carpeting

Now Britons are growing exasperated with a decorator whose tastes run to the intellectual equivalent of avocado-colored appliances and garish shag carpeting.

Brettler removed the shag carpeting in the living area and bedroom and poured terrazzo floors to match the original floors throughout the house, many of which had to be repaired.

Its lavish, privately funded $73-million Performing Arts Center is the showpiece, where only white wine is sold, lest a splash of red stain the carpeting.

An era remembered now, if at all, for leisure suits, burnt-orange shag carpeting and muttonchop sideburns, it marked the passage from progress to reaction.

The myriad small towns are brief interludes amid the dairy and poultry farms and lush carpeting of vegetables, fruit and nut trees that stretch to the hazy-brown horizon.