London Pride

摘要

It's still kind of thrilling," designer Suzanne Rheinstein observes of a favored interior: the London drawing room of best-dressed hostess and amateur historian Evangeline Bruce, featured in AD in March 1991. Decorated about two decades earlier by John Fowler, a partner in the blue-chip British firm of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, it had a Francophile air and understandably so. Bruce's late husband, David, had been U.S. ambassador to Paris (among other spots); her favorite year was 1795, a tumultuous period when the Bourbon monarchy collapsed; and Fowler was mad about Marie Antoinette. "The hand-painted silk cushions, the Louis XVI furniture, the palette of melons, lemons, corals, and blues. That lightheartedness made a big impression on me," the Los Angeles-based Rheinstein says of the Braces' confectionary digs in Albany, London's most exclusive apartment house. "It had so much charm, and everything in it was wonderful of its kind." Notably the fantastical oyster silk draperies frothing from ceiling to floor, the fabric cut with scalloped pinking shears, a detail that Fowler had spotted on an antique dress in a museum. Rheinstein, smitten, took the bait. "I got this very, very, very elderly lady out of retirement who had a pinking machine," the decorator recalls, "and had her make curtains for my daughter's room with a Colefax and Fowler glazed chintz that was so shiny you could practically see your reflection."