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!

Let's Talk About Color: Four Color Schemes To Know And Love

Color is among the most basic and primary of elements in interior design, but somehow it ends up being the one that frightens, mystifies, and stymies people the most. Hopefully this post will ease any discomfort or anxiety you may have about working with color. If you know this information already, please bear with us as we explore hues, tints, tones, shades, and color schemes!

I am sure we all remember this from grade school, but there are three primary colors. They are called primary since all other colors are derived from combinations of these three. Red, yellow, and blue are the "original" colors.

When you combine any two of these, you get secondary colors: orange (from red and yellow), green (from blue and yellow) and purple (from red and blue).

And then if you combine these secondary colors you get--yes, you guessed it--tertiary colors! When we continually combine, the colors are more subtle, richer, and more complicated, like Red Orange or Blue Green.

Now I'd like to introduce you to an invaluable tool: the Color Wheel. You can buy one at any art supply store. It is literally a wheel that allows you to turn colors and see what combinations produce what colors. Look at the wheel below and you can see, for example, that the front side shows, at the twelve o'clock position, what happens when you mix blue with orange. At the two o'clock position, you can see what happens when you mix black with yellow: you get a sort of olive green color.

This leads us to a very handy trick when dealing with color, which is technically called a "hue." If you add white to any hue, you get a "tint," if you add grey to any hue, you get a "tone," and finally if you add black to any hue you get a "shade."

So here is where the fun comes in. Once you know the basics of color, you can apply it to interior spaces in the form of color schemes or palettes. There are four major color schemes I want to cover, and the first and simplest is the Monotone color scheme.

When we hear the word "monotone" applied to color, we tend to think of a room that has a white or neutral color palette. But a Monotone color scheme needn't mean a lack of color. In fact, it simply means a single hue, whether that hue is white, red, or even green.

Above bedroom by Anne Coyle. Photo used by kind permission.

From there we graduate to a Monochromatic color scheme which means tints, tones, or shades of a single hue. This can be used to great effect, especially when used with traditionally "calming" hues like blues or greens.

Now we can add more hues to our color schemes. An Analogous color scheme is one that uses several colors next to each other on the color wheel. You could stay calm and relaxing with a combination of yellow-green, green, blue-green, and blue. Or you could do something bold like yellow-orange, yellow, and yellow-green. Take a look at these rooms that feature exactly such schemes.

Above living room by Amy Lau.

Next up is what is known as a Complementary color scheme. Complementary refers to the fact that two hues are opposite each other on the color wheel. Look back at the color wheel above and see for yourself some classic combinations like red and green, and blue and orange. It is possible to create a very pleasing and engaging color scheme from complementary colors. In the first two examples below, you can plainly see that red and green do not automatically mean "Christmas." We have cultural and societal conditioning toward certain colors and combinations, but when red is tempered with a bit of orange, and the green is toned down, the result is actually quite sophisticated.

There are advanced color schemes like a Split-Complementary or a Tetrad, but for now I hope this tutorial about color will get you started. When you use a color wheel, it is so easy to establish a color palette using one of these four major color schemes. And here is my Design Mantra #3: there are no bad colors... color schemes can be inspired by nearly anything under the sun: a pillow, a piece of art, a garden, a favorite outfit, a place, or even a time period. But that's a post in itself...

Until then, thanks for reading and happy designing!