This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Interior design reached remarkable heights of individuality and artistic quality in the 1920s and 30s. Sadly the interiors in question have almost all disappeared, but thankfully many of them were photographed for the owners’ satisfaction or for magazines like Vogue, the Architectural Review and Country Life. Two collections, from the firms of Bedford Lemere & Company and Millar & Harris, survive in Historic England’s archive at Swindon and form the basis of my book, London: Lost Interiors.
The interwar years are commonly understood in terms of Art Deco and Modernism. However, the reality was much more complex and interesting, a point that Gavin Stamp made in relation to architecture as a whole in his superb, posthumously published book Interwar (2024).
Modernism was very much a minority taste, disliked by many for its austerity and wholesale exclusion of the past. Full-strength Art Deco was usually reserved for commercial contexts such as cinemas, hotels and shops. In new houses and flats, a simplified Deco-Moderne style was established. Unlike Modernism, Deco could accommodate historic motifs and objects and adapt them to individual tastes. To get a sense of this, we might start with interiors which once graced two houses in Smith Square, Westminster.
Mulberry House, a sober brick residence of 1911 by Edwin Lutyens, was bought by Henry and Gwen Mond, heirs to the ICI fortune. In 1929-30 the interior was remodelled by Darcy Braddell and Humphry Deane. The dining room was lined with stone in a Deco-Primitive-Classic manner, as a setting for sculpture, ceramics, chrome-plated doors and a French-designed table.
Gayfere House, just across Smith Square, was built in 1930-31 for Wilfrid Ashley — soon to be created Lord Mount Temple — and his wife, Muriel. It was designed by the remarkable Oliver Hill, whose buildings ranged from Arts and Crafts and Modernism to the highly original take on Art Deco displayed here. Lady Mount Temple’s bedroom had a mirrored bed alcove and custom-designed furniture, and the walls curved seamlessly into the glossy ceiling.
The Monds and the Mount Temples required unique settings that incorporated historic motifs. Other people wanted a more comfortable (though still sophisticated) accommodation with the past which decorators such as Sybil Colefax helped them achieve. Her early Georgian house on Lord North Street, just round the corner from Smith Square, was painted in light tones and filled with a choice range of Georgian antiques.
This was the first place where Sibyl developed the “English country-house style” that she took forward in partnership with John Fowler and which still runs as a powerful theme in British and American taste. Sibyl was one of a number of women who established successful businesses as designer-decorators in the 1930s. Others, notably Syrie Maugham and Betty Joel, had very different approaches.
Some clients were happy to let their designers create settings for their lives. But in the 1930s English traits of individuality, eccentricity and humour were at their height, in literature and culture. The aristocratic brothers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, with their sister Edith, saw themselves as warriors for culture and art. In their Georgian terrace house, 2 Carlyle Square, the brothers entertained writers, artists and musicians. Baroque and Regency furniture jostled with Victorian bric-a-brac and contemporary paintings, in what Alan Pryce-Jones described as “a temple of a now forgotten style called the ‘amusing’”.
You did not have to be a Sitwell to express yourself in such terms. In 1924, Miss Emily Thistlethwayte, the 73-year-old daughter of a Hampshire gentry family, inherited a Georgian house, 7 Hill Street, Mayfair, and set to work. It is pleasant to think of her redecorating it to suit her cultivated and imaginative taste, with painted decoration and old carpets cut up and used as wall-hangings.
However, whilst high society was still a reality for Osbert, Sacheverell and Emily, the aristocratic mansions of the West End were disappearing: Lansdowne, Chesterfield and Devonshire Houses were amongst the many which disappeared in these years. Brook House, a vast plutocrat’s mansion of the 1860s, was inherited by Edwina Ashley, who married Lord Louis Mountbatten. The Mountbattens had Brook House demolished and replaced with a new block of luxury flats, with a vast penthouse that included a study with murals by Rex Whistler (1933-5).
A couple of floors below, Lord and Lady Sieff of Marks & Spencer moved into another luxurious apartment, designed by Lutyens and the decorator Syrie Maugham. The Sieffs’ bedroom represented Lutyens’ take on Art Deco overlaid with some of Syrie’s favourite motifs; a reflective ceiling, concealed uplighters, a shag-pile carpet, “Vogue Regency” furniture and a sleigh-shaped bed.
Lady Mountbatten and Lady Sieff were in the lead in creating these apartments, settings for entertaining and daily life. Other hostesses, including Maya Phillipson, the wife of a Newcastle coal magnate, went further and ran cultural salons. Between 1937 and 1938 Maya and the interior designer Felix Harbord created an extraordinary studio at 144 Brompton Road, as a setting for her musical soirées. It was a high camp fantasy, with a grand piano, harpsichord, Baroque balustrades and fireplace, striped-tent decoration and murals.
The interwar years were arguably the high point, the belle époque of interior design as an art form, but it is hard to grasp this today, given how few of the interiors survive. Paradoxically we have more fine Georgian interiors with their contents in existence today than Victorian ones and more well-preserved Victorian interiors than ones from the 1920s and 30s. Interior design is a fragile and fugitive art form. The interiors, it seems, were as fragile and mortal as their creators.
Steven Brindle’s book London: Lost Interiors is published by Atlantic, £50
