There are times when I wish she had never taken the boat

Nonetheless, take the boat she did, and after arriving in England in 1927, Mrs Ronald Tree began to create the mythic Englishness at the heart of sappy Virginian Decoration in England – a style now known on this side of the pond as "English" or a tad less mystifyingly as "English Country House."

It was, one might suppose, one of history's happier coincidences – if less earth-shattering than some might have one believe given the amount of twaddle written about them – the eventual partnership of Tree, or Nancy Lancaster as she became, and John Fowler, and given its success, inevitably, the association led to many imitators. After years of maudlin chintzes being pitchforked across battalions of bergeres, tables, sofas and windows, this so-called English style has been reduced to a wretched formula, leading to rooms that are prosaic and analgesic, where elements are constant, whoever the decorator, from magazine to blog to Pinterest to Instagram and back again. Some decorators strive to convince us it's a snappy American style and, arguably, given with whom it began, they're not wrong but my point remains, English or American, it's still the same stuff all the time.

Where's the originality, I wonder? Who has the ability to look at a space and not want to recreate what everyone has published in magazines, books, and online for the past umpteen years: be it a Fifth Avenue version of a salon from Chateau de Ferrieres; a dining room from Pavlosk; Nancy Lancaster's Brook Street yellow room; everything by no-lady Mendl; the same white room by Syrie Maugham;  badly-drawn cabbage roses, black-and-white-stripes and big baroque moulding by Dorothy Draper; nothing I can remember of demimondaine Rose Cumming's outré offerings, and far too much by Cecil Beeton. The list is longer but I'll draw the line here.

Mentioning Cecil Beeton does bring to mind an idea I occasionally have – that there might be a difference between gay and straight decorating. Not that I am suggesting that Mr Beeton was homosexual – heaven forfend! – but if he were, would it be possible to infer that there was a certain gayness in his work and his houses, theatrical as one might say they were. BUT, I digress …

Perhaps I'm wrong in hoping for originality and individuality from decorators when I suspect what clients mostly want is to conform to a perception of monied propriety. Respectability, like virtue and good manners, is a concept created in copywriters lairs, so why would a client want to stand out when conforming and being told one is unique is merely a matter of image creation by publicist, photographer, stylist and copywriter?

Consider the undoubtedly beautiful room above – and to be clear, I really do find it beautiful but, to my point, it's more of the same. I have not read about the room in Elle Decor (which I do not take) but to my eye it conforms to mainstream expectations of social background and economic status, and it projects a strong image to the world about the inhabitant's status against that background. In other words, it is a room of parade – not quite a State Room but nearly so.

By contrast, the room above, by a decorator in England, has some of the same elements but the objective is different – here I don't have to rely on deductions based on a photograph but can read a text. A quotation will be illustrative.

"To accommodate the owner's preference for contemporary art, a balance had to be struck between the majestic interior and the contents planned for it. Chester achieved this by buying a huge painting by Mimmo Paladino, which is even larger than the room's dominant central wall panel, and by placing below it a 3-metre (10-foot) banquette fronted by a massive coffee table. The style may be entirely different, but the scale and weight of these elements are so compatible with the room's architecture that the problem is resolved. The rest of the room is a mixture of contemporary art, modern furniture, tribal artefacts, and appropriately scaled antiques." [Italics mine]

I added the italics because the sentence is not about decoration but about design – note the words "the problem is resolved." So much of modern interior decoration, especially by the devotees of mid-century-anything, seems a lemming-like rush to publicity with a consequent dumbing-down of expectations by everyone concerned. I read yesterday of a designer without design education dancing her way into fame and product lines in fabric houses and wondered if her experience was not untypical. I have no idea how many of the media darlings have any design education but I wonder if it matters for with fame and fortune comes image creation by publicist, photographer, stylist and copywriter. Quite where education fits in any longer is hard to say.

This room with its George I paneling I find one of the best examples of twenty-first-century traditional interior design. I have scored through the word "traditional" because I feel this room shows exactly how a cultured and literate decorator can span the demarcations we normally think of in decoration.  Besides that highfalutin' stuff, this is a room one would enjoy walking into, sitting down with drink to hand, reading one's iPad (rediscovering Georgette Heyer in my case), listening to sublime music (Missa Papae Marcelli) – if one is not napping on the sofa – or simply waiting peacefully for dinner to be ready. What better in such a room?

First photograph from Instagram but I think originally from here.
Second and third photographs also from Instagram but originally from here.

Vampire chic and my personal favorite

It struck me as I listened to the waiter's inventory of fishy specials that every waiter under forty had a beard and that their grandfathers or, more likely their grandfather's gay brothers, all had facial hair, also. Gay clones, we called 'em then, I thought as I sipped my cocktail and, wonderful as it is to see the wheel of fashion revolving yet again, it is clear the tipping point – the point where individuality tips towards uniformity – has long been passed. Young men, generally speaking, have facial hair – unkempt or not – and their female cohorts, uniformly, have long straight hair and wear the same style print short shifts. Wondering aloud about why we are persuaded that uniformity is individuality wasn't, I knew, going to fly as a subject of conversation with the three HQ dandies sitting with me at table, so I reached for my cocktail again, whilst the waiter informed us about his personal favorites. A collective cringe affected even those checking in on Facebook. A waiter's personal favorite – there's a thought! A personal favorite? As silly piece of tautology as that often-spied "Private Residence" for aren't all favorites personal and all residences private? 

A none-too-private residence, purportedly that of the Salvatore brothers in The Vampire Diaries, surrounded by office towers, is nothing less than an atmospheric shell now that the family has dwindled, removed itself and left the house in the hands of an "events manager." With logs burning in the fireplace, it is easy to imagine the house as a character in a novel: perhaps Michael Innes's The Open House – a mystery story where the hero, John Appleby, after his car breaks down on a deserted road, comes across a large house whose windows are illuminated, the front door wide open and the house empty. Better yet, this "living hall"in the picture below, despite being over-furnished in an Edwardian way, brings to mind the great Hall of Stanyon Castle in Georgette Heyer's A Quiet Gentleman where the hero returning from the Peninsular wars is met by his estranged and unwelcoming family. This hall is, indeed, an opulently ordinary room, as conventionally decorated as all of its kind, but could be a place for any vampire with romantic sensibilities to have a quiet evening at home, on the Knole sofa, listening to wolf-song, sipping occasionally from a companionable vein, much as one might sip bourbon, and reading the The Monk by M G Lewis, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho or, even, a family biography, fanciful though it is, by Abraham Stoker.

 

The Knole sofa seems to me to be the ideal for those of us who love to lay down whilst reading – almost a room within a room and in such a large high space one of the best draft excluders there is. There was a time my sofa, a Chesterfield, provided similar refuge from the howling wolves black dogs, reading many an e-book male/male romance/mystery as I lay on it. Genre fiction, a term that always sounds acutely demeaning, has occupied me in the long watches day and night and I have come to appreciate its humane portrayals of the naturalness of love between males. Love is love.

If I were to give a list of genre fiction: mysteries; m/m romance; historical romance I would begin with three writers. The first, Michael Innes, whose detective stories are the most dexterously literate I've ever read. My favourite book of his, Lord Mullion's Secret, is no detective story at all but a foxtrot through Englishness, character and erudition – a description that could be applied to all his stories. I adore them.

The second writer, Georgette Heyer, whose Regency Buck I read first in the 1960s and reread again only this weekend, is perhaps more famous for her Regency Romances than for her detective stories of which she wrote eleven, or twelve if one counts The Quiet Gentleman as a mystery set in the Regency period. Nowadays we'd call it a cross-over, I suppose – historical romance and mystery. All her mysteries are superb, witty, well-observed and occasionally downright funny. I'd cite They Found Him Dead from 1937, the connected Duplicate Death from 1951, and Envious Casca from 1941 as the ones I enjoyed the most.

The third writer is Josh Lanyon: unknown to me until two years ago, I have since read most of what he has written and thoroughly appreciated his characterization, humaneness and humor. The Adrien English series of books – five interlinked stories of (without wishing to sound like a blurb writer) love, loss and redemption – Fatal Shadows, A Dangerous Thing, The Hell You Say, The Death of a Pirate King and The Dark Tide, are the ones I would recommend anyone new to this genre to read.

The point to me in all this, is not that one is unshaven, wouldn't know tautology if it slapped one up the side of the head, or even whether one sips from vein or goblet, it is the creation of a coherent world – be it Jane Austen's small piece of ivory (two inches wide), or Shakespear's Journey's End where lovers meet – in which the characters can act out their stories. In genre fiction the world is not smaller and the past is not a foreign country where things are done differently.

Couch chair at Knole, Kent

"Stuffed and covered with crimson velvet. The cushioned headpieces are hinged to the arms, and adjusted with rachets. The upholstery if fixed with gilt nails and trimmed with silk thread fringe, overlaid with silver threads. The dating of this unique couch has been much disputed. I incline to c.1640 on the basis of entries in the 1630s in the furniture bills of items suppled to Queen Henrietta Maria (Appendix A15). I have not yet established the precise differences between a couch chair and a couch bed. Similar items were supplied by John Casbert, the French upholsterer to Charles II from 1660."

Quotation about Couch chair at Knole, Kent from Upholsterers & Interior Furnishings in England 1530-1840, Geoffrey Beard, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997.

Photo of Couch Chair from same.