An Aesthete's Lament

Well Said: Lily Bart

2012-01-20T09:08:00.000-05:00

Manhattan debutante turned silent-movie actress Katherine Harris Barrymore (1891-1927). She portrayed Lily Bart in director Albert Capellani's 1918 film of "The House of Mirth."

"If only I could do over my aunt's drawing-room, I know I should be a better woman."

So said Lily Bart, tragic heroine of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth.

Well Said: Elsa Schiaparelli

2012-01-18T14:42:00.000-05:00

"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale."

So said Elsa Schiaparelli (1890—1973), fashion provocateur, inspired hostess, patron of the arts, and author of the engaging memoir Shocking Life.

From the Archives: John Vesey, The Next Big Thing?

2012-01-14T23:12:00.000-05:00

John Vesey, furniture designer and future felon, sitting in a
solid-aluminum Thonet-style rocking chair in his New York City
showroom, 1965. Image from The New York Times.

NOTE: This article, originally published on this blog on 18 November 2008, has been updated with new images, additional text, and a bibliography. That last-named feature is a research source list that will become a feature of An Aesthete's Lament.

As the strippers in the musical Gypsy! state in clarion tones, "You gotta have a gimmick." This is true in so many professions, whether bumping and grinding or designing furniture. For John Vesey, shown above, a once prominent but now puzzlingly obscure American talent of the 1950s and 1960s, the gimmick was taking traditional furniture forms and translating them into crisp, cool metal, usually aluminum and stainless steel, often with accents of polished brass.

Who took his glittering bait? Oil magnate Howard Hughes, for one, as well as art dealer Leo Castelli, international public-relations man Count Rudi Crespi, fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, and Ira Howard Levy, the president of Estée Lauder cosmetics. A Vesey profile published in 1965 fairly swooned listing the designer's high-society clients, among them fashion model-turned-Warhol superstar Jane Holzer; heiress Wendy Vanderbilt; Italian socialite Countess Gioconda Cicogna; automotive divorcée Anne McDonnell Ford; the beautiful Sunny von Bulow; the even lovelier Isabel Eberstadt; French aristocrat Count Charles de Rohan-Chabot; Greek shipping heiress Chrysanthe Goulandris; stylist Vidal Sassoon; Governor Nelson Rockefeller; and Condé Nast president and chairman Iva Patcévitch. The same article declared Diana Ross of The Supremes "one of John Vesey's best customers."

A pair of Vesey-designed metal chairs with wickerwork seats and backs, from the 1960s. The chairs are being offered at the 2012 Winter Antiques Show by dealer Liz O'Brien.

A steel campaign-style chair by Vesey, 1957. Image from The New York Times.

Today it is major dealers who are transfixed by Vesey's work, and they are bringing his designs to a new generation. Gallerists R. Louis Bofferding, Liz O'Brien, and Gail Garlick of Good Design are among today's keenest admirers. Bofferding, for instance, once possessed one of Vesey's most striking designs, a round occasional table whose bulbous openwork metal base was sparked by, of all things, an American wool winder. In O'Brien's current stock is a pair of Directoire-inflected chairs, shown above, dating from the 1960s. She will have them on display in her booth at the Winter Antiques Show, which opens to the public on Friday, 20 January.

As this blog noted at the time, at the 2008 Modernism Show in New York City, Garlick showcased several vintage Vesey pieces in Good Design's sparsely decorated stand—two lounge chairs modelled after Cuban planter's chairs, a console whose glass top is supported by stainless-steel sawhorses, and a polished-aluminum campaign-style bench. It was arguably the biggest collection of his work pulled together in one place within recent memory. Garlick's next big Vesey show begins 20 January, at her gallery, Good Design; it runs for six weeks.

A pair of Vesey benches made of powder-coated wrought aluminum. The shape is a modern rendition of the Savonarola chair of the Middle Ages. The benches are offered by Good Design, and the image is from Artnet.

A pair of Vesey's calfskin-upholstered chairs from his "luxurious, costly" Maximilian Group, circa 1958. The chairs and its matching sofa were inspired by classic Cuban planter's chairs. Two of these were among the furnishings of photographer Cecil Beaton's London townhouse. A version with fine woven-aluminum mesh as the sole upholstery cost $355 in 1958. Image from Design Addict.

Six-foot-six-inches tall and matinée-idol handsome, John Vesey Colclough Jr was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on 22 September 1924, the only son and youngest child of John Vesey Colclough Sr, an investment banker, and his wife, Bertha. (His elder siblings were Florence, Marjorie, and Norina.) The family was not only prosperous but distinguished, descended from a famous Irish landlord of the 18th century, Vesey Colclough, chatelain of a much-admired County Wexford landmark, Tintern Abbey. And Colclough Sr's dynamic sister, Pauline Adams, was one of the bright lights of America's women's suffrage movement.

During the Depression, however, the finances of Colclough's parents collapsed. To make ends meet, his mother took a job managing an apartment house, while his father found employment as a salesman in the local traffic bureau. According to a profile published in 1958 in The New York Times, John Vesey Colclough Jr intended to be a museum curator and actually studied at Harvard for a year. But on 19 May 1943—after a brief stint in banking—he joined the Merchant Marine. Following World War II he surfaced in Manhattan as an antiques dealer with a specialty in 18th- and 19th-century French and English furniture and art. By this time he also had dropped his Irish surname (which was pronounced COAL-claw in case you were wondering).

A button-tufted leather Chesterfield sofa with metal legs by John Vesey, circa 1960. In 1965 an article in The New York Times illustrated a smaller version anchoring the Manhattan living room of art dealer Leo Castelli, which had been decorated by interior designer John Elmo. Another article pointed out that Vesey's sofa's cost $300 a foot. The example shown here sold for $55,000 at Wright last year.

After experiencing some success and then selling off his stock of antiques at Parke-Bernet Galleries, Vesey began exploring the possibilities of metal in 1956, driven by a fascination with steel furniture of the past. In 1957 he opened a showroom at 150 East 54th Street in New York City, and by the next year he had produced 15 designs. That year he moved his business to 235 East 58th Street (eventually he ended up at 969 Third Avenue), and an article about its debut describes a spacious interior displaying arresting metal furnishings alongside luxurious fur rugs and huge paintings.

Once part of the furnishings of the Rome apartment of Rudi and Consuelo Crespi, this brass-and-steel Vesey writing table (now sold) was recently in the stock of Manhattan dealer Gerald Bland.

Count Rodolfo "Rudi" Crespi at the same writing table, in the master bedroom of his apartment in Palazzo Odescalchi in Rome, Italy, 1969, which was decorated by American expatriate designer Howard Dilday. Until recently the writing table stood in the New York City apartment of Crespi's widow, Consuelo. Image by Patrick Morin from The New York Times.

"Steel is putty in John Vesey's hand," The New York Times reported in 1958, noting that the designer utilized craftsmen in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Long Island for the metalwork, while the leather upholstery was given over to artisans in Manhattan's Chinatown. "He bends [steel], tapers it, and turns it," the newspaper's reporter Rita Reif explained, "ending up with chairs and tables as beautiful as the antiques that inspired him."

Beautiful, yes, but the results meld surreality, industrial chic, and sadomasochism. There is something perverse, after all, in taking an otherwise uncontroversial furniture form like Thonet bentwood rocker and reproducing it in gleaming solid aluminum and replacing its woven-cane panels with fine, anodized metal mesh. That unexpected transmutation takes the Art Nouveau icon from cozily curlicue to brutally chic—and with exceptional attention to quality. Vesey's aluminum creations, Design Forecast magazine favorably noted in 1959, are "wrought, not cast; [the] frame of each chair or sofa is one solid piece."

A 19th-century American wool winder, used in the production of yarn, was the inspiration for this hallmark Vesey design: an openwork metal occasional table. This example is available from dealer John Salibello.

A Vesey ottoman, circa 1965. Image from Mondo Cane.

Over the next decade Vesey was a wild success, his talents spoken of in the same breath as contemporary tastemakers such as John Dickinson and Baron Alessandro Albrizzi. By 1969 he intended to take even greater leaps of style. As Vesey explained to The New York Times, "I want to copy this 1800 antler chair in metal. It would be a real kooky chair for a far-out apartment." Indeed it would have but whether that swinging design made it off his drawing board is unknown. What is certain is that Vesey's high-flying career came crashing to the ground two years later.

A pair of Napoléon III-inspired armchairs by Vesey, made of chromed steel and leather. They sold in 2011 at Rago Auctions for $13,000. The original model cost $465 in 1958. Image from Artnet.

After sexually assaulting a 17-year-old high-school dropout he picked up early one morning at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and took to his duplex townhouse apartment at 105 East 64th Street, Vesey was sentenced to five years in prison. During this enforced absence from the American design scene, his company, John Vesey Designs Inc., was sold, sold again, and eventually closed. As for Vesey, after his release, he lived quietly and obscurely, ultimately dying of pneumonia on 14 April 1992 in Rhinebeck, New York.

Offered by the Manhattan gallery Good Design, this Vesey cocktail table from the 1960s is made of polished stainless steel and brass and bears its original 3/4-inch glass top. Image from Artnet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ancestry.com

Bender, Marylin, "In Rome, Home Can Be a Palace or a Nest of Steel and Plastic," The New York Times, 19 May 1969

De Halve Maen (Holland Society of New York, 1981), page xxxiv

Design Forecast, Volume 1 (Aluminum Company of America), 1 January 1959, page 20

"Designer Gets 5 Years," The New York Times, 22 January 1972

Drayton, Cynthia A. "John Vesey: Style and Scandal," Modern Magazine, Fall 2011

Fosburgh, Lacey, "Furniture Designer Convicted of Homosexual Attack on Boy," The New York Times, 16 December 1971

"Home Beat: David Katz Has Made Secret Hiding Places His Business," The New York Times, 30 March 1978

Klemensrud, Judy, "5 Place-Setting Men Test Skill at Table-Setting," The New York Times, 21 September 1968

O'Brien, George, "New on the Home Front," The New York Times, 15 March 1964

Reif, Rita, "A New Age of Metals," The New York Times, 8 August 1965

Reif, Rita, "It's Lethal Looking, It's Weirdly Shaped—and It's Back in Style," The New York Times, 19 March 1969

Reif, Rita, "New Styling on an Old Design," The New York Times, 11 November 1967

Reif, Rita, "Steel Is Putty in Hands of Furniture Designer," The New York Times, 28 August 1958

Sheppard, Eugenia, "Newest Status Symbol—Furniture by John Vesey," Corpus Christi Caller-Times, 19 May 1968, page 11G

"Steel Takes Its Place in Decoration," The New York Times, 5 October 1957

Sverbeyeff, Elizabeth, "Life with Pop," The New York Times, 2 May 1965

"Van Gogh Canvas to Be Auctioned," The New York Times, 6 November 1955

Well Said: Hélène Rochas

2012-01-05T20:08:00.000-05:00

An acrylic-and-silkscreen portrait of Hélène Rochas by Andy Warhol, 1974.

“I’m against the idea of dressing young—that shows fear."

So said Hélène Rochas (1927—2011), former fashion model, international beauty, and director of the Paris perfume house of the same name, following the 1955 death of her first husband, Marcel Rochas. Among the scents she inspired or commissioned were Femme de Rochas (a wedding gift from her husband in 1944), Madame Rochas (launched in 1960), Eau de Roche (aka Eau de Rochas), and Muse de Rochas.

Requiescat in Pace: Eva Zeisel

2011-12-31T13:01:00.002-05:00

“Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.”

So said industrial designer Eva Zeisel, who died yesterday at age 105, after a rich, creative, and highly influential life.

Well Said: Coco Chanel

2011-12-20T06:59:00.000-05:00

"It is as dreadful to be too rich as to be too tall. In the first instance you don't find happiness and in the second you can't find a bed."

So said couturière Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971), as quoted in The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand (Pushkin Press, 2008).

From the Archives: By George

2011-12-07T00:04:00.001-05:00

Roumania-born, Tunisia-based tastemaker George Sebastian in the 1930s.

NOTE: This post was originally published in 2009 and has been updated with additional research. As further information becomes available, it will be incorporated into the text. Many thanks to an anonymous reader, who has alerted me to a February 1935 "Country Life in America" article about Dar Sebastian, which has supplied more details. I would also like to thank Med Mehdi Sahli and Julien Lévy for their contributions.

Design history is populated bymysterious personalities—decorators who doggedly remain in the shadows, craftsmen of uncommon brilliance who left few documentsbehind, patrons who languish in obscurity despite their onetime prominence. Consider GeorgeSebastian, for instance. A polyglot Roumanian with crystal-blue eyes and brilliantined hair, he put Hammamet, Tunisia, on the map in the early 1930s and built Dar Sebastian, one of North Africa's mostadmired residences. (It is now the International Cultural Center of Hammamet.) American poet Robinson Jeffers, in a letter to a friend in 1940, called it "the great Moorish house one always sees when a perfect house is pictured in architectural magazines."

Until recently the details of Sebastian's life have been largely conjecture but an enterprising Roumanian scholar, Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, has cleared the fog. Karl Gheorghe Sebastian was born on21 September 1896, in the city of Bacău, north of Bucharest. His father, Chiril Sebastian, may have been Russian; his mother, Moldovan aristocrat Maria Keminger de Lippa, was a baroness whose relations were stars of Romania’s glittering social goulash. Her half brother Prince Dimitrie Ghika-Comăneşti was a celebrated explorer, while another married the sister of Queen Natalie of Serbia. Princess Marthe Bibesco, the poet and novelist, was a relative; one cousin's wife was Liane de Pougy, the ravishing French dancer and grande horizontale, and Maria's nephew Prince Barbu Ştirbey was the lover of Romania's queen consort—and likely the biological father of her youngest child. By blood or marriage, Madame Sebastian and her son were connected to most of Roumania's consonant-rich, crème-de-la-crème clans, including the Mavrocodatos, Cantacuzenes, Ştirbeys, Sturdzas, and Lahovarys.

Enveloped in an aura of power and privilege seasoned with Mitteleuropean exoticism, George Sebastian arrived on the internationalscene in 1918 or thereabouts and settled in the fashionable Paris suburb of Neuilly sur Seine, at 2 rue Frédéric Passy. For a while, he was employed as a clerk, and he traveled at least once to the United States, in 1924, in the company of Roumanian diplomat and banker Radu Irimescu and his American tannery-heiress wife. With the relocation from Eastern Europe to France, significant friendships developed. Sebastian fell into the orbits of interior designer Jean-Michel Frank and society photographerBaron de Meyer. Somewherealong the line he befriended the future Duchess of Windsor, either (says one source)during her youthful sojourn in Peking during her first marriage or (says another)through her second husband, Ernest Simpson. It was not, however, an unblemished association. As a letter Simpson wrote to his erstwhile wife attests, he was mortified when, at the Guards' Club, Sebastian "insisted on holding my hand throughout lunch," for reasons unknown.

Perhaps the most intense relationship was with Porter Woodruff (1894—1959), an American artist, who designed covers for House & Gardenand sketched fashions for Vogue. Records suggest they met shortly after the first world war. A biography of artist and costume designer Gordon Conway, a mutual friend, states that Woodruff was Sebastian's inamorato and that the two lived together in France and Tunisia. (Woodruff painted some strikingly attractive views of Hammamet as well as dashing scenes of North African life.) Affairs of the heart aside, the suave Roumanian formed a marital alliance in 1929 with Flora Witmer, an attractive American widow a couple of decades his senior. Fifty-two to Sebastian's 32, she swiftly shavedoff a few years—seven to be exact—in an effort to reduce the chronological gap.

Flora E. Witmer, the future Mrs George Sebastian, in 1922.

Flora Sebastian in a detail from an early 1930s photograph, likely snapped at Dar Sebastian, her winter residence in Tunisia. Image courtesy of a Stifel family member.

How bride and groom met is unknown, though a chance meeting at one of Europe's watering holes wouldn't be surprising. More important is what the widow Witmer brought to George Sebastian's life: a great deal of money and an apparent willingness to allow him to spend it to his heart's content. A native of Wheeling, West Virginia, the former FloraElizabeth Stifel (1877—1939) was an heiress to a fortune built on the manufacture of printed calico. The family firm, J. L. Stifel & Sons, was founded in 1835 by her paternal grandfather, a German immigrant, and it churned out millions of yards of indigo-dyed cotton a month. She also possessed, in comparison, a fleabite legacy from her first husband,Porterfield Krauth Witmer (1871—1920), cofounder of a Des Moines insurance and real estate agency.

How Mrs Witmer amused herself during nine years of widowhood has yet to be ascertained, though it appears she spent some time upgrading her appearance. A 1922 passport photograph shows a glum-looking creature with an unflattering bob and wearing a blouse with an untidy collar and a mannish striped tie; about a decade later, the camera records a woman who is the very model of American chic, draped with pearls, her dark hair elegantly coiffed and crowned by a smart halo-brimmed hat. Somehow, somewhere Flora Witmer crossed paths with George Sebastian. And eventually, dear reader, she married him. One month after they sailed together to New York City from Cherbourg, aboard the Leviathan, Mrs Porterfield Krauth Witmer became Madame Charles George Sebastian on the evening of 23 November 1929. Following the brief Lutheran ceremony—held in, of all locations, Porter Woodruff's apartment at 230 East 50th Street—the newlyweds traveled to Canada for a honeymoon and, thence, to Paris, which would be their home base. Winters would be spent in palm-shaded Hammamet.

The main entranceof Dar Sebastian, which was constructed circa 1932 by GeorgeSebastian, with the assistance of a Sicilian builder, Vincenzo Dicara. The door surround is made of carved marble; on the roof is glimpsed a bit of Flora Sebastian's breakfast room. Image by David Massey from "Maisons de Hammamet" (Dar Ashraf Editions, 1988).


A 1930s photograph of the bay-side façade of the Sebastianmansion, which is made of concrete and stucco painted a blinding shade of white. Image by George Hoyningen-Huene.

A 1930s view of the breakfast room on the roofof Dar Sebastian, which is walled with traditional mashrabiya panels; the interior of the space featured yellow cushions, a departure from the house's largely black-and-white decor. Image by George Hoyningen-Huene.

A sleepy fishing village with a ravishing beach and houses as square and white as sugar cubes, Hammamet had come into fashion in the 1920s, some four decades after Tunisia had been taken over as a French protectorate. Its relative proximity to Italy, located little more than 100 miles northeast across the Strait of Sicily, helped too. Hammamet—beautiful, unspoiled, exotic—became a station of the cross for thrill-seeking socialites, who snapped up local embroideries, dined on coucous, and bronzed themselves by the shore as jasmine perfumed the air. George Sebastian lost no time in establishing a foothold there, his first visit being in 1925. Soon he acquired some 42 acres of farmland on the Bay of Hammamet and began planning a winter residence.

The construction date is unclear. One sourceclaims the house was built in 1927, another declares that 1932 is the correct completion date, andyet another says construction began in 1923 and was finished seven years later. The book Maisons de Hammamet states that ground was broken in1927 and construction completed in 1930. A correspondent, however, has mentioned that a plan of the house indicates it was constructed in stages, from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, and has provided a supporting image, which is reproduced below.

Originally called Dar el Kbira (The Big House) and now known as Dar Sebastian (Sebastian House), this North African pleasure dome was designed by George Sebastian, who plucked ideas from regional mosques, marabouts, and museums and combined them with the assistance of a local builder, Vincenzo Dicara, a native of Sicily. (Flora, presumably, picked up the tab as the house became ever larger.) Low-slung,snow-white, and dappled with delicate handcarved screens known as mashrabiya, the house won the approval of French Vogue, which called its style "arabe modernisée" and admired its "lignes sobres et pures." Le Corbusierand Frank Lloyd Wright found the lean, uncomplicated structure worthy of abundant praise, with the latterapparently describing it as "the most beautiful house I know," hailing the structure's arcaded swimming pool and air of fantasy.

Propped above the living room fireplace is displayed a framed plan of the Sebastian residence. The completed house is shown at center—a reverse L-shape, with the pool tucked into the right angle, the covered patio alongside, and, below that space, the long living room. Pictured at the right of this plan are three insets showing the various stages of construction, from top to bottom.

Exterior of Dar Sebastian, showing the main entrance (left) and the bay-side loggia (center). On the roof of the house is a suite of rooms, including a lattice-walled breakfast room and a bath with a sunken marble tub. Image by George Hoyningen-Huene, French "Vogue," January 1935.

"Thehouse, perfect and requiring no ornament, is like a line that never breaks," couturière Elsa Schiaparelli, a part-time Hammamet resident, recalled in her enchanting autobiography, Shocking Life. "The architectureis white and smooth—arcade after arcade, alleys of ever growing cypresses, and avast crystal blue swimming pool; a long black marble table, on banquet days veiledwith tuberoses, asphodels, and lilies of the sand." Indoors groin-vaulted rooms sheltered spare gatherings of sinewy furniture by Frank, Eyre de Lanux, and othergilded createurs of the time, and here and there stood painted screens by George Sebastian's friend, Porter Woodruff, as did hassocks of red leather. A mashrabiya-paneled room on the roof of the house—overlooking the bay and variously described as a breakfast room or a reading room—featured goldenrod-yellow cushions, while the ground-floor patio had a translucent ceiling made of squares of Lalique glass.

FloraSebastian at her winter residence in Tunisia, accompanied by a fox terrier. Sheis seated in what appears to be a classic Roorkhee campaign chair, versions ofwhich are still retailed today, notably by Melvill &Moon. Image by George Hoyningen-Huene, French "Vogue," January 1935.

Everyone from Wallis Simpson to Jean Cocteau gladly made the 40-mile trip from Tunis to Hammamet to bask in the Sebastians' hospitality. (Somerset Maugham and Greta Garbo came too, as did Cecil Beaton.) The photographer Horst, another Hammamet habitué, recalled being bedazzled by the Sebastians' "many handsome Berber servants." Among them, presumably, was the live-in cook, Sadok, a cleancut gentleman whose culinary expertise was the focus of an article published in American Vogue in August 1935; entitled "My Cook is an Arab," it extolls Sadok's skills, notably his way with couscous, chachouka (lightly fried eggs set atop chopped and cooked vegetables), and roast Tunisian partridge, which the article described as "remarkably plump ... with succulent white flesh, less gamy and more tender than the smaller [European] birds"). Meals at Dar Sebastian typically ended with fresh white or black figs from the garden, watermelon, or ice cream. The last-named confection was produced in a machine called an Economy Cream Maker, which the Sebastians proclaimed "a salvation ... for any one who lives in a country where the dairy resources are not of the best." The couple's enjoyment of Hammamet was so enriched by their cook that, they observed in the Vogue article, "should any strange circumstance ever draw us from Hammamet it would undoubtedly draw Sadok with it, so integral a part of our household has he become."

Prior to engaging Sadok, however, the Hammamet kitchen was manned by François Rysavy, the Czech-born chef of the Paris restaurant Au Danube Bleu, whom they hired shortly after their marriage. "Two automobiles were waiting for us when we got off the boat in Tunis," recalled Rysavy—later to be White House chef during the Eisenhower Administration—"and Sebastian chose to drive his Renault convertible himself, with his wife [who spoke no French] beside him, while I road grandly in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes ..." (The driver was likely Sebastian's young Austrian valet and chauffeur, Franz Leitner.) The dish Rysavy's new employers loved most was the French classic Poulet Sauté Chausseur, or sautéed chicken with mushrooms and tomato sauce. The dish was the main course of a meal he created for Wallis and Ernest Simpson when they stayed with the Sebastians in March 1932. (Knowing the couple was strapped for cash at the time, their host sent them round-trip tickets, leading Wallis to splurge on a new linen suit. Ernest and his fourth wife, Avril, would visit the Sebastian house again after their wedding in 1948.) Presumably it was served beside the swimming pool, at that great black marble refectory table that Schiaparelli so admired and which was adapted from a Jean-Michel Frank design.

When the Sebastians' guests weren't dining well—Rysavy stayed in their employ for several years, and the couple sent him to London to learn English, so he could talk with Flora—they were being inspired culinarily. Mary Oliver, a childhood friend of Paul Bowles' and the wife of a British department-store heir, stayed frequently at Dar Sebastian and came up with Stuffed Peppers Hammamet, which made it into The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The directions are as follows: "Boil barley in salted water until tender—it should absorb all the water. Mix with chopped onions and parsley. Fill green peppers with this mixture, cover with olive oil, and put in oven. Serve with sauce made of lemon juice and paprika."

The livingroom, with chalk-white walls and vaulted ceiling and whitemarble floor. Armchairs designed by Eyrede Lanux were upholstered in white wool and gathered around a vast white divanthat was flanked by white-plaster lamps with molded swags. The other dominant coloraccent in the house was black, in the painted door frames and window grilles as well as some furnishings. Alongside the divan, as well as standing in the far corner, are Jean-Michel Frank's Ananas low tables. A leather hassock and a zebra-skin rug can be glimpsed at the photograph's lower right-hand corner. Image by GeorgeHoyningen-Huene for French "Vogue," January 1935.

A pair of Eyre de Lanux armchairs. Multiples of the same model were purchased by Flora and George Sebastian for their Hammamet house. Designed around 1925, the chairs sold in 2007 at Christie's New York for $85,000.

A circa-1934 Ananas low table by Jean-Michel Frank. Several were used throughout Dar Sebastian, though in raw waxed oak. Offered by Galerie Vallois, Paris. Image from Artnet.com.

The living room of Dar Sebastian today. The doors at the left lead to the pool; the doors at the center open to the patio, and the door at right leads to the bay-side loggia. Image fromTunisia.com.

The patio, strewn with zebra hides and furnished with leather hassocks, that connects the living room with the pool area. The glass for the ceiling reportedly was manufactured by Lalique. Image by George Hoyningen-Huene, French "Vogue," January 1935.

The patio as seen today. The column-and-arch sequences throughout the house were adapted from similar architectural details at the Great Mosque of Sidi-Uqba in Kairouan, Tunisia. Image from Sejurtunisia.ro.

A scan of a Porter Woodruff illustration of the patio at Dar Sebastian. The work, presumably executed in the 1930s, is used courtesy of a Stifel family member.

A bronze bust of George Sebastian, displayed in the patio; it has since been hideously polished. Image from the blog Hai-hui prin Tunisia.

Though the house is almost entirely empty now, being used as a gallery and for receptions, a handful of original furnishings remain on the premises. There are several low oak Ananas cocktail tables by Frank, which when I last saw them were sway-backed by exposure to the elements. (I had the good fortune to spend a brief but fruitfulsojourn in Hammamet more than a decade ago, but that’s another story.) That weighty poolside dining table remains in place too. Other Frank designs were purchased for the house too, including an upholstered stool paired with a dressing table (both pieces have vanished).

The most extraordinary space is a ground-floor suite whose bath is centered on a sunken marble tub inspired by a sixth-century Paleo-Christian baptistry. Some observers have examined the tub's shape and size—four curved lobes, each with steps that could also serve as seats—and believed it to be a communal hot tub, a sort of hammam, where the occupants could submerge themselves in steaming water. It seems far more likely that the bath and adjoining bedroom and dressing room were the domain of Flora Sebastian (other bedrooms are located around the ground-floor patio). Perhaps the unusual tub and the mirrored double doors surrounding it are merely her husband's essay in Hollywood-meets-North-Africa extravagance, created for the American heiress who made it all possible.

Upstairs, on the roof, is another master suite, presumably George's, overlooking the Bay of Hammamet. Paved with black marble, it is comprised of a large dressing room (its mirror-clad wardrobes and three-panel cheval glass are still in situ); a small bath; a bedroom with a six-door low mirrored cabinet stretching from one wall to another; and the previously mentioned lattice-walled space, used either as a breakfast room or a reading room.

A black-marble staircase leads to the rooftop master suite.

A groin vault crowns the rooftop bedroom; the marble-framed arch on the right leads to a small bath and the latticework room beyond, while the arch to the left opens to a mirrored dressing room. Just visible, in the lower right-hand corner, is the room's fireplace.

The fireplace in the second-floor bedroom; note the carved marble frame of the door to the bath.

The uncrowned king of Hammamet, George Sebastian,dressed in a djellaba, circa 1940.

In the ground-floor master suite, the furniture—herean upholstered stool, presumably by Jean-Michel Frank, and dressing table—was sheathed in pale parchment set off by a colorful striped runner. The door frame, like much of the woodwork and wrought iron used in Dar Sebastian, is painted black.

One of Dar Sebastian's bedrooms, as seen today. Image from Tunisia.com.

The extraordinary sunken marble tub in the ground-floor suite of Dar Sebastian; the bidet and sink are concealed behind the mirrored doors. The tub's shape interprets that of a sixth-centuryPaleo-Christian mosaic baptistry that is one of the treasures of the Bardo National Museum in Tunis.


The marble-tiled swimming pool that occupies one wing ofthe house is bordered by arcades, distinguished by horseshoe arches supported by squat marble arches. Image by David Massey from "Maisons de Hammamet" (Dar Ashraf Editions, 1988).

A closeup of the poolside dining table, made of black marbleafter the Ananas design by Jean-Michel Frank. The legs are fashioned of individualsegments of marble. Standing on the table is a glass-and-wrought-iron candelabra.

The Sebastians spent their marriage in glamorous transit, flitting between New York City, Wheeling, Paris, London, and Hammamet, with jauntsto Italy, Tahiti, Austria, China, and points beyond. The union, however, did not last, ending in divorce after Flora returned tothe United States in the fall of 1936. The following year, in Paris, she took her third matrimonialplunge, marrying another younger foreigner, the fancifully named Eric Cipriani Dunstan,a British film critic and journalist known as the Golden Voice of Radio; Mrs Dunstan died in 1939, leaving her widower quite comfortably provided for.

George Sebastian,on the other hand, soldiered on at Dar Sebastian. The globetrotting Roumanian was the undisputed leader of Tunisia's seasonal array of American and European socialites and expats, a louche, pleasure-seeking crowd that Maggie Davis, in her 2001 novel Rommel's Gold, described as a"collection of international oddities settled down on the African shore todo some rather elaborate sinning." Davis's acid portrait of a fictional Roumanian artist cum grand seigneur named Sebastian Ghrika (obviously modeled on George Sebastian) is chilling. Not only did he "spend his time sucking up to the Germans" during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, one character, clearly based on Sebastian's neighbor Jean Henson, offers this scathing assessment of the master of Dar Sebastian:

"[Ghrika] knew damned well what he was doing, he was only spending [his wife] Essie's money like water, that was all. Fortunately the old fart had taste. Except toward the last, when he was living in one room with all those nasty little boys. They used to pee in the courtyard fountain instead of using the john. Made the whole house stink."

Dar Sebastian's kitchen, where the Sebastians' cook, Sadok, and chef, François Rysavy, reigned. The doors and cabinets are painted whiteand decorated with nail heads in Tunisian fashion. The metal sconces are original to the house, as are the stove and refrigerator. Image from Tunisia.com.

Documents suggest Sebastian's wartime life was quite a bit less collaborationist, however. Though Dar Sebastian was requisitioned during Nazi Germany's Africa campaign, and General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, spent a few nights there, Sebastian had already absented the premises. He reportedly fled to Monterey, California, in 1939, upon the declaration of war, and did not return to Hammamet until 1946. Presumably some damage was done, because afterthe war, Sebastian "struggl[ed] to restore his villa toits avant-guerre perfection," according to an article published in 1947 in Town & Country. At some point he was joined by Porter Woodruff, who died of cancer in October 1959 at the house and in whose lush gardens he was buried.

Three years later Sebastian sold the house of his dreams tothe Tunisian government, which appointed him an adviser on historic restorations and turned Dar Sebastian into a cultural center. He died in Washington, D.C., on 9 March 1974, at age 77, the victim of kidney cancer. His will specified that his ashes be scattered at Dar Sebastian, as they duly were.

Well Said: Daisy Fellowes

2011-12-06T20:02:00.001-05:00

Daisy Fellowes in a 1930s photograph by Cecil Beaton.

"Either a thing is a disappointment or it is not."

So said Franco-American fashion icon and novelist Marguerite "Daisy" Fellowes (1890—1962), daughter of the 3rd Duc Decazes and Glücksberg, a granddaughter of Singer sewing-machine magnate Isaac Singer, muse to fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and mistress of many.

Well Said: Lesley Blanch

2011-11-30T11:53:00.001-05:00

"The placing of a desk, or a bed, or the choice of a chintz may prove more revealing [of a person] than a documented study."

So observed British writer Lesley Blanch (1904-2007) in Pavilions of the Heart: The Four Walls of Love (Putnam, 1974).

Well Said: Nancy Mitford

2011-11-28T10:03:00.001-05:00

The Hon. Nancy Freeman-Mitford, 1935, in a photograph by Bassano.

"Good clothes are a matter of health."

So said Nancy Mitford (1904—1973), British author and Christian Dior devotée.

Well Said: Coco Chanel

2011-10-16T20:43:00.001-04:00

French couturière Coco Chanel pinning a sleeve in 1962.

"The opposite of luxury is not poverty because in the houses of the poor you can smell a good pot au feu. The opposite is not simplicity for there is beauty in the corn-stall and barn, often great simplicity in luxury, but there is nothing in vulgarity, its complete opposite."

So Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883—1971) told photographer Cecil Beaton in 1966.

From the Archives: Get Inspired—Dress Your Doors

2011-10-01T09:47:00.000-04:00

Raised-panel doors painted with bird portraits in the early 20th century by Danish artist Michael Ancher. Image by Andreas von Einsiedel for "The World of Interiors".

[In 2008] a friend on the staff of The Menil Collection museum invited me on a private tour of the meticulously restored residence built by art collectors Dominique and John de Menil in Houston's posh River Oaks neighborhood. I was suitably awed by the anonymous, low-slung, brick-and-glass building (it was designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1951) and the voluptuous upholstered furniture (custom-made by Mrs de Menil's couturière, Charles James). But as always, I found myself distracted by chic, inventive details. It's the visual equivalent of perusing a book's footnotes before actually delving into the narrative. The treatment of the doors to the small bedrooms, for instance, was more memorable to me than the world-class art on the house's stark walls—their plain front surfaces are clad in the precise shade of crushed raspberries, now beautifully faded. And that unexpected touch of brothel elegance inside that modernist masterpiece (surely the velvet had to be Charles James's idea) got me wondering: Why aren't interior doors more special?

For Christian Lacroix's haute-couture-jewellery director Monica Soczynska, interior designer Gerald Schmorl covered closet doors with mismatched panels of toile de Jouy edged with a complementary gimp. Image by Guillaume de Laubier for "The World of Interiors".

What could be simpler than upgrading a door, so many of which are distressingly banal? They certainly could be wrapped with, say, Italian marbleized book paper. Why not cover a door in burlap held fast by large brass nailheads or perhaps in alligator-textured artificial leather or sumptuous suede, whether real or mock? I have considered decoupaging a dull door with overlapping paper cut-outs in emulation of the influential work of designer John Derian or a Victorian scrap screen, protected by a coating of clear shellac. A door could be given a striking new countenance through the studied application of stencilled decorations or intricately joined bits of fabric echoing an antique crazy quilt or an icy span of palest blue silk moiré edged with silvery galloon.

One could also break out various shades of paint and speckle a door's surface like spatterware or a dappled Early American floor. And if the door in question is a traditional model divided into symmetrical panels, use those individual sections as canvases in the manner of Swedish artist Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin. In the late nineteenth century Larsson improved one such door in the couple's impossibly charming house, Little Hyttnäs, with a painted depiction of a tall, lushly blooming amaryllis that spanned two panels, its attenuated green stalk interrupted by the door's white framework.

In the Paris bedroom of oceanographer Anita Conti, the folding doors of her built-in wardrobe are layered with shellacked maps of the world. Image by Guy Hervais for "The World of Interiors".

From the Archives: Heaven Sent

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000-04:00

"The Dream of St Ursula", a 1495 painting from a series by Vittore Carpaccio. Depicting a young princess being visited by an angel, it currently hangs in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy. © 1990 Scala, Florence.

Inspiration can be found in the oddest nooks and crannies. As Stephen Calloway's intriguing Twentieth Century Decoration (1988) explains, a quattrocento tempera painting called The Dream of St Ursula, for example, has inspired two known beds and likely a handful of others yet to be discovered. The work, executed in 1495 by Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio, depicts the young lady in question—a teenage princess doomed to martydom—supine in a majestic canopy bed set on a high inlaid platform or predella, its elaborate tasseled valance held aloft by delicate attenuated posts. This particular Carpaccio, one of a series of eight scenes examining the saint's life that was hailed by critic Bernard Berenson for its "vivacity and gorgeousness", originally hung in a school for orphaned girls dedicated to St Ursula; today it resides in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Berenson proclaimed the painting less a portrait of a saint than "the picture of a room with the light playing softly upon its walls, upon the flower-pots in the window, and upon the writing-table and the cupboards".

True enough, because the sleeping subject is the least interesting part of the work. It is the limpid, barely furnished but strangely opulent interior—"a vivid impression of a Venetian bedroom in the late fifteenth century", according to one architectural historian—and in particular the astounding bed, that commands attention. John Ruskin, the British artist and critic, who first saw this painting in 1869, described it as "a broad four-poster, the posts being fully wrought golden or gilded rods, variously wreathed and branched, carrying a canopy of warm red". Carpaccio surely based it on something he had seen, say, in a palazzo of his time. The rooms of that city are rich with beds of all kinds of elaborate descriptions but this model—commanding yet curiously weightless, skeletal yet sumptuous—seems not to have survived anywhere to my knowledge.

Bedroom of Barbara Rutherfurd, 660 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York. Both the bed and the chair beside it are copied from Carpaccio's painting. This image, by an uncredited photographer, was published in British "Vogue" in August 1917.

Around 1916, a Manhattan post-deb named Barbara Cairncross Rutherfurd (1895-1939) woke each morning in an apricot, rose, violet, and black room whose furnishings carefully reproduce those in the St Ursula painting, right down to the curious throne-like chair that appears on the canvas. Dominating the space is a bed that is a very slightly simplified adaptation of Carpaccio's virtual version, its headboard free of gilding and the pradella shallower and free of inlay. Its towering, theatrical character was a perfect complement to the Sleeping Beauty splendor of the Rutherfurd's home, an 1881 turreted French Renaissance castle designed by Richard Morris Hunt for her stepfather, William Kissam Vanderbilt Sr; her mother, the former Anne H.S. Rutherfurd, became Vanderbilt's second wife in 1903. The eccentric bed also was perfectly suited to its occupant, a creature of electrifying Casati-like beauty who eventually married twice, grew increasingly unbalanced, was committed to a sanitarium, and died at only 44 years of age. A photograph of this troubled soul, seated in the Carpaccio-style chair, is reproduced below. Somewhere there exists a circa-1921 portrait of her by sculptor Renée Prahar, a fashionable talent of the day, the work once described as "a lead intaglio set in ebony" and so highly polished that the lead possessed "the moonlight glow of old pewter".

The decor of Rutherfurd's bedroom, as described in British Vogue in 1917, deserves to be recounted in full: "The colour plan is made up of tones of apricot, rose, and violet, accented in black, which gives it character. The dado, mantlepiece, and ceiling, as well as the rough plastered walls, are all in tones of apricot, much glazed with violet; this produces an unusual mellowness and makes the tones in the different parts of the room vary according to the light and the hour of the day. The carpet is of a deep violet, and the doors and all the furniture are of black lacquer with the least bit of gold introduced. The bed ... is of black lacquer with a bedspread and day cushion of mauve and gold brocade. The canopy, nine feet high, is in cloth of gold lined with mauve velvet, and mauve tassels decorate it; the pillow at the foot of the bed is of turquoise blue velvet. The screen is composed of black glass panels and is hung with tassels of mauve. The wall lights are of black glass plaques mounted in gilt metal framework. The curtains for this room are of deepest violet damask, and violet and apricot-rose gauze inside curtains complete the window".

What happened to the bed and the chair is unknown. The name of the furniture's designer is also obscure, though at least one researcher attributes the bed to Geoffrey Scott (for more about him, see below). Between 1915 and 1916, Bernard Berenson, whose assistant was Scott, had published two widely read articles about Carpaccio, which brought the Venetian painter's work to broader attention in an era when Italian antiques had begun to transfix certain members of transatlantic society. And it is known that Anne Vanderbilt, Rutherfurd's mother, moved in the same circles as Scott, Berenson, Elsie de Wolfe (she would decorate Mrs Vanderbilt's house on Sutton Place), and other contemporary tastemakers. So perhaps Scott did have something to do with that Fifth Avenue interior. More research will have to be pursued.

What is known is that Barbara Rutherfurd married Cyril Hatch, her first husband, in 1916—apparently not too many years after her bedroom's completion—she soon moved into the starkly handsome Spanish Revival house that The New York Times reported was a wedding gift from the bride's mother. Its architect was Frederick J. Sterner. (Later owned by stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and later still by artist Jasper Johns, the East 63rd Street residence now belongs to director Spike Lee.) At present there is no indication that the St Ursula bed made the move uptown with the newlywed Mrs Hatch. Perhaps it was simply sold, sometime between the closing of the Vanderbilt house after her stepfather's death in 1920 and the vast mansion's demolition in 1926.

Barbara Cairncross Rutherfurd (Mrs Cyril Hatch) as a newlywed. She is seated in the same throne-like, black-lacquered chair that stands to the left of her bed at 660 Fifth Avenue; it also was copied from the Carpaccio painting. This image, unsigned but seemingly the work of Baron de Meyer, was published in the February 1917 issue of British "Vogue".

Another example of the St Ursula bed has been in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1984. Credited to architect and art historian Geoffrey Scott (author of The Architecture of Humanism) and a London upholsterer called M. Southgate, it was made in 1922 for Scott's cousin William Heywood Haslam (1889-1981), heir to a cotton-spinning fortune and perhaps best known as the father of British interior decorator Nicky Haslam. Some scholars have claimed the bed was created in Florence, Italy, in 1914, but additional research has ascertained a different date and place of manufacture. Moreover, Haslam's is an adaptation, vigorous but significantly different from the quite careful replication executed for Barbara Rutherfurd. Scott dramatically altered the headboard, for instance, reducing its aristocratic arc to an suburban echo and dispensing with its exclamatory urn-like finial. He also created boldly sculpted bases for the posts, which themselves have been pruned and thickened, and mounted the bed on six gilded lion's paws.

William Heywood Haslam's bed in the 1930s, as seen in the Grotesque Room of his country house, Great Hundridge Manor, Chesham Road, Hyde Heath, Chartridge, Buckinghamshire, England.

Painted peacock blue, lavishly gilded, and crowned by an open canopy fringed with brilliant red Venetian silk damask, the bed was reputedly was ordered for Haslam's London residence, 8 Hanover Terrace. After his marriage to Diamond Ponsonby in 1930, however, it migrated to the couple's late-17th-century country house in Buckinghamshire, Great Hundridge Manor. There it was placed in Haslam's own bedroom—Scott designed a more feminine bed for his cousin's delightfully named wife—the so-called Grotesque Room, a first-floor chamber lined with bevelled paneling and extravagant landscapes framed by faux scagliola. To see Scott's bed for William Haslam in its fully restored glory, simply look below.

William Haslam's bed, designed in 1922 by Geoffrey Scott and restored in recent years by Seymour Furnishings, Upholsterer. The bed measures 88H by 46.5W by 96D. The image shown above appears on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © V&A Images

Do the Twist

2011-09-27T14:32:00.001-04:00

The gallery of the Agnelli country house near Turin, Italy. The image, by Horst, was published in American "Vogue" in 1966.

Though for years I have been an firm proponent of big, blowsy, naturalistic floral arrangements—in the manner of Constance Spry, for example, or Anne, the Countess of Rosse—I've recently developed a renewed appreciation for bouquets with a high artifice quotient, the more sculptural, the better.

Consider, for instance, the bold compositions of snow-white and hot-pink spider mums set atop a pair of Piedmontese silver-gilt tables at Villa Agnelli, the Fiat automotive dynasty's country house in the hilltown of Villar Perosa, Italy, in the mid 1960s. With their conical silhouettes and barber-pole swirls of color, the graphic arrangements bring a crisp, declarative statement to the sweeping space, the striped bouquets holding their own amid this gala interior's delirious swarm of golden arabesques.

Well Said: Ghislaine de Polignac

2011-09-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

Ghislaine, Princesse de Polignac, by Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Paris, 1957. Image from the artist's website.

"Men are simply not accustomed to suffer to be beautiful."

So said Princesse de Polignac (née Ghislaine Charlotte Claire Brinquant, 1918-2011): Continental society ornament; former wife of Prince Edmond de Polignac; public relations director for Revlon in France; fashion stylist for Galeries Lafayette; mistress of many, and by all colorful accounts, an all-around good-time girl.

Well Spent: Millicent Roger's Ruby Heart

2011-09-14T13:02:00.000-04:00

Known for passionate affairs of the heart, the legendary Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers—subject of Cherie Burns's new biography, "Searching for Beauty" (St. Martin's Press)—advertised that her propensity for romance on her sleeve. Or, rather, her bodice, in the form of a heart-shaped brooch made of pavé rubies pierced by an arrow composed of caliber-cut yellow diamonds. It is being offered for sale at Siegelson, the Manhattan jewelers. The price? A company representative coyly says the interested buyer should expect to spend in "the upper half of the six digits." So if you are seriously interested in acquiring this 3-3/8 inch by 2-3/8 inch ornament, click here to email your query.

Millicent Rogers, wearing the Flato brooch, with her third husband, stockbroker Ronald Balcom, in 1939.

Made around 1938 from a design dreamed up by Rogers for her friend society jeweler Paul Flato—its rounded, voluptuous shape is sometimes called a fat or puffy heart—the brooch is draped with a sapphire ribbon bearing the yellow-gold Latin phrase Verbum Carro. This has been translated as "A word to my dear one," thought it could be a play on Verbum caro, "The word made flesh," a reference to Jesus Christ as recounted in John 1:14. This makes some sense, since scholars have observed that the colorful jewel recalls the South American folk charms known as milagros.

Happy Fashion Week

2011-09-11T19:15:00.000-04:00

Ginette Spanier, circa 1960. The Anglo-French Spanier (1904-1988, Mme. Paul-Émile Seidmann) was the directrice of the Paris fashion house Pierre Balmain for more than 25 years, after which she worked for Nina Ricci. This photograph of Spanier—wearing a Balmain evening dress, of course—appears in her memoir "It Isn't All Mink: The Sparkling Autobiography of a Woman of Style" (Random House, 1960). The highly entertaining book was edited by Spanier's lover, British journalist Nancy Spain.

"Why do women want to be chic? Why do women feel like this? Why do they pay attention to their clothes?

"Men say it is to attract men. Women think it is to knock spots off other women. I have my own belief. Women need the sense of security that the griffe gives them. The griffe is the little label that the couture sews into the back of the dress, with the great name (Balenciaga, Balmain) on it.

"I can remember perfectly the first griffe in the first model I had. I bought the model in a sale in Cannes in 1933—a pale-pink evening dress by Worth and a coat that went with it. My dream would have been to wear the dress with the griffe of Worth outside. Indeed, I kept negligently throwing my evening coat on the back of a chair with an organized gesture. The label meant nothing to the man who took me out for the evening. It meant everything to me. It gave me confidence. It said, 'Go in and slay them, Ginette.' It helped me talk to people. It made me walk into a room with shoulders back."

So wrote Jenny Yvonne "Ginette" Spanier in It Isn't All Mink: The Sparkling Autobiography of a Woman of Style (Random House, 1960).

The Simple Life

2011-09-07T06:00:00.000-04:00

The breakfast area of a London dining room decorated by David Mlinaric, circa 2007. Image from "Mlinaric on Decorating" by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric (Frances Lincoln Limited, 2008).

Simplicity is something I've never been much good at achieving, particularly when it comes to outfitting a room. The reductive results either look impoverished or impractical. But if I could achieve the same spare, bold, hushed atmosphere embodied by the picture above, in our house or our apartment, I think I might come close to true happiness.

The Platonic serenity of this image is resolutely modern but also strangely classical, a functional space furnished for the bare minimum of activity and raked by cold, unforgiving light. (Not for nothing was this 19th-century structure in Chelsea the former studio-residence of artist John Singer Sargent, for whom northern light was crucial in the production of his portraits.) It has something of the calm clarity of the paintings recently shown in "Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of depictions of sunlit European rooms, especially the works of German artist Georg Friedrich Kersting. The room seems empty but is actually quite full, furnished with honest materials spanning the poles of light and dark—curtains of silk the color of fog; plaster stippled an even more evanescent shade of grey; satiny marble; seats of supple leather; a carpet of woven sea grass; and polished mahogany chairs with cornucopiae supports. That exuberant last-named detail, the horn of plenty, is an eccentric chair element though so fitting in a room for meals. I am also keenly appreciative of the lack of overt decoration, a paucity that demands one heed the person opposite and what he or she is saying (or not saying), as coffee is poured and toast is buttered; this is a no-nonsense spot, a place where one cannot hide, where extended silences would be considerably awkward. It contains but it does not cosset. Of this atmosphere I wholeheartedly approve, since a room's decoration, to my mind, should never subsume its occupants.

One must admit, however, that this particular photograph is taken out of context. It is not the small room it seems but instead the breakfast-area end of a spacious dining room in the London residence of financier Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, shaped by Theis + Kahn Architects and interior designer David Mlinaric. The now-relatively-retired founder of Mlinaric, Henry & Zervudachi is a decorator so brilliant the septuagenarian really should be knighted, though the CBE he received in 2009 "for services to interior design and to heritage" is not to be sniffed at. Consider, for instance, the superb asymmetrical siting of the art here, notably Auguste Rodin's Le Sommeil (one of three marble versions) pushed firmly and idiosyncratically into its corner. There the sleeping woman—a gift from the artist to his American-born last mistress, Claire de Choiseul—commands attention and yet, because of her smoky-white complexion, she seems to fade into the grey wall along with the resolutely plain plinth. And what about that pulsating thread of vivid blue connecting the Yayoi Kusama abstract on the left to the Ben Nicholson canvas on the right to the armchair in the kitchen beyond? Subtly handled, I'd say, and highly deliberate.

To me, this sliver of tailored space embodies everything Mlinaric once said about his approach to fashion, according to an interview posted on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum: "I always quite liked being smart, tidy and clean and trim." To that, I'll raise a glass.

NB: Other blogs have previously posted images of Sir Evelyn and Lady de Rothschild's London residence, namely Cote de Texas in 2009 and Brilliant Asylum in December 2007. A large article about the house was published in the January 2008 issue of W.

Technical Issues: Please Stand By

2011-09-05T09:32:00.003-04:00

Dear Readers,

Apparently the text of An Aesthete's Lament is experiencing garbled wording here and there. I have called upon our crackerjack engineers to determine the problem and eradicate it. Your patience is much appreciated.

Sincerely,

The Aesthete

Home Away From Home

2011-09-04T03:00:00.000-04:00

India is a country that looms large in my mind. Its culture,its cuisine, its messy, glorious, violent history; the mindboggling decadence of its princely rulers; the abjectness of its impoverished; the rigidity of itscaste system; its flamboyant deities: All these things, for some reason, rivetme no end. One cannot be bored by India; one can only be astounded.

Recently news that one of my favorite books, William Dalrymple’s riveting White Mughals, will be made into a movie—as well as the discovery of Penelope Treadwell's Johann Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer (Paul Holberton Publishing), a 2010 study of the 18^th-century painter, who spent some artistic quality time in the court of Oudh—got me thinking about Indian style, especially those fertile moments in design, when subcontinental motifs and foreign influences collide and coalesce. (NB: Howthe producers intend to shrink Dalrymple's sprawling tale of history, romance, and social anthropology intoa two-hour tale is beyond my comprehension; it really should be a miniseriesalong the lines of "The Jewel in the Crown.")

A self-portrait of artist and designer Robert Home (1752-1834), court painter to the King of Oudh. This image, posted in Wikipedia's Robert Home article, has been in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery since 1943.

This melding of styles isnot always an easy one but it is always entertaining and frequently inspiring. Take, for instance, the inexplicably underexamined work ofRobert Home (1752-1834), an intrepid Yorkshire expat who studied with German-born British painterAngelica Kauffmann and ultimately found fame and fortune on the Indiansubcontinent, where he relocated around 1790. One sitter, in fact, described him as “the best artist in Asia.”

A nativeof the city of Hull, Home (pronounced "Hume") spent a highly productive chunk of his senior years in Lucknow, working for 13 years as the court painter to Ghazi-ud-din Haider (1769-1827), the seventh nawab wazir and first king ofOudh, before dying in Cawnpore. (The name of the kingdom is pronounced "uh-VUD.") This sophisticated monarch of Persian lineage and Muslim faith was limned by Home in a marvelous portrait that was identified last year. The circa-1819image shown below was included in a 2011 exhibition of Lucknow portraiture at the Musée Guimet in Paris and is now offered for sale by the London gallery Philip Mould. Another of Home's portraits of his royal patron, a rather large example, is the collection of Queen Elizabeth II (Her Majesty also owns two additional Home works); another hangs in the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. A description of the last-cited painting, published in 1907, is as follows: "[The King] is dressed in a canary-yellow chapkan; and strings of pearls and other precious stones encircle his neck and bluish-yellow turban." When he wasn't busy painting the ruler, his wives, and their children, Home put likenesses of British official to canvas, including the Marquess of Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington), of whom he painted more than a dozen portraits.

Ghazi-ud-din Haider, King of Oudh, circa 1819, in a portrait by Robert Hume. The work is presently being offered for sale by Philip Mould, a gallery in London.

Home didn’t merely record august personages in brilliant oils. As an album of hisdrawings held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum bearseyepopping witness, he also took up design with breathtaking abandon. Given the architecture, furniture, jewels, clothing, and decorative objects he proposed to themonarch—how many of these fantasies were actually produced seems to beunknown—one could easily call him the Thomas Hope of India. Like his English contemporary, Home seems to have been a master ofswaggering Regency extravagances flashy with gilding and not a little exoticpomp. It is a pity that the Yorkshireman and the Prince Regent, later George IV, never met, becausethe former’s objects for the British royal’s Oudhian counterpart would havelooked right at home in the delirious chinoiserie interiors of Brighton Pavilion.

An extraordinary crocodile barge designed for the King of Oudh by Robert Home. The image, which is contained in an album of Home designs held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was published in "Made for Maharajahs: A Design Diary of Princely India" (Vendome Press, 2006). © V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum.

Whether driven by the otherworldlinessof the subcontinental kingdom where he resided or a natural sense of fantasy hybridized with fashionable British taste, Home was a man who trafficked inextravagances. Among his works for Oudh's ruler (the seventh nawab wazir acceded to the throne in 1814, took the title of king in1819, and reigned until his death in 1827) was a lengthy barge in the form of a grinning crocodile. On its scaly back sat a howdah-likepavilion so the monarch of Oudh and one or more of his numerous wives—among them was an Anglo-Armenian and an Anglo-Indian—could relax in the shade asrowers propelled them along the lazy waters of the Gombti River. Which, it must be added, was crossed by an iron bridge shipped from England on the King's orders.

The fish-shape Royal Boat of Oudh, a torpedo-like pleasure vessel with decorative fins, as seen circa 1858-1860. The image, by Anglo-Italian photographer Felice Beato (1832-1909), is from Bernard Shapero Fine Books, via Wikipedia's article about the photographer.

Another royal Oudh boat in the same water-creature vein—which was recorded in a photograph snapped by Felice Beato in the middle of the 19^thcentury—assumes the shape of a fish, right down to its dorsal and tail fins.A range of jalousied windows stretches along one side of the fish, and presumably the opposite as well, giving itspassengers a measure of privacy, which surely must have been welcomed giventhe vessel’s bizarre appearance. The stately progress of this boat along the Gomti—agiant, glistening fish skimming the waters like a god come to life—surely caused the jaws of the King’s subjects to drop. Whether it was designed by Home, however, is unknown. It seems a bit lumpen in its execution but the vessel's mad looks could well have been inspired by Home's work for the first King of Oudh. Or perhaps it was Home's work after all. Scholar Mildred Archer has written that the artist's proposals had a "certain zaniness," notably "silver carriages shaped like shells supported by peacocks and extraordinary boats in the form of a swan, fish or alligator." Perhaps this fish vessel is the very one described by a 19th-century eyewitness. He wrote of a fish-shaped pleasure boat "made of cedar, for the harem ladies, covered with scales of silver, each the size of a rupee though not so thick. The interior was more luxuriously fitted ... [and] there were jalousies through which the fair and dusky occupants, without being seen, could themselves look upon a city as naughty as Nineveh." One English resident of Lucknow in the 1850s recalled a royal boat shaped like a dolphin and brilliantly enameled.

An 1895 image of Bara Chattar Manzil, a palace complex erected by the first King of Oudh, which was built alongside the Gomti River between 1819 and 1837. Among its pleasures was an English-style picture gallery furnished with chairs designed by Robert Home. Image by G. W. Lawrie and Company, from the website Old Indian Photos.

Capable of striking awe into the observer too was the enormous palace complex commissioned by theking during Home’s tenure in Lucknow and in whose creation Home had a part. (The complex was such an ambitious project, however, that it was not completed until 1837, under the reign of the king's son and successor.) The picture gallery of the dome-topped Bara Chattar Manzil (Umbrella Palaces) was an essay in classical British taste and furnished with chairs made to Home's designs. The eminent British cleric Bishop Heber, who visited Lucknow for ten days in 1824—he declared it "the most polished and splendid court at present in India" and sat for his portrait by Home during his trip—left to posterity a detailed description of a formal breakfast in the room:

"... [It is] a long and handsome, but rather narrow, gallery, with good portraits of [the king's] father and [Governor-General of India] Lord Hastings over the two chimney-pieces, and some very splendid glass lustres hanging from the ceiling. The furniture was altogether English, and there was a long table in the middle of the room, set out with breakfast, and some fine French and English china. [The King] sate [sic] down in a gilt arm-chair in the center of one side, motioning to us to be seated on either hand. ... The King began by putting a large hot roll on the Resident's plate, and another on mine, then sent similar rolls to the young Nawâb his grandson, who sate on the other side of me, to the Prime Minister, and one or two others. Coffee, tea, butter, eggs, and fish were then carried round by the servants, and things proceeded much as at a public breakfast in England. The King had some mess of his own in a beautiful covered French cup, but the other Musselmans eat as the Europeans did."

Visitors to the palace during the reign of the King's son (his mother was a palace chambermaid) commented on the European-style atmosphere, ticking off a dining room "that differed from an English dining-room in no essential particular," a chef who hailed from France, and a coachman from Ireland. (The second King of Oudh, who openly declared his passion for anything European, also married an Englishwoman, the daughter of a rich Lucknow merchant.) It seems arguable that Home, with his expansive creativity, oversaw more than just the gallery's seat furnishings, though more research needs be conducted on this subject. (I plan on following this thread in the near future, hopefully with an update.)

Bara Chattar Manzil, the former palace of the King of Oudh, as it is today. Image from the website of the Central Drug Research Institute.

The splendid palace complex, which is located on a bank of the Gomti River, caused some Western visitors to wince, particularly individuals claiming refined taste. The 1883 Encyclopaedia Britannica approached it with barely concealed condescension, calling the structure " a huge and irregular pile of buildings, crowned by gilt umbrellas, [that] glitters gaudily in the sunlight." An English visitor of the time had a similar opinion, reporting that it was "an immense mass of buildings with no architectural pretension." Partly transformed into a soldiers' club and library after the deposition of the royal family in the 1850s, Bara Chattar Manzil is now the headquarters of the Central Drug Research Institute.

The arms of the Kings of Oudh, which incorporate twin fishes centered between two tigers passant. The female figures appear to be winged mermaids, which also figured in Oudhian iconography. Image from the website Royal Ark.

Twin fishes were emblazoned on the Oudh coat ofarms, so Home was careful to incorporate them into many of his designs. In his circa-1819 portrait of the king, however, Ghazi-ud-din Haider apparently sits in one of Home’s giltwood chairs, and no fishes are visible; instead, the scroll-arm chair seems to be ornamented with fruit-like finials. A fish-theme Oudh chair attributed to Home is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Pictured below, it incorporates a double-fish backsplat and arms supported by scrolling elements that also possess a piscine silhouette. Given its stately yet madcap details, is it any reason I'm longing to see more of Home's creations, whatever they may be?

A carved-wood armchair with gilded brass and gilded gesso mounts, likely designed by Robert Home for the first king of Oudh, circa 1820. Later owned by the 5th Earl Amherst of Arracan, it is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. © V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum. The chair is also featured in the 2001 book "Furniture from British India and Ceylon" (Peabody Essex Museum in association with V&A Publications).

Fight Club

2011-09-02T03:00:00.000-04:00

Angelica Kauffmann's 1787 portrait of Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby, with his first wife, the former Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, and their heir, the future 13th Lord Derby. Don't let the happy scene fool you—the countess ended up running away with another nobleman, bearing an illegitimate daughter, and expiring at an early age.

Overthe summer, members of The Friends of Honeywood Museum convened at the site of anow-demolished 18^th-century country house in Surrey, England, to discover evidence of an architectural curiosity: a cock-pit built forEdward Smith-Stanley, 12^th Earl of Derby, a Georgian Croesus whom historian AlistairRowan once described as “one of the Adam brothers’ most opulent patrons.”

Whilesteering well clear of animal-rights issues in this space, I do want to goon record with my fascination with this project—and not only the archaeological dig, which unearthed nothing relating to the cock-pit, though its participants fished up antique brick foundations, the remains of 18th-century plaster architectural details, and a 1903 farthing. What impresses me most with The Oaks is LordDerby’s ingenious solution for fulfilling his at-home gaming desires. Designed as a mini-stadium for watching angry roosters maim each other in the name of sport, the earl’scock-pit was integrated into The Oaks, his dog's-breakfast of a country house.

The Oaks, as seen in an 1809 engraving.

The building, which has been little studied, appears to have been a picturesque mishmash, set in the midst of a handsome park with gentle hills and painterly clumps of trees. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, for one, gingerly called The Oaks "large and irregular." (One suspects he really meant "ungainly and unfortunate" but couldn't bring himself to write the words.) Architect Robert Taylor designed its initial Palladian-villa phase in the 1750s and expanded that in 1765 for Lord Derby's paternal grandfather.

A view of the interiors of the temporary pavilion designed by Robert Adam in 1774 for The Oaks, Surrey. Lavishly plastered, richly statued, and comfortably furnished, the pavilion was built for a party celebrating the union of Edward Smith-Stanley, Lord Strange, heir to the 11th Earl of Derby, and Lady Elizabeth "Betty" Hamilton.

In 1774, in order to celebrate his forthcoming wedding to a daughter of the 6th Duke of Hamilton, the young aristocrat commissioned Robert Adam to erect a grandiose pavilion alongside. The temporary structure was built for one purpose only: to serve as the centerpiece of a fête champetre, a country-theme entertainment whose extravagance bedazzled Georgian society—Parliament actually went on hiatus so its noble members could attend the fancy-dress shindig. By the end of the century, The Oaks had again increased in size and appearance, a drizzle of castellation giving it the countenance of a fanciful castle. It was sold out of the Stanley family in the mid 19th century and razed to the ground by 1960.

Eighteenth-century gentlemen attending a cockfight.

Now back to Lord Derby's cock-pit. As a writer observed in the weekly journal All the Year Round in 1878, cock-fights had been popular for ages but were all the rage in the 18th and 19th centuries. "In those old times, nobleman competed in the cockpit rather than at agricultural shows, and game-cocks were bred instead of short-horns," the reporter explained. "The 'old Earl of Derby' [the subject of this post] is reported to have had many a main of cocks fought in his bedroom, as he lay sick for the last time." His Lordship's favorite fighting fowl came from his own flock of Black Breasted Reds, the roosters of which possessed white legs, "claws strong," and "nails long and white," according to his son and heir's gamekeeper. (The breed is readily obtainable today, though the white-legged variety seems to be a rarity.)

Lord Derby's best-known cock-pit was erected in 1790, in the Lancashire village of Preston, where he also established a well-known race track. (Horseflesh was the aristocrat's primary hobby, in fact, and he was the founder of the Derby and Oaks races.) Unlike the cock-pit at The Oaks, the cock-pit in Preston was a freestanding brick-and-timber building with a domed skylight and elegant arched windows, where the rakes of the day hung out in intervals between races. Not long after the earl's death in 1834, this den of violence and vice became, of all things, a Mormon temple.

Oral histories suggest that Lord Derby's cock-pit at The Oaks was located below the tripartite room shown at the bottom of this illustration. Trenches A, B, and C delineate segments of the recent archaeological dig. Image from John Phillips and Paul Williams's "Research Design for an Excavation at The Oaks, 2011," published by The Friends of Honeywood Museum.

The cock-pit at The Oaks was a private pleasure rather than a public provocation. It was hidden from view, incorporated into the mansion as an ingenious example of architectural camouflage. The architect (evidence suggests Adam was arguably the responsible party) concealed it beneath the floor of a tripartite room in the mansion's east wing.

As a 20th-century inhabitant of The Oaks recalled, as cited in a report posted online by The Friends of Honeywood Museum, "Furniture would be cleared from the centre of a room on the ground floor to the East and sections of the floor hinged back with benches on the underside forming a square with the pit in the centre." (To the full and fascinating study, go to Google and type in Cockpit Earl Derby Oaks; the report's PDF file will appear in the listings. Download and immerse yourself in the details.) Once the brutal match was over, the pit could be rinsed clean—cock-fighting was a bloody business—the hinged floor closed up, and the furniture moved back into place, with no one the wiser.

Save D. Landreth Seed Company

2011-09-01T15:16:00.001-04:00

On Facebook today, America's oldest operating heirloom-seed house, D. Landreth Seed Company, posted a plea to ensure that an astonishing garden resource will not go out of business in 30 days. This cannot be the fate of this extraordinary business and its centuries-old legacy.

Help reduce its looming $250,000 debt, which has been called in by an investor holding a note: buy a $5 mail-order catalogue now, buy two, buy three, buy more if the spirit moves you. If the debt is not wiped out by the end of September, D. Landreth Seed Company, founded in 1784 and owned today by Barbara and Peter Melera, will be no more.

Click here to read about D. Landreth Seed Company's time-sensitive plight.

Details Count: The Vicomte de Noailles

2011-07-07T13:55:00.001-04:00

A salon at L'Ermitage de Pompadour, a former home of Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, and his wife, Marie-Laure, in Fontainebleau, France. The 18th-century building—which was constructed for royal mistress Madame de Pompadour and is now owned by Noailles grandson Carlo Perrone—and its six-acre grounds are being sold for $9.3 million.

“My grandfather also planted scented flowers beneath the guest room windows so when they were opened in the morning, guests would smell their fragrance.”

So said Italian newspaper publisher Carlo Perrone in The New York Times on 30 June 2011, recalling one of his family's French residences, L'Ermitage de Pompadour, which recently came on the market after nearly a century in private hands. The six-acre estate in the commune of Fontainebleau, near Paris, was purchased in 1919 by Perrone's great-grandmother Madeleine de Noailles, Princesse de Poix. It is being sold through Emile Garcin.

The scent-conscious grandfather to whom Perrone refers was French society figure Charles de Noailles (1891—1981), an inspired patron of the arts who created some of the most inspiring gardens of the 20th century. The Vicomte de Noailles's strategic positioning of perfumed plants at his Fontainebleau residence is worth remembering when the subject turns to gardens or even spare rooms, for that matter. I, for one, would cultivate tuberoses beneath all my bedroom windows or perhaps Confederate jasmine or great masses of Oriental lilies.

Many Thanks!

2011-05-21T10:38:00.000-04:00

What a pleasant and unexpected surprise!

Interior designer Charlotte Moss called An Aesthete's Lament one of the three blogs she can't get enough of, along with The Style Saloniste and All the Best. She mentioned us in her recent interview in last Thursday's Home Section of The Washington Post. To read the whole thing, do click here.

I guess this means I'd better start producing more content, tout suite!

Lights, Camera, Action!

2011-04-11T15:32:00.000-04:00

Filmmakers are always seeking evocative locations for their movies, so it should come as little surprise that a handful of iconic houses have found their way onto the silver screen as integral plot devices. My favorites to add to any design groupie's Netflix queue?

The Hunting Lodge, decorator John Fower's famous country house near Odiham, Hampshire; for decades now it has been the week-end residence of British interior designer Nicky Haslam.

John Fowler's renowned Hunting Lodge, a Tudor-era folly given a fanciful brickwork façade around 1720, served as Vanessa Redgrave's residence in the 1968 Tony Richardson movie "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Fowler smartly used the location fee to build a garden pavilion on the grounds of the house.

A bedroom at Château de Groussay, longtime country house of Charles de Beistegui.

Château de Groussay, the widely admired country house of silver-mining heir Charles de Beistegui, was used as the primary set for director Marc Allégret's 1970 movie "Le bal du Comte d'Orgel." Yes, the movie is in French, but if you don't understand the dialogue, there is enough of Groussay on display, indoors and out, to make this romantic drama about aristocratic adultery in the 1920s (based on the posthumous 1924 novel by Raymond Radiguet) a cinema-library must-have.

Members of the cast of "Le bal du Comte d'Orgel" (1970) in Groussay's Salon Hollandaise.

Well Said: Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz

2011-04-05T17:28:00.000-04:00

Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, circa 1940, from Mo Amelia Teitelbaum's "The Stylemakers: Minimalism and Classic Modernism, 1915—1945" (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2010)

"Everything has its place in life. Even objects guests don't normally see should reflect one's tastes and beliefs."

So said Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz (1860—1951), arguably the aesthete of all time, after a visitor to her house noticed a scarlet ribbon stylishly tied around the handle of a common household broom. A Bolivian-born mining heiress who sat for John Singer Sargent, inspired Jean-Michel Frank, supported Stravinsky, and collected Picasso, she left a lasting mark on interior design, choosing soulful minimalism over extravagant folderol.

Outreach Program

2011-03-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

A woven fabric used in the London flat of Pauline de Rothschild. Private collection.

Does anybody out there have any idea what company manufactured this pretty stuff, as the U set calls fabric or material?* And if it is still produced?

Woven with chinoiserie motifs such as lanterns and chrysanthemum-like blooms, it was used to drape the canopy bed in Pauline de Rothschild's London flat, in the early 1970s. She apparently brought the fabric to this much admired project, not her interior decorator John Fowler. Its original source remains, thus far, unknown.

Per the baroness's idiosyncratic directive, the graphic black-and-silver fabric, which has a subtle moiré pattern worked into the background, was used on the reverse. She preferred that side's more subtle, silver-and-black colorway (see below).

Rothschild preferred the paler reverse of the fabric. Private collection.

* When Princess Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon, born a commoner, told her how much he hated the material used for the dress she was wearing, the royal snapped, witheringly, "We call it 'stuff'."

Q & A: Hanut Singh

2011-03-09T12:50:00.003-05:00

Jewelry designer Hanut Singh, at home in New Delhi, India.

One’s heritage can often be one’s destiny. Soldiers beget soldiers, lawyers follow in parents' footsteps, and actors, artists, and writers often have similarly creative offspring. In the case of Hanut Singh, however, taking up the family trade was not an option.

His paternal great-grandfather, Major General Sir Jagatjit Singh, Maharajah of Kapurthala—he lived in a circa-1900 replica of Versailles—lost his princely powers in 1947, along with his fellow subcontinental sovereigns, following the implementation of the Indian Independence Act. As a result the New Delhi-based Singh has no crown, but that doesn’t mean he can’t design one. Inspired by the Aluwalia dynasty’s famous collection of antique and modern jewels, which includes fascinating adornments commissioned from Cartier in the 1920s and ‘30s by one of Singh’s grandmothers, the ebullient entrepreneur spends his days creating gem-studded rings, bracelets, and other personal ornaments donned by women such as Padma Lakshmi and Beyoncé.

Singh, who is 38, decided eight years ago that jewelry was his calling and walked away from a career as a well-known fashion writer and magazine editor. “I write quickly and I write well, but it never fueled my creative passions,” the alumnus of New York City's Hunter College explains. “It was just a job-job.” Recently, in a telephone interview from his home, Singh talked to me about his heritage, his designs, and why he considers "bling" to be a dirty word.

Necklace with a ruby and diamond scimitar pendant. The prices for the jewels shown in this post are available upon request. To see more of Singh's designs, go to the designer's website, hanutsingh.com.

Q: Among India’s princely families, the royal family of Kapurthala seems to have been especially passionate about jewels and commissioned hundreds of amazing pieces. One of your great-grandfather's wives, a Spanish dancer, owned an incredible Art Deco emerald necklace studded with diamonds once worn by one of her husband's elephants; it sold at Christie's London in 2007. And one of the that maharajah's turban clips made by Cartier had more than 3,000 diamonds and pearls.

A: We have always had beautiful jewels—not just giant ceremonial pieces, but everyday things commissioned in the ‘20s and ‘30s by my father’s parents, Sita Devi and Karam of Kapurthala, who were big clients of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. And my great-grandfather, the maharajah, was very fond of Boucheron and Cartier too. My mother and sister always talk about what they’re going to wear for the day or to a party. Jewelry has always been a very vibrant topic around the house.

Cat's-eye ring with pavé diamonds.

Q: Do you design jewels for family members?

A: I have a very glamorous sister and mother and many cousins, so I make things for them too. My astrologer told me I needed to wear diamonds, so I designed some organic rings and a bracelet for myself.

Maharajkumari Sita Devi of Kapurthala, Singh's maternal grandmother, in a silken gown and masses of diamonds, in the 1930s. Image courtesy of Hanut Singh.

Q: Your grandmother Princess Karam of Kapurthala was an international sensation in the ‘20s and ‘30s—photographed by Cecil Beaton, dressed by Mainbocher, and bejeweled by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Dubbed a “secular goddess” by Vogue and one of the world’s best-dressed women by Look, she must have been an enormous influence on your career.

A: My grandmother wouldn’t have dreamed of getting dressed without jewels, even if she merely planned to stay at home. She had incredible sugar-loaf diamond rings, lovely pearls, beautiful diamond bracelets, and amazing sapphires. Cartier made her an Indian-modern suite and wonderful tutti-frutti brooches. It was a great visual education, to see works by the masters worn by the woman they had been designed for.

Another portrait of Singh's paternal grandmother, Sita Devi (1915—2002), who was a daughter of the Raja of Kahipur. She married Maharajkumar Karimjit Singh of Kapurthala in 1928, when she was 13. The couple had two sons, one born in 1944, the other in 1947. Image courtesy of Hanut Singh.

Q: What was your grandmother like?

A: She was a total spark but also the most compassionate person I’ve met or encountered in my life. And hugely flattering. She would meet someone and right away would say, “Oh, young man, you are so handsome! You must be an actor!” Of course he probably wasn’t, but she cast that kind of spell. She was well read and traveled all over the world and could talk about history and literature, as well as more glamorous things. One of her best friends was Barbara Hutton, who became my father’s godmother. She took jewels very seriously too.

Earrings of abalone and diamonds.

Q: How did you get started in this field?

A: I wasn’t trained in jewelry design at all. For some years I was an editor of a fashion magazine, running the offices, writing articles. But it never fueled my creative passions. So about eight years ago I borrowed money from my family and decided to create a collection of jewels, made from abalone and pearls. God was good to me, because it sold out entirely, and I was able to repay the loan. That first show opened up lots of avenues.

Earrings of mother of pearl, rubies, and diamonds.

Q: Your family's collection of jewels has obviously been an inspiration in your work.

A: Traditionally most of the jewelry was actually worn by men, meaning the big ceremonial pieces, like my great-grandfather's huge emerald-and-diamond turban ornament and massive ropes of pearls. Last year I inherited a fantastic Golconda-diamond ring that is mentioned in a book about Cartier. In early 20th century, the maharajahs started going to Paris and ordering jewels for themselves and their wives. My grandfather Karam would take loose stones to his appointments at Cartier—emeralds, rubies, Kashmir sapphires, Golconda diamonds—and the designers would flip out. My grandmother told me that Monsieur Cartier was flabbergasted. The patronage of the maharajahs was the reason French jewelry firms, especially Cartier, began producing Indian-inspired designs for the Western market, like the tutti-frutti pieces inspired by old Indian jewels that mixed a multitude of colored stones together.

Ruby ring with pavé diamonds.

Q: One of my favorite aspects of your designs is the colors, especially how you combine delicately shaded gems with darker, more rugged ones. What stones do you find inspiring right now?

A: I’m super-excited by chalcedony, a milky blue semiprecious stone that was a favorite of the Duchess of Windsor; she had an incredible chalcedony necklace and matching earrings made for her in the ‘30s by Suzanne Belperron. I love the color and like combining it with black-diamond beads and mandarin sapphires, which are orange. Carved rubies, which is a Moghul technique of literally carving patterns into the surface of the stone, is another favorite of mine. I just finished a very simple hexagonal carved-ruby pendant, stark and architectural, that weighs 180 carats.


Earrings of quartz, prehnite, and diamonds.

Principessa earrings of morganite and diamonds.

Q: Several of your recent works incorporate morganite, which I’d never heard of and am now crazy about.

A: I love morganite! It is a stone that reminds me of colored diamonds from the 17^th century, which often have a pinky-amber cast like cognac.

A ring of rock crystal with rubies and diamonds, from Singh's latest collection.

Q: In your new collection, however, color is confined largely to accents.

A: My new collection is based around rock crystal. I found some beautiful old stones and have been turning them into sculptural rings and pendants decorated with rubies filed into rectangles.

Rubies carved with images of the god Ganesh highlight a pair of earrings accented with diamonds and black enamel.

Q: The style of the new collection is bold but not overwhelming. Even your bigger pieces tend have a delicate appearance.

A: The jewelry world has gone so bling, which is a word I hate. Lots of people want jewels that are showy and flashy, with large stones, which isn’t my style at all. My work has always been delicate; I don’t know why. It’s just my aesthetic bent. Perhaps it's because I think delicate pieces are easier to wear, more versatile. I want to make things that are slightly Indian in feeling but that feel like today, or an amalgamation of what’s happening now with taste of the 1930s, the period when so many of my grandmother’s jewels were made.

Goth-style earrings with carved black-onyx skulls, diamonds, pearls, and quartz.

Q: There’s an edginess, though, in some of your works, like the onyx-and-diamond skull earrings.

A: I can’t be super-crazy avant-garde, though, because nobody will buy the pieces. At the end of the day people don’t want to wear experimental things. Most of my pieces don’t scream. You have to look at them up close, and then the interest kick in. Which is nice, because I’m not good at selling myself. I’m sort of bashful and let the jewels do the talking.

To see more of Hanut Singh's work and for contact information, go the designer's website, hanutsingh.com.

Well Said: Gladys Duchess of Marlborough

2011-02-23T19:30:00.004-05:00

Gladys Deacon, later Duchess of Marlborough, in a portrait by Paul-César Helleu.

"If you want to do something, don’t tell other people about it, just do it. Other people will always find a reason to try and prevent you."

So said Gladys Duchess of Marlborough (1881—1977), American heiress, intellectual, adventuress, and celebrated beauty.

SOURCE: Hugo Vickers, "An Eccentric Duchess," New York Social Diary, 23 February 2011.

Well Said: Gina Lollobrigida

2011-02-19T03:00:00.003-05:00

"What is the use of being beautiful, if you have to buy your own emeralds?"

So said actress Gina Lollobrigida (born 1927), after being complimented by Moroccan diplomat Taibi Benhima at a dinner party in New York City in 1965.

SOURCE: Gladys Wilson, The Duchess Pini di San Miniato, Memoirs of a Canadian Duchess (Montréal: P.D.S.M. Editor, 1986), page 110.

Well Said: Pablo Picasso

2011-02-18T03:00:00.005-05:00

Artist Pablo Picasso in his studio. Image from World Art.

"There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing: What is color?"

So said Pablo Picasso (1881—1973), in a conversation with German writer Ernst Jünger in the 1940s.

SOURCE: Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here (Penguin, 1989), page 110

The Eyes Have It

2011-02-16T03:00:00.011-05:00

British artist Colin Gill's 1928 depictions of the bright blue eyes of Gladys Duchess of Marlborough (née Gladys Deacon) stare down from the North Portico of her former country house, Blenheim Palace, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The Marlborough seat is hosting an exhibition about the duchess through 25 March 2011. Image courtesy of Blenheim Palace.

History is a curious thing. Scandals become footnotes, emotional bruises fade, and people that once commanded international headlines recede into anonymity. Such an individual was the American beauty Gladys Marie Deacon (1881—1977). But through 25 March 2011, visitors to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, where she briefly but memorably reigned as Duchess of Marlborough in the 1920s and 1930s, have an opportunity to step back in time and catch a fleeting glimpse of a lady the Anglo-American Member of Parliament Chips Channon called “the world’s most beautiful woman, the toast of Paris, the love of Proust, the belle amie of Anatole France.”

The Long Library at Blenheim, site of the exhibition "Gladys Deacon: An Eccentric Duchess."

Curated by the bestselling British biographer Hugo Vickers and arranged from end to end of Blenheim’s ravishing Long Library, “Gladys Deacon: An Eccentric Duchess” is an intimate exhibition of photographs, art, and fascinating ephemera, among them a lock of golden hair, a Jacob Epstein bust, suitcases, and Gladys’s personal photograph albums. Last night was the show’s gala opening, and Mr Vickers will be giving a lecture about Gladys and her rackety life at Blenheim on 2 March. To purchase tickets online, go to Blenheim Palace's website.

Gladys Deacon, her beauty celebrated, in a photograph by Lafayette. Courtesy of Hugo Vickers.

“It’s quite an emotional story, and my involvement with it is emotional as well,” Vickers told me in a telephone interview on Sunday. “When I was 16 years old, if somebody had asked me who I would have most liked to meet, it would not have been Winston Churchill but Gladys Deacon, the fascinating woman who married his cousin.” Vickers befriended the Duchess of Marlborough when he was 23 and spent two years visiting the aged aristocrat, then in her 90s and confined to a psychiatric hospital, feeble rather than insane. The more than 60 interviews that resulted ended up as the foundation of Vickers’s first book, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough; it was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1979, two years after its subject’s death.

Gladys Deacon, age 27, as painted in 1908 by Giovanni Boldini. The painting is in a private collection.

In her heyday Gladys Deacon (the name was pronounced GLAY-duz) was an A-list personality, as renowned for her unsettling beauty—especially those great, staring, crystal-blue eyes—as for her impressive intellect. Writers, musicians, and politicians were in her thrall, as were several dukes and princes. The German kaiser’s eldest son fell head over heels for her though his father put an end to that infatuation; the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou compared her beauty to that of an archangel. The self-absorbed Gladys adored being adored, though she seems to have loved no one. Art scholar Bernard Berenson, who met Gladys when she was 17, bitterly wrote of his disappointment in what he perceived as her capriciousness. "I decided to stop seeing Gladys Deacon when I convinced myself that in human relationships she offered nothing but an offensive arbitrariness, pursuing people in a flattering and ensnaring fashion, only so as to be able to break it off with them noisily when the fancy struck her."

Gladys Deacon, daughter of Florence Baldwin and Edward Parker Deacon, as a young girl. Courtesy of Hugo Vickers.

Berenson's wife, Mary, recorded her mixed impressions of the intriguing American, then 20 and taking Italy by storm. “The event of this month has been the reappearance of the radiant Gladys Deacon, so beautiful, so brilliant with her soft elixir ways, her hard clear youthful logic, her gaminerie, her lively imagination, her moods, her daring. It would take volumes to describe her and I don’t feel up to it. … Beautiful, cruel, selfish, untrained. What will become of her?”

"Gladys Deacon," a 1917 bust by Jacob Epstein. It is in the collection of The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

What became of the fascinating Miss Deacon is the stuff of “Gladys Deacon: An Eccentric Duchess,” which Vickers says should really be called “Gladys Deacon: The Lost Years.” (It includes the lady's numerous scrapbooks, which have never been seen before and are in Vickers's possession.) At the age of 40, on 25 June 1921, she married her lover Charles Spencer-Churchill, ninth duke of Marlborough, following the end of his marriage to her close friend the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt. (A morose and irritable man, the duke was perversely called Sunny, a nickname derived from his courtesy title, Earl of Sunderland.) The newlyweds soon realized the union was a mistake—Sunny's only passionate relationship was with Blenheim, to whose survival he was devoted at all costs. Still the duke honored her presence in his life. A pair of long-necked lead sphinxes, cast in Gladys’s image in 1930 by W. Ward Willis, grace the grounds of the palace.

A detail of one of Gladys Marlborough's eyes, as painted on the ceiling of the North Portico of Blenheim by British artist Colin Gill. Image courtesy of Blenheim Palace.

Two years earlier artist Colin Gill (1892—1940) painted gigantic evocations of her famous blue eyes on the ceiling of the portico; the brown ones accompanying them, in some sort of inside joke, are suspected to be Consuelo's but could just as well have been the duke's. Leaks and weather largely destroyed those surreal orbs and the flashing gilded rays surrounding them, but thanks to the present duke, Gladys’s step-grandson, Gill’s distinctive work was restored to its original glory a few years ago.

Gladys Deacon and Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough on their wedding day, 25 June 1921. The ceremony took place at the Paris home of her artist cousin Eugene Higgins and was described by one of the guests, Linda (Mrs. Cole) Porter as "the most incredibly vulgar performance I have ever witnessed." Others witnessing the nuptials were the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and several crowned heads, including a maharajah.

In Gladys Marlborough, the blueblooded world of Edith Wharton intersected with modern tabloid tawdriness. Her parents’ tempestuous marriage ended when her father, Edward Parker Deacon, murdered her mother’s French lover and then went insane. Obsessed with her Greek-statue good looks, Gladys, at age 22, had an enterprising surgeon inject melted wax into the bridge of her nose in an effort to create a perfectly straight line from forehead to nostrils. The freakish procedure worked for a while; eventually, however, the wax migrated, settling in her cheeks and along her jawline, somewhat altering a beauty recorded by Rodin, Degas, Boldini, Epstein, and other leading artists. Her enormous aquamarine eyes, however, remained intact, as did that inquisitive mind.

Gladys Marie Deacon, in a passport photograph taken in 1918.

Unfortunately the duke didn’t appreciate his wife's mental acumen or her increasingly odd behavior. Nor did he happily accept her many Blenheim spaniels, which left their mark, literally, in the state rooms of his ancestral seat. Ultimately a union that began in mutual if misjudged admiration turned to implacable hatred. “Watch Sunny—he hates her guts—great sport!” Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, chortled on a visit to Blenheim in the early 1930s, as Gladys prepared to enter the room. “She left Blenheim under pretty gruesome circumstances,” Vickers says. When Gladys refused to find other accommodations as her marriage disintegrated, the duke abandoned her and ordered Blenheim's gas and electricity cut off. When she took refuge at their London mansion, he did the same thing. (Friends smuggled in a portable stove so she could cook.) Those actions didn’t dislodge the recalcitrant duchess either, so he had her evicted. Divorce proceedings followed; unfortunately the duke died in 1934 before the legal papers could be finalized. And with that, Gladys Marlborough, Europe's golden girl, vanished into the English countryside—growing older, more reclusive, even adopting an alias to avoid detection. Eventually, in the 1960s, she was committed to an institution. Gladys apparently didn't put up much of a fight as she was removed from the cottage she called home. As the elderly duchess told Vickers on one of his visits, “Sometimes something happens that is so awful that it cuts you off and after that you don’t care.”

Gladys Duchess of Marlborough, died in 1977 at the age of 96. And now, at least through the end of next month, she’s back home.

The Duchess of Marlborough, snapping a self-portrait, in 1928. Image courtesy of Hugo Vickers.

Well Said: Edmond Roudnitska

2011-02-13T11:59:00.003-05:00

“A beautiful perfume is the one which gives us a shock: a sensory one followed by a psychological one."

So said Edmond Roudnitska (1905—1996), creator of memorable scents, notably several for Christian Dior, among them Diorama (1948), Diorissimo (1956), Eau Savage (1966), Diorella (1972), and Dior-Dior (1976).

In honor of Roudnitska, today I splashed on Moustache, the 1948 fragrance that he and his wife, Thérèse, created for Marcel Rochas. Though Moustache has been discontinued, supplies of a recalibrated version can be found online but nothing beats the long-ago real thing. As Bruce Everiss, writer of the blog Bruce on Shaving, explains, "If you are looking for Moustache then the new formulation is in a rectangular frosted glass bottle with a silver cap. The original is in a cylindrical fluted glass bottle." For an example of the latter, see the '60s advertisement below.

Word to the wise: Proctor & Gamble, owner of the Marcel Rochas marque, should bring back Moustache—the Roudnitskas' 1948 formula, please. And that distinctive bottle too.

Well Said: Patricia Highsmith

2011-02-12T06:00:00.004-05:00

"Obsessions are the only things that matter."

So wrote noir novelist Patricia Highsmith (1921—1995), masterful writer of books that biographer Joan Schenkar has called "brilliantly disorienting narratives of ... shimmering negativity."

Well Spent: 1940s French Armchairs

2011-02-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

One of a pair of 1940s Louis XV-inspired armchairs, available at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler Antiques.

Furniture made by designers of the 1940s ranks high on my list of desirables, especially those French talents who reinterpreted dix-huitième elegance for their own unsettled time. That backward glance can be traced to a desire to create a safe harbor in a world that had been shattered culturally, socially, and emotionally. As the quietly soignée Solange de Noailles, Duchesse d'Ayen, an editor at the Paris editions of Vogue and House & Garden, achingly observed in a wartime letter to a friend in New York City, "loves, lives, and belongings have lost every kind of value ... we suffer, and we shall suffer more." Despite her noble title, her perfectly fitted Balenciagas, and her family's romantic Château de Maintenon, the duchess (1898—1976) knew what she was talking about. Her husband, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, spent three years being shuttled from one concentration camp to another, before perishing at Bergen-Belsen—one day before it was liberated by the Allies. Her only son, a 19-year-old infantry sergeant, was killed when he stepped on a German landmine. Mme d'Ayen herself spent months in solitary confinement in the famously brutal Fresnes prison.

Solange de Noailles, Duchesse d'Ayen, as seen in a signed 1931 photograph by fashion photographer Baron George von Hoyningen-Huene. It can be purchased from Staley-Wise Gallery.

Postwar France, the duchess noted a few years later, was finally free of its Nazi oppressors but it remained psychologically crippled, a land barely breathing. By returning to the glories of the distant past, she and many others thought, the spiritually wounded could find succor. Aesthetically, they had a point. In The Age of Comfort (Bloomsbury, 2009), cultural historian Joan E. DeJean, trustee professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, winningly and wittily explores how the tastemakers of 18th-century France created not only palaces and hôtels particuliers of imperishable beauty but also chairs and sofas whose unprecedentedly ergonomic silhouettes and innovative upholstery techniques invited the human body to relax. In short, to be comforted. Which partly explains why so many French designers working in the 1940s and 1950s enthusiastically embraced handcarved cabriole legs and goosedown stuffing. And why their revivalist creations, however retardataire in concept, arguably represent something more than a mere fashion trend.

Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler Antiques in London has in stock a pair of open armchairs (Reference #AF16939) made in the 1940s, their painted-wood frames echoing the taste of the Louis XV period. They are priced at £4,800, approximately $7,700. The pale pink upholstery, trimmed with passementerie in a slightly darker shade of the same color, is highly appealing, don't you think?

Well Said: Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

2011-02-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

"A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal."

So wrote Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902—1983), the author, as Wikipedia states, of a "46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951-74), one of the great achievements of 20th century art scholarship."

To order the latest editions of these celebrated guides, click here. And to hear one of Pevsner's Reith radio lectures about English art, click here.

Originally posted on An Aesthete's Lament on 5 December 2008.

The Other Lanvin

2011-02-09T06:00:00.003-05:00

Soprano, pianist, patron of the arts, and heiress to the Lanvin fashion fortune founded by her mother, Marie-Blanche de Polignac is shown seated in the music room of her hôtel particulier at 16 rue Barbet de Jouy in Paris. The image is an watercolor illustration by Cecil Beaton, which was published in British Vogue on 1 May 1936.

Haute couturière Jeanne Lanvin is justly renowned, decoratively speaking, for the periwinkle-blue apartment she inhabited at 16 rue Barbet de Jouy in Paris, France. Created for her in the early 1920s by Armand-Albert Rateau, its rooms—some of which are preserved at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs—were a frenzy of femininity, the silk-upholstered walls drizzled with embroidered white flowers and leaves sprouting from the carved-wood skirting boards. Its cerulean glory, however, has thrown another significant Lanvin interior, located at the same address, in deepest, darkest shadow: a music room that was commissioned by Lanvin's elegant daughter, Marie-Blanche de Polignac, from Art Deco designer Louis Süe.

The only child of Jeanne Lanvin's brief marriage to an Italian nobleman, the former Marguerite di Pietro (1897—1958) was known to intimates as "Ririte" but preferred to be called Marie-Blanche after she became the wife of Count Jean de Polignac (1888—1943). (She was also the inspiration for Lanvin's invention of the color rose Polignac as well as the perfume Arpège, but that's another story.) Music mesmerized her more than fashion, and as a girl the young Mademoiselle di Pietro made plans to become an opera singer, a dream for which the lissome brunette diligently trained and was admirably suited. Artist Jean Hugo compared her silvery soprano to the singing of the sirens of Greek mythology and was impressed that she could spend remain "for hours at the piano sight-reading the most difficult scores." As another admirer observed, "Her voice was ravishing, like Saint Cecilia in person," adding that, in all areas of life, Marie-Blanche's "taste and ... discernment were perfect." Even the American composer Ned Rorem agreed, writing that "were I lost on a desert island with only five LP records, one would be her singing of Monteverdi's madrigals under the direction of her dear friend and mentor Nadia Boulanger."

Marie-Blanche, Countess Jean de Polignac, painted by Edouard Vuillard between 1928 and 1932. The portrait, which shows the countess in her bedroom, is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay. Photograph by Ondra Havala via Flickr.

Though social engagements sometimes interfered, the "haughtily lovely" Polignac was a founding member of the celebrated Nadia Boulanger Ensemble Vocal. In addition to composing music, performing in concerts both public and private, and appearing on seminal recordings—her husband helped underwrite Boulanger's pioneering 1937 recording of the Monteverdi madrigals—the countess quickly established herself as a sophisticated patron of the arts. Among her close friends were Boulanger, Erik Satie, Gabriel Fauré, Germaine Tailleferre, and, most especially, François Poulenc. Like Satie, he wrote numerous works in her honor, including "Trois poèmes de Louise de Vilmorin," a song cycle that set some of Vilmorin's writings to music.

Given those talents and her high-profile marriage to a scion of one of France's grandest noble families—she had been previous married to and divorced from President Clemenceau's grandson Dr. René Jacquemaire—it is natural that Marie-Blanche de Polignac became a magnet for artists. As such she flung open the doors of her mansion on rue Barbey de Jouy, mere blocks from the Invalides, for a soirée every Sunday evening. American pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher described these crushes as being populated by "a whole host of splendid names, aristocrats and cultural figures alike" while singers sang and pianists played. Often new works were aired for the very first time, such as soprano Janine Micheau's rendition of Jacques Leguerney's "Chanson Triste" (1944). This sort of heady entertaining required a suitably impressive and comfortable setting, of course, so the count and countess commissioned the adventuresome Paris decorator Louis Süe (1872—1968) to do the honors.

A detail of the doors and paneling of Count and Countess Jean de Polignacs' Empire-inspired library in Paris, which was the work of architect Emilio Terry. The 1940s mahogany-and-faux-ebony woodwork was a star of the 2002 Biennale des Antiquaires. Image by Didier Herman from cdecor.com

Previously owned by the radical political hostess and art collector Marie-Louise Arconati-Visconti (1840—1923), the Polignacs' handsome neoclassical hôtel particulier would eventually include significant decors orchestrated by Süe between 1930 and 1932. Among them was a dining room inventively frescoed by Christian Bérard; in the 1940s Emilio Terry became involved in the house and installed a neo-Empire mahogany library. (The paneling of the latter space ended up for sale at the 2002 Biennale des Antiquaires, as shown above.) The mansion, demolished in the mid 1960s and replaced by a dreary modern apartment building, also contained Jeanne Lanvin's admired blue apartment, because mother and daughter, whatever their increasing differences, rarely lived apart.

White silk cushions were scattered across the grey satin sofa in Marie-Blanche and Jean de Polignacs' music room on rue Barbet de Jouy. The cocktail table's mirrored top was set on a painted base that recalled a fragment of an ancient column. Interior design by Louis Süe and Henri Gonse. Image by Buffotot published in British Vogue, 10 June 1936.

Curiously, given Marie-Blanche de Polignac's reputation for personal restraint, she selected a decorator best known for opulent, often decadent interiors. To name just one example, Süe created an astounding grotto-style dining room set aglow with phosphorescent paint for the Neuilly-sur-Seine villa of fashion plate and writer Daisy Fellowes, a Polignac relative by marriage. (Her formidable aunt Winnaretta, a major music patron backed by Singer-sewing-machine millions, was the widow of Jean de Polignac's composer uncle, Prince Edmond de Polignac.) For Marie-Blanche's music room, however, the designer and diplomat-turned-decorator Henri Gonse (1874—1946) soft-pedaled his usual edgy extravagance in favor of haute-couture monumentality.

Paved with golden parquet and a coral-pink carpet, the music room at 16 rue Barbet de Jouy was as much a statement of the muscular classicism of the 1930s, though wrought in candy-box colors, as Mme Lanvin's apartment exemplified the feminine frivolity of the 1920s. At either end of the chalk-white room Süe and Gonse carved out wide, ceiling-height alcoves: one sheltered the main door, the other a large window overlooking the Polignacs' garden and the dome of the Invalides. In the latter, a raised platform was constructed to support an immense button-tufted sofa dressed in dove-grey satin and scattered with white cushions. Here six to eight guests could comfortably relax as uplights, concealed behind the sofa, set the filmy pale-pink curtains aglow.

At right angles to the Polignacs' satin sofa were smaller windows lined with mirror, which Marie-Blanche used to display potted orchids. Tall folding screens of polished wood were placed in the corners of the room, their ebony complexions setting off a sequence of Roman-style busts perched on tapering pedestals. Here and there tailored canapés stood at the ready, and Süe custom-made the room's centrifugal pièce de résistance: a sumptuous round ottoman, about eight feet in diameter, upholstered in brilliant coral-pink satin, and squatting on a half-dozen lion's paws made of snow-white plaster.

The Süe-designed ottoman that centered the Polignacs' salon musical. (The dark area at the top right is an overlapping photograph that could not be cropped out.) Image by Buffotot, published in British Vogue, 10 June 1936.

Eighty-odd years after the heyday of that blush-colored salon musical, it is easy to imagine Marie-Blanche de Polignac's Sunday soirées—bejeweled women and brillantined men taking in the latest art song by Satie or Poulenc, sometimes performed by an up-and-coming young soprano, sometimes by their soignée, thirty-something hostess. And with the windows open during the spring, Salvador Dalí archly observed in his memoirs, one could repair to the Polignacs' garden and listen as "string quartets played in the interior all aflame with candles and Renoir paintings and with the malefic coprophagia of an unsurpassable pastel by Fatin-Latour—all this accompanied by petits-fours and much candy and other sweets."

Well Said: Marie-Hélène de Rothschild

2011-02-08T06:00:00.006-05:00

Baroness Guy de Rothschild (née Baroness Marie-Hélène Naïla Stéphanie Josina van Zuylen van Nyevelt) at a movie premiere in 1973, in the company of Salvador Dalí and Yul Brynner.

"Those who are small in spirit, who are mean, narrow-minded or timid, should leave entertaining to others."

So observed Marie-Hélène de Rothschild (1931-1996), the queen of Paris society.

Originally posted on An Aesthete's Lament on 8 November 2008.

Well Spent: Highgrove Shop Boot Rack

2011-02-07T05:00:00.030-05:00

Given the copious amounts of snow we are experiencing in our picturesque corner of the world, this handsome boot rack would be welcome near the front door.

According to the Prince of Wales's charitable-gifts website, The Highgrove Shop, it is "handmade by craftsmen ... using air-dried hardwood from a sustainable broad-leaved Welsh woodland." And the cunning little urn detail replicates the stone urns that march along the roofline of Highgrove House, the Prince's residence near Tetbury, Gloucestershire. Built between 1796 and 1798 by a rich Huguenot cloth-trader with the amusing name of John Paul Paul, Highgrove was elegantly Palladianized for the Prince of Wales, circa 1989, by architect Peter Falconer. His redesign was inspired by an idealized painting of the house by Felix Kelly.

The Highgrove boot rack is priced at £65 (approximately $105). To order one, click here. All profits go to The Prince's Charities Foundation.

Well Said: Mildred the Maid

2011-02-06T06:00:00.003-05:00

"You got your dishes, you got your home."

So said actress Nancy Walker (1922—1992) in her role as the idiosyncratic maid, Mildred, in the first episode of the 1970s crime drama McMillan & Wife. In that particular segment, San Francisco Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan's wife, portrayed by Susan Saint James, nearly gets killed when a murder investigation intersects with her search for a missing Wedgwood china service she inherited from an aunt.

I understand Mildred's sentiment completely. When I lived in Spanish Harlem, in my youth, my ground-floor apartment was utterly bare, I mean mattress-on-the-floor bare. There was also a floor lamp and my dog. That was it. I did, however, possess a set of sterling silver flatware and some 1830s English plates, which made eating Chinese take-out while seated on the floor much more comforting.

Get Inspired: A Perfect Porch

2011-02-05T17:43:00.000-05:00

The town my family and I call home most of the week is graced with all manner of charming houses. A walk down almost any of its tree-lined streets bears witness to a mid-to-late-19th-century heyday: here a Victorian mansion with a whimsical tower, there a Greek Revival cottage dignified by a temple-like façade. After dropping our daughter off at school one morning, my husband and I walked past a particularly delightful residence extensively renovated by an owner with a romantic streak.

Clad partially in shingles, partially in clapboard, and painted a pleasing shade of biscuit, the house has been made memorable by the addition of an L-shape double-porch that stretches across the street façade and around one side of the building. But instead of deploying balustrades of turned-wood spindles or fancy gingerbread that would have been common around here a century and a half ago, the owners and their architect came up with captivating railing treatment: wood pales rounded at the top, pierced with a single hole, and then set closely together in a manner that provides privacy but without being standoffish.

My husband, who lived in Turkey as a teenager, says it reminds him of yalis, the lacy wood Ottoman houses built along the Bosphorus. To me the overall impression is of a summer house in Eastern Europe, say a dacha located an easy carriage drive away from the bustle of Budapest, the sort of house where white linen is worn when the temperature rises and whose female inhabitants protect their complexions with lace parasols.

Get Inspired: Ernest Wiart

2011-02-02T06:00:00.003-05:00

Space: An apartment balcony in Paris, France

Year: 1936

Client: Called a member of Paris's jeunesse dorée by his friend the pianist Arthur Rubenstein, Georges L. Brocheton was a scion of a Spanish banking family that had settled in Paris around 1860 and whose descendants married into the French nobility as well as the American diplomatic corps. By the 1930s, however, the dashing young heir was a distinguished gentleman nearing retirement, living with his forty-something second wife, Renée, in an elegant limestone apartment building on the Champ de Mars, the fashionable sycamore-shaded park that stretches from the Eiffel Tower to the École Militaire. (The mosque-like building on the other side of the Seine is the original Palais du Trocadéro, a meeting hall from the 1878 World's Fair, which was soon to be demolished.) The neighborhood was, and remains, a bit stuffy, but the pale Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau façades surrounding the park concealed many stylish residences, including the Brochetons' high-ceilinged flat. At some point the highly social couple came into contact with Ernest Wiart, an interior decorator, and he transformed their rooms into cool, classic, comfortably modern settings sparked with chinoiserie accents. The most inspired touch, to my mind, however, was Wiart's bright-idea treatment of a spacious balcony.

Elements: Through the installation of a glass-paned metal shelf that surely must have been hinged, Wiart gave the Brochetons' balcony a dual character. Shelf down, the balcony served as simple vantage point, a pleasant place to momentarily stand and gaze. Shelf up and locked into place, it became a plein-air entertaining space, a perfect spot to partake of drinks and hors d'oeuvre or enjoy more serious dining. Renée and Georges Brocheton and a couple of guests, all seated comfortably in chairs likely pulled out from the dining room, could sip wine and converse well into the evening, the grey-green sycamore trees, the Eiffel Tower, and a picturesque assortment of spires and rooftops spreading out at their feet and across the horizon. Boxwood planted in terracotta pots and clipped into tall, tidy cones were positioned at each corner of the balcony, making it seem an intimate adjunct to the park below.

Image: Bodorff for British Vogue, 5 August 1936, page 32

Get Inspired: Yves Saint Laurent

2011-02-01T06:00:00.002-05:00

"Standing Moroccan in Green," a 1912-1913 work painted by Henri Matisse during his first trip to North Africa. It is owned by The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

"I'm not painting pictures, I'm painting furniture. I found two beautiful wooden Moroccan tables in the souks, and I painted them in vivid colors à la Matisse."

So said Yves Saint Laurent more than two decades ago, when a reporter heard the fashion designer had taken up painting at his home in Marrakech.

What's stopping you from doing the same?

Details Count: Passementerie

2011-01-31T18:27:00.001-05:00

The living room of Katherine and Julien St. Charles Chaqueneau (né Shakno), 933 Park Avenue, New York City, New York, as photographed in 1934. Image by Samuel Gottscho from the Museum of the City of New York.

Sometimes passementerie can go too far.

I don't know whether to sit in these armchairs or wear one as a peignoir.

Well Said: Filippa Rolf

2011-01-29T19:39:00.000-05:00

Véra Nabokov and her novelist husband, Vladimir, in Switzerland, 1966.

“She is a fine decoration in an armchair.”

So poet Filippa Rolf observed of Véra Nabokov (1902 — 1991), wife of the novelist.

Remember: You are as much an ornament in your rooms as any bibelot. So comport yourself accordingly.

Get Inspired: Sydney Redesdale

2011-01-14T04:00:00.010-05:00

Wilbury House, Wiltshire, England, as seen in Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715. Considered one of England's greatest Palladian residences, it was skillfully restored over the last decade or so by Miranda, Countess of Iveagh, who died last month.

"... [Wilbury House] made a lasting impression on [my mother] at an age when sensitive children notice the details of their surroundings. Muv never again lived in a fine eighteenth-century house like Wilbury, her ideal, but her ability to make her succession of houses attractive and original on little money was one of her outstanding talents. She did not bow to fashion, mixing furniture and objects from different periods which many people would have thought unsuitable for their surroundings. She used what was available .... Junk shops drew her like a magnet .... She never employed a decorator or sought advice; she knew what she wanted and got it done."

So the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire wrote, about her mother, Lady Redesdale (née Sydney Bowles), in her recently published and highly entertaining autobiography, Wait for Me! Memoirs (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010). As a child in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Lady Redesdale lived at Wilbury, when her father, publisher Thomas Gibson Bowles, and Wilbury's owners, Sir Henry and Lady Mallet, agreed to save on expenses by sharing the house.

Get Inspired: Madame de Pompadour

2011-01-13T09:26:00.001-05:00

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, painted around 1756 by François Boucher. This famous portrait of Louis XV's influential mistress is in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.

"She had a horror of common or banal objects, or ones that were often copied, with fashionable motifs; if a piece of furniture was to please her it must be unique of its sort; the same applied to all her upholstery and hangings, always specially woven for her."

SOURCE: Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour (New York Review Books, 2001), page 158.

Of Taxidermy and Such

2011-01-12T15:04:00.002-05:00

One of Rachel Denny's "Domestic Trophies" series, whimsical riffs on hunting trophies that the Oregon-based artist crafts out of wool, foam, and wood. For information see the artist's website.

Over Christmas I accomplished two feats: rearranging my brother's house and reading the final installment in Edmund Morris's stirring trilogy about the 26th president of the United States, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, 2010). The two actions are not entirely unrelated, I must point out.

Like the pince-nezed Teddy, my younger brother is a vigorous sort — military man, wearer of spectacles, given to enthusiastic bursts of optimism and patriotism. More importantly for this blog, however, is an aesthetic characteristic he and Roosevelt have in common. My brother has no sense of interior design at all, other than "the hunter's desire to surround himself with disjecta membra." That's one of Morris's insights into his subject, and it means, basically, animal parts. My brother doesn't hunt much and what he kills, he eats, so while I was at his new residence in South Carolina — a sprawling and surprisingly untouched 1950s house long owned by the founder of a local institution of higher learning — he regaled me with the venison he put away in the freezer as well as the sausage he made from the meat of a wild boar.

Evidence of those hunting expeditions sat on the floor of his library: a glassy-eyed four-point buck and a bristly black boar's head with a malevolent grin. There was a fish of some sort too, affixed to what appears to be a large piece of driftwood. My sister-in-law dislikes these objects greatly; ditto my mother. But my brother clings to them as evidence of his prowess as a modern-day hunter-gatherer, in the same way Theodore Roosevelt scattered the rooms of Sagamore Hill with bear rugs and such. So I scooped up the trophies and declared the heads perfect for displaying above the copper hood of the fireplace in the family room, which is precisely where they are now, flanking a signed and numbered James Bama print depicting a Shoshone chief. The fish went into the family room too. Where else was it going to go?

My only sibling doesn't have a precious bone in his body or much appreciation for beauty for beauty's sake. Neither does his wife. And they would both agree with me. The furnishings they have accumulated over the years are a bit of his, a bit of hers, as well as a great deal of furniture purchased with the house, meaning suburbiana from the 1950s and early 1960s, most of it, well, not my style. Expressing that opinion, however, was not my place, though I rolled my eyes plenty of times. What was important was to work over the house top to bottom and make it more welcoming — putting tables alongside chairs, moving a spinet piano to a better location, rearranging bookshelves, transferring lamps from one room to another, arranging pictures. (They recently moved into the house and seemed a bit overwhelmed when I arrived.) The end result, I hope, is a house whose furniture placement makes more sense, where collections are more orderly, and where, at the end of the day, my brother has, for the first time, a proper room of his own, where he can relax, play his guitars, and read, if he will ever sit still long enough to crack open a book.

Reworking the library was the hardest part of the holiday makeover. As a room it is nothing special: it a conventionally dark space, about 12 feet wide by 20 feet long, fully lined with mahogany-stained wood divided into panels by applied moldings. The fireplace is framed by slabs of spinach-green marble flecked with veins of white. The wall-to-wall carpeting is beige. If the room was mine I'd paint every inch of wood a Chinese green, the kind of green that's so dark it's almost black; rip up the carpeting and brashly spatter-paint the underlying concrete floor; and haul in a couple of English-club-style chairs, a glimmering giltwood console, some blue-and-white-porcelain lamps, and call it a stylish day. But it isn't my library. Though my brother knows nothing about interior design, he is nonetheless quite stubborn about what he'll live with, which meant that my mother and I could change relatively nothing. Still there's a lot one can accomplish within those narrow confines.

We dragged in a wing chair from the living room, where it didn't look especially happy, and placed it beside the fireplace, facing my brother's partners' desk. The moment that happened he began to envision, for the very first time, how the library could be used, such as hosting an affable father-and-son chat straight out of "Leave It to Beaver." (His observation, not mine.) A Mission-oak-style chair was nearly carried out to the garage, because my brother thought it looked severe and sort of boring. But when I pointed out that its firmness and height made it good for sitting and strumming his guitar with a music stand by his side, he agreed that it could stay. Ditto an old brass table lamp he deemed too retro; it serves a purpose, I told him, and you can always get a more pleasing fixture in the future — so the lamp stayed put. This sort of push-me, pull-you went on for three days straight. He was especially concerned (nay, alarmed) when he came home to find my mother and I removing the shelves from some bookcases, turning them into display cases, and arranging his framed medals and citations against six-foot lengths of wide green-and-white ribbon à la Mario Buatta. The displays weren't perfect, I agreed, but even he admitted that the cascades of carefully arranged frames looked far better than shelves half full of worn books and scattered objects. Plus the documents in the frames reflect who he is and what he has accomplished, professionally, in his life thus far.

So with this experience in mind, I exhort you all: open the curtains, move the furniture, and edit the clutter. All it takes a little effort to create a room worth inhabiting. It might not be as beautiful as one in a magazine but it can be comfortable and inviting. Just ask my brother.

Well Said: John Dickinson

2011-01-04T20:02:00.000-05:00

Designer John Dickinson at home in San Francisco, California, 1978. Image by Terry Schmidt for the San Francisco Chronicle.

"A room is finished when you cannot remove something without it being missed. Everything must earn its keep."

So said John Dickinson (1920—1982), American decorator and designer, who was known for furniture and interiors that were "spare, cerebral, uncompromising, and original." Such as carved-wood lamp bases shaped like femurs or a table of galvanized tin ingeniously worked to resemble draped fabric.

Lo! Unto us a Child is Born!

2010-12-25T01:00:00.003-05:00

The holiday window of dealer R. Louis Bofferding in New York City. The giltwood figure dates from the eighteenth century, and the star-like mirror is attributed to designer Gilbert Poillerat.

THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST
The Bible, Luke 8:14

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

"For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

"And this shall be a sign until you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST
The Qu'ran, 19:18-34

[Mary] said [to the angel of the Lord, disguised as a man]: "I seek refuge from thee to (Allah) Most Gracious: (come not near) if thou dost fear Allah.

[The angel] said: "Nay, I am only a messenger from thy Lord (to announce) to thee the gift of a holy son."

She said: "How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?"
[The angel] said: "So (it will be): Thy Lord saith, `That is easy for Me: and (We Wish) to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a mercy from Us': It is a matter (so) decreed."

So she conceived him, and she retired with him to a remote place.

And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm-tree. She cried (in her anguish): "Ah! would that I had died before this! Would that I had been a thing forgotten and out of sight!" But (a voice) cried to her from beneath the (palm-tree): "Grieve not! for thy Lord hath provided a rivulet [of water] beneath thee.

"And shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm-tree. It will let fall fresh ripe dates upon thee.

"So eat and drink and cool (thine) eye. And if thou dost see any man, say 'I have vowed a fast to (Allah) Most Gracious, and this day will I enter into no talk with any human being.' "

At length she brought the (babe) to her people, carrying him (in her arms). They said: "O Mary! Truly an amazing thing hast thou brought!

"O sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a man of evil, nor thy mother a woman unchaste!"

But she pointed to the babe. They said, "How can we talk to one who is a child in the cradle?"

[The infant] said: "I am indeed a servant of Allah: He hath given me revelation and made me a prophet;

"And He hath made me blessed wheresoever I be, and hath enjoined on me Prayer and Charity as long as I live. (He) hath made me kind to my mother, and not overbearing or miserable.

"So Peace is on me the day I was born, the day that I die, and the Day that I shall be raised up to life (again)!"

Such (was) Jesus the son of Mary: (it is) a statement of truth, about which they (vainly) dispute.

Details Count: The White House Entrance Hall

2010-12-22T09:55:00.003-05:00

A detail of the entrance hall of the White House this holiday season. Image from the blog Architect Design.

This week Stefan Hurray of the diverting style blog Architect Design posted all manner of pictures of his first-ever visit to the White House in Washington, D. C., which is presently decorated for the holidays. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but an image he snapped of the curtains in the entrance hall, aka the grand foyer, which is shown above.

Take a look at the flamboyant swooping valance holding aloft the red-silk panels dripping with saffron and scarlet tassels. Now that's swagger. A member of the White House curator's office told me the early-nineteenth-century-inspired valances were installed in 1998 during the Clinton Adminstration, under the direction of the White House Preservation Committee, and are made of carved and gilded wood. The curtains were made by Nelson Beck, an eminent District of Columbia upholsterer.

Oh, and the Honduras mahogany concert grand piano with the eagle supports? A custom-made version of Steinway's D-274 model, it was completed in December 1938 to the designs of White House consulting architect Eric Gugler and with inspired input from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As for the stenciled-gold scenes that decorate the curved side of the piano, The New York Times reported, in an article about the piano's arrival at the White House, they depict "the Virginia reel, the American Indian ceremonial dance, the New England barn dance, the Southern Negro cake walk, and cowboys singing on the Western plains." The Virginia reel, the president said, was one of the Roosevelts' favorite dances.

Fun fact: Interior decorator Jeffrey Bilhuber's engineer grandfather Paul H. Bilhuber (1889—1979) — a Steinway relative, factory manager, vice president, inventor, and acoustical expert — created the piano's innards, including its soundboard.

Get Inspired: Dogmersfield Park

2010-12-21T05:00:00.019-05:00

The garden house at Dogmersfield Park, a great Hampshire estate. John Fowler's country house, The Hunting Lodge, was one of several follies on the property. Image originally published in Country Life, 27 April 1901.

A few recent emails about John Fowler's famous country house, The Hunting Lodge, led me to pick up the spade of research and go a-digging. One hears so much about the iconic British decorator's longtime Hampshire hideaway but almost nothing about the estate it once graced, Dogmersfield Park.

Fowler's immensely charming second home, for many years now a residence of interior decorator Nicholas Haslam, was built around 1740 or around 1770, depending on which scholar, book or historical document one prefers to believe. What is unquestionable is that it was constructed as one of several follies decorating the landscape around the Palladian mansion at the heart of Dogmersfield Park, not far from the village of Odiham. At least one source states that The Hunting Lodge, an eye-catcher of eccentric loveliness, was nothing more than a fancy-fronted cottage for a gamekeeper, which is good enough for me until the issue can be further clarified. And as for the main house?

Dogmersfield Park, Odiham, Hampshire, England. Image from Country Life, 27 April 1901.

Seat of the Mildmay baronets and constructed in 1728, Dogmersfield Park — gutted by fire in the early 1980s and now renovated as a Four Seasons Hotel —was the subject of a deep, admiring profile in Country Life on 27 April 1901. Among the enticing photographs is one depicting a handsome pedimented stone garden house. Located behind the mansion at the end of a broad gravel path known as the Long Walk and flanked by ivy-clad, red-brick walls, it is a dream of a structure, apparently erected in the nineteenth century by Major Sir Henry Paulet St John Mildmay, 6th baronet (1853 — 1916). Or so the Country Life article infers. Crowning the two spacious arches that form the entrance is a curvaceous broken pediment ornamented with blocky obelisks capped with spheres. The interior of the garden house looks most inviting; a built-in painted-wood settee fills the three solid sides, with a large rectangular table parked at the center. The walls appear to be lined with encaustic tiles, and accenting the entrance, here and there, are glazed-ceramic Chinese garden stools.

I'd build garden house of Dogmersfield Park if I had the money. Though entirely out of painted wood, which would give it an American twist, don't you think?

The handsomely weathered garden house at Dogmersfield Park today, showing that its nineteenth-century tiles and painted settee remain in place. Photograph © Allan Soedring of Astoft.co.uk and used with permission.

Get Inspired: Trumeau Mirrors

2010-12-20T06:00:00.025-05:00

A trumeau mirror updated with a graphic nineteenth-century botanical depiction of a cactus.

I have never been fond of trumeau mirrors, whether trumeau de glace, trumeau de cheminée, or trumeau whatever. Perhaps I've just seen too many second-rate examples of these tall, thin looking glasses, where the upper panel is filled with an indifferent painting depicting mincing courtiers or twee arrangements of flowers and usually displayed in a saccharine French-style room.

Yesterday, however, I was at a friend's house in Cooperstown, New York, and remembered she owns a pair of matching trumeau mirrors and has jazzed up their tasseled Louis XVI formality with gritty botanical prints depicting tropical plants. So out came my iPhone and I started clicking. One trumeau contains an image of a wonderfully spiky cactus; the other, which hangs in a spare room over a chest of drawers, displays a portrait of a bunch of unripe bananas, as if the stalk had been hacked from a tree with a machete mere moments before. The gutsy works of art add an unexpected south-of-the-border swagger to the elegant green-and-gold frames. One could easily imagine them hanging in a mansion in Mexico City or in the salon of a ranch on the Argentine pampas.

My friend's departure from the trumeau norm gave me an idea that I might pursue, if I ever come across a trumeau that's attractive enough and cheap enough to seduce me. Why not fill the upper section with a mod watercolor, an abstract oil painting, a graphic map, a striking photograph, a Matisse-style collage made by your child, even a fascinating scrap of exotic fabric? After all a trumeau is just a frame with a reflective section below. So why not be creative with what you put in it?

Inspired, I took an online spin through the engrossing website of The Old Print Shop in New York City and found a few interesting possibilities, such as a fantastically fiery Currier & Ives print of the flaming wreck of steamboat Lexington in 1840 and a bold 2001 abstract woodcut by Su-Li Hung.

The trumeau hanging in a friend's spare room is fitted with a botanical image of a bunch of bananas.

Archive: A House By Any Other Name

2010-12-19T08:09:00.001-05:00

The Hunting Lodge, Odiham Common, near Odiham, Hampshire, England, the country house of interior decorator Nicky Haslam and, before him, of John Fowler. Photograph by Hugh Chevallier from Geograph British Isles.

"Well that's pretty pompous!" I overheard someone say with an unpleasant snicker when they learned an acquaintance's otherwise modest country house—a cottage, really—had a name. Not just an address, mind you, but an actual name. As the condescending critic went on, christening one's home is something only a person putting on airs would do. But why shouldn't a dwelling be more than just a number?

In the good old days, back when addresses didn't really exist, especially in rural areas, one's residence had to be identified somehow. Often it was by the inhabitants' surname, such as the Miller place or the Collins farm. Relatively humble properties were given formal appellations too, such as Ferry Farm, the quite modest house in which George Washington spent his childhood, a wood building much smaller than the average suburban dwelling of today and so-called because of its proximity to a ferry landing. Only in the mid to late 19th century did the naming of houses begin to elicit sneers, especially in class-conscious Britain, the mockery triggered by ghastly-good-taste types who flocked to the newly built suburbs and declared their gimcrack-laden homes The Elms or The Laburnums.

For several years I lived in a 1760s shingled farmhouse in Westchester County, New York, which was dubbed Beggar's Bog, a name combining my cash-strapped existence with the house's location on the edge of a mosquito-infested wetland. (It was simply referred to as The Bog in casual conversation.) The name also, I thought, inventively echoed Beggar's Bush, aka Jordan's Journey, a 17th-century ancestor's fortified plantation near Jamestown, Virginia. That place was reportedly the first residence in the Virginia colony to be given a name. My current home, a 1801 Federal farm house, has been given several names since we took up residence; none have felt exactly right, so we're still pondering.

Residential history is full of charming names for houses. There's Pook's Hill in Bedford, New York, a lovely brick manor built in the 1920s by and for architect Mott B Schmidt; he took the name from Puck of Pook's Hill, a 1906 novel by Rudyard Kipling. Little Ipswich was the name interior decorator Ruby Ross Wood gave her country house in Syosset, New York, in honour of her husband's ancestral town, Ipswich, Massachusetts. The couple's residence in Manhattan, on the other hand, was called Star House, because the decorator collected stars and mounted a collection of brass ones on its painted front door. A mansion built by one of Wood's clients, the beautiful Swan House in Atlanta, gets its name from the owner's favorite bird, which also shows up throughout its rooms in the form of porcelain, paintings, and tapestries.

Prosaic names work quite well, especially if you are fearful of appearing too grand. Nicky Haslam's mock-Gothic country place (for many years it belonged to John Fowler) is known as The Hunting Lodge, because the picturesque redbrick folly is reputed to have been erected as a gamekeeper's cottage. Fowler's business partner Nancy Lancaster's final residence, The Coach House, formerly stored carriages and the like. I once attended a rather wine-soaked luncheon at the home of a delightfully ribald, cigar-smoking grande dame, Rose d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, whose place in Kent was called simply The Old Laundry—it had been just that, a stately Victorian laundry building, before Lady d'Avigdor-Goldsmid moved out of the estate's Jacobean mansion and renovated the awkwardly scaled utility structure for habitation.

If you do choose a name for the place you live, however, steer clear of the queasily whimsical. Even houses have feelings. How would you like to be called Dun Roamin'?

Originally published on 29 May 2009 in An Aesthete's Lament.

East Meets West

2010-12-18T17:40:00.002-05:00

A detail of the patinated-bronze-and-enamel surface of a table designed in the 1960s by father-and-son artisans Philip and Kelvin LaVerne. The table, described as a console and measuring 26 inches high by 4 feet 8 inches long, is available from Fat Chance in Los Angeles. Presumably one could also use it as a tea-height cocktail table. Image from 1stdibs.com.

Chinoiserie is one of those evergreen styles that trends in and out, riding the fickle tsunami of public taste. In the eighteenth century seemingly all of Europe lusted for objects Asiatic — or at least the era's sensationally jumbled and inventive interpretation of Far East motifs. A century later there was japonisme, a related style whose Asian elements were combined, often promiscuously, and scattered across drawing rooms and boudoirs, especially in France and England. Side tables sprouted shelves shaped like delicate fans, for instance, and chandeliers writhed with serpents or dragons.

In the 1920s, when opium was a fashionable recreational drug and adventuresome social figures such as Nancy Lancaster, Carlos de Beistegui, and Wallis Spencer (the future Duchess of Windsor) were checking out the hot spots in Shanghai and Peking, chinoiserie exploded onto the aesthetic scene once more. Likely culprits in the style's renewed popularity were Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot, which caused pandemonium when it made its debut in 1926 in Milan, and the glamorous movies of Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. The result was chop-suey interiors splashed with red lacquer and sparkling with gold leaf, such as one can see at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, completed in 1927 to the designs of architect Raymond Kennedy. (Perhaps a puff of opium made especially outlandish versions of the style more bearable, at least on the residential front.) A modern-day evocation of these Jazz Age ethnic extravaganzas is the decor of one of my favorite restaurant settings: the vast dining room of Ruby Foo's Times Square in New York City, courtesy of architect David Rockwell.

Philip LaVerne, left, and his son, Kelvin, right, manhandling a round bronze tabletop in their Wooster Street studio in 1968. Image by Richard Walker for The New York Times.

I willingly admit a weakness for all the abovementioned examples of Sinophilia but nothing causes me to swoon quite as much as the sophisticated chinoiserie produced in the 1950s and 1960s by the father-and-son design team of Philip and Kelvin LaVerne. (Okay, perhaps the Royal Pavilion at Brighton comes in first.) Close relatives of the furniture and screenprint-wallpaper geniuses designers Estelle and Erwine Laverne — the couple's see-through acrylic Lily chair is a 1950s classic— the LaVernes toiled in an unassuming studio at 74 Wooster Street in New York City. There behind the building’s bland brick façade, they made, by hand, remarkable limited-edition bronze and pewter furnishings distinguished with exotic decorations that married modernism and antiquity with notable grace.

A table by the LaVernes. Measuring 4 feet 8 inches long by 26 inches high by 20 inches deep, it is available at Fat Chance in Los Angeles, California. Image from 1stdibs.com.

The best known of the father and son’s romantic works — which were given the patina of age through prolonged immersion in a supersecret stew of chemicals and an oily soil sourced somewhere in Asia — are replete with bas-relief images of pagodas, temples, mandarins, and geishas. Others pieces explore Egyptian and Etruscan themes, according to a profile of the designing duo published in The New York Times in February 1968, and one table I have come across has a bas-relief top inspired by the gardens of the Château de Versailles. But it is the team's Chan and Lo Tai series of chinoiserie furnishings that makes me inexplicably happy. I would gladly give up our nineteenth-century Chinese altar table and rickety wedding bed in exchange for something certifiably LaVerne.

A LaVerne wall plaque, available from Belkind Bigi, Tarrytown, New York. Image from 1stdibs.com.

Whether lean cocktail table, blocky cabinet, shapely wall plaque or mirror or tables wrought large, small, round or irregular, the LaVernes' chinoiserie products are ornamented with willow-treed garden views and lively urban scenes that seem to be taken straight off the panels of a Coromandel screen. (The gentlemen, who signed their works "Philip + Kelvin LaVerne," reportedly made extensive creative use of the New York Public Library and other illustrative sources.) The mysterious greenish-gold iridescence and artful weathering of the mixed-metal surfaces, often brilliantly picked out with colorful enamels, added greatly to the final effect. Such manipulations give the designs the impression of antiquity, as if they recently had been unearthed from a Ming Dynasty burial mound. However, the LaVerne works only look as if they should rest behind museum glass. As the Times article noted, their expertly etched surfaces require nothing more than “a monthly rubdown with automobile paste wax."

A side table by Philip and Kelvin LaVerne. Available from gallerist Liz O'Brien. Image from 1stdibs.com.

These two LaVerne cabinets are in stock at Weiss Antiques Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan. The doors open to reveal lacquered interiors of vivid celestial blue. Image from Weiss Antiques.

A Chan bar by Philip and Kelvin LaVerne. Made of bronze, pewter, and colored enamels and featuring folding extensions, the bar has double doors illustrating courtly Chinese scenes while the top is decorated with the colorful figures of peasants gathered around an ox. It is available from Cristina Grajales Gallery. Image from Cristina Grajales Gallery.

DIY: Faux Paneling

2010-12-17T10:20:00.001-05:00

A dining room in a house decorated by Asheton Langdon.

Genius is in the eye of the beholder. One man's bright idea is another's been-there-done-that. That being said I continue to be impressed by the do-it-yourself gusto of New York interior decorator Asheton Langdon, who died earlier this year, aged 82.

The dining room of the New York house, which has a countrified Regency flavor, is lined with pickled-wood wainscot. The upper sections of the walls has been stretched with a nubby fabric divided into panels with woven-jute upholstery webbing.

Recently I visited a house Langdon decorated and came back elated, my digital camera loaded with snaps of inspiring details. Several of them record the Brooklyn-born designer's creativity with, of all things, upholstery webbing. You know what I mean: the woven jute strips that keep one from falling through the seat of a chair. Typically this humble material is hidden beneath fabric, stuffing, and springs. Langdon, however, recognized that webbing could be a decorative element, particularly when deployed as trim and utilized in the creation of trompe l'oeil paneling, as shown in the dining room shown at the head of today's post.

A close-up of one of interior decorator Asheton Langdon's do-it-yourself boiserie, as seen at a house he decorated in New York. Measured and mitered, common upholstery webbing has been applied to a nubby fabric to create panels.

In the same house, Langdon transformed upholstery webbing into smartly tailored passementerie, trimming portières in a book-lined corridor that connects the public areas of the house to several spare rooms (see below). The red-black-and-buff color scheme was taken from ancient Greek ceramics, examples of which are displayed on brackets, along with related antique engravings.

Upholstery webbing trims the curtains that flank an interior door. The panels of the wainscot were created with gaffer's tape.

Archives: Get Inspired — David Hicks

2010-12-13T10:27:00.000-05:00

Space: Master bedroom, Boyesen Road, Southampton, New York.

Year: 1967-68

Client: Lydia Buhl Melhado Farr (later Mrs William H Mann, died 1997), third wife of Francis Bartow Farr, one of Wall Street's richest salesmen, according to The New York Times. Heiress to a Detroit industrial fortune, Lydia Farr—then in her early 30s and the mother of two young sons—had an 18-room apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue and a fabled collection of Verdura jewels. And the good sense to hire David Hicks when she and Farr built a modern house in Southampton, shortly after they married in 1966.

Elements: Next to nothing, really. A wall-to-wall field of white-glazed hexagonal Provençal tiles. A 19th-century French armoire, stripped to the raw pine. Sleek white-lacquered side tables topped by dead-plain modern lamps. A director's chair of polished steel and white leather. The bed, however, is the piece de résistance, a towering shelter hung with white-linen curtains printed with an overscale damask pattern and lined with crisp glazed white cotton. It is opulently penitential, like something a world-weary marquise of a certain age might have commissioned after being named abbess of a deluxe convent.

Image: From David Hicks: Designer by Ashley Hicks (Scriptum Editions, 2003).

Originally published: An Aesthete's Lament, 20 November 2008

DIY: Gaffer's Tape

2010-12-12T10:22:00.000-05:00

Several months ago a meeting took me to visit a gentleman with whom I serve on a board of trustees. Mutual friends said he possessed an incredible library of books about architectural and design dating back to the eighteenth century, hundreds of volumes on subjects ranging from the houses of Vanbrugh to Southern plantations to New England saltboxes. Consequently I was looking forward to cozying up with those precious volumes, pen and paper in hand: perusing, jotting, scribbling, even, perhaps, borrowing, if that would be allowed. After I arrived, however, my camera got a workout too, because to my surprise, the books were housed in a 1970s three-car garage that had been converted into a black, grey, and white pleasure dome inside, straight from the pages of Percier and Fontaine. And the primary decorating medium was matte-grey gaffer’s tape.

Yes, gaffer’s tape, the kind that costs about $3 a roll.

The pedimented plaque, one of a pair, is actually a church hymnal board.

The gentleman in question modestly took none of the credit for this trompe l'oeil transformation. Instead, he explained, as we talked late into the night, glasses of red wine in hand, it is the work of a longtime friend, Asheton Langdon (née Jay Langdon Gaiser, 1928—2010), a Brooklyn-born, Harvard-educated decorator who specialized in interiors of astonishing grandeur. Langdon, a designer I had never heard of and about whom I long to know more, also could create extraordinary special effects with common burlap upholstery webbing too, though more on that skill another day.

My host’s multitude of books needed a proper home, and since the garage wasn’t being used to its full credit, a major decorating project was born. Masses of grey gaffer's tape in two widths were purchased, and sometimes mitered, most times not, were deftly deployed, creating simple panels on walls, ceilings, and doors. The success of this stage-set paneling is furthered by the addition of pilasters made of planks of wood fastened into place against the Sheetrock walls and painted black.

Over all this have been hung mirrors, etchings, paintings, watercolors, and busts on brackets, all the components of a country-house library. Antiques and vintage furnishings in a variety of styles — Victorian, Louis XVI, Moroccan, Empire, even a boldly flowered Bessarabian rug — give the effect of having been gathered together over generations.

Get Inspired: Millicent Rogers

2010-12-09T07:00:00.001-05:00

Space: The living room of Millicent Rogers, 21 Sutton Place, New York City, New York.

Year: Circa 1935

Occupant: Rogers (1902 — 1953) was arguably the most glamorous of all the Standard Oil heiresses. Adventuresome too. She identified the genius of American couturier Charles James early on his career and acquired his clothes with the eye of a curator. She learned to forge gold so she could design and make barbarically chic jewelry, including a pair of gold-nugget-like cufflinks she created for Clark Gable, one of a string of lovers that included the future author Roald Dahl. She collected, with discernment, Biedermeier furniture, Navajo turquoise jewelry, Native American artifacts, and terrific paintings (Renoir, Corot, Fragonard). Rogers also had an astoundingly good eye for interior decoration, creating extraordinarily personal decors for her residences in Austria; Washington, D. C.; New Mexico; New York; Jamaica, and Virginia.

Elements: Located in the famous riverside tenements smartly renovated by Dorothy Draper during the Depression and decorated for Rogers by McMillen & Co. — Billy Baldwin gives some credit to Van Day Truex too, though surely the photograph records Rogers's exacting taste and no one else's — the room looks overstuffed at first glance. Especially to modern eyes, what with the exuberant Victorian needlework rose garden rolled out underfoot and the walls dressed with deep red satin cascading from cloak pins in early-nineteenth-century European fashion. (Note the cast-iron steam pipe in the left corner of the photograph, disguised to blend in with the fabric.) The space is actually quite minimally furnished, however, with about ten pieces of furniture, none of which takes up much room or is at all superfluous. Two tailored modern love seats with down-stuffed cushions. A pair of Chinese Chippendale tables holding Victorian glass lamps converted to electricity. A brace of papier-mâché side chairs glimmering with gilt and mother of pearl, which could be pressed into service in the adjoining dining room. A couple of Régence fauteuils covered in velvet (surely silk, given Rogers's superlative taste and bottomless pocketbook). Oh, and a low black-lacquer cocktail table set with crystal ashtrays. That's about it.

Lessons Learned: Even if the sumptuousness of the setting is out of your financial league, the takeaway is texture. It's all about juxtaposition. Sleek satin played against lustrous velvet. Crisp modern upholstery relieved by a double dose of old-fashioned button tufting. Smooth lacquer alongside nubby needlework. Don't forget the animating qualities of gilt frames and crystal candelabra either. Every room needs a bit of dazzle to keep its spirits up, even if it's just a trail of golden nail heads tracing the curves of a chair. As for the Victorian table lamps, they are pure camp — and the room is all the better for their quirky presence.

Details Count: No-Nail Pictures

2010-12-08T12:38:00.007-05:00

Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers at home with one of her several dachshunds. Photograph by Richard Rutledge for American "Vogue," 15 March 1945.

Most people simply pound a nail into a wall when they decide to display a photograph or a painting. Sadly, however, that's where those framed treasures usually stay for time immemorial, often losing their power to attract the eye through daily familiarity. But leaning a work of art against a wall rather than displaying it conventionally on the wall is always more interesting. (And I'm not talking about utilizing those narrow picture shelves popularized by mail-order catalogues.) Casual placement on tabletops, mantles, even the floor, is curiously potent. It implies a certain dégagé attitude toward the treatment of one's possessions as well as, conversely, a sense of deep attention to the intended effect. Even if the work of art in question isn't particularly compelling or valuable, propping gives it more gravitas. Plus, this kind of deployment allows works to be moved around at will without resorting to a hammer.

The impossibly stylish Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, shown above, propped several giltwood-framed paintings on a Greek-key-ornamented desk in her living room in the 1940s. Curiously the table lamps partially obscure the art, tempting one to step forward and take a closer look. (Sometimes great design is about seducing others to experience the world way you do.) The leaned pictures also break up the formality of the installation, loosening the stays, as it were, of the matching lamps and the symmetrical display of nineteenth-century paintings on the wall above.

Tastemaker Pauline de Rothschild, another charter member of the propped-art school, often displayed a small Bonnard painting on a chair carefully placed at her bedside, so it was the first thing the American-born baroness saw when she woke. Precious, but why not? Real style embodies a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.

A great friend of mine, a lady of highly evolved aesthetics, has set a beautiful representation of a flower — I'm sure it's an antique, a Redouté perhaps? — on the floor of her spare but perfectly decorated sitting room overlooking the East River in New York City. The rather small artwork, no bigger than a standard magazine cover, is beautifully framed and placed so low and with such modesty that coming upon it is a delightful surprise. Seeing it out of the corner of one's eye, leaning against the baseboard, is like a gift.

The Tale of a Table (Part 1)

2010-12-07T07:04:00.000-05:00

A detail of a tabletop I marbleized last week. Unfortunately it looks more like a map of America, as seen from the air, during a record winter freeze. My next DIY attempt at faux-finishing the table will be far better, I assure you.

It's just one project after another up at our house. For the past several months my husband and I have been making lists of improvements we intend to make in our six small rooms, from hanging wallpaper in our daughter's bedchamber to having battleship linoleum laid in the galley kitchen to boxing in our clawfoot tub so it looks more refined and less like an Appalachian set piece. Needless to say, most of these projects require significant outlays of money, so we've been approaching them slowly, one by one, as cash is saved and economy-minded workmen are interviewed.

Getting the dining room into order is at the top of the list, mainly because we'd like to start entertaining again in a finished space rather than one that is forever in flux. The plans for the winter of 2010-2011 involve the installation of wainscot; lining the walls with hand-blocked West St. Mary's wallpaper from Adelphi Paper Hangings; repainting the badly worn wood floor (a task now completed); repainting the doors and trim; having new curtains made, et cetera.

Standing about five-and-a-half feet high, the 19th-century German cast-iron stove we found on eBay was recently installed for us by Top Hat Chimney Sweeps of Fort Plain, New York. The base is an old grindstone we found on our property, a former farm. That protective metal heat-shield has to be painted into submission soon.

Recently we installed a 19th-century German wood-burning stove in the form of a Doric column; it was one of my husband's numerous eBay finds. The space is quite cold in winter — our Federal Style residence, the surviving 1801 wing of a house that was begun in the 1760s, is utterly uninsulated — so the cast-iron stove is a welcome addition when the Fahrenheit drops and lake-effect snow blankets our property. As for the round pedestal table, it is usually hidden beneath a series of tablecloths, but when those linens are off being cleaned, its circa-1900 golden-oak ugliness is all too apparent. And, to my mind, it is entirely unacceptable.

I neglected to snap a photograph of our dining table before its recent transformation, but found this representative image on the website of Prices4antiques. Made of golden oak by Kershan Bros., an Ohio manufacturer, between 1880 and 1920, it is a near-match for our dining table, though minus the casters.

A view of our dining table after it was painted; the base was finished in satin black.

Last week-end, armed with directions I adapted from the Better Homes & Gardens website, I marbleized the top of the table as an experiment. A couple of days' exertions with three shades of latex enamel applied to the wood surface with an 18-inch-by-24-inch rectangle of thin plastic sheeting resulted in flamboyant amateur excess — grey faux marble with veins so thick they resemble mortar joints. (I didn't have a sumi brush, as the directions suggested for fine veining, so pressed one of my daughter's watercolour brushes into service.) Not long after the table was completed, I had the chance to visit the regal apartment of one of my idols, interior decorator Howard S. Slatkin, and realized my mistake once I laid eyes on the pair of obelisks displayed in his dressing room. The tabletop should have been painted a deep shade of terra cotta and speckled to resemble porphyry rather than boldly smudged and veined to look like mottled grey marble. That way it would have a quieter, more sophisticated presence, would show off our china better, and live more happily with the intended wallpaper.

Red Chinese porphyry, the actual stone, as seen on the website of Xiamen Orient Rising Imports.

Looks like I know what I'll be repainting in the near future. Simple directions for executing faux porphyry can be found in George D. Armstrong's Painter's Cyclopedia (Frederick J. Drake, 1908), and I'll be following them closely. And, one hopes, with more success and subtlety.

Another view of the dining table.

Well Said: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

2010-12-06T13:26:00.000-05:00

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." ("It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.")

So wrote aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 — 1944) in his 1939 memoir Terre des Hommes.

Details Count: James Pendleton's Window-Top Fireplace

2010-10-28T11:03:00.000-04:00

The living room of Woodland, the Beverly Hills home of producer Robert Evans, with its curious window-set fireplace. Photograph by Jason Schmidt from The New York Times.

In The New York Times this week Pilar Viladas writes about a fascinating California house — and by fascinating I don't mean just because it is the longtime home of legendary rake and movie producer Robert Evans. For me it's far more thrilling that the house at 1032 Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills was designed in 1942 by architect James Wolff for an interior decorator nobody but nobody remembers now, James B. Pendleton (né James Archibald Blakely, 1904 — 1995). A mentor of one of America's great modern-minded designers, Mel Dwork, the Oregon-born Pendleton worked in New York City in the early part of his career and was a great pal of Ruby Ross Wood's before he sought and found fame and fortune in Hollywood, as well as a wealthy wife, Mary Frances (1896 — 1963).

Called Woodlands and wreathed in vines, it is a magical structure well worth coveting, where Hollywood Regency meets François Mansart. It's also on one level, an architecture decision with a practical purpose; a deformed hip made climbing stairs difficult for Pendleton's wife. But what's always struck me as especially chic is the living room fireplace set in front of a window. If memory serves, the smoke is channeled up the sides, an engineering trick that leaves a framed garden view instead of a standard wall. Jayne Wrightsman had one of those window-topped fireplaces at her house in Palm Beach, as I recall, and I know I've seen one in an early-nineteenth-century house in France, built during the reign of Napoléon I.

I do hope somebody's working on a book about John Woolf and the houses he built for so many celebrities. There's a perfect spot on my bookshelf for it.

A pool party at Woodland in 1960, when it was the home of Mary Frances and James Pendleton. The photograph is a classic by Slim Aaron.

Well Said: Vincent Fourcade

2010-10-12T12:12:00.000-04:00

“I learned my trade by going out every evening as a young man. I went to every pretty house in France and Italy and other places, too, and I remembered them all, even down to what was on each little table.”

So said interior designer Vincent Fourcade (1934-1992), a master of the magnificent.

Simply put, nothing beats keeping your eyes open.

Details Count: Fillet, Fillet, Who's Got a Fillet?

2010-09-08T09:22:00.000-04:00

The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire's drawing room at the Old Vicarage, Edensor, Derbyshire, England. Image from Côte de Texas.

I was thumbing through the September 2010 issue of The World of Interiors last night and came across an illuminating comment from the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who has moved from the family pile, Chatsworth, into an early-nineteenth-century former vicarage on the estate: "One thing I learned from Chatsworth was what a good finish a fillet gives round the cornice, the doorcases, and skirting."

The fillet of which she writes, in case you didn't know, is a narrow strip of fabric, metal, or gilded wood that outlines a room and its architectural features. It is especially useful when one wishes to provide detail without actual bulk, particularly when a room is, well, deficient in architectural charm. In Deborah Devonshire's pale-pink drawing room, show above, the walls and windows are defined by a whisper-thin fillet of plain giltwood, probably three-quarters of an inch in width; its gentle metallic flash adds a touch of animation as well.

One could use grosgrain ribbon to similar effect.

Well Said: Pauline de Rothschild

2010-08-09T17:17:00.000-04:00

"The great danger for an American woman married to a Frenchman is to become too French. To assimilate too much of another nationality weakens you. Though on the surface I might not seem to be 100 percent American, I have tried to remain as shaggy inside as possible."

So said Pauline de Rothschild (1908-1976), style icon, fashion designer, hostess, and author.