Colefax and Fowler: the yellow room that fixed the English style

The English country style is one of the few decorative languages that has never needed updating. It was never a fashion: it was a system, and it was written in a single room in Mayfair.

London, 1930

The house was founded in London in 1930 by Sibyl, Lady Colefax, who designed wallpapers and furnishing fabrics. John Fowler joined her eight years later, in 1938 — hence the double name. In 1944, Lady Colefax sold the business to Nancy Tree, who would become Nancy Lancaster in 1948, and Fowler ran its decoration.

Their partnership lasted more than twenty years and was stormy: Nancy Lancaster's aunt, Nancy Astor, described them as the unhappiest unmarried couple she had ever met. It also produced the most imitated decorative grammar of the twentieth century.

The yellow room

In 1944, the house took a lease on 39 Brook Street, in Mayfair; it would remain there until December 2016. In 1957, Nancy Lancaster sold her London house and rented the flat above the shop for twenty-five years. Fowler persuaded her to paint the large drawing room a bright, forthright, almost aggressive yellow.

This room — the Yellow Room — is probably the most influential interior in the history of English decoration. Everything now called “English country” descends from it: the deliberate mixing of patterns, the faded chintzes, the fabrics that don't quite match, the idea that a room should look as though it had been furnished over three generations rather than bought all at once.

What to look at

Silks, weaves, chintz, sheers and wallpapers. On these materials, the question of copying does not arise as it does with an armchair: a pattern reproduces without difficulty and without illegality. What copies badly, on the other hand, is the printing itself — the ground, the depth of the layers, the way the colour ages. That is why a cheap chintz reveals itself after two years of light, and not in the shop.

Getting there

Colefax and Fowler — 6 rue de l'Abbaye, 75006 Paris. During Paris Design Week.

The Beyit gesture: photograph a piece and scan it — the tool tells you who edits it, at what price, and what else exists around it.