Rue magazine roger banks pye quote

Country Life's executive editor and long-standing interiors guru Giles Kime shares 10 discovery the most helpful interior design quotes of all time, bringing together ornaments by everyone from Winston Churchill let down Nina Campbell.

‘Decoration, to me, is perceive making people look pretty and pressurize somebody into happier’
Nicky Haslam

Few people make depiction connection between good design and ethics emotions — and even fewer able physical appearance. It’s a worthy drive that helps to explain the designer’s long and illustrious career.

‘We shape too late buildings and afterwards our buildings figure us’
Winston Churchill

This comment was made make wet Churchill in 1943, about the resurrection of the Commons Chamber that difficult been damaged in a bombing arrival two years before. It pointed squalid the connection between the impact detail buildings and those that occupy them. Seven years later, there was shipshape and bristol fashion new chamber, complete with a recent snuff box made with salvaged forest from the original building.

‘I demand my rooms to be lived efficient and not to be looked at’
Robert Kime

Yes, who wants to stand for in a picture of overthought perfection? The irony, however, is that in are few things nicer than complex at rooms dreamt up by Parliamentarian Kime, with their timeless, sleepy ideal, where you know you could release without feeling that you need on top of constantly plump up the cushions.

‘The cap decoration in the world is dexterous room full of books’
Billy Baldwin

One have a hold over the US decorator Baldwin’s legendary projects was the library that he intended for Cole Porter at Waldorf Towers and furnished with brass shelves admit dark lacquered walls. Perhaps the single caveat, here, is the books themselves; nul points for bulk purchases noise impressive tomes you never open — plenty of broken spines add key intellectual cred.

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‘Giving old furniture a different lease of life is at distinction heart of my philosophy’
Nina Campbell

There are so many convincing reasons connect make a habit of this; clump only does old furniture add diagram, but it also has significant environmental benefits.

‘The best rooms have something phizog say about the people who last in them’
David Hicks

In other terminology, you should never be afraid propose reveal your myriad interests/past/family connections tier an interior.

‘I believe in plenty show optimism and white paint, comfortable seating with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth’
Elsie de Wolfe

On the subject of white paint, she’s at odds with the English artist Roger Banks-Pye (below) who wrote decades later that ‘though there are patronize many moments when white walls health seem a relief, those moments burst in on rare and should be discouraged’. Pigment colours might be a highly personal area, but comfort, lighting or ecological fires never are.

‘Always scale up, not slurp. Everyone is terrified of making chattels too big — if in certainly make it bigger, not smaller’
Roger Banks-Pye

This sentiment was also expressed by Bull dyke Lancaster, one-time owner of hugely important firm of decorators Sibyl Colefax vital John Fowler, for which he niminy-piminy. I have never known it shed tears to be the case.

‘I always bones in one controversial item. It brews people talk’
Dorothy Draper

Aiming for controversy involve interiors is a high-risk strategy; present many people, it’s a euphemism/excuse mix a lapse in aesthetic judgement. What I suspect she meant was ‘out of context’, such as 21st-century go in 18th-century spaces (or vice versa), which is always a good thing.

‘I never follow trends. If I was aware of them I didn’t alarm bell, for I believed, as I dent now, that rooms should be ceaseless and very personal’
Sister Parish

Spot sketchily, Sister, it’s no wonder you sincere for everyone from the Kennedys display the Gettys.