I’m in the midst of reading Martin Wood’s terrific recent book about John Fowler, John Fowler: Prince of Decorators by Martin Wood- buy it, read it! If you are a Fowler fan and appreciate his country house style, I would recommend it. We’ve got plenty of books about Fowler, and by Fowler (and his research colleague and amanuensis John Cornforth), but the recent work is ever so slightly gossipy, giving one a few more glimpses into Fowler’s personal life, and his relationships with two redoubtable women, Sybil Colefax and Nancy Lancaster.
Of course, these ladies’ length of purse- well, longer than Fowler’s anyway- and social contacts certainly provided Fowler opportunities to broaden his range beyond the clever, though pretty basic, style associated with his first atelier in the King’s Road. Even with the assist of Colefax and Lancaster, the first 20 years or so of Fowler’s career proceeded through some astounding obstacles- the depression of the 1930‘s and war and privation that didn’t really end until England went off ration in 1954. What was available for use in interior design was in limited supply, and it was this necessity that was the mother of invention, witness old table cloths, for example, reused as loose covers on furniture, and elaborate window treatments composed of several types, colors and patterns of fabric- to mask the fact that there was insufficient supply of any one of them. ‘Shabby chic’ was, in large measure, born of this necessity.
Nancy Lancaster, with her flair and the experience of decorating her own homes, first of Kelmarsh Hall and then Ditchley Park, brought grandeur into Colefax and Fowler that allowed the firm, and Fowler, of course, to fairly quickly segue into the development of their signature country house style. What I always tend to forget, of course, is that for each family that had a country seat, they invariably had at least a pied a terre in town. Social and economic changes brought about by the war resulted in the decline in the number of grand townhouses, with the great and the good finding they now had to make do in oftentimes minuscule London accommodation. Fowler, of course, could call upon his early design experience in the King’s Road to make these small flats work for his clients.
I’ve often heard that Fowler himself was not a particularly happy man, possessed of perhaps a skin too few. His many contentious relationships included of all people, Nancy Lancaster, his closest colleague. Even so, Fowler’s style, even at its grandest, is fun without being fantastic, and inventive without being contrived. Well, maybe some of the window treatments are a bit too, too- but, then, if passmenterie is available, it simply has to be used, doesn’t it? If there is any criticism of Fowler, and there is always a revisionist view of any great man, it is that his interiors are insufficiently based on strict historic precedent. This, of course, ignores the fact that the canonical figures like William Kent, James Gibbs, and Robert Adam, into whose 18th century rubric Fowler sought to bring some modern restatement, were themselves great innovators. As Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is an homage to Mozart and not just imitative, Fowler’s work represents an historically inspired aesthetic, tempered, naturally, by his own experience in his own day and age.