evidence is all around him at Steve Starr Studios, the art deco shop he has owned on Clark Street near Diversey for more than two decades. Starr’s late father was a lawyer, but “not a lawyer type at all. He was easygoing. Everybody liked him. And he wore great clothes. My dad was on a list of the ten best-dressed lawyers. He always wore the best suits and a hat.”
In time, however, Starr found himself drawn once again to the past. He designed a line of art deco furnishings produced in plasterlike fiberglass: replicas of the scallop-shell console tables that had stood in the entryway on Roscoe Street were among the line’s offerings. He added vintage clothing to his shop’s wares, which in turn led him into theatrical production: Vanity, a campy musical revue that showcased his clothes, ran to sellout crowds for five years in the 70s.
“I obviously feel an affinity for certain sorts of things, although most things I’m drawn to were before my time. Why? It’s hard to say. Some people are drawn to certain objects because they like the look of it. And some, just because it reminds them of things.”
