Anyone looking through the myriad white paint options that exist today might be surprised to know that, only a hundred years ago, the shade was perceived as decidedly avant-garde. Indeed, Syrie Maugham’s all-white music room, which she launched with a party in 1927, sent shock waves through society – but also firmly established Syrie as the decorator-du-jour, and the first great English ‘lady decorator’ of the 20th Century. Several of her projects are in the pantheon of greats, and her influence has been lasting: ‘in my career, I have continually referenced her style and design ethos,’ remarks Veere Grenney. And, ‘Syrie was a constant touchstone when we were decorating our flat in London,’ says Benedict Foley. Later this month, Dreweatts auction house in Newbury is selling a collection of furniture, paintings and objets, ranging from Grand Tour marble relief plaques via Louis XVI chairs to paintings by Glyn Philpot and John Nash, which between them hint at Syrie’s extraordinary life – and legacy.
Syrie’s career owed to the twin needs of distraction and an income, as well as her spirited resolve. Already divorced from the pharmaceutical millionaire Henry Wellcome with whom she had a son, she had noticed that her new husband, the writer William (Willie) Somerset Maugham, with whom she had a daughter (secretly born before their 1917 marriage), preferred spending time with his young American secretary, Gerald Haxton. Syrie persuaded Walter & Ernest Thornton Smith to give her an unpaid apprenticeship, which taught her about furniture restoration, curtain design, upholstery, and trompe l’oeil painting (later in the 1920s, John Fowler also trained there.) Then in 1922, aged 42, she borrowed £400 and opened her own decorating business at 85 Baker Street, pre-empting Mrs. Munro (1926) and Sibyl Colefax (1933).
Many middle and upper-class English interiors were still steeped in the remnants of ponderous Victoriana, the war having stymied various advancements, including Roger Fry’s Post Impressionist-inspired Omega Workshops. Syrie, who was well-travelled, had noted the new fashions in France, where designers including Jean-Michel Frank and Serge Roche were using pale, natural materials in a modern manner, and Art Deco was on the rise (though not yet called that). She was aware of the Bauhaus, the groundbreaking art, design, and architecture school founded in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919 that merged arts and crafts with functionality and industrial production. Syrie’s brilliance came in combining those continental developments with English traditionalism – and what a client already had – to create a look that was soon named ‘Vogue Regency’. It was one that that valued airiness and understated chic over clutter, and Syrie specialised, explains the art historian Stephen Calloway, in ‘clever effects produced by stripping or bleaching good old pieces of furniture to create a lighter effect in a room’, which became known as ‘pickling’. Additionally, she refinished French 18th-century chairs, tables, commodes and cabinets with a craquelure varnish, or painted flowers and swagged ribbons. She also, says Daniel Slowik, ‘knew all about drapery – and if you’re good at that you can make sackcloth look like Olympus.’ And, adds Benedict Foley, ‘she understood scale, and had vision: she excelled at the essence of decoration.’
Her radical all-white music room in her house on the King’s Road – unveiled the same year that she and Willie divorced - combined white walls (at the time, only a humble cottage would have had the same) with long, low, boxy sofas upholstered in the palest white-beige satin, and fringed. There were sleek chrome and mirrored screens, white velvet lampshades, a white side-table and white shagreen coffee table, lacquered doors, elegant arches, arrangements of white flowers by Constance Spry – and, the final touch – white curtains dipped in cement to perfect their hang. It was an unequivocal triumph, heralding a new modernism, and demonstrating her spectacular ability; ‘take away all the business of colour and pattern and there’s nowhere to hide so you have to be good,’ points out Daniel Slowik. Syrie was photographed sitting on the sofa by Cecil Beaton, and numerous all-white rooms, by others, followed. (The artist Francis Bacon, who early in his career dabbled in decoration, gave Madge Garland, editor of Vogue, curtains made from ‘white rubber sheeting that [hung] in sculptural folds.’)
But, remarks her granddaughter, Camilla Chandon, Syrie had ‘enormous enthusiasm for change and innovation’ – and the all-white room was never repeated for a client. Rather, her exceptional projects varied widely, for she moved in both high society and artistic circles. Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things and inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte, engaged Syrie to help him decorate Wilsford Manor, just north of Salisbury. Nicky Haslam, visiting decades later, described the hall ‘that always takes one’s breath. Pink velvet swags cover what walls aren’t painted with gold stars on powder blue, a gleaming silver ceiling, turquoise fur rugs over white fur rugs over fraying Aubusson. Light struggles out from crystal brackets or hollowed shells.’ The house was full of grotto furniture, there were pink chiffon curtains in a bathroom, metal swags were made to decorate radiators, Syrie put white rope around the cornice of a room with a Tudor ceiling, and in the library was a huge plaster and wood Nautilus shell, supported by stylised dolphins. Alongside, Syrie glamourised Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park for the then Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. Her own villa in Le Touquet had a salon decorated entirely in shades of beige, relieved only by pale pink satin curtains. She is thought to have ‘helped’ – and certainly influenced - Coco Chanel when it came to the decoration of her boutique on the rue Cambon with its famous mirrored staircase, and the apartment above, which made much use of screens and beige satin (Karl Lagerfeld famously paid tribute to Syrie with Chanel’s Haute Couture Spring 2017 collection.) For it all, she became known as ‘the Princess of Pale.’
In 1935, another Bright Young Thing, Edward James (rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Edward VII), commissioned Syrie to help him and Salvador Dali transform the Lutyens-designed Monkton House in West Sussex into what became the only complete Surrealist house ever designed in Britain – and one of the most extraordinary interiors ever to have existed. The façade’s pillars were disguised as palm trees, the drainpipes as bamboo. Inside, the walls were padded to resemble those in an asylum, Edward’s bed was modelled on Nelson’s hearse, in his bathroom lights shone through the alabaster walls like planets, and Dali’s famous scarlet sofas based on Mae West’s lips graced the drawing room. The project coincided with a shift in Syrie’s palette, and jewel-like tones began to spread through her rooms, alongside white, an adjustment reinforced by a 1936 trip to India with the great American decorator, Elsie de Wolfe. Those hues lasted through the war, and beyond; Cecil Beaton remembers emerald greens, and deep pinks. There were fewer opportunities for lavish decorating projects in England then, due to rationing, which wasn’t Syrie’s ideal: “if you don’t have ten thousand dollars to spend, I don’t want to waste my time,” she once informed a hesitant client. Happily, Syrie’s fame had traversed the Atlantic – she had shops in both Chicago and New York by 1930 – so she simply increased the time she spent there, designing homes for Babe Paley and Paul and Bunny Mellon, and collaborating with the architect David Adler.
Camilla Chandon recalls Syrie’s last home on Park Lane, where the Hilton Hotel stands now. ‘The Schiaparelli-pink hallway leading into the exquisite pale-blue-and-white drawing room . . .and her pretty white bedroom, where she often held court. The flat was a treasure trove to be explored. There were Indian chests containing lengths of beautiful silks and brocades and an endless assortment of passementerie, tassels, trimmings, and silken cords. . . the cupboards were full of bibelots’ – and there were ‘secret drawers in her elegant painted desk.’ The desk is among the lots being offered for sale, alongside ‘pickled’ and palely upholstered furniture, first editions of her ex-husband’s novels, rococo wall brackets, porcelain dinner services, and silver-topped perfume bottles, which Syrie would have filled with her favourite rose-geranium scent. Every piece comes imbued with Syrie’s extraordinary story – but there are other means of too, beyond the auction, of embracing the great designer’s legacy. There’s grotto furniture, mirroring, extraordinary whimsy and artistry, and inspirational determination. There are screens, the use of satin, fringing, and ‘establishing the experience you want people to have on entering a space, finding it, and sticking to it,’ ordains Benedict Foley. Most famously of all, there’s the colour white.
Syrie Maugham: A Family Collection is being sold by Dreweatts on Tuesday 28 October; dreweatts.com
