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Stanley House: the Residence of Michael Inchbald
At the western end of Knightsbridge, where the tall, gloomy ‘Pont Street Dutch’ houses give way to a little stuccoed Chelsea quartier with some pretensions to urban planning, stands Stanley House, a surprisingly large and grand double-fronted house in the Italianate taste, built in 1855 by the Chelsea speculator John Todd for his own occupation. The tiers of creamy-white columns, pilasters, friezes and runs of balustrading, offset against a ground of apricot-coloured stucco, give it the proprietorial air of a little palazzo. But its relatively conventional exterior belies an extraordinary interior, only hinted at by the enormous pair of plate-glass doors that shelter beneath its columned portico, each one garnished with a snarling lion mask in patinated bronze. Inside, in the little mirrored vestibule, the funereal obelisks flanking the front door are endlessly reflected, providing a spectacular prelude to the home of Michael Inchbald, whose death in 2013 robbed architectural and interior design of one of its most daring and stylish exponents.
Michael Inchbald was born in 1920, the eldest son of Geoffrey Inchbald, a City solicitor, and his wife Rosemary. His mother’s brother, Courtenay Ilbert, formed the great horological collection – said to be the finest ever formed - that is now in the British Museum. The family home was a large house - Halebourne in Chobham, Surrey, and Michael Inchbald showed a precocious interest in architecture and interior design. He won a Daily Telegraph drawing competition for teenagers when he was nine, and was later forbidden to win the school art prize on the grounds that it was ‘unfair’ to the other boys. At home, Michael would drastically remodel entire rooms and then wait and see if his father noticed when he got back from work. Michael Inchbald went to Sherborne School and then studied architecture at the Architectural Association, lodging from 1945 with his uncle Courtenay in the capacious, clock-filled house in Milner Street. The young Inchbald was initially allocated a single bedsit room, but he soon asked his uncle for another – pointing out that a gentleman had to have one room to live in, and another in which to work. He got his way, and both were soon stylishly tricked up with things he had spotted in antique shops and salerooms – eighteenth-century French and English furniture and a painting by Horace Vernet in the sitting room, while a Panini kept company with Empire pieces in the ‘Vogue Regency’ bedroom-cum-study. The flat was featured in Ideal Home in 1947, and later in House and Garden. He was also making his mark in contemporary design – he won prizes for the design of oil heaters and a safety ashtray in the 1946 The Shape of Things to Come exhibition, and was involved in the Britain Can Make It exhibition of the same year. In 1955 his stylish wicker ‘Mambo’ chair won the National Design Prize and was later exhibited in the 1957 Milan Triennale. After leaving the AA early, he contemplated emigrating to America, but his marriage in 1955 and the death of his uncle Courtenay the following year opened up other opportunities – not least the refurbishment of the large house in Milner Street which he inherited. The lower floors were converted as an office for his fledgling interior design business, while the rooms upstairs were stylishly adapted as living quarters which combined his interest in contemporary design and new materials, with a fearless sense of colour and a taste for theatrical display. Here he arranged his antique furniture, pictures and sculpture, as well as some of his uncle’s finest clocks.
Executed between 1957 and 1959, and published in House and Garden magazine in 1960, the interiors of Stanley House confirmed Michael Inchbald’s reputation as an up and coming young interior designer - equally confident and assured in a modern or traditional idiom. In its first incarnation, Stanley House gives a good idea of his evolving style and ingenuity – from the Entrance Hall with its metallic wallpaper and tented doorcases, to the chintz-hung Ante Room upstairs, which doubled as an impromptu Dining Room, which had been conjured up from uncle Courtenay’s dated bathroom. Off this lay the two main living rooms, a clear blue-painted Bedroom to the left, which converted into a comfortable Drawing Room during the day – the bed dividing in two and rolling back to form two matching sofas, while the pedimented bookcase-bedhead became an overmantel with shelves of books and carefully-chosen, colour-coordinated ornaments. It must have been an extraordinary nightly transformation, although no-one quite knows what happened to the large polar bear skin that lay on the floor between the opposing sofas. Across the Ante Room lay another, much larger, Drawing Room. When the two pairs of double doors were flung apart, the view from the Inchbald bed was a palatial three-room enfilade, terminating in a great mirror. Everything was arranged in grand vistas - as if awaiting the photographer.
The large Drawing Room, which extends the full depth of the house, was where the finest pieces of furniture and works of art were displayed, shown off against soft coral-red walls. The key pieces were French – the great greenish-grey marble Rococo chimneypiece surmounted by a portrait of the duc de Penthièvre, a grand ormolu-mounted bureau plat, a series of imposing commodes, and a pair of Neo-Egyptian bronze and ormolu candelabra. But there was also an Adam-style giltwood mirror with a cresting of hippocamps, a pair of Japanese bronze deer, and a Renaissance damascened helm. Six of Uncle Courtney’s best clocks were accorded pride of place, notably a disarmingly modern-looking Breguet skeleton clock which stood on the chimneypiece, which bore the cypher of Napoleon I, picked out in diamonds. Another horological wonder was a curious Augsburg timepiece in the form of a lion, which has moving eyes and roars on the hour, and there was a crucifix clock surmounted by a pelican, which told the hours with its beak. Many of the smaller, precious, objects were confined to gilt-framed back-lit wall cupboards, but every surface was littered with carefully arranged ‘tablescapes’ contrived of bronzes, precious boxes and neatly graduated piles of art books. But this wasn’t a conventional ancien règime interior - the handsome geometric floor is made from hard-wearing, 5th grade linoleum, carefully cut and laid to Mr Inchbald’s design (and, he claimed, the first use of lino in a non-functional setting) . At the far end of the room was a modern Solarium, said to be a first in any London house, which Inchbald designed and cantilevered out over the garden. The rusticated flanking walls of the light-filled space– executed in bleached natural cork – open to reveal a desk, storage, and an ingenious mechanical draughting board.
Much of the drama of the room was enhanced by its carefully planned lighting. A pair of bronze tripod tables with illuminated opal glass tops act as uplighters, while Mr Inchbald would ruthlessly cut away the sides of expensive tôleware lampshades and drill holes in antique tables to direct and disguise illumination, or lose electrical flex. But other lighting solutions were surprisingly makeshift - dangling lightbulbs were taped behind sculptures, so as to light them dramatically from behind, and a discreet spotlight stuck in the backside of one of the Japanese bronze deer directs its gentle beam onto a superb Vulliamy regulator clock. When asked by The Daily Mail; ‘doesn’t a room like this interfere with your work when you’re designing something like the QE2?’, he retorted, ‘But I believe the more you design for the future, the more you should know about the past. You’ve got to have a feeling for the great heritage of civilisation. Surrounding yourself with beautiful things gives you a standard’.
Amazingly, Michael Inchbald’s great first floor Drawing Room survived into the second decade of the twenty-first century, much as he first arranged it in 1959. It is true there had been some changes; the flame-coloured walls changed to a rich yellowish ochre, and there was the inevitable ebb and flow of furniture and objets d’art. Next door, the cunningly disguised matrimonial bedroom was superseded by a little royal blue painted cabinet, hung with Old Master drawings and a Jacobean portrait of an ancestor – but still housing a discreet bed. More changes were wrought downstairs, past the Egyptian anthropoid coffin mask on the landing, where Mr Inchbald created a stylish Dining Room in about 1967, with acid-drop coloured floral wall coverings and a glass and perspex oval table. Across the Hall with its silvered wallpaper was Mr Inchbald’s Study, like some interior in a Roman palace, dominated by a pair of massive seventeenth-century presses, with Italian throne chairs, Roman busts and, behind an antique screen, a door to a secret flat – as remote from Knightsbridge as one could imagine.
Michael Inchbald confessed that the carefully orchestrated theatre of Stanley House sometimes intimidated his clients. One can see why, although they included the Duke of St Albans, duchesse Sonia de Liancourt and the Earls of Perth, Dartmouth and St Aldwyn, as well as contemporary celebrities - the film director, John Schlesinger, the author, Alistair Horne, and the banker, Henry Tiarks. But if Inchbald’s cool blend of neoclassical and modern never approached the popularity of John Fowler in his domestic work, his success in the commercial sector - as the interior designer for several American banks, the headquarters of Plessey, and a series of remarkable interiors in luxury hotels - certainly approached that of his chief rival, David Hicks. Among the most celebrated of these was the Ballroom of the Berkeley Hotel, Knightsbridge, lined with crystal white marble with silvered joints, and whose twenty icicle chandeliers were reflected in its mirrored ceiling. He also caused a sensation with the River Room at the Savoy, with its seasonally interchangeable colours schemes – ice blue for the summer, a cosy red velvet for winter. Further commissions followed, although his Arabian Nights themed Forty Thieves Restaurant in the Post House Hotel near Heathrow had to be hastily rechristened when Trust House Forte took it over prior to completion! Nor were Inchbald’s talents confined to dry land – he worked on state rooms for the liners Carpathia, Franconia, and the Windsor Castle, and designed the first-class saloon aboard the QE2, where he compensated for the low ceiling height and vast expanse of floor, with a latticed ceiling and upswept, trumpet-shaped columns. Inchbald-designed down to its safety ash-trays, the Queen’s Room was acclaimed as ‘the most successful marine interior ever conceived’.
Inchbald’s sleight of hand combining old and new is evident in his work for Dunhill in Duke Street, St James’s, where a dingy showroom with an irregular floor plan and five different ceiling levels, was transformed by mirrored vitrines and dark woodwork, evoking a great Baroque library. Another opportunity came in 1972, with a commission to refurbish the headquarters of the Crown Estate Commissioners at 13-15 Carlton House Terrace. With great resourcefulness, Inchbald rifled the storerooms of Windsor Castle for surplus furnishings, radiators were cunningly disguised as Regency dwarf bookcases, while a bevy of plaster vestal virgins were dragooned into lighting the main corridor. The Sunday Telegraph pronounced it ‘more sumptuous than any other government offices’, while Terence Musgrave, Curator of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, thought it had ‘an atmosphere of handsome, masculine dignity that evokes the years when this Imperial office of the Crown was engaged in planning some of the grandest events of its long history’.
So many of Michael Inchbald’s interiors have been swept away, it is ironic that his name is now best known from the eponymous Inchbald School of Design, which he set up in 1960 with his wife Jacqueline, to teach design and art history. Established in a single basement room in Stanley House, it was the first interior design school in Europe. After their marriage was dissolved in 1964, the School was continued by Mrs Inchbald - and is still going strong today – although Mr Inchbald always felt rather equivocal about the success of the School that bore his name! But Michael Inchbald’s real legacy are the interiors he created at Stanley House. As Stephen Calloway elegantly put it in an article in Harpers and Queen in 1988; ‘Michael Inchbald is a rare character. Among vociferous and self-opinionated designers he is diffident, among interior decorators he is a true connoisseur of beautiful things; a man of taste, not of fashion’.
Tim Knox
Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Note about Literature:
Michael Inchbald's interiors at Stanley House have appeared in international magazines and books several times since their formation in the late 1950s, and as such almost every item in this collection has been published at least once; the list of publications includes but is not limited to:
Stephen Calloway, 'Vistas Welcome', Harpers & Queen.
Guy Oliver, 'The House of Inchbald', Country Life, 10 April 2003, pp. 92-7.
James Stourton, Great Houses of London, London, 2012, pp. 280-5.
Peter York, The World of Interiors, January 2014, p. 94-103.
AN ENGLISH GOLD-PAINTED CAST-METAL LION'S MASK MOUNT
MID-20TH CENTURY
Details
AN ENGLISH GOLD-PAINTED CAST-METAL LION'S MASK MOUNT
MID-20TH CENTURY
14.1/2 in. (37 cm.) high; 14.1/4 in. (36 cm.) wide
MID-20TH CENTURY
14.1/2 in. (37 cm.) high; 14.1/4 in. (36 cm.) wide
Provenance
Purchased by Michael Inchbald in the early 1960s with two others, which were installed on the glass doors at the entrance to Stanley House.
Sale room notice
Please note that this is cast-metal and not cast-iron as mentioned in the printed catalogue.
Brought to you by
Laetitia Delaloye
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