One of the most widespread and accessible of art forms, interior design is also one of the most fragile and fugitive: houses are demolished, rooms gutted and redecorated. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, interior decoration was taken very seriously by upper and middle class households. They were proud of the results, and often had them photographed. Historic England’s archive holds tens of thousands of these images, mostly taken by the firms of Bedford Lemere & Company and Millar and Harris.
The photographs are a precious record, for almost all of the interiors they show are now lost. Many of the buildings have been torn down, and the ones still standing have usually been refitted, their contents long gone.
Looking at the photos, we discover that these vanished rooms were a charismatic expression of their owners’ personalities and makers’ skills. The cumulative effect is like stepping into a lost world. More than simply objects of curiosity, these forgotten interiors offer a fascinating insight into the style and tastes of previous generations.
Careful examination reveals how intricately the history of interior design is intertwined with that of art collecting. Some of the most magnificent Victorian interiors could be considered works of art in themselves. A fine example of this is Dorchester House on Park Lane, designed in the mid-19th century by the architect Lewis Vulliamy for the art collector Robert Stayner Holford.
This Italianate palace was built and decorated over 13 years, its slow progress reflecting the immense care that Holford and his architect took over perfecting every detail. We see this in the house’s Red Drawing Room, lined with silk damask as a background for Old Master paintings and featuring a beautiful frieze painted by Holford’s brother-in-law, Sir Coutts Lindsay. After a stint as a military hospital during WWI, by the 1920s Dorchester House and its Victorian splendour must have seemed like a relic from another age. Death duties took their toll, and Holford’s financially challenged heir sold the house to developers, who demolished it in 1929. The Dorchester Hotel now stands on the site.
These archival images also demonstrate a widespread predilection for Louis XV style. The British elite had long been fascinated by French culture of the 18th century, and this became a fashionable choice for drawing rooms and boudoirs. 26 Grosvenor Square was bought in 1901 by Sir George Cooper, a Scottish lawyer, and his wife, Mary Emma Smith, heiress to a Chicago railroad fortune. With exquisitely detailed panelling created by the Parisian firm of Anatole Beaumetz, the French-style drawing room was a fine example of the trend, also with its tapestry-covered fauteuils, or armchairs, supplied by Duveen Brothers — probably authentic 18th-century pieces. Despite the quality of its interiors, the house was demolished in 1957.
The taste for French style lasted well into the 20th century. However, other aspects of Victorian taste completely disappeared. Many upper middle class houses had what they termed “Oriental” rooms, reflecting the fact that many of their residents had been in business or in the service of the empire in China, Japan, India or the Middle East, and wanted to create rooms that drew on local styles. There was quite a variety. Take 28 Ashley Place, off Victoria Street, which owner Major George Wallace Carpenter turned into a 19th-century evocation of the Middle East, and had photographed in 1893. It had been decorated by the firm of Henry and John Cooper, specialists in Arabian and Moorish interiors, and the themed decor reached its peak in the house’s “tent room”, which featured a canopied ceiling, textiles, inlaid furniture and fret-carved shelves for ceramics.
In contrast, the 1880s and 1890s also saw the rise of “aesthetic” style. Seeking to create new forms of beauty in the industrial age, its blend of light colours, white joinery and floral patterns was a reaction against Victoriana clutter and dark palettes. Liberty & Co. became leading exponents, as seen in the drawing room it created at Rosslyn Tower, a Victorian gothic villa in Putney, in 1906–7. Photographs show a light-filled room with chintz upholstery, sinuous wallpaper and delicate furniture.
After the first world war, Victorian taste and social mores were widely criticised and rejected. Stylistically, the interwar years are often perceived in terms of art deco and Modernism. Yet archival photographs demonstrate that Modernism was in fact a minority taste, while full-strength deco was usually reserved for commercial settings like hotels and cinemas. Instead, we find a milder “deco-modern” style deployed in the new apartment blocks that rose in the West End and upper and middle class homes. In the mid-1930s, the Hon. Katherine Norton decorated her new flat in Arlington House, near the Ritz, in an example of the glamorous deco-modern style — glossy black walls, satin upholstery, and a textured carpet.
With hindsight, the interwar years look like the high-water mark of interior design as an art form, when it was dominated by women as the clients and often as the designers — a fact difficult to appreciate now, as virtually none of the interiors survive intact and with their contents.
At 90 Gower Street, the actress and celebrated hostess Lady Diana Cooper commissioned the decorator Sibyl Colefax to restyle her drawing room in “vogue Regency” style — a term coined for interiors that adopted a simplified, updated version of the Neoclassical idiom of the early 19th century, often using a number of antique pieces alongside modern fittings. With painted decoration by the artist Rex Whistler, the room provided an elegant setting for the Coopers’ musical soirées until their departure in 1938, shortly after Alfred Duff Cooper resigned from the cabinet over the Munich Agreement.
Meanwhile, across London the Baron and Baroness d’Erlanger decorated their apartment in Stratton House on Piccadilly in a richer style, with stamped Spanish leather, satin upholstery and strings of cut-glass beads. This approach, which blended a wider range of historic objects with a darker palette, was christened “Curzon Street Baroque” by the writer Osbert Lancaster.
In an age without social media, the homeowners who commissioned these interiors regarded them as extensions of their personalities. Their vision of interior design was one that required a high degree of intensity and commitment. Now, photographs are all that survive of these lost interiors: windows into the past with the potential to be rich sources of inspiration for the present.
‘London Lost Interiors’ by Steven Brindle (Atlantic Publishing) is published on November 4
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