page_title: Syrie Maugham
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Syrie Maugham / Career
caption_attribution_description: Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo (later Wellcome, later Maugham). Drypoint by Paul-C&#233;sar Helleu. Iconographic Collections Keywords: Gwendoline Maud Syrie Wellcome; Paul Cesar Helleu
context_page_description: Syrie Maugham was a leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and 1930s and best known for popularizing rooms decorated entirely in shades of white.
context_section_description: In the 1910s, Maugham began her interior design career as an apprentice under Ernest Thornton-Smith for a London decorating firm learning there about the intricacies of furniture restoration, trompe-l'oeil, curtain design, and the mechanics of traditional upholstery. In 1922 at the age of 42, Maugham borrowed £400 and opened her own interior decorating business at 85 Baker Street, London in 1922. As the shop flourished, Maugham began decorating, taking on projects in Palm Beach and California. By 1930, she had shops in London, Chicago, and New York.
  Maugham is best-remembered for the all white music room at her house at 213 King's Road in London.  For the grand unveiling of her all white room, Maugham went to the extreme of dipping her white canvas draperies in cement.  The room was filled with massive white floral arrangements and the overall effect was stunning. Although she was known for white rooms, her own drawing room was the only all-white room she ever did.
  Also well-known was Maugham's salon in her villa at Le Touquet, a society resort in France. 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.
  Maugham charged high prices and could be very dictatorial with her clients and employees.  She once told a hesitant client, "If you don't have ten thousand dollars to spend, I don't want to waste my time."
  Maugham popularized mirrored screens, indirect lighting, and plump furniture upholstered in white. She preferred wood furniture to be pickled or stripped, painted, or finished with a secret craquelure technique.
  Maugham's glamorous rooms influenced almost every designer, particularly Elsie de Wolfe, Jean-Michel Frank, and Frances Elkins.
  After Maugham closed her New York shop in 1932, someone suggested that Rose Cumming fill the gap and design white furniture of her own. No, Cumming said, "white was always Syrie's."
  Maugham's daughter Liza married in 1936, and the London house Maugham decorated for her was among her best work. After finishing it, she sold her own house and traveled to India with Elsie de Wolfe "to paint the Black Hole of Calcutta white". Maugham continued decorating, but had already completed her most famous and successful work. Her clients included Wallis Simpson, Marie Tempest, Oveta Culp Hobby, DeWitt Wallace, Elsa Schiaparelli, Capt. Edward Molyneux, Edward James, Mona Williams, Babe Paley, Bunny Mellon, Clare Boothe Luce, Alfred Lunt/Lynn Fontanne, Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll and the Hon. Stephen Tennant. She redecorated The Glen, Scottish home of Christopher Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, who hated the existing Scottish Baronial style of the house.
caption: Drypoint by Paul César Helleu
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