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Jerry Harpole

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Share This Article Print Email High-Tech Harmony Architect Jerry Harpole strikes a balance between traditional and 21st-century design for his client, a retired AOL attorney By Judith Bell | Photography by Philp Schmidt MAY/JUNE 2006 Harpole created a pared-down environment in the living room with four custom club chairs encouraging intimate conversation. When the client bought his third Washington-area residence in 12 months—the first, a Dupont Circle townhouse, and the second, an apartment at 14th Street and Rhode Island, were sold within months of moving in—-he asked architect and interior designer Jerry Harpole to transform the 10-year-old standard McLean center hall Colonial into a distinctive home where he could entertain the capital’s political set. Harpole had handled the design of this retired AOL attorney’s Key West property and had begun the initial work on each of the two former DC residences. “The client presented me with a list of objectives he wanted to achieve with the McLean house,” recalls Harpole. “It was a kind of business plan for living.” Chief among the owner’s goals was creating an interior that would meld elements of his traditional Midwestern upbringing with the most high-tech advances in home design. Harpole, who established his firm in 1983 and began incorporating interior design into his residential practice five years ago, possesses a subtle touch, quietly blending modern and traditional in a harmonious mix. “There’s an edge to my work,” says Harpole, “but it’s a livable edge that eliminates the hardness sometimes associated with contemporary design. Here, the idea was to create unexpected moments within a house that presents traditionally.” The owner wanted the main floor in particular to be comfortable for formal entertaining and conducive to active conversation. Harpole gravitated to what he calls non-specific colors, those that have a mutable quality and change with the light throughout the day. The formal dining area, foyer and living room share a common neutral palette, encouraging flow between the different rooms. The wood floors were stained throughout with an ebony stain. Harpole bypassed tradition in the living room, creating a pared-down environment. Four custom club chairs of his own design, arranged to encourage intimate conversation, lend a subtle Deco feel. An aluminum-leaf ceiling finish defines the space while adding an unexpected element. Small windows on either side of the fireplace were what Harpole calls “a designer’s dilemma.” He paneled the entire wall in African anigre, designing perforations for the windows that function as shutters and add a sense of calm to the room. The reddish orange tones of the wood provide warmth and echo the red onyx used to replace the wood mantel. In the formal dining room, the client wanted guests to be comfortable spending time at the table. Harpole acquired an unusual round 19th-century English dining table in yew with segmented concentric leaves fitted to the parameter. He paired the table with new chairs found at Hollis & Knight, but modified them, adding arms to create more relaxed seating. A large photograph of rebuilding in Berlin after the fall occupies one wall. “There’s an edge to my work,” says architect Jerry Harpole, “but it’s a livable edge that eliminates the hardness sometimes associated with contemporary design. Here, the idea was to create unexpected moments within a house that presents traditionally.” In the family room, the fieldstone fireplace was sheathed in polished granite to create a reflective surface for the room. Here, as elsewhere in the house, the artwork sourced through Annie Gawlack of Washington’s G Fine Art enhances the spatial sense of the rooms while adding conversational value for guests. The large silvered lavender abstract painting by Jason Martin adds further luminosity to the room. An L-shaped sectional sofa in pale brown wool flannel features cutouts that give the seating unexpected openness and offer visual access to the space. Multi-colored pillows in a fabric with a raised stripe that recalls the simplicity of corduroy introduce casual warmth. The original kitchen and its cabinets with raised-panel painted doors were torn out and replaced with maple cabinets with horizontal banding in stainless steel. Mosaic glass tile backsplashes and polished granite countertops complete the sleek look. Rather than create a breakfast area next to an island, Harpole designed an elongated island with a distressed concrete top that allows seating for six at the bar area. Stainless-steel cabinets below add storage space and echo the accents on the cabinetry. Two lantern chandeliers salvaged from an old church add a traditional touch to the room. While studies are a standard room in most Virginia houses, the client wanted his to function as a digital library. An antique desk from Gore-Dean anchors the room and was re-designed to allow a computer screen to be concealed by and pop out of the top. The bookcases that line the walls on three sides were designed atypically to play up the horizontals with recessed vertical elements, and were painted red, another Virginia tradition. But Harpole added another twist on convention, asking artists from The Valley Craftsmen to complete a faux finish in red lacquer with a black glaze. The middle shelves were lit for art and books were stacked horizontally to accentuate the effect. The formal French Regency reproduction chairs are actually recliners. Two stools designed by Harpole provide extra seating when needed and can be stored under the desk.  The window coverings in simulated metal mesh add another high-tech element. In the formal dining room, a large photograph of the rebuilding of Berlin prevails over the round 19th-century English dining table. The expansive master bedroom—a 24-foot square equal in size to the family room—features a tray ceiling and cove lighting. An eight-foot-tall upholstered bed anchors the room. Harpole custom designed end tables to house the audio/video controls for the flat screen TV and the security panel. An antique bamboo chair and lounge and aluminum Art Deco sconces add interest. The carpet in restful shades of green echoes the walls, but the pattern brings in the technical again, recalling a computer motherboard. The master bath was gutted and a skylight added. A freestanding tub and the wall behind it designed to display art make a strong visual statement. Custom maple cabinetwork provides for ample concealed storage. The floor is French limestone. And a flat-screen TV concealed behind a one-way mirror is only visible when the TV is turned on. The guest room provides all the conveniences of a hotel room. “The client wanted the guest quarters to really be comfortable,” says Harpole. “I thought about the amenities that we experience in a hotel and how those are not generally available to house guests. A guest wants easy access to their suitcase, storage for their clothes.” Harpole removed a closet to create an open space to lay out one’s suitcase and added an ironing board that pops out when needed. The décor focuses on creating an intimate, calming environment. “We’re in bedrooms predominantly at night so dark colors with warmth work especially well,” says Harpole, who chose a palette of browns for the room. The trim was faux wood grained, again by The Valley Craftsmen, to tie in with the shutters and other woods in the room. The tufted headboard and bumper give the room a plush feel. The wall behind the bed was draped, concealing windows the bed would not fit between. Reading lights come out from behind these drapes and provide symmetry. “The owner wanted the house to generate active conversation,” says Harpole.  “It’s a house that does that through a balanced blend of comfort and the unanticipated.” Judith Bell is an art historian, features and fiction writer based in Washington, DC. Photographer Philip Schmidt is based in Holly Springs, North Carolina. RESOURCES LIVING ROOM Anigre Paneling Design: Jerry Harpole. Paneling Fabrication & Installation: Amazing Grain Woodworking, Rockville, MD. Red Onyx Slab Mantelpiece & Hearth Design: Jerry Harpole. Mantel Fabrication & Installation: Laser Marble, Rockville, MD. Iron Firescreen: Steven Handelman Studios, Santa Barbara, CA. Aluminum Leaf Finish on Ceiling: The Valley Craftsmen, Baltimore, MD. Wall Sconces: August Georges, Washington, DC. Stainless Steel Rods & Drapery Fabrication: Drapery Contractors, Baltimore, MD. Carpet: Carpet Impressions, McLean, VA. Custom Club Chairs Design: Jerry Harpole. Club Chair Fabric: Robert Allen, Washington, DC. Pillow Fabric: Holly Hunt, Washington, DC. Pillow Fabricator: Carlos Interiors, Crofton, MD. Oil Painting: Howard Mehring through G Fine Art, Washington, DC. Wood Flooring: Classic Floors Designs, Washington, DC. A large silvered lavender abstract painting by Jason Martin adds luminosity to the family room, which opens to the revamped kitchen. DINING ROOM Dining Chairs: Hollis & Knight, Washington, DC. Custom Chair Modifications: Jerry Harpole. Fabric: Coraggio Textiles. Stainless Steel Rods & Drapery Fabrication: Drapery Contractors, Baltimore, MD. Carpet: Carpet Impressions, McLean, VA. Ceiling Decorative Painting: The Valley Craftsmen, Baltimore, MD. Built-in Anigre Cabinetry Design: Jerry Harpole. Paneling Fabrication & Installation: Amazing Grain Woodworking, Rockville, MD. Photograph of Berlin: By Frank Thiel, G Fine Art, Washington, DC. FAMILY ROOM Custom Sectional Sofa Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabric on Sofa: August Georges, Washington, DC. Fabricator: Texstyle, Hickory, NC. Oversized Round Bolster Fabric: Scalamandré, Washington, DC. Bolster & Throw Pillow Fabrication: Carlos Interiors, Crofton, MD.  Acrylic on Steel Painting: Jason Martin, via G Fine Art, Washington, DC. “Wave” Maple Console: Dakota Jackson, Washington, DC. Multi-Colored Striped Wool Rug: Carpet Impressions, Washington, DC. Wood Frame & Upholstery Armchairs: Dessin Fournir via August Georges, Washington, DC. Classic Cloth Fabric: August Georges, Washington, DC. Tri-color Murano Glass Table & Lamp on Console: Itre, Inc. Custom Mahogany Coffee Table Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabrication: Tartt Millwork. KITCHEN Maple & Stainless Steel Laminate Custom Cabinetry Design: Jerry Harpole. Cabinetry Fabrication & Installation: Amazing Grain, Rockville, MD. Wall Cabinets & Granite Countertops: Laser Marble, Rockville, MD. Colored Concrete Island Countertop: Stone Casting, Charleston, SC. Installer: Falcon Construction. Barstools: R. Jones through J. Lambeth, Washington, DC. Barstool Fabric: Vinyl by Scalamandré, Washington, DC. Mosaic Tile: Ann Sacks, Washington, DC. Natural Water Reed Roman Shades Fabrication: Drapery Contractors, Baltimore, MD. Old Church Chandeliers: Good Wood, Washington, DC. DIGITAL LIBRARY Custom Built-in Shelves Design: Jerry Harpole. Shelf Fabrication: Amazing Grain Woodworking, Rockville, MD. Paint Finish: The Valley Craftsmen, Baltimore, MD. Simulated Mesh Metal Shades: Drapery Contractors , Baltimore, MD. Mid-19th-century Oak Desk With Inset Leather Writing Pad: Gore-Dean, Washington, DC. Leather Installer: Falcon Construction. Reproduction Reclining Armchairs: Holly Hunt, Washington, DC. Custom Wooden Stools on Casters Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabricator: Greg Wiercynski, Falcon Construction. Flannel Cushion Fabric: August Georges, Washington, DC. Cushion Fabrication: Carlos Interiors, Crofton, MD. Carpet: Carpet Impressions, McLean, VA. Paintings by Cindy Blair: Jerry Harpole’s Collection. The elongated island in the kitchen allows seating for six at the bar area. Two lantern chandeliers salvaged from an old church add warmth to the room. GUEST BEDROOM Custom Upholstered Headboard, Rails & Footboard Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabricator: Texstyle, Hickory, NC. Wood Rod & Drapery: Drapery Contractors, Baltimore, MD. Reading Lights: Hines, Washington, DC. Built-in Cabinetry Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabrication: Falcon Construction. Faux Wood Grain Finish: The Valley Craftsmen, Baltimore, MD. Carpet: Carpet Impressions, McLean, VA. MASTER BATH Lavatories, Faucets, Fittings, Wall Sconces, Limestone Flooring, Towels & Accessories: Waterworks, Washington, DC. Maple Woodwork Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabrication: Amazing Grain Woodworking, Rockville, MD. Photograph: Todd Hido through G Fine Art, Washington, DC. Limestone Countertops & Backsplashes: Waterworks, Washington, DC. Fabrication & Installation: A and M Marble & Granite, Rockville, MD. MASTER BEDROOM Green Suede Upholstered Headboard & Frame: Mike’s, Los Angeles, CA. Reading Lights: Artemide. Custom End Table Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabricator: Ivan C. Dutterer, Hanover, PA. Chaise Longue, Armchair & Round Wood Table: Aston-Garrett. Chaise Pillows, Armchair Pillows, Chenille Throw, Green Vase: Material Possessions, Chicago, IL. Faux Fur “Dice” Pillows Design: Jerry Harpole. Fabric: J. Lambeth, Washington, DC. Fabricator: Carlos Interiors, Crofton, MD. Antique Green Rice Barrel: The Washington Design Center. Carpet: Carpet Impressions, Washington, DC. Despite its traditional trappings, the study functions as a digital library. An antique desk from Gore-Dean was re-designed to allow a computer screen to be concealed by the top. A faux finished in red lacquer with a black glaze by The Valley Craftsmen The guest room provides all the comforts of a hotel room. In the master bath, a freestanding tub and the wall behind designed to display art make a strong visual statement. **Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Thomas Britt

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/video?videoID=33029421001

Mica Ertegun

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/video?videoID=37048123001

Paul Vincent Wiseman

The San Francisco Designer Embraces His Lifelong Love of Art and Architecture

Text by Nicholas von Hoffman/Photography by Russell Abraham and Matthew McMillman

Published February 2006

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Paul Vincent Wiseman is one of those people who, like the Apostle Paul, discovered his life’s work in a single moment. In St. Paul’s case, it was a voice from on high; in Wiseman’s, it was a friend’s. “He said to me, ‘Why are you studying political science? All you ever do is talk about art and history. Why don’t you do something with art history and architecture?’” With that, Wiseman says, “everything just started falling into place.”

The designer grew up on a California pear farm. “The nice part,” he explains, “was that we were close to the capital, Sacramento, and close to San Francisco. So it was like growing up in a very rural area with a lot of sophistication. It’s an unusual place; it looks kind of like the Mississippi Delta, except there are no snakes or alligators. We all live on islands connected by drawbridges. I am,” he declares, “the only decorator in San Francisco who can drive a tractor and a 10-wheel truck.”

Wiseman grew up on a California pear farm. “I am,” he declares, “the only decorator in San Francisco who can drive a tractor and a 10-wheel truck.”

Wiseman’s grandparents were Southern California orange growers, but there was nothing isolated or provincial in his background. “The day after I graduated from high school, I went to Europe for three months while all the other kids were buying stereos and cars.” After saving up for the trip, he went everywhere he could possibly go. “I put 12,000 miles on a car in England, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria. I’ve never been shy about travel. I think that’s probably been the most influential thing in my career—travel and looking at art and architecture.”

Wiseman attended the University of California at both its Berkeley and Davis campuses, studying political science in preparation for becoming a lawyer. He spent his junior year in Australia at the University of Tasmania. This was the trip that changed his life. “Two of my friends came, and we worked in the pear orchards outside Melbourne for a month, and then we took six months off, coming home through Asia. That,” he recalls, “is when I started really shifting. I’d always been very interested in architecture, art and history, but I hadn’t really ’fessed up to it. I went back to Berkeley and hated it.”

He began investigating design schools, but when he told his parents, they said, “Darling, we just spent all this money on your education. Why don’t you go get a job in the industry and see if you really like it, and then we’ll talk.”

That’s exactly what he did. In short order, he got a job with an office furniture company, then he was at Hexter Fabrics, then on to work for Winfield Windsor, the antiques dealer to whom Wiseman says he is indebted for guidance and training. After that he worked with Robert Hering, who did both antiques and interior design. “I loved it,” Wiseman says. “But when I started selling so much, they fired me because I was making too much money. I was so upset that I decided I’d move to France, work on château restoration and suffer for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, my friend Sue Fisher King [a well-known San Francisco dealer] said, ‘While you’re suffering, why don’t you come help me with windows?’ ” He did and was discovered there by two of his former employer’s clients, who asked him to help them.

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From a Different Cloth

Pioneering Decorator Rose Cumming’s Bold Textile Designs Are Rediscovered

Text by Jeffrey Simpson/Photography by Billy Cunningham

Published April 2007

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Shocking-violet hair, floating draperies, a rich anecdotal style and a shrewd and loving eye for beautiful things—these were the elements that made up Rose Cumming, the legendary decorator. Her life was the stuff of romance. She was born on an Australian sheep ranch. In 1917 she and her sister came to New York on their way to England, where Cumming was to be married; but even though the United States had not yet entered World War I, no ships were accepting women for passage across the bellicose waters, so the sisters were stranded. Having great social presence (and a little money), they became popular in New York society. Cumming, finally deciding that she needed a job, asked her friend Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, what to do. When he suggested she become a decorator, Cumming is said to have replied, “Perhaps I would, but first tell me what it is.”

She quickly learned what decorating meant. She opened her own shop on Park Avenue, which functioned in the European way: It was her decorating office and a retail shop for antiques and fabrics.

Her greatest strength was as a colorist. “Parrots are blue and green. Why shouldn’t fabrics be?” Cumming asked.

Cumming’s signature trait was that she was a showman. From the beginning, she put the best of her furniture and bibelots in the window of the shop, and at night she left the lights on, which nobody had ever done. Her rooms were stage sets, with an unexpected mix of elements and a glittering fairy-tale effect. As a decorator, Cumming would become famous for combining pieces in ways that seemed random, although they were actually highly disciplined. She liked and used—often together—Gothic and early English, Asian (except Indian), Chippendale, Louis XV, Austrian Baroque and painted Venetian furniture. Her greatest strength, however, was as a colorist. She painted walls aubergine, mixed teal blue with lime green, tangerine orange and blood red and filled a room with her favorite hyacinth taffeta, spiced with purple and pink. “Parrots are blue and green. Why shouldn’t fabrics be?” Cumming asked.

She was an iconoclast with materials as well as styles and colors. She covered walls with Mylar, draped beds in silver lamé and, in the 1930s, hung cellophane curtains at the windows. With her sense of the dramatic, it is not surprising that she counted Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer and Mary Pickford among her clients.

Cumming designed and printed fabrics in her own bold colors, creating some from scratch and sometimes recoloring chintzes she bought in England. Her sister Eileen Cecil carried on the fabric business after Cumming’s death in 1968, with the help of a designer named Ronald Grimaldi. Recently, the business was sold to Dessin Fournir, the Kansas-based furniture and fabric firm headed by Chuck Comeau. In going through the archives, Comeau discovered old boxes that contained fabrics hand-painted and printed by Cumming in the 1930s in simpler and more abstract forms than her chintzes. Comeau says, “Opening those boxes, I felt the way somebody would feel if they found King Tut’s tomb. It shows another side of what Rose did, but it all fits in with the way she combined forward thinking and progressiveness with classicism and timelessness.”

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Draper’s High Style

The Museum of the City of New York Remembers the Legendary Decorator

Text by Nancy Collins/Photography courtesy The Archives of Dorothy Draper & Company, Inc., The Carleton Varney Design Group

Published May 2006

Dorothy Draper was to decorating,” says interior designer Carleton Varney, “what Chanel was to fashion. The woman was a genius; there’d be no professional decorating business without her.”

Anyone requiring proof has only to drop by the Museum of the City of New York, where “The High Style of Dorothy Draper”—prescience, brains and bravado—is on magnificent display from May through August, marking the first time a major museum has honored an interior decorator with her own retrospective.

“She took a world that was drab and dreary and made it colorful.”

Which isn’t surprising. Draper, after all, was a dame who specialized in firsts—starting in 1925 when she opened the Architectural Clearing House, arguably the first official interior design business. “Women didn’t work back then,” says Carleton Varney, “and what decorating profession there was, and it wasn’t much, was mostly made up of men.”

That didn’t stop Draper from parlaying her blue-blood background into big business. Born a Tuckerman (her niece Nancy became famous as Jackie Kennedy’s White House social secretary), Draper grew up in New York surrounded by the best of American upper-class WASP style. Nevertheless, the tall, patrician beauty wanted out—and got there by marrying George Draper, FDR’s personal physician and brother to actress Ruth Draper, whose infamous monologue “The Italian Lesson” was inspired by her sister- in-law. “Dorothy didn’t know she was going to be a career woman,” continues Varney. “She always said she married George Draper ‘to break out of the walls of Tuxedo Park’ ”—precisely where most of her clients wanted to break in.

“Dorothy was wealthy and had every social credential,” says Varney, “which is why all the best hotels in the world came to her. Her clients knew if they used her they’d make money, because she was their social credential.” And she hardly bothered with private homes. “Dorothy wasn’t interested in working with houses.

She liked doing hospitality.” Big projects for a big personality, you might say. “Dorothy created New York’s Sutton Place,” says Varney, who, in the early ’60s, in his 20s, walked into her office and never left. “In those days you couldn’t get anybody to live there, so Douglas Elliman hired Dorothy, who painted all the buildings black with white trim, adding colored doors—like Dublin. She turned those tenements into one of Manhattan’s chicest addresses.”

It was a success she repeated on New York’s West Side. “You couldn’t sell the west side of town until 1937, when Dorothy redid the Hampshire House on Central Park South and moved herself into a duplex.” (She later lived in another of her projects—The Carlyle.) “People came to Dorothy because she did the unexpected—and had this brilliant sense of color. She took a world that was drab and dreary and made it colorful. She made the Hampshire House like an English country house with flowered chintzes.”

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Elsie de Wolfe

The American Pioneer who Vanquished Victorian Gloom

Text by Edgar Munhall

Published January 2000

De Wolfe in 1919.

Though dead for half a century, Elsie de Wolfe remains an icon to this day, revered as America’s first decorator. The key elements of her style are as fresh as ever, and the aura of celebrity she brought to her profession has been passed on from one to another of her successors.

Born in New York City, (“Our home is now Macy’s front door”), ugly little Elsie spent some early years in Scotland and in 1885 was presented at court to Queen Victoria (“a little fat queen in a black dress and a load of jewels”). After having had some success in amateur theatrical circles in New York, she became a professional actress and performed various light comic and historical roles throughout the 1890s. Her appearances, however, were praised more for the clothes she wore than for what she did in them, as de Wolfe enjoyed the unusual arrangement with her producer of being allowed to choose her own wardrobes—usually couture ensembles she ordered in Paris from Paquin, Doucet or Worth.

As early as 1887 de Wolfe had settled into what was then called a “Boston marriage” with Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury, a formidable figure in New York society who also happened to be a wildly successful literary agent and business representative for, among others, Wilde, Shaw, Bernhardt, Sardou, Rostand and Feydeau; she even brought the play Charley’s Aunt to the United States.

After having restyled with some panache the house the two women shared on Irving Place—sweeping out her companion’s Victorian clutter, opening spaces and introducing soft, warm colors and a bit of eighteenth-century French elegance—de Wolfe decided in 1905 to become a professional decorator, issuing smart business cards embellished with her trademark wolf-with-nosegay crest. That same year a group of powerful New York women, named Astor, Harriman, Morgan, Whitney—and Mar- bury, organized the city’s first club exclusively for women, the Colony Club. Its handsome headquarters at Madison and Thirty-first Street were designed by Stanford White, who, along with Mar-bury and other friends on the board, got de Wolfe the commission to do the decoration.

When the Colony opened in 1907, the interiors established her reputation overnight. Instead of imitating the heavy atmosphere of men’s clubs, de Wolfe introduced a casual, feminine style with an abundance of glazed chintz (immediately making her “the Chintz Lady”), tiled floors, light draperies, pale walls, wicker chairs, clever vanity tables and the first of her many trellised rooms. The astonished reaction of the members to her illusionistic indoor garden pavilion put de Wolfe’s name on many lips and led to a number of lucrative commissions across the country.

During the following six years, until her meeting with Henry Clay Frick, de Wolfe did more clubs, a number of private houses, both on the East Coast and in California, a model house (with Ogden Codman, Jr.), opera boxes and a dormitory at Barnard College; she also lectured and published her most influential book, The House in Good Taste. By that time she had a suite of offices and a showroom on Fifth Avenue, with a staff of secretaries, bookkeepers and assistants. She even had imitators.

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John Fowler

Master of the Sublime Comforts of the English Country House

Text by Stephen Calloway

Published January 2000

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Fowler modeled his 1969 design for the living room of David and Evangeline Bruce’s London apartment after a Louis XVI Parisian example. The ruffled draperies, in the elaborate style he was known for, were based on a wedding dress he saw at a museum.

John Fowler’s entry into decoration occurred by chance. As a young man, he endured office jobs before escaping to a farm. Then, hearing of a position in the grand old London decorating firm Thornton Smith, he began in its paint studio “restoring”—or faking—Chinese wallpapers. From there he moved to head the new painted-furniture department at Peter Jones. Even then he had an original eye, creating smart, unusual rooms that mixed countrified Georgian furniture, French painted pieces and the odd florid Victorian chair covered in voguish satin. From the start he was a genius at draperies.

In 1938 the decorator Sibyl Colefax invited Fowler to join her firm. As he began working for grander clients, his style became grander too. The faded splendor of English country houses became his beau ideal, but it was his collaboration with an American client that would prove the crucial influence. Nancy Lancaster employed him to help with the decoration of her own rooms but became fascinated with decoration herself. At the end of World War II she bought the firm that became Colefax & Fowler from the retiring Colefax.

The working relationship between the two was always bracing. Lancaster’s formidable aunt Nancy Astor called them “the unhappiest unmarried couple in England.” It was the unique combination of their enthusiasms and talents—Fowler’s knowledge, attention to detail and color sense and Lancaster’s eye for scale and insistence on comfort—that led to the creation of their English country house look, a style that has lasted half a century.

Pauline de Rothschild’s bedroom in her London apartment, which she decorated with Fowler in the 1970s. “She wouldn’t have achieved anything of this kind without John Fowler,” said her husband, Baron Philippe de Rothschild.

In spite of crippling shortages of materials, which inspired Fowler to fashion superb draperies from dyed army blankets, the postwar years marked the beginning of their heyday. With the discovery of his own country house, the Hunting Lodge in Odiham, in the late 1940s, Fowler came closest to his aim of “humble elegance.” “What I wanted here was something utterly unpretentious, very comfortable, with a veneer of elegance and informality.” The pretty neo-Jacobean structure became, in the words of one later occupant, Fowler’s “own personal Trianon.” The country retreat, before that an earnest, spartan affair or something impossibly twee, would never be quite the same.

At the firm’s Brook Street premises, Fowler’s office was dominated by his “palette,” a wall on which were pinned all his favorite samples and colors; most fabrics—such as the Bowood chintz—were named after the houses in which he had found the original documents. He formed a private language of color names such as “dead salmon” and “mouse’s back”—to which Nancy Lancaster added the infamous “caca du dauphin” and “vomitesse de la reine.”

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