Although our main line of endeavour is the retailing of 18th century English and continental European antiques, we do, from time to time, undertake special, selective projects for clients. Possibly you know that we do all our own restorations, and that includes upholstery. We use a variety of fabrics, but since it is the period furniture frame we are selling and are obliged then to match an appropriate fabric somewhat subordinate in presence to the appearance of the frame, we must then shop an array of fabric lines.

We were pleased then, at the behest of a younger client to have the opportunity to use an exquisite Fortuny print on a pair of Louis XVI fauteuils with original blanc vernis finish.  Mind you, this upholstery job was hardly a dawdle, and required the personal attention of the best upholsterer we use- at 84 years old, what he doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing, and what he can’t do is probably otherwise impossible.

The pairing of handmade with handmade presents some challenges that in the modern age we’ve mostly forgotten about.  The neoclassical beauty of the fauteuils is enhanced by inherent features- patination and irregularity, for instance- that can only be the result of 230 years of use. Match this with the handblocked beauty of the Fortuny fabric, and, well- the result is wrought not without some difficulty. While we considered using nailheads to trim, we opted for gimping as it provided a more subtle visual segue between fabric and frame. Nailheads, we thought, might provide too strong a focal point- it is the fabric and the frame that are important- not the trim.

This project took our upholsterer two solid weeks of work to complete, and possibly a little extra aquavit in the evening to unwind. Aquavit must have kept him nimble, too, as his labours yielded an exquisite result. Mind you, we didn’t perform this project gratis, but I must say we are thankful to our client for her desire to use Fortuny. The upshot of this for Chappell & McCullar? We’re not certain our client will run riot with fabrics, but let me say that for ourselves we look forward to our next opportunity to use Fortuny.

Despite the times, we still manage to sell a few large pieces of furniture each year, most notably dining tables. As tempting as it is to offer behemoths, we’ve found that a certain size table- between 42” and 50” in depth, and no more than 136” in length- commands the most interest.

The why of this isn’t terribly difficult to suss out. Where typical Regency period dining rooms- and I’m not speaking of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton- might be possessed of a table and possibly a sideboard, the chairs would likely be multiuse, brought in for the purpose from various places in the house.

It is not just what were formerly parlour chairs that have migrated into the modern dining room, but also a large-ish storage and display adjunct- the breakfront.  The use of a breakfront bookcase for storage and display of china or silver was unknown in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Purpose built for libraries, a breakfront never moved from its intended place. China and serving pieces, when not in use were relegated to butler’s pantries, or, in the case of silver, locked away in a strong room.

With changes in use, what was in the early 19th century a sparsely furnished room has now become at times the most elaborately furnished in the entire house. Consequently, even a large dining room can become positively claustrophobic unless its furniture pieces are of a scale allowing for them to articulate not only with the scale of the room, but also with each other.

By the way, if this has piqued your interest, note that all our dining furniture is included in our annual Summer Sale. Browse our site www.chappellmccullar.com and let us know what you like!

A fun read about dining is Phillipa Glanville’s Elegant Eating: 400 Years of Dining in Style, available from V & A Publications.

The Spencer House sale is history, some impressive results, very nearly all of it well in excess of what would require any of the pieces to get government permission to leave England. How much of it was purchased by Lord Rothschild for placement back into Spencer House we will know in the fullness of time.

A minute ago, I had a brief word with one our craftspeople, describing his onsite repair to a period piece of furniture within an expensively designed interior he pithily characterized as ‘boring’. Naturally, and conveniently I might add, this put me in mind of my blog yesterday. Say what you want, Vardy’s work at Spencer House might be called lots of things, but boring couldn’t possibly be one of them. Realizing that, aesthetically speaking, English rococo isn’t everyone’s tasse de thé, Vardy’s Palm Room nevertheless achieves an ultimate classicism, defined within this context as a canonical mid-18th century expression of material culture.

And, for contemporary designers, what more can a body, either interior designer or client, aspire to? Not to say that every 18th century interior is as effectively wrought, but very many are, and I would find it illuminating, in this age of houses all around the world that are extreme examples of wealthy effulgentia, to see an economic comparison made between what’s laid out now, and what was laid out in the 18th century, for domestic architecture and design.

Whatever such a comparison demonstrates, it so often appears that, with the likes of so many masters of architecture and design- Adam, Kent, Chambers, Carr, Holland- the list goes on and on- the ‘quality’ of two centuries ago got more for their money. Within the larger consideration of material culture, the rubric of art and architectural history considers as its primary focus a search for a site of meaning. And so many 18th century interiors are fraught with meaning on so many levels. For the Spencers, with John Vardy as their medium, the expression of Palladianism meant much more than a fashion, a prominent advertisement of knowledge and sophistication gained from the Grand Tour, but more basically a celebration of an Augustan Britain, with classic architecture a visible link to an Arcadian golden age.  Think the Acropolis transplanted to St James’s.

Amidst the buzz about the Althorp clear-out, it might possibly be that the focus is on the celebrity of the Spencer family. A pity, as the notoriety about the family and its possessions occludes the splendor of Spencer House, which survives in its now thankfully restored glory.

Its Green Park façade survives in its originality, designed in the 1750’s by John Vardy in the Palladian manner. Interesting, though, to see the crossed palm fronds in the pediment, placed beneath and thereby giving rather unusual emphasis to the ocular window.

With the demolition of so many aristocratic London great houses in the 1920’s, Spencer House is a rare survival. Nevertheless, for most of the 20th century, it was put to hard use, for over thirty years as offices for The Economist, complete with suspended acoustical ceilings in the interior and other institutional detritus. Its restoration began with the acquisition of the property in 1985 by a consortium headed by Lord Rothschild. Astonishingly, significant portions of the interior remained virtually intact. Although in the interior realization Vardy was early on replaced by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, Vardy’s Palm Room wildly celebrates the aforementioned motif used, albeit with considerable restraint, in the façade.

With the rooms of state all aesthetically fairly exuberant, it might be difficult to discern the segue from the rococo of Vardy to the archeologically accurate neoclassicism of Stuart. Placed directly over the Palm Room, Stuart’s neoclassicism finds expression in the Painted Room. With its complement of damask and gilt, it is some distance removed from the restraint one might expect if one were to gauge from the illustrations in Stuart’s 1762 Antiquities of Athens.

While it is the various works of Vardy and Stuart at Spencer House that are especially acclaimed, the contribution of interior designer David Mlinaric in providing guidance for the restoration of the rooms of state and the successful integration of the lesser rooms to make the entire interior a contiguous whole that arguably constitutes a feat almost as notable as that of those 18th century worthies.  Although Mlinaric’s design firm carries on, M. Mlinaric is largely retired, but his years of activity contributed a wonderful legacy in a number of historic interiors. Indeed, Lord Rothschild used Mlinaric in another project to great effect, the design of the rooms in the Bachelor’s Wing at Waddesdon Manor, a Rothschild house in Buckinghamshire.

Open to the public virtually and actually engenders response, consequently, from distant quarters, as my last blog entry did. One of my closest friends, an English gentleman, took exception to what he took to be my denigration of London as an 18th century style centre, or more accurately, my favorable characterization of Paris. Well, this would be an irritant since, as my gentle friend has so often told me, the French are the traditional enemies of the English. I hadn’t realized how recent the battle of Agincourt actually was. Fresh in English consciousness, at any rate.

This, of course, put me in mind of English nationalism expressed in material form in, you guessed it, the chair. Ironic, too, that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Napoleonic Wars would be a crucial vector for design motifs.  With the classical world of Greece and Rome providing a framework for design in the last quarter of the 18th century, antiquarianism spread a bit further to the south toward the end and beginning of the century following, with the motifs of ancient Egypt becoming particularly fashionable. It is a bit tidier to presume that busy designers like George Smith, and more famously Thomas Hope were at work popularizing lion’s head monopedia, but a more immediate cause was Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign that terminated with Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

I don’t know of too very many events in history met as ecstatically as Nelson’s Nile victory, but it is dwarfed by the public acclaim the result of Nelson’s subsequent victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. All things Nelson became a mania in England, with the victory instantly incorporated into chairs with the use of a rope twist motif, emblematic of Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS ‘Victory’.