From Buckingham Palace to the Bank of England: Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler celebrates 90 years as Britain’s foremost interior designer
It is the go-to decorator for castles and country houses, yet the company’s recent projects have also included a group of log cabins in Wisconsin. As designer and joint managing director Emma Burns tells Harry Seymour, it’s simply a question of ‘suitability, suitability, suitability’
The ‘Yellow Room’ at 39 Brook Street, London — Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s former headquarters — photographed in 2014. Designed in 1957 by Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler, it was described by House & Garden magazine as ‘one of the most spectacular rooms in London’
In 1957, Nancy Lancaster, the urbane daughter of a wealthy Virginia businessman, secured the lease on an apartment in London, behind 39 Brook Street — an elegant, stucco-fronted Mayfair house halfway between Claridge’s hotel and New Bond Street.
Thanks to a series of marriages, she’d spent the previous three decades honing her skills at turning faded English manor houses into comfortable and stylish homes. Along the way, she acquired a stake in the decorators Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, as well as a reputation for having ‘the finest taste of anyone in the world’.
In Mayfair, however, Lancaster was to make her most enduring mark. She covered every surface of the pied-à-terre’s 46-foot-long drawing room in a cornucopia of yellows — from citrus silk cushions to egg-yolk gloss walls, buttercup taffeta curtains and sofas upholstered in canary shantung. ‘One of the most spectacular rooms in London,’ is how Loelia Lindsay, the Duchess of Westminster, described it in House & Garden magazine shortly after its unveiling.
Lancaster’s design set a new tone for interiors among the social set. And being attached to Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s showroom, it established the business as the purveyor of country-house style as it is still envisioned today.
An anteroom at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, decorated by Emma Burns and Philip Hooper of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. The cushions on the bed are in the company’s ‘Leopard Stripe’ fabric. Photo: de Gournay
Emma Burns, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler and one of five decorators working at the company: ‘The better you know your clients, the better a decorator you are for them’
‘It’s my favourite,’ says Emma Burns, one of two current managing directors of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, now headquartered at 89-91 Pimlico Road. ‘It’s a fabulous room. The walls are this amazing Chinese yellow, with a high level of gloss varnish that’s very reflective and widens the room. There are several seating areas, but it has fantastic rhythm and fantastic glamour. At the same time, it’s an incredibly comfortable room. If the dog jumped on the sofa, nobody would have minded. It wasn’t at all precious.’
The ‘Yellow Room’ wasn’t entirely Lancaster’s work. While she conceived the overall concept, design and placement of furniture, the finer details, such as curtains and trompe-l’oeil cornicing, were the work of her business partner, John Fowler.
Fowler had worked at the design firm Thornton Smith, then at Peter Jones, restoring old European furniture and painting Chinese wallpapers, before opening his own studio at 292 King’s Road in Chelsea in 1934 — 90 years ago.
A flat in Wimbledon, London, decorated by Emma Burns. The tapestry chairs came from a French dealer in the Dordogne. Photo: Gavin Kingcome
Fowler’s eclecticism, encompassing a love of swagged French fabrics, Regency furniture, rustic Norfolk rush mats, traditional stoneware and, above all, bold colour (tastes that flew in the face of Art Deco and the International Style), soon caught the eye of Sibyl Colefax. The wife of a lawyer and politician who lived in nearby Argyll House, she already had her own decorating business, also begun in 1934, on Bruton Street in Mayfair, and in 1938 invited Fowler to be her partner.
In 1944, the year the business moved to Brook Street, Colefax retired and sold her share of the firm to Lancaster, whose social connections to the English aristocracy and American high society opened the doors to the country’s finest houses. ‘Nancy and John’s partnership is really what everybody thinks of as Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler,’ says Burns. ‘She had such style and aplomb. He was incredibly well informed and scholarly, with an eye for detail. That’s when the business really got its personality.’
The company’s client list was — and still is — resolutely confidential, but Fowler alone redecorated parts of Buckingham Palace, Holyroodhouse, Chequers, Chevening House, Christ Church Oxford and the Bank of England, as well as some 30 National Trust properties.
In the hallway of this French house is a mural inspired by Bedouin tents. It was painted by Lin Connor to the design of decorator Lucy Hammond Giles, a director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. Photo: Simon Upton
A sitting room in the French house decorated by Lucy Hammond Giles. Photo: Simon Upton
Today, Burns is one of five decorators working at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler — not to be confused with the parent company Colefax and Fowler, which produces fine fabrics and wallpapers. Is it her job to maintain the signature style? ‘We strive to make the most appropriate background for our client’s life, possessions and building. But within that, there would be a link, which is timeless, well considered, everything quite orderly,’ she says.
‘There’s always inspiration from the past, and it’s lovely to look back and see the solutions John or Nancy used for a particular issue, such as a window treatment.
‘There is nobody finer than John Fowler for his curtains. But not every house can take very grand, elaborate curtains, so we pull elements, like the trim, and simplify it so it doesn’t look ridiculous. We move things forward so they’re relevant and fresh.’
This echoes Burns’s personal design mantra: ‘Suitability, suitability, suitability’.
The Hurlingham Club, London, decorated by Emma Burns. Some of the cushions are in the firm’s classic ‘Squiggle’ print fabric. Photo: Boz Gagovski
Elaborating on her philosophy, she recalls, ‘I once had a client who showed me a lovely photograph of the library at Blenheim Palace, and told me it was her dream to have that in her basement in a small house in Kensington. I pointed out that of course you can have a library, but it needs to be suitable for the space. Equally, if it’s a very grand room, the treatment needs to match. Everything needs to make sense. And that has always applied to Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s look and appeal.’
The design process typically begins with this sort of discussion about each room’s purpose, including what pieces of furniture a client would like to keep. This is followed by computer-aided designs and hand-drawn sketches.
‘Nothing is more lovely and romantic than a sketch,’ says Burns. ‘Samples of paints, wallpapers and fabrics are also really important for people to see and touch. Then the client thinks, “Do I really want to sit on this velvet sofa? Or will it be uncomfortable for me if I have bare legs and I’ll hate the feeling of it?” You don’t want any surprises.’
A staircase in a family camp of seven log cabins in Wisconsin decorated by Emma Burns. Photo: Simon Brown
In the bar of the Wisconsin camp, Burns used antique paisley shawls to upholster a vaulted ceiling. Photo: Simon Brown
The next stage involves thumbing through Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s hallowed ‘Little Black Book’ of craftspeople: the company commissions the very best makers, from weavers to woodworkers, helping to keep traditional techniques alive.
‘We rely on our fantastic artisans to carry out the ideas we come up with,’ says Burns. ‘It is so lovely when you have specially woven trimmings, for example, so you can choose the exact colour and length of the fringe, or specific edging. It’s satisfying to know not everything is mass-produced.’
Burns points to two recent properties decorated by Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler to show how the breadth of its practice has evolved. ‘We recently decorated a suite of rooms at Belvoir Castle. We restored the four-poster bed and were able to do very grand curtains. A special colourway of wallpaper was printed for the castle by de Gournay.
The dining room at the camp in Wisconsin: ‘The whole place had this lovely feeling of having been there for ever, yet it was only built eight years ago.’ Photo: Simon Brown
‘We also decorated a family camp of seven log buildings in Wisconsin. We used a lot of old pieces of furniture, a lot of embroidered fabrics and a chandelier made from antlers, which actually came from Christie’s,’ she continues. ‘In the entrance hall, the wallpaper was made from birch bark, peeled off from enormous silver birch trees. Going back to suitability, it all felt right at home there. The whole place had this lovely feeling of having been there for ever, yet it was only built eight years ago.’
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Each job is constantly evolving, too. ‘The better you know your clients, the better a decorator you are for them,’ says Burns. ‘You’re on the same wavelength. You’ll see something and send them a photograph and say, “I think this would look amazing.” It’s a constant flow.’
To mark the 90th anniversary of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, the company is launching an anniversary collection, including a lambswool lap rug woven with the classic ‘Berkeley Sprig’ motif beloved by Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, a reproduction of a Regency étagère with simulated bamboo paintwork, a two-tier flower holder originally designed by John Fowler using test tubes as vases, and the archival ‘Gothic Stripe’ fabric, drawn by Fowler. There is also a selling exhibition of the work of decorative artist Lucinda Oakes at the company’s showroom, 89-91 Pimlico Road, London, until 26 October 2024