Right at Home With London Decorator
While bombs fell, London’s renowned and perhaps poshest interior design firm, Colefax & Fowler, was as busy as ever. No, it was not its customary business of pleasing clients by combining palest shades of slipper satin drapes with glazed chintz upholstery, regilding Louis XIV chairs, finding that just-right bit of Aubusson carpeting or damask fabric--it was kept busy making blackout curtains from whatever fabric that could be found, often old blankets.
And when blackout curtains were no longer necessary and wealthy people were redecorating, restoring or rebuilding, Colefax & Fowler was again busier than ever. The National Trust trusted it to restore and refurbish many of the trust’s national treasure houses, and even with a severe budget (heritage groups never have enough money), the firm achieved triumphant results, refinishing walnut-grained gilded woodwork to “a marvelous plum cake look,” using distempered paper in lieu of silk damask, putting huge goblet headings on curtains “for a nice and extravagant look.”
Imogen Taylor, senior partner of Colefax & Fowler, was telling us the story before a showing of a suite she installed at the San Juan Capistrano Library and Cultural Center. It is not, of course, as lavish a showing as “Treasure Houses of Great Britain” in Washington, recently visited by “our young royals” as Taylor called Prince Charles and Princess Diana, but it is as close as you will get to see in Southern California.
Royals, young and old, British and international, lords and ladies, well-to-do merchant class and ordinary people have been Colefax & Fowler’s clients for more than 50 years. Much of the firm’s work for the National Trust involves turning English mansions formerly lived in “in a most amazing way” (the sole task of one servant, the Groom of the Chamber, was to change the blotting paper on the various desks) into museums visited by the public. “A sad story in a way,” she said, “but at least the houses are saved for us all.”
She showed us slides of rooms reflecting this gracious living of former days, houses with lakes in front and arbors and woods behind, with pergolas and walking galleries, with blue-and-white plaster ceiling friezes as carefully molded and colored as old porcelain and yet with such richness that they clearly spoke of comfort. Here, right in the foreground in front of a stone mantel laden with blue and white teapots, is a huge basket painted red, a sleeping basket for the dog. I was pleased to see dog baskets--enormous ones for enormous dogs, not poodles--in almost every other elegant living room we saw. Log baskets, too.
One lady’s staircase was done in rush matting “which was lethal but very attractive--she lost many a friend,” Taylor dryly commented. We saw Fowler’s famous yellow walls, Chinese yellow highly glazed (hey! like my bathroom) and his glazed walls in pink, watermelon, cantaloupe shades. And we saw a room painted dark at the client’s demand, the color named Elephant’s Breath by Colefax & Fowler.
Meanwhile, down at San Juan Capistrano you can see At Home in an English Country House, the Taylor-designed suite brought to California by La Sala de Libros y Artes, the newly founded nonprofit group headed by dynamo Gep Durenberger that sponsors events to support and enhance the San Juan Capistrano Library and Cultural Center. It’s open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Dec. 21 (information: (714) 493-5911). There’s a Gothic gazebo, entry hall, drawing room, morning room and master bedroom. And take time to wander through the library proper--it’s a new, jaw-dropping architectural wonder by Michael Graves with Rennie Makintosh and Art Deco overtones bursting gloriously with its own gazebos, courtyards, gallery and story tower-- whoo-ee!