There was a child went forth every day

The last two weeks seem to have been – witness my new waistline – nothing more than a round of lunches, dinners and, ultimately, a reception given by a good friend, celebrating our wedding. Bemused as we both still are about our new legal state and suffering, variously, from indigestion, hangover and, in my case, occasional bad temper, it has proved difficult to knuckle down and continue my posts about timelessness in decorating.  (By the way, in this photograph I'm the one at the back in the Liberace wig and the botox.)

One thing I have done, though, is look through the blog for posts when I have used the word "timeless" and have come up with a few examples for, seemingly, I have been concerned for quite a while with interiors "standing the test of time". A reader pointed out that for him the rooms by David Mlinaric in the last post were redolent of the 1980s and though for me they were not – Post-Modernism and English Country House Style is what I associate with those years – I have given and continue to give his reaction some thought. The following, which I quote from here, I wrote three years ago 

"It never ceases to impress me how some interiors, at their creation completely contemporary, do not date and retain that quality of here today here tomorrow. Why some interiors look dated and why some do not is a question occasionally on my mind and if I have reached a conclusion it is this: when a decorator trysts with or construes contemporary interpretations of living, it is at this point that the spectre of senescence begins to take form as an identifiable characteristic of a period.

To my mind, one of the characteristics of good 20th century decorating is a refusal to draw the curtains against the philistine dark but instead to embrace the best of global aesthetic culture. It's an axiom, a "truth universally acknowledged" to say that the best of one period will fit with the best of another, and whilst this is totally debatable, as a maxim, assuming we all agree what is the best of ...... well, you know the rest of that argument."

Today, thus, I'm giving a few images from past posts (all photographs from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s) that illustrate my interpretation of timelessness – there yesterday and here today. 

Kalef Alaton

Alberto Pinto 

Arthur E Smith 

Geoffrey Bennison

 Roderick Cameron

Antony Childs 

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder,

pity, love, or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day, for a certain part

of the day, and for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

William Baldwin 

Generally speaking, all the rooms I consider to have stood the test of time have a certain asceticism – I have referred to it as absence – a refusal to fill space for the sake of it. The other day, I came across the quotation (above in Italics) in my favorite book of the moment Art in Everyday Life. A book written at  a time when concepts such as good taste and character were not snigger-inducing, it is proving a salutary experience to revisit the principles and opinions underlying my training as both a graphic and interior designer: to read the unselfconscious acceptance of those verities considered eternal before marketing, branding and cult of personality removed any need for them. The quotation above from Leaves of Grass begins the following from Art in Everyday Life. 

"Mere belongings have a tremendous influence in forming character. It would take an unusually strong character to remain true to high ideals of truth and sincerity if dishonesty were the keynote of the home surroundings. Such things as wall paper and metal made to simulate wood; too shiny fabrics imitating costly damask – all these would be avoid if there significance were understood.

"Unfortunately, quality in things is more or less intangible – as difficult to define as personality in an individual – but the outstanding feathers can be recognized and classified. With the eyes opened one very quickly reaches the point where every picture, every piece of furniture, or drapery pattern speaks its note of social grace or friendly domesticity, vigor, or fineness. Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon told as much about themselves in the furniture and decorations with which they like to surround themselves as we are able to learn from historical records. Similarly, we are better acquainted with people after a short time spent in their home, surrounded by their own things, than we would be in a long time spent  with them in a hotel or any other impersonal setting.

"If the reader happens to be one who has never realized that the things people chose tell about their character and their ideals, let him think for a few moments about impressions which he has received at the theater. The curtain rose, let us say, upon a living room; before anyone came on to the stage the audience formed a very definite idea of the kind of people who would be at home in that room; and, if the stage decorator understood his craft the people would prove to be just about what was expected. If a stage setting shows a living room with glaring lights, florid wallpaper and rugs, showy lace curtains, and overdecorated lamps, one expects the people who live there to come on stage in flashy clothes and using a great deal of common, unpicturesque slang. Suppose, however, that the setting shows a room with soft and mellow lights, yellow walls, rugs with subdued and harmonious coloring, thin white glass curtains with attractive chintz over curtains at the windows, well-designed furniture, with some comfortable chairs in front of an open fire, plenty of books, flowers, a few good pictures and decorative objects that catch the light and create points of interest. The audience would expect the people who live in this room to be tastefully dressed, well-bred, and charming.

One of the wondrous things about the above quotation is the elitism of good taste, the prevailing class stereotypes as illustrated by interiors (first written in the 1920s) and the assumptions we all still make about each other based on what we wear, where we live and how we live. 

I wonder sometimes if what dates a room is not objects or atmospheres attributable to certain decades but our concept of class and the way it is used when selling to us. 

All photographs except for the first which is mine attributed in previous posts.

Reflections

A month ago a correspondent sent me this link to an article about the eighty-seven-year-old Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's latest memoir A Chimp in the Wine Cellar. Her brother, of course, is not mentioned in the video embedded in the article but what I found interesting was her accent – of an age long gone and of a class that, however notorious its behaviour might be to outsiders, saw privacy as its right. This video has set me off down another path in my personal search for this man, Roderick Cameron, who proved to be so influential in twentieth-century decorating – all without being a decorator himself.

If a compilation of eulogies is not a mirror, giving glimpses of subjects and authors as it does, I'm not sure what is. One such, Anne Cox Chambers' Remembering Rory, has proved to be a source of much pleasure – odd word, I know, pleasure, when used in relation to eulogies, but what else can said when each page is a source of connection, learning and reading? Also, when reading them, how can one not be conscious that all reputations will be subject to revision by a following generation.

Remembering Rory sits slipcased in all its green leather, gold tooling and marbled paper glory next to Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's memoir A Lion in the Bedroom, Roderick Cameron's own The Golden Riviera and now, Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier – the author of one of Cameron's tributes. I'd hoped to find traces of Roderick Cameron in Bernier's book but so far, at a cursory glance, have not. Not that it matters, for Rosamond Bernier's book is proving to be a good accompaniment for those hours after midnight, when the soft ticking of a clock that has done so since before Napoleon became emperor, the rustle of sheets from the bedroom I have just left, the occasional siren of an ambulance racing along the continental divide outside the window, and the scent of hyacinths, all suggest that if heaven were here on earth, this is how it would be.

In her eulogy of Roderick Cameron, Rosamond Berniers speaks, as do many in the book, of his aesthetic, quoting other people as she does so:

"Rory Cameron in his own houses worked for a quality of repose. Bustle and confusion and untidiness were not for him. Having shopped with him in former years, I know that his eye for size, shape, and predestined location were unerring. Planning for his house in Ireland he selected piece after piece almost without bothering to measure them, only to find on arrival in Donegal that every one of them fitted snugly into the space that he had in mind for them.

"Mark Hampton remembers, amongst much else, the range of color that Rory allowed himself – 'coarse linen the color of Caen stone, yellow in warm shades running from heavy cream to deep maize, celadon greens, and every possible shade of white.' He liked large, calm, yet grand pieces of furniture – perhaps they echoed his own large, calm presence – but he never allowed them to dominate. Other, smaller pieces of miscellaneous provenance were encouraged to come forward and sing their songs, and sometimes he dressed the room down where everyone else would have dressed it up.

"Unlike scholars who 'know everything' but cannot conjugate their knowledge with the business of living, Rory Cameron had an infallible sense of what to do with a house. To mix and mate one object with another was both this genius and his greatest pleasure. Better than almost anyone around, he knew how to release the conviviality of objects. People never forgot their first introduction to one of his houses. Thirty years after the fact, Kenneth Jay Lane remembers the moment in Paris when luncheon was wheeled in on a lacquer table by Jansen. The silver was English, eighteenth-century, there were black lacquer bowls from Japan, and very grand but rustic French dishes come on heavy silver plates, with glasses hand-blown and full of bubbles from Biot, in the south of France. There was a set of grass mats woven by the Queen of Tonga and given to Rory."

A lacquer table by Jansen, English eighteenth-century silver, Japanese black lacquer bowls, hand-blown bebubbled glasses from the south of France, grand but rustic dishes on heavy silver plates."

So, the other path I mentioned in the first paragraph is one I'm not yet walking and wonder if  I should. There is not much more that, however many eulogies I might quote, can be written about of Roderick Cameron's aesthetic and the influence he had. Since I began writing about him, I've not been too exercised about this much-loved man's private life but, inevitably, there have been glimpses of that in a lot of what I've written and quoted. What has always interested me the most are connections. so when I read, for example, of his acquaintance with Unity and Diana Mitford, the Moseleys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (actually friends of Cameron's mother), Greta Garbo, Grahame Sutherland, David Hicks, Peter Quennell, Freya Stark, Somerset Maugham, Alvide Lees-Milne, Elizabeth de Chavchavadze, Louise de Vilmorin... the actual list is much longer... I wonder about his politics.

I wonder too about prurience (not Cameron's, ours) –  though why I would in a society where every celebrity's doings are fair game for the press – when I read this about one of the heroines of many a style blogger's fantasies.

"Mummy had known Windsor for many years and, although I do not think he had been one of her lovers, she liked him very much. It was not long after this that they came to Fiorentina with Jimmy [Jimmy Donahue]. After lunch, everyone was sitting on the terrace talking when the duchess said, 'I just want to take Jimmy and show him the marvellous view from your point.' The duke sat around reminiscing, saying, 'When I was monarch ...' while everyone knew the duchess was having it off with Jimmy in one of the upstairs guest rooms. Mummy told me that the duchess was famous for her expertise in fellatio: rumour had it that she had had lessons in China on this particular art. She was a very masculine woman; there was nothing soft or feminine about her, and I personally did not think she was at all good-looking. She had a presence. I suppose that was the best one could say about her."

If I were to write a biography of Roderick Cameron, I would have to overcome my distaste of knowing too much about someone's sexual habits. Perhaps I'm a prude.

Beyond all that, what is clear at this point is that Roderick Cameron, his circle of friends and those whose aesthetic he influenced, is that they sit at an ever-increasing distance (Cameron died twenty-eight years ago, Billy Baldwin forty years ago, David Hicks fifteen years ago, Van Day Truex thirty-three years ago), hidden in the pages of books, and the focus has blurred and in some cases been obliterated. Their work, when compared to what is published today, has a quality of being edited, of having things taken out rather than added to. Those rooms were photographed on their best behavior, reserved but not standoffish, awaiting patiently for the music of voices, for the clink of ice, the scents of flowers and warm pulse points, and time's passing.


Quotations from Remembering Rory, Anne Cox Chambers, and A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill. Photographs from A Lion in the Bedroom.

Figure in a landscape

I have written* and quoted much about Roderick Cameron over the last year or so and, though this is likely to be the last post about him for a while, I'm not done yet - to quote David Hicks, "I could write a book about Roderick Cameron."

Spurred on as I was, in the beginning, by my distaste at two comments in print about Cameron: waspish and grab-arse pansy, long dead of Aids** eventually I came to realize how central he had been, not only to the lives of his friends but central also, if not to my life, then to much of my thinking. Given that I've concentrated on the positive aspects of his character as related by his friends and, in two gratifying instances, by people who had worked for him, what I have written borders, perhaps, on hagiography but, to be honest, I've never been interested in writing an exposé.

"For almost all of us here this morning in the Grosvenor Chapel - a building he must have particularly admired - the death of Roderick Cameron marks the end of a very long friendship, which made a great addition to our lives. My own friendship with him began just after the end of World War I, and lasted nearly forty years. When I first met him, he was living with his mother in London at nearby Lees Place; and he and Lady Kenmare used sometimes to attend the delightful dinner parties given by the famous Anglo-American hostess Lady Cunard (who for some reason hated to be called a hostess) on the seventh floor of the Dorchester Hotel. I remember him in those days as a tall, elegant, but rather quiet young man, somewhat overshadowed by his resplendent mother, a celebrated beauty of the pre-war world.  And it was only a little later, when I stayed with them at their house in the south of France, that he seemed quite to have emerged from the chrysalis of youth and to have become a completely individual character."

Among his earliest achievements, I suppose, was to redesign his mother's house, La Fiorentina, near St. Jean, Cap Ferrat. Before the war it had been a large Edwardian villa; but during the German occupation it was half-destroyed, and Rory completely transformed it on the classical lines of one of the splendid villas Palladio built near Venice. This was an important feat, since in later years, La Fiorentina was the harmonious background against which he exercised his gift for friendship. Rory Cameron was a man with many friends - that is a point I should like to emphasize; and, besides being himself a Man of Taste, he always loved to share his taste. It was not only for himself but for his friends' benefit that he both collected pictures and smaller objects of art, and at the same time laid out a glorious garden overlooking the Gulf of Beaulieu - it once included, I recollect, a pool covered with bright blue water lilies he had brought back from Australia, which, alas, a greedy fellow-gardner eventually stole.

"Rory's generosity was a keynote of his character. So was his hospitality; and among his guests were many writers. I remember Cyril Connolly (for whom La Fiorentina was an anticipation of Heaven) sunning himself upon the terraces. Rory's neighbours were William Somerset Maugham and Jean Cocteau. He was deeply interested in literature; and though he was conscious of having had a somewhat neglected education, he felt, himself, a keen desire to write. His subject was often his own travels; and his first book, 'My Travel's History,' which dealt largely with a visit to Egypt, was spotted by a clever publisher's reader, and accepted and published by Hamish Hamilton. He gave us - and I personally much enjoyed - no less that eight other books, mostly dealing with his impressions of foreign lands, from India to Australia, the continent where his mother had been born and brought up. And in each of his books I noticed the same quality. He had what I can only call a painter's eye. He could bring an exotic landscape or building to life by his evocative observations of line and colour, and his discerning sense of beauty.

"I have said enough, I hope, to suggest that he was no mere leisured dilettante, but had a true creative impulse. He worked hard, was always ready to accept criticism, and aimed at perfection in everything he did, whether he was writing a book, rebuilding a house, planting a garden, or placing a picture he had discovered and acquired exactly where it should be hung. His tastes were catholic, and he exercised them generously. In his personal life, as I have already said, he had an extraordinary gift for friendship. It is both as a friend we valued and as a creative spirit we respected that we are bidding him goodbye today."

                                                    Peter Quennell's "eulogy at Rory's memorial service, November 1985."

I first came across Roderick Cameron, merely a figure in a landscape - territory fascinating and as yet unexplored by me - in an article published in The World of Interiors twenty-seven years ago. I had no idea who he was - all I knew was that his house, Les Quatre Sources, at Ménerbes, impressed me no-end. The photographs and his description of what was his last house house stayed with me for years - his phrase the silver-green of the back of an olive leaf  has assuredly been a touchstone for my own aesthetic. I look around our flat, sparely but not sparsely furnished, and can see colors, muted but not diminished, responding well to the early light from the east and to the golden light of the westering sun.

As the Celt and I head to Manhattan for Thanksgiving, let me offer my thanks to all of you who have over the past two years, contributed to and commented on my journey of discovery of Roderick Cameron and his circle. It has been, and continues to be, a delightful odyssey. Thank you all for coming along for the voyage.


*Click on Roderick Cameron's name in sidebar "Topics"
** The link for this quote seemingly is inactive.

Photographs of the Grosvenor Chapel where Roderick Cameron's memorial service took place from Wikipedia Commons.

Two portraits

"I could write a book about Roderick Cameron but this is a small and humble tribute to the nicest man I ever knew.

"In 1954, when I was twenty-three, I was invited to lunch at Fiorentina by Elizabeth Chavchavadze who was staying there with Rory Cameron. Arriving on my rented scooter, I had little idea of the impact on my senses that that first glimpse into Rory's world would have, or what a tremendous influence he would be on my taste, or what a friend he would become. I was bowled over by everything, from the white-washed trunks of the straight rows of orange trees in front of the Palladian portico to the vast arrangement of sunflowers on the Louis XV table, next to the Sung horse and the huge books of engravings, to the fez on Rejabo's head, the Moorish water garden, the Battersby trompe-l'oeil inner hall, and the vista between the sphinxes leading down to the pool, which seemed to be part of the sea below.

"At the pool an elegant whippet welcomed me, followed by George III, but strangely tanned and tall, who greeted Shirley Worthington and me with diffident charm and introduced us to Pat Cavendish, Peter Quennell, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, Jimmy Douglas, Lady Waterpark, Anthony Hail, and Hamish Erskine. Princess Chavchavadze looked after me at lunch, which was absolutely delicious, and when we had almost finished Rory's mama arrived with a Hirax on her shoulder, murmuring to the assembled company, seated on the Italianate loggia above the box and lavender, 'Rather late - painting, you know." She had to be Rory's mama - anyone less elegant, exotic, and simply beautiful would not have been appropriate. His sapphire eyes were from her.

"Quite overwhelmed, we left for our pension in Antibes, but I was determined to re-enter the magic world created by Rory that I had seen and, before leaving, I had pressed my London telephone number into his hand.

"That autumn he telephoned and I got to know him. Out of his kingdom he was a frank, sometimes shy, always invigorating personality. His knowledge of enthusiasms - for the pre-Raphaelites, Mies Van der Rohe, flowers, photographers, designers, writers, eighteenth-century follies, clothes, restaurants, exhibitions, travel, antiques, house and 'interesting' people - were so sympathetic. I was able to take him to the legendary Winnie Portalington and my Essex folly, The Temple, and other architectural delights he didn't know. Subsequent, almost successive, summers from 1955 to 1983 I stayed with him at Fiorentina, Le Petit Clos, Le Clos, in Co. Donegal, and finally at Les Quatre Sources. He came often to Britwell and came over to see us when we had Place de l'Horloge in Roquebrune-sur-Argens near St. Raphael and at Classiebawn Castle in Co. Sligo. His visits were always enormously enlivening.

"He would go through the rooms, feeling the objects, opening those that had lids. Once, at Roquebrune, he opened a large orange Scandinavian tub and was delighted to find that it turned out to contain ice. He had one of the best senses of juxtaposing objects, a wonderful appreciation of opulence combined with understatement, and he used beiges in a masterly way. If he was not a professional interior decorator he certainly had an immensely sure touch when doing his own houses and gardens.

"And he was the perfect host - the food, the comfort, the guests. Also a wonderfully appreciative guest himself, and a great traveler. Pamela and I did two expeditions with him - one to Aixe-en-Provence, the other around a game reserve in Kenya, and he edited out the boredom of, respectively, too many fountains and too man girrafes. 'Come on,' he said quietly, after banging on the landrover roof, 'we've seen the giraffes, let's go on to zebra.'

"He always called me 'Master David,' and the most wonderful thing for me - after all, I learned so much from HIM - was when in the spring of the year he died to told my Persian friend Nahid Ghani, for whom I was building a house in Portugal and whom he hadn't met before, "My dear, you are in the best possible hands.' It will be, forever, one of my greatest accolades.

"Whenever I've solved an architectural problem or wondered about a planting solution or when I hang pictures in Portugal and group objects, I long, long, long to see his reaction, to have his approbation OR gentle criticisms as in the pool garden at Britwell in 1964 - 'Do you think the garden is a little big for the pool?'

"The Prince of Provence is no longer with us but we have so many happy stories and events to remind us of what a tremendous, hugely warm, erudite, generous and cosy friend Rory has been in all our lives."

Two portraits, then: one, an affectionate eulogy by David Hicks of his friend whom he called the Prince of Provence; the second, a portrait thought to be of Samuel Johnson's much-cherished servant, Frank Barber, versions of which hang in the Tate Gallery and the Menil Collection - Joshua Reynolds' A Young Black, whether copy or original I have no idea, hung above the chimneypiece in that same Prince of Provence's drawing room in Paris.

Image of Francis Barber (or, as it has been suggested, of Sir Joshua Reynold's own servant) from the Tate Gallery. 

Roderick Cameron's living room photographed by Jacques Boucher for Les réussites de la décoration francaise, 1950 - 1960. Collection Maison et Jardin, Condé Nast S.A. Editions de Pont, 1960

Three portraits, three rooms

"I was appointed an honorary attaché to the British Embassy in Paris in 1948, and shortly after my arrival there I was invited to visit Lady Kenmare and her son Roderick Cameron at La Fiorentina. It was Easter and it was to the be first of many wonderful moments spent with them both in the years that followed, and particularly with Rory as Enid seemed to travel so much or would be visiting her daughter Pat Cavendish.

"To use Rory's own words, life and people were 'enchanting' and 'delicious' during those after-war years, and I think back to those Fiorentina days filled with speculation and excitement of who would be coming to lunch or dinner, or to spend a few days. There were of course many such visits and my early recollections of friends or Rory's - and some became mine - included Elizabeth Chavchavadze and her husband George, a great pianist, who composed a ballet for George de Cuevas aided by Marthe Bibesco. They became constant companions of Rory, particularly Elizabeth, who it was said wrote him a letter a day. She lived in Paris and also had a charming house in a garden full of lavender and English flowers, at Dampierre, close to Paris. She had a tremendous influence upon Rory's taste and he probably on hers. They did spend a great deal of time together till her tragic death - she and George were killed on the way to their house at Chatel Censoir.

"Somehow Rory developed from that moment on - but he kept on seeing his early friends either at La Fiorentina or in Paris, where he also lived. Rory later on said he never truly liked Paris, and seldom came. His dinners, his objects, either recent purchases or otherwise, and the ambience be managed to create, were exceptional. I can remember during this early period evenings or days with Jacque Février, Nora and Georges Auric, Odette Massigli, Bill Baldwin, Marthe Bibesco, Grahame Sutherland, Charlie Chaplin and his wife, the Quennells, the Lees-Milnes, Princess Grace, Van Day Truex, Hubert de Givenchy, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Bunny Mellon, Duff and Diana Cooper, Philippe Venet, Serge Lifar, and Marguerite and Mark Littman.

"There were many, many people in the life of Rory, and La Fiorentina was his true background - not the Vaucluse.

"Rory loved to travel, and recorded and photographed every face, place, nook, and cranny. His two favourite countries, he declared strongly, were India and Mexico. He knew them both well, of course, and it was Rory who led me by the hand on my first visit to India. For me the trip was enhanced by his knowledge and understanding of that wonderful country. When I return there I will think of him with much affection and nostalgia.

"Rory fancied himself a cook and there were times when one thought he had had a Cordon Bleu course, He loved concocting dishes for Sunday evening supper. There was quite often an Indian flavour to it all. I copied several of his recipes and I like to think my Paris dinner parties improved as a result.

"There were many faces of Rory that I could dwell upon. I could say he loved eating, putting on weight, and then going to Montecatini each July to lose it all. He loved dogs; he rhapsodized over butterflies; his favourite colour was probably brown; he spent hours with books and objects. Perhaps his greatest interest was his garden in the house where he died. As for the gardens at La Fiorentina and Le Clos Fiorentina, they are universally known.

"Rory enthused over flowers and it gave him great pleasure to arrange massive bowls of garden carnations in white and pink, or tubs of bursting-out peonies - always cut short near their heads. He knew the names of all the flowers and plants and quite often he and Charles de Noailles spent hours together comparing notes!

"I must stop! But you must agree Rory was truly an enchanting, delicious gentleman."

I must mention again how kind people have been to send me images, recollections, suggestions and texts in connection with my themes. The quotation above, one such gift - a tribute by Walter Lees to his deceased friend Roderick Cameron - is yet another instance of how fortunate I've been in my correspondents. The tribute, one of three sent to me together with Lees' portrait, is from a privately printed book that ... well, I'll let Anne Cox Chambers, explain:

"Shortly after attending Rory's memorial service in London, I thought how fitting - how right - it would be to help bring into existence a small volume not mourning his death but celebrating his life, so that we could all share with one another the happiness of having known Rory.

"To that end I took the liberty of writing many of the friends he had "collected," inviting them to set down their recollections of that rare and roving spirit.

"We remember him with pride and love, and in the hope that we were "worthy" - to use one of his favorite words - of being his friend."

Walter Lees was unknown to me before I wrote about Le Clos Fiorentina, Hubert de Givenchy's house on Pointe Saint-Hospice, the same house decorated previously by David Hicks for Sao Schlumberger who'd bought it from Roderick Cameron. I say he was unknown to me - but actually I'd read about him in Van Day Truex's biography and had forgotten. Lees, who died last year at the age of 100, was the son of a joiner, British Embassy attaché, an intimate of the Windsors on both sides of the divide, of the Mosleys, a diplomat in more senses than one, personal assistant to Stavros Niarchos and afterwards Pierre Schlumberger, model for a character in Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred, close friend of Hubert de Givenchy, and mentor and friend to Van Day Truex - a surprising, perhaps only to me, connection in my ongoing theme - a seemingly modest man who knew everyone.

The china on Walter Lees' dining table above (a vignette, I'm sure, created especially for the book) is the same pattern, Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', that led Roderick Cameron in his The Golden Riviera to sketch an affectionate portrait of his old, much-loved and much-respected cook.

"How attached one becomes to one's routine, always the same china; Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', a stylised pattern dating from the last century and one that is to be found in countless English houses. Mohammed, a Moroccan who has been with me for years, greets one with a flashing smile, produces the papers and pours the tea. Next to appear on the scene is Catherine. Catherine, of Italian extraction, was brought up in our village. She must have been very good-looking, and even at eighty-four is still handsome. Her face, lively and wrinkled, has changed very little in the thirty-odd years she has been working for us. Living in the village, she rides up every morning to the house on her mobilette, long flûtes of bread sticking out of the basket attached to the back of her bicycle. Unbeknown to her I was driving behind her one day as she mounted the hill from the village, and her progress was almost royal: 'Bonjour Madame Catherine.' 'Bonjour,' she intoned with a dignified bow of the head, sitting very straight, averaging a pretty fast clip, too fast for me to overtake her. She is a remarkably good cook and loves being taught new dishes, working by instinct rather than measure. When we meet she stands, hands joined in front of her clean white pinafore, while we discuss the menu, a procedure we have reduced to a form of telepathy. I remember her, also, in the days when one used to attend the galas in Monte-Carlo. She would stand next to the great olive growing at the bottom of the entrance steps, waiting to see my mother, and this, also, would be discussed with next morning's menu. She was crying, I noticed, the day we all drove off to Princess Grace's wedding."

If you look closely you will find the portrait of Lees in his London living room at the right-hand top corner of the photograph of his Paris living room with its mirrored walls, white-covered sofa, rococo chairs, Giacometti tables, old-master drawings, Russian silver, David Hicks carpet and a view of the dome of Les Invalides.

There is one more stop to make in Paris - the house of another of Lees' acquaintance - and then it's back across the Atlantic to stay, I think. It seems that in trying to broaden my scope, I've merely completed a circle.


The first photograph, according to the correspondent who sent it to me, is of Roderick Cameron's Paris living room. I do not know who the photographer was, or where the image was originally published.

Update to the above: thanks to Mr Toby Worthington, I now know that the photograph of Roderick Cameron's Paris living room is from Les Réussites de la Décoration Francaise, Les Éditions Condé Nast, 1960. The photograph is by Jacques Boucher.

Photographs by Jean-Bernard Naudin, from The Finest Houses of Paris, Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery and Jean-Bernard Naudin, The Vendome Press, New York, 2000.

The hands of the Madonna

"The other afternoon, when at the top of the house in what is known as the Anglo-Indian room - the study in which I work - Emilienne came through on the house phone: the admirable Emilienne who hs been running things for us for the last thirty-five years. I must come down, there was an old lady of ninety-one who wanted to see the garden. Emilienne has an infallible judgement about people, and wouldn't have called had the visitor not passed muster. So I went down, and there at the door stood Madame Delor accompanied by three friends. Impulsively she held out both hands - 'I was born here, grew up in this house, and it is only now I have dared to come back'. She apologised for intruding, and her eyes were misted with tears. Equally moved, I took her arm and we walked off down under the pergola. Excitedly she exclaimed on this and that, and turning into the spring garden she showed me where the family used to play boulles: 'and you know, we could get so worked up that we stuck a candle on the couchonnet and went on playing in the dark'. She carried her years well and there was no faltering or fumbling for words. 'You still have that palm, I see. You know the coastguards were always after my father about cutting it down. They claimed that it made a landmark for the smugglers.' Again the tears of joy behind the glasses: "And the Madonna up there' - she was referring to a twenty-foot Virgin and Child cast in copper which stands next to the King of Sardinia's mortuary chapel capping the head of the point. 'The sculptor was a friend of my father's and he used my hands as his model.' The Madonna is not actually in the garden, but looms over the wall and was originally intended for the tower - all that remains of the original fort. Her role was to be that of guardian angel to the fisherman, but somehow she never quite made her supposed elevation and now dwarfs her surroundings, a miniature Statue of Liberty, an ecclesiastical landmark cradling the Christ Child instead of holding aloft a lamp of liberty.

"Before leaving, I asked Madame Delor to sign the visitors' book: the date is 20 May 1974, and without hesitation she wrote out her piece, ending with a well-turned phrase, thanking me - 'Who has given me today, at the age of ninety-one, the opportunity of reliving my early years'."

There it stands, next to the eleventh-century Chapelle Saint-Hospice, the inordinate bronze statue of the Virgin, overlooking what was Roderick Cameron's garden and, at her feet, the ninety graves in the First World War military cemetery - graves of Belgian soldiers who died at Villa Les Cedres, the house belonging to the Belgian king Leopold II, that had been converted to a hospital.

Occasionally, I think I'm done with Roderick Cameron and his friends, yet each time more connections are made and new ideas present themselves. Nevertheless, for a while at least, I want to move away from Cameron and look in other directions and broaden my theme of circles within circles.


Photo of the Madonna by Eric Hoekszema from Google Maps.
Screen shot from Google Maps.
Quotation from The Golden Riviera, Roderick Cameron, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975.

Full circle

Van Day Truex is a man I've never written about. I've quoted him, referred to him, quoted other people about him but I've not written about this essential link in my circles within circles. I intend to, I keep telling myself, knowing as I do that he was more than a decorator, artist and teacher - designing for Tiffany, Hinson, Minton and Wedgwood as he did - but Van Day Truex's history* has already been written.

It seems to me that as the world turns and time passes, the more individual his later rooms become and the harder they are for modern clients, decorators, and, in my case, students, to understand. The interiors of his that I admire the most, and I think many would agree, are not those of 1940s New York, but those in his last house at Ménerbes - simple, unpretentious, symmetrically arranged distillation of stone-floored and plaster-walled spaces furnished with rattan and wood, softened with linen, cotton and African art.

I have shown these later rooms in lectures to students as part of a history of interior design and the reaction almost without exception has been one of wonderment that I find significance in them - that they are set apart from the work of his colleagues. They are so beguiled by fad and fashion, it makes me wonder if I am wrong in how I try to portray the man and his work. As I see it, the younger generation is increasingly swayed by the deepening relationship of celebrity and marketing, where few standards beyond cute and famous are relevant. With the dissolution in modern design of many precepts Truex might have recognized, I should perhaps not be surprised to find myself and what I value increasingly off-topic.

Truex's influence is undoubted, as his place in the history of interior design, but it seems he is too far removed from this present generation for them to care - he died over thirty years ago - and there are many newer names jostling for position. Unlike David Hicks, Angelo Donghia, Geoffrey Bennison and Michael Taylor, there is little that exists to carry his name - unless Tiffany reissues his designs.

Truex's name is still well-known, more so than that of his friend Roderick Cameron, but I wonder to whom. Is it a generational phenomenon - the Olympians of one generation fade into legend and new kids on the block with their own idols take their place?

A while back I bought The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera because it contained an essay with photographs of Roderick Cameron's last house, Les Quatres Sources, in Provence. The book was produced in the middle 1980s and has all the choppy, scattered arrangement of a page characterized by small images, floods of negative space and muddy photographic reproduction - a style of design that has not stood the test of time. However, the quality of 1980s book design is not what this post is about.

 

"I was luckily on my own when I first visited this garden. I discovered the garden of Les Quatre Sources shrouded in the morning mist, my steps accompanied by the light-hearted rhythm of the overture of Don Giovanni, faultlessly whistled by the music-loving gardener. From the underwood covered with dew to the terraces soaked in the morning sun, along paved paths, and up hidden stairways, I had the feeling of I was discovering a new universe, where each planet sent out its own perfume, its own message or myth; wild mind, lavender, rushleaved broom, and dead leaves combined their fragrances. One should know the language of scents to understand this garden."

So wrote the author of his visit to Les Quatre Sources, and whilst there is much more that could be quoted about how Roderick Cameron and his lover Gilbert Ocelli created their garden - a garden so personal as to hold a memorial to Cameron's mother that read Enid, his beloved mother, Countess of Kenmare, one of the beauties of her time - and, as the following paragraph tells, the ashes of Van Day Truex.

"Higher up on the last terrace, an obelisk flanked by two urns, interrupts the perspective. Under the obelisk lie the ashes of of the friend who showed this place to Roderick Cameron. Roderick Cameron wanted his garden to be inhabited by all those most dear to him. Unfortunately, this master landscaper has since died. 'I wanted to create a romantic garden,' he had confided to me."

Roderick Cameron's ashes were scattered in the garden he created around Truex's obelisk. Where Gilbert Ocelli's ashes lie I have no idea.

So there, scattered in a garden in Provence, the ashes of the two lynchpins of my circle within circle theme, lie close by a memorial to the woman of whom her daughter writes: "Mummy and Rory both had the same quality of innocence. The dark spots of life were discarded and not allowed to intrude on their existence. They saw the world through a golden haze and if you were lucky enough to be part of their magic circle they took you through into that fairyland where life was always fun and always filled with beauty. The reverse simply wasn't tolerated, or perhaps noticed." 

Quotation and photograph from The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera by Michel Racine, Ernest J-P Boursier-Mougenot and Françoise Binet. The MIT Press, 1987.

Photograph of Roderick Cameron and Van Day Truex in Ireland from *Van Day Truex, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, 2001.

Quotation about Roderick Cameron and his mother from A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney 2004.

Red pants, white cups and blue dragons

New purchases, for me, like new ideas, are not embraced immediately: they sit prominently displayed where I – crab-wise and apparently typically of my zodiac sign – walk by, look askance at, consider, reject for a while, even play with... until I finally trust them. So it was with the red pants I bought three weeks ago: only yesterday were they taken out of their packaging and moved on to the next part of the journey to what will be part of a splendid outfit. So it will be with the white, mark-embossed Meissen demitasses I bought on Saturday - they sit in their box by me on the dining table, yet to reach the china cupboard - and so it is with my writing about Roderick Cameron and his circle.

In many ways I walked backwards into Cameron and now shortly will begin an amble through his circle of friends - people who, in the main, held him in deep affection and appreciated his talents. His sister, particularly, loved him deeply and judging by her autobiography, was also in awe of him. As well she might have been, for in her book the man who hitherto I saw only in glimpses now has shading and depth. In a profession where we tend to exalt those with talent, and it must be said, those without a shred of it, I found it refreshing to read about man of quirks, pretensions, standards, erudition, talent, taste and, very definitely, clay feet. Affectionate, though, this portrait of one sibling by another is, it's no canonization.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the more I learned, the more connections made, that my scope should widen and a greater picture would emerge, however faded and overlaid with the chicanery of memory, of a band of men who, to a great degree, were outlaws in their own time. Socially acceptable only because they were obliged to hide their inner lives, their sexuality and their partners. It is a dichotomy that continues today in the lives of many and leads in increasingly more instances to unspeakable tragedy - except where anonymity can be bought. 

I have mentioned before, how fortunate I've been in receiving positive comments, suggestions for further research, anecdotes from people who worked for him and on occasion scans of images from magazines not available to me. One correspondent scanned the photograph of Cameron's Paris living room - yet to be used in a post but no less welcome for that. If it were possible to tell you who these people are I would, but they generally speaking wish to remain anonymous. Another such kind soul, the blogger le style et la matière sent me the photograph above of Cameron's Anglo-Indian room, his study at Le Clos where he wrote his books - The Golden Riviera, the book I've just finished being one of them.

"By the time Rory had finished Le Clos itself, the top two floors consisted of six bedrooms and ensuite bathrooms and the ground floor was the dining room, a library and a large sitting room. The walls were painted the palest of pale olive green. I watched him pick an olive leaf and, turning the back of the leaf over, he got the painters to match the color. The sofas were large and opulent, covered in off-white, thick textured cotton with matching cushions. The chairs were large and Louis XV. Stripped to a pale olive grey, they were also covered in heavy cotton but in the lightest of lemon yellows.

Rory was, I believe, the first person to conceive the idea of the modern-day tablescapes. Large tables were covered in thick layers of material that flowed to the floor and on them he would place his flower arrangements and his precious collected pieces. He would go to the Nice market and buy tuberoses, carnations, lilies, and roses, all in the palest of pinks, whites, creams and yellows. He would cut off the stems and arrange large bowls of massed flowers. The rooms all had french windows open to the sunlight, which used to filter through the leaves of the olive trees and dance on the Aubusson carpets. The scent of the flowers would drift through a house bathed in the glow of warm Mediterranean sunshine. One of the sitting room walls had Louis XV panelling to frame Rory's collection of beautiful leather-bound books, many of which were first editions of the Belgian botanical artist Pierre Redouté and the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. There was a secret panel in the carving and on pressing one of the rosettes, a door would swing open, leading into a library where other first editions lay opened and displayed on easels, their pages changed each day. Not nearly as large as the sitting room, the library walls were also panelled and housed the rest of his famous collection of books."

Soon I shall move away from Roderick Cameron - not entirely, for I'm not yet done with him - to his circle and beyond. Some are well-known, others less so. Not all are known for their decorating skills but all were in their times famous or even notorious for how they lived their lives.

Interesting, isn't it, that Cameron's sister credits him with the invention of tablescapes - that pleasurable if not always beautiful arrangement of favored objects so indelibly associated with David Hicks - a great friend of both Cameron and his sister. Those early arrangements of objets de vertu arguably are the parents of many a tabletop agglomeration of ... well, just stuff, and which of us is not tempted by such a display, especially when persuaded that we too can live the life portrayed by magazine proppers and stylists? But that is a discussion for another day.

Blue Dragons? Roderick Cameron in The Golden Riviera begins a lovely account of an early morning on the Pointe de Saint-Hospice with "How one becomes attached to routine, always the same china: Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', a stylised pattern dating from the last century and one that is to be found in countless English houses." I will continue with this story in a later post but for now here is Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon'.

Quotation from A Lion In The Bedroom by Pat Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney, 2004.

Photo of Roderick Cameron at his desk in the Anglo-Indian room and of the library at Le Clos from the book mentioned above but for which there is no attribution given.

Scent and the Golden Riviera

This morning I awoke from a dream that convoluted around dahlias and bread. For the bread I have no explanation but the dahlias are another thing: for the dahlia, in this household at least, is a flower one either despises or one loves - the one finding them vulgar and the other loving their merry color. Well, standards of taste are always subject to change if not downright erosion and now the dahlia after a long banishment is acceptable - barely, but with good grace.

For me, the dahlia, together with michaelmas daisies and golden rod, announced the end of a summer that had in its time begun with walks in bluebell woods - woods that, when I look at old photographs, were really more of a sparse stand of trees, not extensive at all, surrounded by low stone walls providing shelter for, and it has to be a carpet not a few clumps, of softly fragrant blue bells. Actually getting to the bluebell woods was difficult - the farmer whose land the lane crossed was always angry at anyone from the encroaching suburbs, the same suburbs that within a few years obliterated his scrubby, cowclap-dotted fields, the bluebell woods and the centuries-old dry-stone walls, with rows of houses and lawns.

Then I just saw a man resentful of those he looked on as trespassers but now he resolves into a man scared of the ending of his way of life - his medieval farmhouse, and medieval is was if memory serves me well, within a few years to be torn down, his barns sold for hen pens and firewood and his final herd sent to the slaughter house. The picture is quite clear, but no doubt at this remove mostly manufactured, of a short, cloth-capped man straddling the right-of-way that ran across the farmyard between his house and barns, threatening us with the bobby if we didn't get off his land. Rather than use the iron turnstile to the side of his gate we'd unlatch the gate and swing on it. Far more fun to swing on a romantic five-barred gate, than sedately walk through a turnstile for the result was the same - being shouted at. Looking back there must have been many a time when the farmer was in his fields and not awaiting our onslaught, but childhood memory is not that forgiving.

The dahlia, thus, joins my grandfather's marguerites and sweet peas neither of which were grown regularly but which shine bright in my elegy-inclined memory - emblematic not only of lost times but also of regret for a quality of life gone and seemingly unregarded.

A sore disappointment to me is the way flowers, generally speaking, don't smell. I write this wreathed in the reek of lilies on the table next to me - a scent so powerful that I cannot, despite the fact that I love the flower, forget my grandmother refused to have them in the house because for her they represented death - as well they might, for she was born at a time, the latter decade of the nineteenth-century, when the dead attended their own wakes and lilies were used to mask any smell of putrefaction. Anyone not raised by Victorians will not have that association but anyone knowing me will, undoubtedly, have been told of it too many times.

Scent, in most cases, may have been bred out but color, as strident as any plastic grave ornament, has seemingly been bred in to the few species chosen by supermarket buyers. Who remembers that pinks and carnations once smelled strongly and sweetly of cloves or that roses once had the most romantic of scents, redolent of spice and silk roads, or even had the most delicately subtle coloration? I wonder, too, how we got from this to the specious promises of plug-in freshness-thru-fragrance and the smell of cinnamon brooms that meets one at the supermarket door  - a noisomeness that in its own way announces the turn of the seasons.

The Givenchy Style, a beautiful book and one, as is to be expected from an essay about one of the most subtle couturiers of the twentieth-century, that isn't saturated with crude color and from which one can almost imagine an air of L'Interdit, the perfume created with Audrey Hepburn in mind, rising from the page.

That book reintroduced me to Walter Lees, Givenchy's close friend and seemingly the model for Philip Cliffe-Musgrave in Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred - a tale of English diplomats in Paris that frequently causes me, not wishing to interrupt the soft burble from the head on the pillow next to mine, to stifle a chuckle as I await my own signal that sleep is ready for me. Not for one minute have I ever lost the childhood feeling that if only I could read one more paragraph, one more chapter .... too swiftly followed by a gentle touch on the shoulder and a declaration that coffee is ready.

I'm still occupied with Roderick Cameron and quite possibly will be so for a while. The Celt ordered me a copy of The Golden Riviera, Cameron's journey through the history and life of South of France, and a book in which scent is clearly as important as form, color and scale, to a knowledgeable plantsman.

"I hesitate to go into too much detail about the garden; amongst the more obvious sweet scented things that we planted were the handsome Carolina Magnolia grandiflora and Latin America's graceful trumpet flowered datura, also clumps of the white Hedychium conronarium from India. Among the less obvious odiferous plants, and probably the strongest smelling of them all, comes the Cestrum nocturnum, the night blooming jasmine, known romantically in the Spanish speaking countries as damas de noche. An inconspicuous shrub with tiny clusters of yellow-green flowers, it is difficult to locate the first time one comes across it in someone else's garden; it is a question of degrees of smell. At the gates we massed a collection of Australian acacia - better known here, of course, as mimosa. At Christmas time they explode in a honey-scented, yellow cloud, to be followed later by the equally sweet-smelling Coronilla glauca, indigenous to several parts of southern Europe, and which we had naturalised in the maquis under the stone pines."

Absorbing - at least to me! Christopher Petkanas described the book here as "a sometimes delightful, often unreadable" ... well, I began with the delightful and have not yet been faced with the unreadable.

Chapter two gives an account of the designing, building, the eventual sale of La Fiorentina and its gardens, and the move back to Le Clos, the house Cameron lived in whilst the big house was constructed, and whose gardens under the care of Mr Givenchy you see here.

".... to help explain the sale of Fiorentina. Left on my own, I was obliged to rent the place during the summer months and by degrees came to feel it too much of a responsibility..... As to the sale, there was another factor to be considered: my brother and his family lived in England, which meant that I was the only one to benefit from the place. Here I was hanging on to what amounted to a sizeable amount of the family capital, living in a house I no longer could really afford. I had made Fiorentina and in way it has become quite an institution, but how hampering to indulge in sentiments. Real estate on the Riviera in the late sixties was still at an enormous premium, and properties such as Fiorentina were able to command exaggerated prices. How long, one wondered, would the market hold? With these thoughts in mind, I suddenly decided to sell, and within a matter of months was lucky enough to find the ideal purchasers - Mr and Mrs Harding Lawrence. Harding, a good-looking Texan in his early fifties, is chairman of Braniff International Airlines, and Mary his wife better known as Mary Wells, a vital and alive woman, is president of Wells, Rich and Green, one of the world's leading advertising agencies. The saw the house and fell in love with it for all the right reasons, and the takeover went through in a wonderfully painless fashion. I took to the Lawrences immediately, and to make things even easier their decorator, William Baldwin, is one of my closest friends, an enchanting person, blessed with infinite tact. It could have been a difficult situation for Baldwin with myself sitting, as it were, at the gates, but he handled it with great discretion and on each visit made from New York stayed with me at the Clos ....

".... As to the house, [Le Clos] it dates from the end of the eighteenth century and is the oldest house on Cap Ferrat, or more exactly the Pointe St Hospice. It has no pretensions to architecture, but in its simplicity can lay claim to a good deal of charm, and is typical of the country: red tiled floors and white marble stairs, a Roman tiled roof, green shutters, and pinkish-ochre walls. Directly outside the front door stands the old covered-in well, once the house's only water supply. Constructionally the alterations were few. The rooms were on the small side, which meant knocking down walls and adding the extra accommodation needed ..."

"As regards the terrace and swimming pool furniture, I have purposely avoided bright colours. Living in the sun, I find one tends to avoid them, and this I feel, applies to any of the Mediterranean countries - something to do with the sharpness and quality of the light.

"The question of muted tones is also carried through to the garden, and wherever possible I have kept to a mixture of greens laid out in casual formality. Not actually occupying the house until recently, I have had years to plan the layout. As basic elements, I had the side of a hill buttressed with terraces leading down to the sea, also the stones from the ruin of an early-seventeenth-century fort to carry on with if any further construction was needed. The fort, as depicted in early drawings. looked a massive affair and was erected by Charles-Emmanuel I as a protection against piratical raids from North Africa. Judged a useless incumbrance by later generations, it was blown up in 1706 by one of Louis XIV's generals, and took two months of concentrated mining to tumble, the walls still bearing the marks where the powder blackened the stones. Along with the terraces, we also inherited some twenty magnificent olives which, judging from their size, must be at least six hundred years old. As is usual in this form of cultivation, the olives are planted in rows and are on the same level as the house, centred in a terrace about eight feet wide along which I have clumped great cushions of grey-green echium, a handsome contrast to the grey of the olives when they burst out with their blue candle-like flowers in the spring. Another feature of the garden is a walk of mandarin trees with their trunks daubed with whitewash. Under them, confined by a low border of box hedging, I have planted double rows of arums and it looks very effective when the lilies are out, their white chalices catching the light filtered through the mandarins' pointed leaves. In one place, copying the Italians, I have massed a bed of aspidistra and on the terraces to the left of the house, where the rocks begin to obtrude and the soil is thin, I have naturalized great drifts of the wild tulips from Greece and Turkey, also a collection of dwarf narcissi, a native of stony reaches of the Alpille. The steep banks behind are anchored with a solid flank of judas trees with, under them, blue drifts of anenome blanda alternating with clumps of pale iris stylosa.

"A garden is a fascinatingly mobile way of expressing oneself, and all the time new ways of presenting things occur to one. The idea, for instance, for the topiary work behind the house came to me while on a flight to Cape Town, the whole terrace, quite broad in this instance, being divided up with squares of box and in the centre of each square a tapering cone of the same plant - nothing spectacularly original but just the right accent, to my mind, at this particular point of the garden. From here stairs railed in a Chinese Chippendale design mount to a further terrace backed by cypress with an underplanting of agapanthus.

The terracing, of course, has played a major role in dictating the character of the garden. It has imposed a strict architectural setting, a frame into which I have tried to work a mixture of loose and tight plants. By varying from light to dark and changing from narrow to broad, I have been able to create an illusion of space, the garden appearing much larger than it actually is."

Quotations from The Golden Riviera by Roderick Cameron, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1973. 

Photographs: Inside. Paris/ C. de Virieu from The Givenchy Style, text by Françoise Mohrt, Foreward by Hubert de Givenchy, The Vendome Press, New York 1998. 

A lovely absence of color

A couple of days ago, as I was writing about Le Clos Fiorentina, I received an email from the same person who had sent me the photo of Roderick Cameron's Paris living room, telling me that I would find photos of La Fiorentina in Cameron's time in an old issue of Architectural Digest. I found them, and I'm thrilled. Finally I know what the inside of the house was like before Billy Baldwin's redecoration - a redecoration that, apparently, Mr Cameron did not like.  For a while that house eluded me, and yet I discover both a terrific essay and wonderful photos in my own library - thanks to the kindness of strangers.

"Lady Kenmare and Rory with a combination of American and Australian money had bought a property on the Riviera which was a wreck due to damages done to it during the war. This remarkable building was known as La Fiorentina, and it certainly did have, for one thing, the most beautiful views and sights on all the Riviera. It was clinging on to the tip of Cap Ferrat, and surrounded by perfectly fantastic gardens, terrace upon terrace, most of which had remained in pretty good condition in spite of the war.

"The restoration began and it was lucky for everybody because Rory was a young man of enormous taste, great enthusiasm, and plenty of money. Together with his mother, they bought a great deal of furniture for the house and turned it into the most beautiful house on the entire Riviera. The restoration was by no means an exact copy of what it had been before the war and before the bombing; instead, Rory brought the whole thing into the present time with a remarkable clarity, a great feeling for textured materials of the day, a lovely absence of color in that most of it was rather bony or very pale, and the introduction of contemporary French furniture, most notably tables by Jean-Michel Frank, who was the last great cabinetmaker in Paris.

"Lady Kenmare even painted murals, and she painted a wonderful one for the dining room which looked like a tapestry of leaves and foliage. Everyone was full of enthusiasm for La Fiorentina and I, for one, adored going there."

I well can imagine Billy Baldwin, the author of the quotation above, did indeed adore going to La Fiorentina.

"A lovely absence of color" a description so redolent of a particular time in my life - the years in Amsterdam - when in the shelter magazines of the day, to talk about no-color was as modish as creating whimsy became in the following decade.

It's a interesting concept, no-color, and occasionally I read of decorators who, having reached color saturation during the day, flee to their own color-free interiors where, perhaps, a pop is allowed, be it a throw, pillows or flowers. I'm not criticizing, for my own interior is much the same, though for different reasons. I cannot explain why ... well, actually I could but there really isn't time for that tale ... but the Celt and I for many years have lived in shadowy, silver-inflected, lilac-tinted, grey, cream and ivory rooms - no-colors, as it would have been expressed thirty years ago - that make me feel relief on arriving home. I always love to come home – and when here I frequently don't see the the need to leave for days on end. Even the bursts of color, such as the Hermes-orange chest of drawers in the grey-and-celadon bedroom and the multi-colored kimono-slice pillows elsewhere, have sidled up to me and now are old friends I wouldn't live without.

Roderick Cameron's palette, as Baldwin states, is not entirely drained of color, though he does describe it as very pale – the color of the back of an olive leaf which, for those of you who look at the backs of things, will know to be a pale and subtle, silver-green and a color used by Cameron in both La Fiorentina and his house at Menerbes. At La Fiorentina that green was used for the walls of the salon, with white marble for the floor, and a lemon yellow for the sofa and chairs. A delightful combination, I find, and as agreeable at twilight as at noon.

Of course it is all to do with light and its effect on color - in the first post I wrote about Roderick Cameron I quoted him: "with the clarity of light down here one is apt to play down colours. The drawing room is the silvery-green of the back of an olive leaf and the stairwell which curves like the volutes of a shell - indeed what inspired its formation - is painted the luminous beige found on the inside of a nautilus. Faded mustard-yellow, moss green and the soft blues of Ming porcelain seem to be the dominant colours."

 

As to whimsy - undoubtedly, during the 1990s, the murals painted by Lady Kenmare and Martin Battersby would have been described as whimsical, despite belonging to a distinguished tradition that goes back at least to the Renaissance. I wonder if mural painting, despite a number of contemporary distinguished practitioners (the late Robert Jackson comes to mind, as does Graham Rust ) has died out for I never see it nowadays except amateurishly done in a child's bedroom. I wonder, too, if mural painting still exists but is invisible because it is no longer understood or valued?

Photographs, unattributed as far as I can tell, accompany an essay written by Steven L. Aronson for Architectural Digest, October 2001.

Photo of Martin Battersby's murals in La Fiorentina's hall by Ken Partridge, from The Decorative Twenties, Martin Battersby, revised and edited by Philippe Garner, Whitney Library of Design, 1988.

Quotation from Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography, Billy Baldwin with Michael Gardine, Little, Brown and Company, 1985.