The Lopez-Willshaws were part of a close-knit South American connection, descending from the venerable Madame Eugenia Errazuriz, friend of Picasso and Stravinsky and called by Cecil Beaton 'the Beau Brummell of twentieth century interior decoration'. It was she who invented the style, even down to a taste for unadorned English mahogany furniture, which Madame Castaing was to develop so successfully. It was her great-niece Patricia, one of the most elegant woman in Paris according to Beaton, and beneficiary of much valuable advice on the decorating and installation of houses, who married the wealthy Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, creator with the architect-decorator Paul Rodocanachi, and later with the architect Georges Geoffroy, of an elaborate eighteenth-century revival ensemble in the Rodoconachi house at Neuilly (now the Musée de la Femme et des Automates). They tackled the hardest aspect of present day decoration, the convincing recreation on a large scale of hand-crafted luxury in the style of Louis XIV. Monsieur Lopez-Willshaw's bedroom with its dais and colonnade, could be mistaken for that of the Sun King himself.

Perhaps only in France could the skills be assembled to achieve this level of craftsmanship among the cabinet-makers, stucco-workers and Lyonnais silk weavers, or the patience to apply literally a hundred coats of paint, and unlimited funds to find the rarest furniture and objets d'art to ensure that the final result treads the fine line between vulgar opulence and an astounding grandeur of conception. It remains astonishing, however, that one of the partners in this enterprise should have been Madame Lopez-Willshaw, whose taste had been nurtured by a woman who valued above all other precepts of house decoration 'harmony, elegance and tidiness' - a glimpse of this restraint is apparent in Madame Lopez-Willshaw's boudoir, with the botanical drawings found in an old atlas, and in the flower-room, the most beguiling of Serebriakoff's drawings