Sandersons Wallpaper and Me

Just thrilled when I found a sample of this wallpaper from Sanderson's notable Palladio collection featured in World of Interiors March issue. I had longed to see it again because it resonates with my childhood at Dovercourt, the primary department of Portsmouth High School. It was an amiable gothicky building designed by architect Thomas Ellis Owen who added such distinction to Southsea in the mid 19th century.  


In the late 1950s I was amazed to find the Lower 2nd classroom had been converted into a restroom papered with this incredibly exciting design.  Moreover one wall was painted in a coordinating soft tangerine and the skirting boards in that putty colour.  Rather grandly at the age of nine,  I congratulated the art teacher on her inspired decorating instincts!   Miss Walden - a great woman with a matching putty coloured complexion, short hair, strong shoes and the kindest nature. I loved her.  I had plenty of time to savour the scheme when I was consigned to a little lie down in the restroom one day.  I had a dizzy spell. Probably a sugar rush from eating too many liquorice pipes at break-time.


But guess what, when I introduced my daughter to my old school in the early 80s, I raced up to the same room and found it still intact.  And Miss Walden still on the teaching staff.  This was the first of many nostalgia attacks about the 50s. 

The designer, Walter Hoyle was an artist and printmaker (1922-2000)  who was strongly influenced by his tutor Edward Bawden at the Royal College of Art.  Indeed he became part of the Great Bardfield  group of which Bawden was the doyen.  Including one of my favourites, Eric Ravilious, it was a brilliant school of figurative artists and illustrators (very much in contrast with the St. Ive's painters)  and  I have always felt that their aesthetic nailed the quintessence of Englishness.  

Here are some of Hoyle's block prints from the mid 1960s of Cambridge University. The images come from the Government Art Collection's website, worth a look in itself. (Although the site appears to be  under construction you can still search the collection.)

 

King's College

King's Chapel Porch

 

Senate House

St John's College

Wren Chapel Emmanuel College

Below:  more of the Sanderson Palladio collection courtesy of W of I.   

'Very Sanderson - 150 Years of English Decoration' runs at the Fashion  and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey St, London SE1  19 March - 13 June.

An English Aesthete and Lover of Regency

Robert Harling was brought up in Brighton by a relative after being orphaned at a young age. This stylish seaside resort was the perfect environment for a young flaneur with a discerning eye, browsing the famed antique shops of The Lanes and internalising the aesthetic of its splendid Regency architecture. He also loved the sea and was attracted to the pleasure boats pulled up on the shingle, fascinated by their names picked out in decorative script. These no doubt had some bearing on his abiding interest in lettering and typography.

A Christmas card designed by Robert Harling. In the mid-1940s he and James Shand published Alphabet and Image, a journal of graphics and typography.


Harling's daughter in a charming piece about her late father (World of Interiors May 2009) remembers that he and his wife Phoebe would generally hold their lively dinner parties midweek because Friday evenings and Saturdays were spent at The Sunday Times both designing the news pages and as architectural correspondent. He spent four days a week as editor of House & Garden from 1957 to 1993. Harling must have had extraordinary energy because he was never happier than when he was designing and beautifying houses.

Robert and Phoebe started married life in a Georgian mill house in Suffolk but moved to an 18th C Sussex rectory called The Glebe House in 1952. He immediately set about restoring its original purity by demolishing an attic floor and mansard roof added by a Victorian rector to house his numerous children and servants.


The wide hall, originally built to accommodate waiting parishioners, was furnished with black and white marble tiles that Phoebe bought at a Suffolk auction with no expense spared; and in the 1960s an ochre/greeny blue Puginesque Gothic wallpaper was installed. A set of ten birch Regency dining chairs were bought with an inheritance from Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and a fine Biedermeier bow-fronted coat cupboard came from Rupert Cavendish's shop on the King's Road.




The sitting-room decor has remained unchanged since 1953. Yellow Regency-style 'Medallion' wallpaper from Cole & Son is in exuberant contrast with the cherry-red chintz and ochre curtains. The chandelier of turquoise glass was added in the 60s, the result of an afternoon's stroll down Mount St.

A gold-on-gold paper in the Harlings' bedroom gave the room a lustrous glow in the evening sun. The curtain fabric, a wool toile, dates from 1953. A decade later the swags and tails and the carved and gilded trim were added.



A 19th C bedcover, formed from tiny gathered lawn rosettes and on the chest a pair of green obelisks flanked by a quartet of 17th C pietra dura architectureal landscapes.


I love this image for what looks like an Edward Bawden pelican along with a collection of prints very reflective of Harling's era and enthusiasms. Below: over the Aga is a print by Eric Ravilious (see my earlier post), a contemporary of Bawden. These were quintessentially English artists and illustrators of the early 20th C and I am crazy about them. Edward Bawden designed the wrought iron bench in my first image.





Robert Harling died in July 2008 at the age of 98. He had a distinguished wartime career in the Royal Navy being in charge of a whaler at Dunkirk, serving in the convoys and getting involved in Naval Intelligence where he worked for Ian Fleming. He launched a series of ten interior design books under the auspices of House & Garden, wrote novels and a memoir entitled Amateur Sailor. What an extraordinary life. I would love to have met him.

The Glebe House's contents will be auctioned by Christie's South Kensington on 9 September.



As drawn by Nicholas Bentley, Harling was a natty dresser renowned for his drainpipe trousers


All images from World of Interiors May 2009 Text drawn from Amanda Harling's article and Robert Harling's obituary in The Independent 8 July 2008