Syrie Maugham - Career

Career

In a career that lasted from 1922 until her death, Syrie Maugham became a legendary interior designer credited for designing the first all-white room. In the early 1910s, Maugham began her career by apprenticing in a London decorating firm to learn about furniture restoration, trompe-l'oeil, curtain design, and the mechanics of traditional upholstery. She established her own interior decorating business at the age of 42, Syrie LTD., at 85 Baker Street, London in 1922, and as her reputation grew, so did her business. She later opened shops in New York and Chicago, and designed homes in Palm Springs and cities all over America.

Syrie was born during the Victorian Era, a time characterized by dark colors and small spaces. Syrie rejected these norms to create rooms filled with light and furnished in multiple shades of white and mirrored screens. In addition to mirrored screens, her trademark pieces included: books covered in white vellum, cutlery with white porcelain handles, console tables with plaster palm-frond, shell, or dolphin bases, upholstered and fringed sleigh beds, fur carpets, dining chairs covered in white leather, and lamps of graduated glass balls. Maugham also started the trend of stripping and repainting French provincial antiques with a secret craquelure technique. This technique remains a popular treatment seen in many modern interior designs.

Although it cannot be said that Syrie was in the first generation of interior designers, she did bring more freedom and creativity to the design profession. Elsie de Wolfe was quite formal, correct, and respectful, but Syrie drew from a various mixture of sources ranging from Picasso to baroque antiques. She reinvented classic furniture with crackled paint applications. She used strange colors. Maugham decorated the first all-white room, the living room in her London house, which she unveiled at a candlelit midnight party with great success.

She is most well known for the music room at her house at 213 King's Road in London and the salon at her villa at Le Touquet, a society resort in France. The music room was actually the only room designed in all white, but many other rooms were primarily white with accents of color in the draperies or pillows. The salon was decorated entirely in shades of beige, relieved only by pale pink satin curtains. Although she made her fortune and fame with her white decors, by the mid 1930s she had largely given up the white decors to create interiors with baroque accessories and color schemes punctuated by bright green, shocking pink, and bold reds. Cecil Beaton remembered leaf-emerald wallpaper, magenta cushions, and Schiaparelli pink.

Maugham was known to work from her bed in the morning, dictating to her secretary who worked from a desk in her bedroom, and gave orders to her shop manager on the way home at night. Her style was very authoritative and demanding, and staff rarely stayed long.

Maugham's daughter Liza married in 1936, and the London house Maugham decorated for her was among her best work. After finishing it, she sold her own house and traveled to India with Elsie de Wolfe "to paint the Black Hole of Calcutta white". Maugham continued decorating, but had already completed her most famous and successful work.

Her contemporaries included Elsie de Wolfe and Lady Sibyl Colefax. Her clients included Wallis Simpson, the Prince of Wales, the actress Marie Tempest, the Texas politician Oveta Culp Hobby, the Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and Capt. Edward Molyneux, art patron Edward James, American socialites such as Mona Williams, Babe Paley, and Bunny Mellon, the playwright Clare Booth Luce, theatre legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and British socialites such as Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll and the Hon. Stephen Tennant. She redecorated The Glen, Scottish home of Christopher Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, who hated the existing Scottish Baronial style of the house.