Cecil Beaton’s name is as irrevocably bound up with his Wiltshire bolthole of Ashcombe as it is his 21st-birthday portraits of Princess Margaret and the Edwardian costumes he designed for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. It’s there, in the ’30s, that he hosted the likes of Edith Sitwell and Adele Astaire for moonlit picnics, egg-and-spoon races, harvest festivals, and fancy-dress parties on the Downs. “I was a bad housekeeper, and utterly extravagant,” he recalled of these gatherings in his diaries. “Not sure if the cook could really cook, and rather than risk the failure of a meal, [I] would arrive every Friday from London with hampers from Fortnum’s full of lobsters, cold game, pickled peaches, bottles of soup, fruits drowned in liqueurs, and other prepared foods that gave Mrs Noble [the housekeeper] no opportunity to show her acumen.” And on Sunday, when the last guest departed back to London, he would be “completely exhausted, surrounded by the debris of torn muslin, 18th-century masks, yards of stencilled satin, and broken apple blossom” that entertaining à la Cecil entailed.
Already, by 1932, the “romantically situated” house had earned enough of a reputation for Vogue to photograph it for the 1 March issue, with Beaton describing it as “rather like a dwelling to which some royalty has been banished in a fairy-story” – “It is unique in England,” he insisted – but if he wrote rapturously of the “romantic beauty” of the place, he was prescriptive about its decoration. “I have not permitted a single piece of chintz or old oak,” he began. Rather, he furnished the drawing room “in a baroque and Victorian manner”, with walls “the colour of strawberry ice-cream”, a nautilus-shaped jardinière filled with “white hydrangeas”, and satin curtains “in the most vivid turquoise blue” flanked by a cage of “matching parakeets”.
To achieve a “gay” effect in his guestroom, meanwhile, he installed chartreuse wallpaper, a “four-poster bed done in daffodil-yellow satin”, and faux tiger skin carpeting, with every visitor invited to trace their hand print on the wall of the adjoining bathroom. “In some cases,” Beaton wrote, “the nails are painted red, with the signatures scrawled across the palm. Here, as you lie in the bath, you can muse on the various characteristics revealed by the shapes and can compare Siegfried Sassoon’s thumb with Sacheverell Sitwell’s.” Everywhere you turned, in other words, was something extraordinary: carpeting “made of the fluffy material sold by fancy-dress costumers for cowboys’ trousers, dyed cedarwood-pink”, curtains “spangled with dewdrops and made of the material sold for Christmas dolls’ ballet skirts”. As for Beaton’s own room? “My bedroom is not yet complete,” he wrote, and “there is painting to be done, when I return from my annual visit to America, for the walls are to be frescoed with clowns and plumed horses and hung with ribboned hoops – since it is to be a circus room.”
More modest and yet equally distinctive? Beaton’s residences in town, which London: Lost Interiors explores in detail. Take his flat in the French Baroque complex of Rutland Court, which gave out onto the barracks of the Household Cavalry and the horse chestnuts of Hyde Park. Beaton rented it in the summer of 1935 – the year his relationships with both Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí were forged – and their influence can be seen in the surrealist feel with which Beaton infused the Kensington Road apartment. Cecil’s bedroom alone featured plaster conical lampshades courtesy of the Giacometti brothers, vases of acid-bright silk poppies, and 18th-century-inspired floral damask wallpaper, which he embellished with sequins and découpage cut-outs of the Hollywood stars and society friends he admired, from Greta Garbo to Prince George.
Then there was the sitting room, which boasted a grass-green carpet into which Beaton stitched artificial flowers by the theatrical costumer Karinska. (Cecil had previously worked with her on a ballet, Apparitions, which starred the 16-year-old Margot Fonteyn, notes Andrew Ginger in Rizzoli’s Cecil Beaton at Home: An Interior Life.) Adding to the dreamlike quality of the room: a modernist cupboard crowned with papier mâché branches, into which Cecil wove silk roses and fresh geraniums. “I doubt if anyone has evolved such an original room as Cecil Beaton, the well-known artist and photographer,” a journalist wrote in an October 1936 edition of the Home Journal. “[He] lives in London part of the time, and likes to transport the country to the town, as advertisements would say. His room represents a garden… a realistic tree grows in one corner and obligingly changes its foliage with the season, varying from blossom in spring to snow in winter. The chairs are those little bright green bent iron kind we are familiar with in parks.”
During the Second World War, however, Beaton relocated to 8 Pelham Place, a stuccoed terrace house in Chelsea designed by architect George Basevi in the 1830s. It would remain his home for the next 35 years. On first moving in shortly after the invasion of Poland, Beaton retreated from his usual modernist style into a cocooning 18th-century sumptuousness, with swathes of rose brocade, crimson velvet, and gold damask filling every room. Yet, when Vogue first visited in January 1947, the magazine was quick to remark that “nothing is forced into a ‘period mould’: bold, convenient new things live side by side with the delicate artifices of Louis Seize; past masters – Fuseli, Francis Rose – hang beside the paintings of living friends such as Dalí and Bérard.” Here, reads one caption, is “Picasso’s ‘Reclining Woman’ above a Beatonesque composition: roses, books, and bibelots.” A few years later, House & Garden rhapsodised about Beaton’s use of colour in a 1950 issue: “The small Edwardian sitting room has carmine flock wallpaper with a lavish Empire design of swans and cornucopias, its colour being almost that of the carnations massed between gilt candlesticks.”
Eight Pelham Place would remain in this style until the ’60s, when Beaton reimagined the house again. Stepping over the threshold, guests were met with plaster casts of ancient Greek, Roman and Babylonian statuary from the British Museum, while in the dining room, he installed a geometric maple-and-mahogany floor lifted, piece by piece, from a Rothschild mansion near Piccadilly Circus. He worked, during the day, at an Empire-style desk rumoured to have belonged to Talleyrand under Napoleon, and at night, he slept in a steel-and-brass four-poster of his own design with gilded pine-cone finials and a Russian wolfskin throw. His collection of artworks – which by then included everything from Dogon masks imported from Mali to David Hockney paintings from his student days at the RCA – were displayed in a gallery room whose walls were lined with black velvet and trimmed with gold Spanish braid meant to recall the lining of bullfighters’ uniforms. It’s here that Beaton’s many glittering parties would begin – with the stiletto heels of his female guests leaving indentations on the floor. “Cecil would point them out,” Brindle reports. “That’s Princess Marina, that’s Julie Andrews, that’s Vivien Leigh…” A bit boastful? Maybe – but to quote Cecil himself: “Perhaps the world’s second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.”
London Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle is out now
