Lights, Camera, Action!

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.

Outreach Program

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'."

Well Spent: 1940s French Armchairs

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?

Get Inspired: Dogmersfield Park

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.