People we Love: Arlene McGibbon
Keith Ferrazzi says in his wonderful book Never Eat Alone that it’s important to surround yourself with good mentors. I never have to go in search of them; good mentors always seem to fall at my feet just when I need them most.
It’s 1999 and I am the proud new owner of my first home. It’s a two-story loft in Montreal in the Original Stelco building. My hugely tall windows on two floors face the park and the Atwater Market. I don’t exactly have much of a budget to decorate the place so decide that the best thing to do is blow what’s left of my tip money from playing piano at the Westin Grand Cayman on new paint and carpeting and the minimum of furnishings. The previous owner had a thing for colours that were inspired by seafoam, spearmint, mould and I wonder how he didn’t go mad living with this palette. I know that I need to change this fast, but I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what kind of carpet and I certainly don’t know how to match it with all of the art that I am slowly taking out of storage and beginning to hang in all the wrong places.
Enter the tiny form of Arlene McGibbon. She comes highly recommended, and I have little idea what to expect of a ‘decorator’! (it isn’t until years later and after many years of friendship that she was responsible for the interiors of my beloved alma mater, The Thomas More Institute). I don’t have any furniture downstairs so she nonchalantly sits herself down on the floor in the centre of the room in half lotus. In half an hour she has planned the whole place, bought all of my furniture (in her head, anyway) and tells me that in four months I will never want to leave the place. Arlene McGibbon has never been wrong that I know of.
Before long, her young contractors (Arlene always manages to be surrounded by men, no matter where she is or what she’s doing) start arriving to do the work on the place. As distracting as all these comings and goings may be, the work starts to make my heart dance…I just may have a fabulous space in the making it says!
Three months later, I’m one of the few people that I know who can say that they enjoyed renovating, shopping, moving and it’s mostly because Arlene has made every trip to Rona, Home Depot, the Bay, or wherever feel like a school outing. She thinks I need more art, says that my taste thus far is evolving to be a bit “Bubbie”. She also wants to know the nature of my relationship with Ghitta Caiserman Roth, a good question now that I’ve got something of hers in every room of my house.
She takes me to artist’s studios, co-ops and introduces me to the artist Richard Roblin, who seems to keep turning up as her houseguest. She drags me to yoga class at the Atwater Library and the studio on Greene Avenue where she teaches Hatha Yoga (oh yes, another one of her accomplishments…she loves yoga!!!)
Arlene is a bit of a walking contradiction. To look at her you wouldn’t think that she might be an all American Ivy League girl. She did a degree in philosophy at Brown, the year of her matriculation being obscured in a tragic and mysterious fire that claimed her degree and transcripts, along with her birth certificate.
She travelled the world, settling for a few years in Hawaii where she hosted her own television and radio shows. As well, her artistic side found expression as she became somewhat of an understudy for the top designer who ‘did’ for the gay set in the Hawaiian Islands. And then off to Hong Kong where she found herself working in the offices of that city’s top design firm. Before long, and who could know the strange twists of fate that moved her there, she found herself working as Hugh Hefner’s administrative assistant at the Playboy Mansion. I still can’t accept that the designer that I know started out keeping the diary of the Bunny Master himself.
I love hearing her stories of her life which seem filled with chance encounters with some of the most fascinating people. She was a young friend and protégée of both Claire Booth Luce (author of The Women and later the American Ambassador to Italy) and Eugenia Bankhead (Tallulah’s sister). She eventually married into an old Canadian family and settled in Westmount, which in the early seventies was an interesting vantage point from which to observe the changing world for anyone; being Arlene McGibbon meant that she proceeded to learn absolutely everything about the strange new place around her, it’s people, their culture, their customs and their art.
Two husbands and two children later, ‘doing interiors’, as she has come to call it, has become the predominant force in her life. Stumbling along in her limited French in Montreal with her wildly eclectic assortment of clients, she is a force to reckon with. She may never be able to shake off that anglophile’s accent when she speaks French, but she assimilates the art, design and architecture of many cultures into her Brown University philosopher’s head, assimilates it, integrates it and comes up with a style of her own. It allows her clients to keep family heirlooms in a new room and marry them with stainless steel, glass, abstract art and polished concrete floors. She has developed a reputation in Montreal and throughout New England for working wonders with any space, be it a charming old century home or an uninhabitable commercial or industrial space that appears to be in ruins… somehow transforming space into comfortable, warm and intimate ‘homes’ where people intrinsically want to stop, gather, talk, share….
Arlene is the first to reinforce an important lesson. When you invest in a magnificent piece of art and properly and appropriately place it, people will want to stop, look, talk and stay. Art, to put it simply, makes people happy…or at least makes them sit up and take notice! Arlene keeps noting my strong interest in art…she keeps telling me to paint…just DO IT….well, now it seems I’m finally listening to the advice she gave me (how many years ago?) to follow my heart and explore art!!! I may not be painting but I’m going to sell a lot of paintings!!!
It may have taken me the better part of a decade before I even began to think that I might be well suited to a career in art. But I’m doing it NOW!
Clearly, I’m not as smart as many of my mentors.
