It’s rainy in San Francisco, and has been through this past weekend. This presents a wonderful opportunity to read, or in my case, reread for the umpteenth time, Brideshead Revisited. What’s put me in mind of it was a recent photo spread in World of Interiors of Madresfield, a stately home in Worcestershire that was Waugh’s inspiration, both in character and locus.
What of course cannot be pictured are Lord Flyte’s fictional Oxonian digs, but Waugh doesn’t let us down, describing with exquisite detail the medieval paneling and disparate collection of objects that litter the interior. Litter is a poor choice of words, because one assumes the collection is, therefore, rubbish. Possibly to Sebastian Flyte, but clearly middleclass Charles Ryder was as taken with the novelty of this eccentric display of unrelated though each in themselves interesting objects as he was with the edible offerings that included lobster Newburgh- doubtless served in an antique silver tureen- and plover’s eggs in a moss-covered basket. This is unlike lunches I had whilst in college, but, then, not many of my friends were members of the traditional aristocracy. I thought I did pretty well offering spaghetti Bolognese.
What, of course, Waugh chronicled with some particular perspicacity was the phenomenon of short-lived aristocratic enthusiasms paired with sufficient money to indulge them. The collection of objects and their accumulation on any flat surface betokens sufficient means to indulge enthusiasm, and that the objects may be disparate in nature might signal, to those of us without the same mindset, as notable and eccentric.
But, of course, this notion of eccentricity has been endlessly aped by those not born to the purple, in the sometimes bizarre pairing of objects of disparate style and period in interior settings. When this works, as it so often does, it is termed ‘eclecticism’. When it doesn’t, we term it ‘interesting’ and politely look away.
The irony is the eclecticism that is the byproduct of aristocratic indifference is achieved with studious effort by interior designers. John Fowler’s ‘country house’ look was not automatic. What it sought to imitate, of course, was an upper class effect that was achieved through a generational organicism that is nearly impossible to replicate. I remember not so very long ago seeing a stately home interior, with one of the decorative elements a child’s model airplane. As it happened, though, this particular model airplane was a 1/25th scale model of the Wright Brother’s ‘Flyer’, purchased in the first decade of the last century and, following its brief service in the nursery, was confined for nearly a century to the attic store from whence discovered/recovered. In interior decoration, nothing substitutes for generation upon generation of habitation. Inherited wealth comes in handy, too.