Excerpt: Rooms with a History by Rizzoli International Publications



ChapteR I

HISTORY 



opposite: My “Bath Museum” in Albany, London, which I lined in glass panels reverse-mounted with my own photographs of favorite objects in museums, for me to enjoy as I soak. above: On the stairs of the Prince Regent’s fantasy palace, the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, are Chinese figures painted on etched glass by Frederick Crace in 1815, lit by real windows behind them.

h i s t o ry





Nailed decoration on a Mughal soldier’s coat of 1750, once at Clandon Park, Surrey

A leather trunk with royal crest and nailing c1680, a perquisite of office now at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

A sphere in nailing done by me on my dining room doors around one of my Coral handles

opposite: I decorated the bathroom door of

my bedroom in Oxfordshire with bright brass nails in a folded-ribbon design, which gives it vitality and sparkle. I painted the walls to look like blood-stained Aztec masonry.

My nailing and bronze handles on a client’s television cabinet in a London apartment

h i s t o ry



above: Circles of painted glass from Renaissance churches in Switzerland were removed by the modernizing Swiss and bought by the antiquarian English to decorate their churches in the 1860s. opposite: Winter sunlight catches Marie-Antoinette in the large salon of

her Petit Trianon, Versailles. Flanking the fireplace are Etruscan-style chairs made to Hubert Robert’s design by Georges Jacob for the Queen’s dairy at the Château de Rambouillet, 1785.



r o o m s w i t h a h i s t o ry









My client’s loo has a daylit view of Venice through clouds, as if from a plane coming in to land. Decor devised by me for a pop-up restaurant in Brown’s Hotel, London, with a frieze of vase silhouettes.

Jib door in the Jacob-Desmalter bookcases in Napoleon’s library, Chateau de Compiègne, France.

A tabletop painted by Louis-Léopold Boilly in 1784, in Elsie Kipling’s collection, Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire.

opposite: The trompe-l’oeil I know best: The

walls of my grandmother’s London boudoir were painted by Rex Whistler in 1937 with her personal imagery and his own beloved Lady Caroline Paget holding a cornucopia.

fa k i n g



above: My father’s Secret Garden, its roses looking slightly the worse for wear after a heavy summer shower, below the castellated pavilion he designed for my mother to give him as a sixtieth-birthday present. opposite: Bringing flowers inside, with my own tulips painted in grisaille on a burlap-covered screen and some wonderfully strawberry-scented Viburnum cut from an old bush in the garden.



r o o m s w i t h a h i s t o ry





ChapteR XI

PATTERN 



xI: pattern

spent my childhood sleeping in patterned sheets, printed ones blazoned with my father’s distinctive logo of four H’s. There’s branding for you! I still have a Victorian buttoned chair from a bathroom at our home Britwell that he covered in those patterned sheets, with buttons wrapped in brown terry cloth. The chair now sits in my own guest bathroom, tiled with Moroccan cement tiles I had made with the same design on a much bigger scale. There’s no escaping your childhood. There ’s no escaping pattern either, despite the best efforts of minimalism. Seeing and making patterns are fundamental to life; you only have to look at animal markings to appreciate that, without even starting on those early human cultures that ornamented everything within reach. Some people obsess on pretty florals; others, like my father, on geometrics. His love for simple, symmetrical geometric designs stemmed, I think, from an innate love of order and discipline coupled with childhood memories of Victorian tile designs lost to the ravages of fitted carpet. Perhaps because I grew up framed by David Hicks geometrics, or because I spend a lot of time with them now while milking his archive, I tend toward types and uses of patterns rather different from his. I like random geometrics, asymmetrical ones, shaded ones; I love Renaissance and Ottoman designs, haphazard effects and organic forms. I have a favorite Turkish velvet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with Cintamani balls and tiger stripes, which I first adapted for trompe-l’oeil billowing curtains painted by my lovely first wife Allegra on our dining room walls in 1993. I used it again for a printed linen, drawn with wavy lines as if it’s been pulled-ragged by the Topkapi Palace cats. I also like patterns that don’t look like patterns. I wanted carpet that looked like a bold terrazzo floor and designed a big repeat that barely reads as one; it just looks like naturally varied stones thrown into a mix, like those wonderful old Italian floors. I made a printed linen inspired by 1830 handkerchief prints that I named Eleuthera, because one of its shapes echoes the outline of the Bahamian island. It is covered in these wriggling squiggles, again without an apparent repeat—its effect one of organic texture. Old footmen’s liveries, with their bold stripes of metal-thread braid, have a wonderfully bold and graphic visual quality. I often make bedspreads with a random design in appliquéd grosgrain ribbon, inspired by those old liveries. The effect is rather good, in that it breaks up the great mass of bed and makes it seem less obtrusive, at the same time giving a dash of energy and fun to the room. Finally, I make patterns that actually have no repeat. These can be completely random geometries like old Chinese ice-ray designs, which were once very popular because expanses of ice that had cracked fortuitously but were still whole were thought auspicious. My big-scale, patterned, painted wall schemes usually have an overruling geometry, either truly hexagonal or slightly sharper-pitched. I play with this to divide the wall into random forms with repeated angles, which gives a vibrant but harmonious effect to a room.

opposite: My bathroom in Oxfordshire centers on a Victorian chair that my father covered in his logo-printed sheeting in 1970,

with the design enlarged for the cement tiles that I had made in Morocco.





opposite: My bedroom in a rented flat. Unable to change the white walls or beige carpet, I gave it some strong character with a pair of screens covered in my Hicks Grande wallpaper from Cole & Son. above: On cupboard doors for a bookcase in my country library,

I painted a random geometric design with colors picked from the room, with angled cut-outs to avoid the need for handles.

pat t e r n









