Legends of Design: Syrie Maugham

In this installation of Legends of Design, we are traveling back to one of the earlier pioneers of what we know today as the profession--and concept of--of interior design.

Gwendoline Syrie Maud Wellcome (née Barnardo), Syrie Maugham. Photograph by Lafayette Ltd.

Born in London in July 1879 as Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, our current legendary Designer was not only a pioneering designer but also a pioneering proto-feminist. She bucked a very strict, religious, oppressive upbringing to study as an apprentice under Ernest Thornton-Smith at a London decorating firm. Keep in mind that she was going against not only her family but also society as women of a certain standing in the 1910s did not work. For perspective, they could not yet vote. So for Gwendoline (Syrie) to light out on her own was something that surely took courage and stamina. But it wasn't until she was 42 years old, in 1922, that she truly took the leap and opened up her own business with a loan of £400. Her London business quickly flourished and her clientele included celebrities like Noel Coward, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and the poet Stephen Tennant. She took on projects in California, a move that brought her to the United States (to work with clients like Hollywood starlet Jean Harlow), and the subsequent opening of outposts in New York and Chicago.

And during all of this, she married Henry Wellcome, an American-born British industrialist who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, giving birth to their son Henry Mounteney Wellcome, having affairs with various lovers including the department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, Brig. Gen. Percy Desmond Fitzgerald, and eventually the novelist William Somerset Maugham. While still married to Wellcome, she gave birth to a daughter with Maugham, Mary Elizabeth Maugham. She divorced Wellcome and married Maugham in 1917 but that ended in divorce as well in 1928.

So why is she a Legend of Design you might ask? Well, in between marriages and affairs and divorces, she championed the very radical idea of an all-white room, creating many for clients over the years, but her most famous all-white room was her own drawing room at 213 King's Road, London, which she unveiled at a midnight party in 1927. Walls lined with slivers of mirror reflected all white sofas, white rugs, white tables, and vases of lilies.

Maugham's perspective exerted great influence on the world of interiors...remember the world was coming out of a period of dark walls, massive tasseled and swagged drapery obscuring sunlight at every window, and heavy carved wooden furniture upholstered in crimson velvet. Her idea of all-white or monotonal rooms, or her salon in her villa at Le Touquet in France which featured an all-ecru palette punctuated with pale pink curtains, was absolutely radical. This penchant for light, bright, monotone rooms can be seen in set designs for many Hollywood films of the 30s in which a starlet, perhaps Jean Harlow, is seen in a white satin and fur boudoir.

She also took a vastly different approach to antique furniture. She removed the precious category surrounding antique pieces and stripped them of paint and stain, choosing instead to "pickle" (bleach) the wood or paint it robin's egg blue, vert Francaise, or the highly controversial white, all with a crackle glaze finish! She even dared to use modern fabric on pieces like a Louis XVI settee. In this and in many ways, she was indeed a woman ahead of her time.

Karl Lagerfeld was inspired by Maugham's all-white room for his Spring-Summer 2017 Chanel collection shown, comme d'habitude, at the Grand Palais in Paris. Look at the slivers of mirror, the white sofas for the audience and the plinths of calla lilies!

Happy designing!