The London mansion flat of Sibyl Colefax designer and tastemaker Wendy Nicholls
Wendy Nicholls of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler recalls a moment of epiphany in her early designing days. ‘I was working for another decorating firm and I remember studying a deep cornice, painted in Victorian bands of colour, in a house that had not been touched since 1840, and thinking, ”I’m out of my depth here. I need to learn more”. That’s when I knew I had to work at Colefax.’ She joined the interior design firm in 1976 and, always passionately interested in buildings and interiors, she continued to broaden her knowledge: ‘Every weekend, without fail, our gang of chums visited country houses. We went to every single one in England – National Trust and other historic houses. We got ourselves into everything. We even bunked each other up through the windows of condemned houses, and had tremendous laughs and larks.’
Wendy’s conversation is still delightfully larky and she is given to aphorisms, such as ‘A Scotch airer is central to life’ and ‘The secret of a happy marriage is separate bathrooms‘ (here she has implemented both). Another of her sayings – ‘Do it well and do it once’ – was her watchword when she and her late husband Julian Dancer moved to this London mansion flat in 1995. It has worn exceedingly well.
‘These tiny Victorian chimneypieces are such piglets,’ she says, standing in her drawing room. ‘But we couldn’t afford to change them.’ So she replaced their floral tiles with slate and commissioned the grisaille wall painting, based on one in a room in Sandemar, the seventeenth-century Swedish manor house. ‘The columns give the chimneypieces a bit more presence,’ she says. ‘And I love the serenity of Swedish interiors. The one colour I don’t enjoy is red, but then one day these two portraits appeared in the Brook Street shop, and I thought ”Be mine”. They’re a brother and sister, in red coats, and they just bucked up the drawing and dining rooms and gave a point to the exercise. Then I was wandering through Olympia and saw that red lacquer table. So practical – if you spill anything, you just wipe it off. So here we are, red all over the place!’
These adjoining rooms, at the end of the corridor that forms the spine of the flat, overlook a tranquil street at the back of the block, while the other rooms look onto the courtyard. In Wendy’s study, a small-repeat, hand-blocked wallpaper by Mauny, of tiny soft-green and tan leaves – the sort you might find on an Indian muslin – makes a perfect background for her collection of engravings of Indian plants. Another beautiful wallpaper, which is in her bathroom, is derived from a small fragment of David Hicks fabric that (with permission) she enlarged, recoloured in blue and white, and had specially printed.
Alexander James
Next door, in her bedroom, walls of pale mauveish grey show off the yellow silk of the four-poster’s simple, unlined curtains. Her shock revelation is that they were made from silk taken from the curtains in the yellow drawing room at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s Brook Street building. That room, with its lacquered buttercup walls and three pairs of massive curtains hung about with passementerie, was a shrine to decorating, an emblem of their grandest classical style. Was it heresy to cut up its curtains? Wendy quickly assures me that these were the last remnants of earlier pairs, which had fallen into shreds.
By contrast, there are no elaborate window treatments in her flat; its curtains are slim and modest, often made from antique textiles, and in her sitting room there are just plain Holland blinds. There are also a number of abstract paintings and prints throughout the flat. ‘I have collected modern art for many years,’ says Wendy, ‘and of course we move with the times.’ She certainly does, decorating as she now does for the children of her first clients.
