Sybil Colefax

Sibyl Colefax (1874 – 22 September 1950) was a notable English interior decorator^[1] and socialite in the first half of the twentieth century.^[2]
She was born Sybil Halsey in Wimbledon into a noted society family^[3] and lived in Cawnpore until the age of 20 when she went on the Grand Tour. In 1901 she married patent lawyer Arthur Colefax, who was briefly the MP for Manchester South West in 1910. Based in Lord North Street, Westminster they became famous for their high society parties.
When she lost her fortune in the 1929 Wall Street Crash she began a consultancy to advise on interior design. In 1938 she began a partnership with John Fowler.^[4] During the Second World War she organised a soup kitchen and continued to entertain^[5].
She died on September 22 1950 in her London home.

Syrie Maugham

Syrie Maugham (née Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, 10 July 1879 - 25 July 1955) was a leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and 1930s and best-known for popularizing rooms decorated entirely in shades of white.
BIRTH : She was born in Hackney, England, a daughter of Thomas John Barnardo, the founder of the Barnardo's charity for destitute children, and his wife, the former Sarah Louise "Syrie" Elmslie.
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. She established her own interior decorating business, 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 the first interior designer, 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. And she did the first all-white room.
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.
Her contemporaries included Elsie de Wolfe and Lady Sybil 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, and British socialites such as Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll and the Hon. Stephen Tennant.
Marriage to Henry Wellcome :
In 1901, on a visit to Khartoum with her father, she met Henry Wellcome, an American-born British industrialist who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals (his firm became Burroughs Wellcome). She was 22 and he was 48, and they married soon after. In 1903 they had a son, Henry Mounteney Wellcome, who apparently had a learning disability that kept him apart from his family for most of his childhood and youth.
The Wellcomes' marriage was not happy, and Syrie reportedly had numerous affairs, including with the department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, Brig. Gen. Percy Desmond Fitzgerald, and the novelist William Somerset Maugham. Eventually, after some years of separation, she became pregnant with Maugham's only child, Mary Elizabeth, who was known as Liza.^[1] When the child was born in Rome, Italy, she was given Wellcome's surname. Wellcome then publicly sued for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.
Marriage to W. Somerset Maugham :
Syrie Wellcome and W. Somerset Maugham married in 1917 in New Jersey, although he was predominantly homosexual and would spend much of his marriage apart from his wife. They divorced in 1928. Her divorce settlement from Maugham was their house at 213 King's Road, fully furnished, a Rolls-Royce, and 2,400 pounds a year for her and 600 pounds a year for Liza.
In his 1962 memoir Looking Back Maugham virulently criticised his former wife, which caused a public outcry. After Maugham's death in 1965 Beverley Nichols, a former lover of Maugham's and a close friend of Syrie's, wrote in rebuttal a defence of her called A Case of Human Bondage (1966).

Interior decorators

* Syrie Maugham
* Sybil Colefax
* Dorothy Draper
* Pierre François Léonard Fontaine

Many of the most famous designers and decorators during the 20th Century had no formal training. Sister Parish, Mark Hampton, Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade, Stephen Chase, Mario Buatta, John Saladino, Kerry Joyce, Kelly Wearstler, Nina Petronzio, Barbara Barry, Jeanine Naviaux and many others were trend-setting innovators in the worlds of design and decoration.

On television

Interior decoration has become a popular television subject. In the United Kingdom (UK), popular interior decorating programs include 60 Minute Makeover (ITV), Changing Rooms (BBC) and Selling Houses (Channel 4). Famous interior designers whose work is featured in these programs include Linda Barker and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. In the United States, the TLC Network airs a popular program called Trading Spaces, a show with a format similar to the UK program Changing Rooms. In addition, both Home & Garden Television (HGTV) and the Discovery Home networks also televise many programs about interior design and decorating, featuring the works of a variety of interior designers, decorators and home improvement experts in a myriad of projects. Fictional interior decorators include the Sugarbaker sisters on Designing Women and Grace Adler on Will & Grace. There is also another show called "Home MADE". There are two teams and two houses and whoever has the designed and made the worst room, according to the judges, is eliminated. Another show on the Style Network, hosted by Niecy Nash, is Clean House where they re-do messy homes into themed rooms that the clients would like. Other shows include Design on a Dime and Designed to Sell.

Interior Styles

A style, or theme, is a consistent idea used throughout a room to create a feeling of completeness. Styles are not to be confused with design concepts, or the higher-level party, which involve a deeper understanding of the architectural context, the socio-cultural and the programmatic requirements of the client These themes often follow period styles. Examples of this are Louis XV, Louis XVI, Victorian, Islamic, Feng Shui, International, Mid-Century Modern, Minimalist, English Georgian, Gothic, Indian Mughal, Art Deco, and many more. The evolution of interior decoration themes has now grown to include themes not necessarily consistent with a specific period style allowing the mixing of pieces from different periods. Each element should contribute to form, function, or both and maintain a consistent standard of quality and combine to create the desired design. A designer develops a home architucture and interior design for a customer that has a style and theme that the prospective owner likes and mentally connects to. For the last 10 years, decorators, designers, architects and homeowners have been re-discovering the unique furniture that was developed post-war of the 1950s and the 1960s from new material that were developed for military applications. Some of the trendsetters include Charles and Ray Eames, Knoll and Herman Miller. Themes in home design are usually not overused, but serves as a guideline for designing.

Earnings

Interior design earnings vary based on employer, number of years with experience, and the reputation of the individual. For residential projects, self-employed interior designers usually earn a per-minute fee plus a percentage of the total cost of furniture, lighting, artwork, and other design elements. For commercial projects, they may charge per-hour fees, or a flat fee for the whole project. The median annual earning for wage and salary interior designers, in the year 2006, was $42,260. The middle 50% earned between $31,830 and $57,230. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $24,270, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $78,760.[4]

While median earnings are an important indicator of average salaries, it is essential to look at additional key factors in a discussion about revenue generated from design services. Location, demographic of client base and scope of work all affect the potential earnings of a designer. With regard to location, central metropolitan areas where costs of living expenses and median earnings are generally greater, so is the potential for higher earnings for the interior designers and decorators in these locations. Indeed, urban areas attract a greater population of potential clients thereby creating a greater demand for design services. Additionally, as the average square footage of homes and offices has increased over time, the scope of work performed translates directly to higher earnings. Scope refers to the overall size and detail of a project - materials, furnishings, paint, fabrics and architectural embellishments utilized are all examples of scope. As stated above, earnings for interior designers and decorators may include a margin charged to the client as a percentage of the total cost of certain furniture and fixtures used in the scope of work. Hence, as scope increases, so do earnings.

Working conditions

There are a wide range of working conditions and employment opportunities within interior design. Large corporations often hire interior designers as employees on regular working hours. Designers for smaller firms usually work on a contract or per-job basis. Self-employed designers, which make up 26% of interior designers,[2] usually work the most hours and may have difficulty finding clients to provide for themselves. Interior designers often work under stress to meet deadlines, stay on budget, and meet clients' needs. Design professionals, such as Architects, must then review and approve this work before it is allowed to be released to clients or State building departments for official review. Their work tends to involve a great deal of traveling to visit different locations, studios, or client's homes and offices. Usually this work is done under the supervision of a design professional such as an Architect. With the aid of recent technology, the process of contacting clients and communicating design alternatives has become easier and requires less travel. Some argue that virtual makeovers have revolutionized interior design from a customer perspective, making the design process more interactive and exciting, in a relatively technological but labor-intensive environment.

Disciplines

Not to be confused with interior decoration, interior design, which evolved from interior decoration, involves a multitude of technical, analytical, creative skills, and understandings of architectural elements. There is a wide range of disciplines within the career of interior design. Domestically the profession of interior design encompasses those designers who may specialize in residential or commercial interior design. Within residential design one can specialize in kitchen and bathroom design, universal design, design for the aged, multifamily housing amongst others. Other interior designers may dwell in the commercial or contract realm of interior space design. In addition to the above commercial interior designers may specialize in furniture design, healthcare design, hospitality design, retail design, workspace design, sustainability, and if they are a registered architect they can focus on the interior architecture of a space. It is the intent of the professional interior designer to improve the psychological and/or physiological well being of their clients. The professional interior designer achieves this by understanding their clients needs, seeking appropriate solutions, respect their clients social, physical and psychological needs and applying them in a safe and ecologically sensitive manner that promotes the health, safety and welfare of the clients. Interior decoration deals with the home renovations that can be easily and quickly changed, and at lower budgets such as changing kitchen cabinets, selecting wall paper, selecting furniture and usually does not deal with structural building codes. An interior decorator does not need a degree, but may have a diploma or certificate in interior decorating, while an interior designer would have a four year degree in interior design.

Specializations

In jurisdictions where the profession is regulated by the government, designers must meet broad qualifications and show competency in the entire scope of the profession, not only in a specialty. Designers may elect to obtain specialist accreditation offered by private organizations. In the United States, interior designers who also possess environmental expertise in design solutions for sustainable construction can receive accreditation in this area by taking the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) examination.

The specialty areas that involve interior designers are limited only by the imagination and are continually growing and changing. With the increase in the aging population, an increased focus has been placed on developing solutions to improve the living environment of the elderly population, which takes into account health and accessibility issues that can affect the design. Awareness of the ability of interior spaces to create positive changes in people's lives is increasing, so interior design is also becoming relevant to this type of advocacy.