IMAGES CREDIT Henry Bourne
Victoria Press’s Blithe Spirit
By Marella
Caracciolo Chia
April 7,
2015
A true aesthete with a taste for imperfection, the
former fashion designer creates her decorating masterpiece — frayed carpets and
all — in a storied London townhouse.
According
to Victoria Press, the golden rule of good decoration is to “just shut up and
stay put. If you learn to listen, the house will give you cues to what needs to
be done.” So says the 88-year-old self-taught aesthete and furniture
connoisseur, sitting in her house on Cheyne Walk, one of London’s most historic
streets, which everyone from Mick Jagger to Laurence Olivier to J.M.W. Turner
has called home at some point. Press’s residence is at number 4, the five-story
Queen Anne house where the novelist George Eliot briefly lived and died in
1880. In 1982, the coveted property was snatched up by Press, then married to
Sydney Press, a South African tycoon who founded Edgars, the largest department
store chain in South Africa.
By the time
she arrived in Cheyne Walk, Press (she divorced Sydney in the mid-’80s but
still goes by her married name) was ready for the challenge of making her own
version of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Over the years, she had
renovated a brownstone next door to the Frick museum in New York, a Cape Dutch
house in Johannesburg, a Modernist-inspired farmhouse in the South African
countryside and two Regency-style homes in London. The Manhattan-born Press,
who had started off working in fashion in the 1940s under the legendary
American designer Claire McCardell, educated herself by going to museums,
reading design books, talking to antiques dealers and enrolling in art history
classes. (She juggled her studies with the raising of her seven children with
Sydney.) Furniture, mostly English, and Chinese porcelain, especially Blanc de
Chine, became her fields of expertise. “Of all my clients, Victoria is the most
knowledgeable in this particular style of Chinese porcelain,” says Ben
Janssens, a London-based dealer of Asian art. In fact, her Blanc de Chine
collection, most of which is now in her house on the Grand Canal in Venice, is
one of the most impressive in the world.
The house
on Cheyne Walk, with its perfectly intact, if fading, early-18th-century
interiors, presented Press with a multitude of architectural and decorative
cues. The main feature is a grand staircase, its original wooden balustrade
still intact. The walls of the entry hall are covered in murals depicting moody
landscapes by John Devoto, a Baroque painter, and on the ceiling Venus rises
from the sea, the brainchild of James Thornhill, an 18th-century English
artist. These works inspired Press to recreate the original color combinations
of the house. She enlisted Wally Carvell, the painter whom she has been working
with for 37 years. “Let’s make these rooms look 400 years old!” she commanded.
While Carvell glazed the living-room walls to give them a muddy patina, Press
took to scratching the layers of paint from the other rooms to uncover the
original colors: forest green in the dining room, pale ocher in the main hall
and powder blue in the master bedroom.
Press
scoured the auction houses, antiques shops and warehouses in London at a time
when one could still find a wicked bargain. “I love things,” she says in her
husky New York accent. Among her most cherished possessions is a small
collection of pieces by Daniel Marot, the French architect and furniture
designer who was on the forefront of the opulent Louis XIV style. These include
a finely engraved commode in her design studio and a pair of appliqués that she
placed above the mantelpieces in the drawing room.
Press has
never been tied down by one style or genre of decorating. She hired the Italian
architect Marco Zanuso to build her farmhouse in South Africa entirely out of
hand-cut stones. The modernist layout, with its large geometric buttresses
jutting out into the landscape, inspired her to fill it with furnishings by
Franco Albini and Giò Ponti. She hired the legendary industrial designer
Achille Castiglioni to make custom pieces for the house, including an elaborate
stereo system. Pietro Porcinai, the Italian landscape designer created wild
gardens of indigenous plants for her. “I liked him because he understood the
importance of including the house in the landscape,” she says, “and he
entertained the children by standing on his head.”
“Victoria
is someone who honors the spirit of the place, wherever that may be,” says the
designer and opera director Patrick Kinmonth, a frequent guest. Probably the
figure that has most informed Press’s narrative for the Cheyne Walk home is
that of Eliot. The novelist had first seen the house in the spring of 1880,
shortly after her marriage to John Walter Cross, 20 years her junior, and had
been captured by its quaintness. Eliot, who by then was not only one of the
most revered authors in Britain but also among the wealthiest, commissioned a
decorator to make the house comfortable with her “wallings of books” and “old
things.” But less than three weeks after moving into their new home, Eliot fell
ill with a throat infection and died, leaving her husband bereft and, as he
wrote, “alone in this new house we meant to be so happy in.”
This sense
of wistful nostalgia seems to be woven into Press’s decoration: She has filled
the house with disheveled sofas, wilting flowers, worn velvets and carpets.
“Imperfection is what makes these interiors so inspiring,” says her jewelry
designer friend Vicki Sarge. She has a point. Despite the grand proportions of
the house and the museum-quality pieces, there is a work-in-progress atmosphere
that makes people feel immediately comfortable in these surroundings. “These
are not stable interiors,” says Kinmonth. “Victoria is constantly moving
furniture around and adding new pieces.” Or making them lovingly imperfect.
There was
the time she brought back two enormous, cheap, fake Blanc de Chine-like vases
from Venice. One afternoon, as she was sitting there with Kinmonth, Press
noticed they were too white to bear so she gave him a pencil and asked, “Oh
darling, please do some crackling effects for me, will you?” He complied.
Another time she woke up in the morning to find a crack in the ceiling above
her bed. Did she call in the builders? Never. It was much easier to cover the
offending line with a Baroque wooden frame and ask Carvell to paint something
pretty inside. Even the stunning staircase runner, which looks as though it has
been here forever, is made up of bits and pieces of tattered old carpets she
bought for a song and sewed into one long piece.
This
hands-on, practical approach may stem from her years as a fashion designer. As
Press explained: “The most useful thing I learned from McCardell was never make
a dress without good pockets.” A few years ago, Press produced a handwritten
booklet on the process of decorating 4 Cheyne Walk. She gave the design
manifesto to her children. In it, she wrote: “I know you are well aware of what
I do, but I want to explain why I do it. It amounts to an overpowering horror
of anything I consider unaesthetic. Since my life is dominated by beauty, I
have fallen into collecting beauty around me.”
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