Karl Lagerfeld sent me the new book Syrie Maugham: Staging the Glamorous Interior (Acanthus Press), by Pauline C. Metcalf, which was fitting as I cracked it open the same day I bought a Louis XV provincial commode at Doyle’s English and Continental furniture sale, painted in the “pickled” style the English-born decorator made her signature. Syrie Maugham, wife of Somerset Maugham, was one of the best in her field (as well as possibly the most intolerant snob), who turned interior decoration on its cabriole legs at the beginning of the last century.
The white commode with a serpentine outline—an all-time fave rare find—is just the kind of thing a Maugham room would require, and reminds me of the one nesting in the corner of her all-white salon at her residence at 213 Kings Road in 1927. This wasn’t my first attempt at speaking her vocabulary. Back in the eighties, Manolo Blahnik and I found two ceremonial English drums fitted with glass tops as to make coffee tables in a basement shop in London.
The book chronicles Maugham’s role as patron to young artists. She introduced decorative plasterwork by Oliver Messel, furniture by Jean-Michel Frank and his associates, and floral arrangements by Constance Spry. She also collaborated with the architect David Adler and his sister, decorator Frances Elkins. Her influence stretched beyond London, to American homes like those of tastemaker Babe Paley in New York and Jean Harlow in Hollywood. Her work also held sway on **Cedric Gibbons’**s set designs for Harlow’s film Dinner at Eight (1933). The all-white set required eleven shades of white to create sufficient contrast between wardrobe and furniture. There is an incredible portrait of **Cecil Beaton’**s sister, Baba, in a sleek, white Goddess-style evening dress, posing in Maugham’s “Party Room,” the room that made her sought-after and that resonated with the so-called Modernist style at that time.
A 1950 Vogue photograph of Paley, in a ruby satin Charles James dress, against a Maugham backdrop—tufted lettuce-green sofa, green velvet wool carpet, and damask stenciled walls—at her Kiluna Farm, shows how the decorator’s style evolved over decades, a style that became synonymous with refinement and unorthodox elegance. She was inspired by the watercolors of **Empress Eugenie of France’**s bathroom and its tufted Second Empire upholstery, which she adapted for contemporary rooms, believing that Victorian design softened the hard lines of modernism. The last image in the book is a room done by Mark Hampton, who applied her idea of an overstuffed sofa, seamed with fringe, to create a beautiful room in a house in La Jolla, California, in 1994.