The season's changing, and that means not only pumpkins and falling leaves, but another set of coffee board artworks at Starbucks. I currently serve five different Starbuckses, and possibly another one if I can contact the manager, who is a longtime friend of mine. Each season I think up a new theme for the boards. This summer's theme was Victorian houses and porches. For fall, I'm continuing the theme but depicting the interiors of those houses, in all their fringed and ornate glory.

I know a couple in the local area who are so enamored of Victorian design that they have decorated their own historic house in 1890s style. There are actually interior design resources that cater to such nostalgic re-constructionists. It's not cheap to outfit your home in the grand old style, but it is possible. But what if you aren't able to create your fin-de-siecle dream home?

Starbucks Coffee shops seem mired in nineties design, by which I don't mean the 1890s but the 1990s. It's interesting how the interior and graphic design of only ten or fifteen years ago looks stale while the designs of forty years past are used in clever revivals. Back in the days of the Victorian era, coffee shops were bigger versions of the upper-class private parlor, a place of elegance and leisure for ladies and gentlemen, as well as artists and writers. Just as nowadays, in the nineteenth century you might find a poet or playwright working out his verses while sitting at a table in one of these coffee houses.

It's in the spirit of the Nineties (eighteen-nineties, that is) that I create my "Gilded Age" theme signs for Starbucks this fall. I use images from period photographs of interiors, as well as a catalog for homewares dating from that era. Fringed tablecloths, grand draped curtains, beaded lampshades and hanging lanterns, coffered ceilings and wood paneling, potted palms and porcelain coffee services, make a bland brown Starbucks into a coffee house of old. Or at least you are there in the Gilded Age when you look at the illustrated coffee board.

"Starbucks Gilded Age," September 07. Opaque acrylic markers on coated metal board. The blank space in the center is for the writing, advertising the featured "coffee of the week."

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