design in interior decoration

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DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATION Author(s): DAVID HICKS Source: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 124, No. 5236 (MARCH 1976), pp. 181-192 Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41372494 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 12:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.142.30.167 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 12:28:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATION

DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATIONAuthor(s): DAVID HICKSSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 124, No. 5236 (MARCH 1976), pp. 181-192Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41372494 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 12:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATION

DESIGN IN INTERIOR

DECORATION

IA DAVID paper

HICKS by

I

I

DAVID HICKS I

given to the Society on Wednesday 7th January 1976, with Madame Francis Spar > Design Editor of

Connaissance des Arts, in the Chair

The Chairman:] To begin this year by mak- ing my first speech in public - and in English - is already a surprise. But it is an even bigger one for me, a foreigner, to introduce one of the most talented interior designers of the day: Mr. David Hicks. In France, we have usually thought that a flair for decoration was a typical French speciality, a sort of reserved territory! It was admitted that the English produced a great sense of comfort and well-being in their houses, but real decoration could only be French. That was until 1954, when David Hicks appeared on the scene. And, working for Connaissance des Arts , I personally knew that things had to be quickly reconsidered.

At the same time as Mr. Hicks began his career, a connoisseur in Paris, Carlos de Beistegui, made the English style à la mode , with great skill. He was quickly followed by many antique dealers. But the big difference was that Paris was once again going in for reconstitutions of a more or less romantic inspiration. In London David Hicks was moving in a quite opposite direction. He was not interested in merely reconstituting the past, but in bringing about a renaissance, a rejuvenation for a society happy to say good-bye to so many grim and cheerless years. He kept the basic architecture, but painted it in brilliant colours that would have pleased the Adam brothers themselves.

Because he loves objects he began to arrange them in a new way, like still-life pictures. In fact, he invented 'tablescapes', a typical 'Hicks' word. On a table or a console, an antique bust, a few gold boxes, a charming vase or a drawing might meet. He did and does not associate objects merely for their value, but for the way in which their individual characters can mingle to produce special harmony. That is how in the Theodoracopoulos flat in New York, I saw two huge and beautiful bouquets on a pair of Louis

XV'consoles. As there were probably no vases of the right proportions David Hicks went to Bloomingdale's and bought two ordinary gal- vanized buckets. I am sure the flowers have been changed but not the buckets !

When decorating the houses of the famous, David Hicks discovered that the basic materials and furniture that he wanted to use in order to decorate his own style did not exist. He had to create himself what he needed. So he opened a shop in London, and designed his first carpet. Other textiles followed, soon to be asked for all over the world. Now his style is so well adapted to a certain taste that you are sure to find, in one of his shops, in Paris or Madrid or Tokyo, what is missing in your house to make it elegant. People buy ťdu David Hicks' without even know- ing it.

In Jersey last year, I visited a very important collection of paintings in a house with no decor- ation at all. It was the most extravagant mixture of nothing I had ever seen. But the private apartments had just been redone, with great pride, by the owners themselves. They were lovely, gay and perfectly adapted to the house. The carpet, wall-paper and curtains were David Hicks - which the owners learned with delight.

After David Hicks, decorator, comes the tour deforce of David Hicks, designer; plus the power and the strength of David Hicks's organization.

Nobody and certainly no French designer has ever achieved that in decoration. For the first time an interior designer has gained an international reputation, as did the great fashion creator Christian Dior, or, now, Yves Saint- Laurent. David Hicks has, I think, invented the 'ready-to-decorate'.

All this has only been possible because behind the trademark exists, full of fantasy and serious- ness, an artist who understands and loves his time.

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The following paper, which was illustrated , was then given.

I read

am designer

very

a paper

honoured in thirty-one

to the

to be years Royal

the to first be Society

asked interior

to of

designer in thirty-one years to be asked to read a paper to the Royal Society of

Arts. I particularly wanted my paper to be called 'Design in Interior Decoration' be- cause that was what Grace Lovat-Fraser called her paper which she read to the Society in 1945, and it is design in interior decoration which is so important.

When reading her paper, I was struck by the fact that although it had been written over thirty years ago, I agreed with all she said, with the exception of one idea, which I suspect she would have reconsidered were she composing a paper in 1976. Although she did not define the difference between interior decoration and interior design, which I should like to do, she clearly was a designer working in the field of interior decoration as opposed to an interior decorator.

Interior decoration is the art of achieving the maximum with the minimum. It is the art of making the most of your house, your rooms and your possessions. Generally speaking, an interior decorator who is not also a designer deals with private houses, is a person of imagination and good taste, with a flair for colour and furniture arrangement. An interior designer is concerned with internal architecture, with planning, with space allocation and with the creation of furniture specifically intended for a contem- porary private interior and for contract work in offices, hotels, restaurants, etc.

Nobody could describe Lady Mendl, Mrs. Somerset Maugham, Billy Baldwin or Boudin as interior designers; nor could they describe Sir John Soane, William Morris, Jon Bannenberg, or possibly myself, purely as interior decorators. Interior designers can also be interior decorators, but I think it is true to say that there are many interior decorators who are not interior designers. I am, perhaps, the only interior decorator and interior designer who is also an author of books on interior decoration and design and a product designer.

I am not only under contract to design for many different manufacturers in such far apart countries as France and Japan, but I also have a series of shops bearing my name in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, South Africa and Spain, with nearly finalized plans for further shops in Austria, Norway and Italy, and I am also a product designer in the world of apparel as widely varied as men's shoes and women's headscarves.

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The diversity of my design practice pro- duces a stimulating and fresh approach to each new assignment, whether it be for a drawing-room, for kitchenware or for sports- shirts. I must confess I consider myself to be extremely fortunate in the breadth of my work, which seems to enable me perhaps to avoid that staleness which is the constant enemy of innovation.

For example, on Monday morning I will design a tourist office for the Algerian Government, while in the afternoon I will design umbrellas for a Japanese manufac- turer. On Tuesday morning I will work on an Emir's palace as an interior designer, and in the afternoon work as a product designer, approving and modifying my designs for an English range of kitchenware. Then on Wednesday morning I will work with a French architect on the reconstruction of, and architectural additions to, a villa in the South of France and after this I will design further models for my collection of men's shoes. On Thursday morning I will vet the plans for a new shop lay-out in Johannesburg and in the afternoon complete the designs for a range of sculptured carpets being manufactured in Hong Kong. On Friday morning I will proof-read my sixth book - on flower arrangements - and while driving to the country for the weekend, I will be dictating ideas for luggage designs.

Needless to say, I am backed in London by a young, enthusiastic design studio and in those countries where I have shops, I also have interior designers. Naturally, it would be impossible to cope with the number of different design activities without their pro- fessional co-operation.

DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATION Interior decoration without design is, as I have said, merely employing a sense of colour, a knowledge of furniture and its arrangement and the ability to select the appropriate accessories, such as lamps. Interior decoration with design is the art of professionally advising clients on creating a truly suitable interior, using a discerning and disciplined eye in order to reflect the charac- ter and personality of each individual client and selecting fabrics and carpets in the con- temporary idiom, ensuring that all fit into the best of modern interior design.

Interior decoration has existed from the earliest times. More recently, apart from Daniel Marot, Robert Adam, William

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1974 . London living-room. Directoire swan chair contrasts with sleek snakeskin-covered table and a white marble and smoked mirror fireplace designed by David Hicks. ( This and all succeeding photographs are by R. Guillemot and reproduced by courtesy of Connaissance des Arts)

Morris and others, interior decoration was not carried out by specialized professionals until the '20S. Architects have usually con- cerned themselves with the structure only, and it was the cabinet makers and upholster- ers who put the rather sparse eighteenth- century interiors together. In the nineteenth century it was the upholsterers and drapers who purveyed the ingredients of the over- filled rooms, and not until the 1920s did the first professionals, who dealt exclusively with interior decoration, appear. Among these were Lady Mendl and Mrs. Somerset Maugham, who began by working for their friends and ended by leaving their mark

indelibly on the decoration scene throughout the world for the next forty years.

Sir Winston Churchill said: ť Without tradition, design is a flock of sheep without a shepherd'. Each period evolves out of some preceding one, and many new ideas are sparked off by previous solutions. It is fas- cinating that one of the oldest stone build- ings in Egypt, the Tomb of Zoser, because of its severe straight lines and stringent proportions looks like the most advanced building of our age.

Like all other arts, decoration is enor- mously derivative. In exactly the same way as the classical orders of architecture have

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1974 . A Roman shade of carnation fabric, designed by Hicks, and an *H' patterned, Brussels weave carpet in a tailored bathroom

been used in many varying forms for three thousand years, we find that decorative motifs have recurred through history. There is not one motif in use to-day that cannot be related to a derivative source.

In decoration to-day we use chairs, tables and curtains which, in principle, have hardly changed since the Egyptians. The actual material and details have altered but the problems of arrangement, comfort and lighting are basically the same.

Although my present interest is mainly concerned with modern interiors, furniture and fabrics, I draw continually on experience gained in working with fine furniture and traditional fabrics in period houses. Modern interiors are as dependent on atmosphere as

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traditional ones. The fault of many interiors of to-day is that designers too often neglect the necessity of atmosphere, character, con- trast and pattern.

The reason why decoration is such an absorbing subject is that all through history it has reflected the character of the person using a particular background. Examples have survived to show us how empresses, great lovers and statesmen lived. The small, intimate background is less well known if it dates from before the nineteenth century. Our age is heavily documented by photo- graphy, films, magazines and books.

Although the way in which Cleopatra, President Jefferson, Sarah Bernhardt or Jean Harlow arranged their rooms does not apply

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1974. An extremely small bedroom is almost completely filled with a tester bed . The bathroom in the illustration on the facing page can be seen through the door

to the ordinary person, it is the same basic problem - creating a background for enter- taining and living.

The principles of great historic interiors and outstanding modern ones apply to the smallest flat. Good period and good modern interiors have one thing in common - style. Style produces atmosphere and if the style is right, then the interior has taste. I cannot attempt to differentiate between good and bad taste, but I will explain how I make decorating decisions and how I personally

create atmosphere and style when I show you some slides later on.

People are often amazed at clients who have a considerable interest in decorating and yet employ a professional interior decorator. One of the aspects of our job is making up people's minds for them. I know how important this can be because whenever I do a room for myself the wide range of possibilities is even more overwhelming than to the non-professional, and I long for some- one to make up my mind for me. People who

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1974. country house visitor's room with Jib door open , revealing a print-filled bathroom

employ decorators should never be accused of having no ideas or not having strong feel- ings about an interior themselves. They are looking for perfection and reassurance. I never like to work for people willing to give me a completely free hand. I strongly believe that my job is to interpret and carry out the ideas of each client and to arrive at an interior that is absolutely right for its use and the personalities concerned. I like it when they insist on using a particular modern chair, have a horror of a certain colour and express strong feelings about the kind of atmosphere they want to create.

For this reason the most important factor in deciding how to treat your rooms is to have a clear decisive attitude towards the possibilities that apply to your particular

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needs. Never be afraid to use someone else's idea if it really applies to the use you are going to put it to, but always try to interpret rather than slavishly copy it.

A few minutes ago I mentioned taste. Taste may, perhaps, in our present world of greed and destruction, sound somewhat frivolous, but everyone who buys even the smallest piece of furniture, or a tie, does so by choosing between alternatives. This choice is governed by their taste.

Good taste is not expensive. Often the more expensive of two alternatives is less acceptable to those who are visually aware - people with taste. Taste, good or bad, affects us in every detail of life. The clothes we wear, anything we buy, the books we read, the films we see, are all governed by taste.

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1970, The bed and window curtains are both made of a David Hicks designed , American manufactured sheet in three greens on a white ground. The dressing- table is turquoise. The sculptured carpet is white on an emerald green ground ,

and was designed in i960

What is really important is that people educate or elevate their taste so that they can judge not only their own problems, but general problems of taste and design. It is amazing how few people bother to cultivate their taste and how very many people there are with no taste, either good or bad, or any feelings about it and all that it affects. This is only too evident when we see into the homes of our politicians, our musicians and

our actors with, of course, notable exceptions. It is even more obvious when we look around at what is happening to our own country and to the world to-day. Everywhere there is total disregard for preservation and for really fine architectural conceptions and a high standard of design in manufactured goods.

I am particularly interested in preserving those once beautiful parts of England which are threatened daily by new developments.

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1974 . A wallpaper made by С olor oil, and designed by David Hicks, in a country house passage with a Provençale cupboard filled with an eccentric collection of objects . The floor is covered with coconut matting , while the

bedroom has white haircord, and pale blue cotton tester bed and wall covering

Almost all of them are ill-considered and badly sited. Under our eyes, every village, small town and city is being villianously wrecked. It needed Malraux and the General to achieve what has been done in preserving and controlling Paris to a very considerable degree, but even they failed to prevent architectural slaughter in Bordeaux and other parts of France.

This is all part of taste and visùal aware- ness. What we allow by disinterestedness or weakness, our children will have to live with.

The great sadness is that there is no leadership in this and other countries. In the past, taste and enlightened patronage

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filtered down from the aristocracy to the landed gentry and, in turn, to the butchers and the grocers. Now the butcher is influ- enced by the Ideal Home Exhibition because the élite or moneyed classes are un- enlightened. In the eighteenth century shops of tradesmen were beautiful, but the pre- mises of their modern counterparts are a disgrace - not to mention the appalling hor- rors of supermarket buildings. The nouveaux riches have no taste. Generally speaking, they merely ape pathetically the conventional ideas of seedy aristocrats. How many new millionaires have built great modern houses ? The Heads of State of the world nowadays have little interest in style, and consequently

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the worst possible example is set. In the past these people had an immense sense of quality and they helped to create the taste of the period.

But to return more specifically to interior design, which is predominantly concerned with taste and style, I would say that having taste means that every detail of your life, and the way you live, is selected with immense care. It is amazing how important it is to choose even the colour of the soap and the towels for your bathroom. The design of the letterbox; the shape of the glass for your gin and tonic; a reading light; a picture frame; a bookshelf; a fork; a flower vase and a curtain heading - all these things are borne in mind by people with taste; people who use their taste to discriminate between one alternative and another. It is what they buy and how they group their possessions to- gether; it is the way they use colour, arrange furniture, upholster their chairs; the flowers they grow and the way they serve their food.

I know of a flat, full of atmosphere created by objects of enormous character, none of which cost more than two or three pounds. The result is as exciting as the Jones Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Obviously the possessions are humble in quality, and none of them would be more than one hundred years old, but they were selected with a discriminating eye, seeking out textures, colours and shapes which would relate to each other in an interesting and exciting way. It is a very personal and eccentric collection, relying on once commonplace articles of daily use, but arranged and lit as though they were antiquities of great value.

I have seen countless collections of incredibly valuable furniture, pictures and objets de vertu , where I longed to remove three-quarters of the contents and inject something simple and fresh of to-day to give life and counterpoint to the individually beautiful pieces. By being massed together in too great a quantity without discernment, rooms housing collections such as these become like an over-rich meal with too many courses of different flavours, too many sauces and wines.

I know a millionaire in America who built the most simple, basic house of excel- lent proportions and with the absolute minimum of furniture. In a sensible but un- usual way he has rejected all the parapher- nalia and frippery with which his friends

surround themselves. He is considered an eccentric, but to me he has great sense.

It is never the value of objects or pictures placed together in the same room, or the quality of furniture which is used that gives style and which shows personal taste; it is their selection and the way they are put together. It is the contrast of texture or colour. It is one object in unexpected juxta- position with another. For instance, a modern hard-edge painting above a Byzan- tine bowl, or a stainless steel glass-topped table against a raw fifteenth-century rough stone wall produces magic.

Taste is formed by looking, by being aware of how the other person chooses, arranges and decorates. All of us form our taste, in some cases from what we were surrounded by and what we admired as children, or by reacting to it and forming a taste of our own, which is different from that of our parents. In reacting to a taste, or a lack of it which we find unsympathetic or boring, we are bound to form a new one by looking at the solutions of others - perhaps even other civilizations; and through this form something which is unique and personal.

I know that as a young man of eighteen I had no taste. I had been brought up in an ordinary, rather dull house, and being parti- cularly visually aware, I began to look and admire, to accept and reject the way other people - to whom taste and style mattered more than to my own parents - lived. I am now able to accept or reject immediately, and I think the layman's great difficulty is that he is not able to react instantly to the alternatives. He is too inclined to be bewil- dered by the choice, which is now multitu- dinous, in furnishing fabrics and furniture, but it is only a matter of being sufficiently aware and interested and of training one's eyes to look at things clearly and ruthlessly. It is a question of accepting or rejecting an idea which is right or wrong for the purpose in mind.

All this applies to modern design just as much as to period interior decoration.

I am often asked what are the most important elements in interior design and decoration. Although it is difficult to estab- lish a correct precedence, I believe that colour is the most important single factor. Secondly, the arrangement of furniture and, thirdly, the lighting. But perhaps more important than any of these is the ability to be decisive. It is important to know exactly

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what you are aiming for, whether you are doing your own house or are acting as a professional adviser.

Perhaps it would be of interest for me to outline how I tackle a new commission to design the interior of a private house.

I first attempt to get the fullest and most honest brief out of the client. This will include such practical considerations as the ages of the children, the maximum and the average number of people to be entertained at a meal, whether furniture from a previous house is to be used, the likes and dislikes of the clients with regard to colour, their inter- est or lack of interest in modern paintings and furniture, the scope of the budget and how many bad structural details they are prepared to alter. During this period a fair amount of diplomacy and psychological assessment is necessary. Then, along with making exciting proposals with conviction, very quickly a plan, a style and an atmos- phere come to my mind, and through enthusiastic verbal descriptions - probably at this stage without any fabric samples, curtain patterns or paint charts - I put over my proposals. Naturally, these proposals are easier for someone of my age and experience to make than they would have been when I was working for my first clients in the '50s.

Besides editorial exposure, I have pub- lished five books on my work in the interior design field, and whereas in my early days I would sometimes struggle for a short period with an unsuitable client, that is to say, someone with whom I had no rapport , my clients to-day tend to know my catholic style before they come to me.

Being properly briefed is, of course, also essential in interior design connected with contract work such as a hotel, a club or a suite of offices, although, generally speaking, work in this more public domain leaves the interior designer with a far freer hand; for instance, when I conceived a scheme for the

I Night Club on the QE2 , my only data were the number of people to be accommodated and, of course, the dictates of nautical con- struction.

Another question that is often put to me is what is the most exciting job that I have ever undertaken. My reply is always the ones on which I am working at the time. To-day there are two such jobs. One is the ugliest house in Switzerland. This is because of the deathly Swiss early '50s architecture, where every single design decision was, by my standards, totally unsympathetic and wrong. My job with the internal architecture, long before we began to think about interior decoration, was almost overwhelming.

The second project is a large stately home in Great Britain for young clients with superb possessions, both of whom are look- ing well into the unpredictable future way of life for owners of architectural masterpieces. With relish we are using the most up-to-date lighting, heating, plumbing, household machinery and equipment in order to make it totally liveable under various circum- stances. The eighteenth- and nineteenth- century plasterwork looks infinitely more dramatic with modern spotlights throwing it into exciting relief, and clear, strong colours have given it warmth and vitality. Eighteenth-century elbow chairs covered in rough tweed, brilliant emerald green kitchen units juxtaposed against the white-painted neo-classic architecture of the old State Dining Room-- these have a strong, practical and fresh appeal.

To sum up the rôle of the professional decorator and interior designer, he should be a man with a sharp eye for architectural detail, a man who delights in colour and texture, a man who revels in immaculate detail, a man of imagination and versatility and a man who can interpret the needs of his client but who, having created the right background, leaves room for adaptability.

DISCUSSION

Mr. Edward Pond, DesRCA, fsia (The Wall Paper Manufacturers Limited) : Mr. Hicks talked about a number of things associated with design and particularly good and bad taste; but he did not once mention fashion. I should like to know what he thinks of fashion as an influence and how long he thinks interiors should last or should not last.

The Lecturer: I don't think that fashion should necessarily influence interior design

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except perhaps in relation to new materials - the introduction of perspex, for example, which became very much part of everybody's thinking in regard to interiors some years ago. My reac- tion at the time was 'Very exciting; let's use it, but let's use it sparingly'. I think one or two designers rather over-did it, and that there must be a number of people who now feel they have got too much perspex. There is the further point that when people get married and set up a home and a family things have got to last for a very

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long time nowadays. Most people buy on a very limited budget. They will probably be obliged to rather ignore fashion. Does that answer you ?

Mr. Pond: But it seems to me that in a sense you have a vested interest in a number of manufacturing organizations, all of which have a sound interest in fashion for its own sake. You talked about emerald green kitchen units for instance. I am sure these are lovely, but after about four years one would be heartily sick of emerald green and would want to have red or blue. That is fashion.

The Lecturer: A number of things that I am designing at the moment are to do with fashion. But I was answering your question in relation to the house in general. The kitchen units that I talked about in the stately home are not mass produced. They are not designed for the mass market, but specifically for that one job.

Mr. Pond: I don't want to labour the question, but what about wall paper ? The wall paper industry lives on a two-year change.

The Lecturer: Yes, but wall paper can be easily changed. You can do it yourself on a Sunday morning. It is not an expensive ingre- dient. I was saying that I don't think fashion should be allowed to influence too greatly expen- sive items such as sofas, carpets, which you are going to buy for use over thirty years or so, whereas it is far cheaper to replace wall paper every time there is a new collection.

Mr. Derek Wren, riba: Looking at your photographs of these wonderful interiors, I couldn't help thinking what they must look like with people living in them; and in particular thinking what my own family - wife and three sons ranging from 10 up to 16, each son having a different activity and interests, the eldest with cans of beer and cards and the youngest still with toy soldiers - would do in wrecking these interiors completely within a matter of hours. Is the explanation that we Wrens have no taste, or that your clients live in a different world from ours ?

The Lecturer: I have three children, and two or three of those photographs I showed you are of the very small apartment that all five of us live in when in London, and it seems to work out. I haven't shown you anything elaborate.

Mr. Wren: It is perhaps my failure to visualize these interiors with people living in them. Photographs of interior decoration are always taken with empty rooms and everything beautifully arranged - even in the bathroom the towels are beautifully set out.

The Lecturer: Photographs for a book or a magazine or a manufacturer of towels will show towels very carefully folded, but the fact that the

towel is untidily or less tidily arranged merely means that you are not a very tidy person, and nobody comes to see your bathroom. It is the guts of the decoration, the background of the room, the style, the atmosphere, which matters. It isn't the immaculate quality, which naturally one has to have in publicity photographs.

Mrs. Jean Monro: Would you agree that it is the people concerned and their possessions which are most important, and when dealing with a client one has often to sow the seeds of an idea and make the client think that it is his idea?

The Lecturer: Yes. This question obvious- ly comes from a professional interior designer! I think we are interpreters of people's taste. We should not be dictators, and this is what horri- fied me about a certain woman in America. She wanted to be trodden on, she wanted one to walk right over her and tell her everything, which I had to do in the end, because otherwise I should have lost the job.

Mr. John Weiss: I am an architect in charge of a college department of Interior Design and Furnishing, so I am interested in the pecking order of the three levels. Architects tend to look down on interior designers, and people who call themselves interior designers quite frequently look down on contract furnishers and interior decorators. I wonder whether this has something to do with time and permanance. Architects always feel that they design perman- ent things, whereas the things that go inside tend to be, in some architects' eyes, merely the fripperies.

The Lecturer: It is sadly true that a number of architects are unsympathetic towards clients using interior designers, but I think they are only the small minority. The great men of architecture realize that the interior designer (although obviously he has less status, if you care about status) is an important professional who should be involved to get a successful result. We, too, have our feelings about archi tects ! But on the whole if the client, when com- missioning his architect, has the good sense to make a decision about who is going to do the interior and how it is going to look, they can work together right from the beginning. There are then no arguments because it has evolved in unison.

Mr. A. R. Tammadge: When you are designing, say, a living room, do you visualize your clients sitting in it or are they walking about? Have you a sort of stage set in mind, with people moving and doing different things, or is everyone tidily sitting in their right places ?

The Lecturer: A living room is to be lived in, it is not to be admired as a wonderful

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Page 13: DESIGN IN INTERIOR DECORATION

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS MARCH I976

piece of interior design. Some of the pictures I showed build a misconception here: as I told you, Madame Rubeinstein never lived in her apartment. It was used purely as a public relations exercise. I have done hundreds of other rooms which aren't really quite interesting enough to photograph, either because the budget was too limited or because we weren't able to finish a room off for some other reason. But I did particularly include a number of simple shots which I hoped would show a background for living.

Mr. Ronald Root, fbds: Do you sub- scribe to a colour theory or do you think it is entirely intuitive ?

The Lecturer: You can learn a lot from the technical point of view but you cannot acquire a great colour sense, it is either there waiting to be developed or you haven't got it.

There being no further questions , the Chairman proposed a vote of thanks to the Lecturer , and the meeting ended with acclamation of them both .

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