Back to simplicity
Colin Amery
MLINARIC ON DECORATING by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric Frances Lincoln, £35, pp. 320, ISBN 9780711225411 ✆ £28 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Iwish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with it at the dining-room table, where I discovered the rather encouraging information, as I looked at the paint peeling from my Doric columns, that he, the man I had always thought of as the great high priest of the perfect interior, was in fact the begetter of the decorating style known as ‘shabby-chic’. That was at the beginning of his designing career, when England was emerging from austerity, hedge-funds had scarcely been invented and owners of crumbling old houses weren’t sure whether to prop them up or tear them down. He showed the world that it was possible to improve your surroundings without necessarily spending a fortune. Like the wonderful and much missed Mariga Guinness, who made Irish Georgian chic with economy, Mlinaric developed an eye for beautiful, simple furniture and inexpensive textiles and created a palette of restrained elegance.
Mlinaric decided early on in life (he was born in 1939 to an English mother and a Yugoslavian father) that he cared about buildings more than anything else. When he announced to his headmaster at Downside that he wanted to be a decorator he was firmly told, ‘Interior decoration: that’s not a real profession’. So he was advised to study architecture at the Bartlett School of University College, London, the last bastion of the Beaux Arts teaching method, where students studied architectural history and learned not only drawing but also the ancient and forgotten art of sciagraphy, which teaches you how shadows are cast and the effect they have on architecture.
Mlinaric, as all his friends will tell you, is modest and quiet. He has often been asked why he didn’t write a book before this. He says that he has always been too busy decorating or that it was too early in his career. When he ‘retired’ from his firm (he now works solo for selected clients) he started to write, but he disliked having to use the first person so much — ‘the word “I” appeared in every sentence’ — that he had to find a co-author. It was a good move to write this huge book in partnership with Mirabel Cecil; it is a duet that works.
The story unfolds chronologically. We see the neophyte exploring the Continent, drawing and painting in Rome and finding himself immediately at home in the shop, on the rue Jacob in Paris, where the antiquaire and decorator, Madeleine Carstaing (1894-1992) ran a salon, arranged her room-settings and put into practice her strong belief that creating interiors was a skill as rewarding as writing poetry. It was after only a short spell working for the decorator, Michael Inchbald, and the architect, Dennis Lennon, that Mlinaric set up on his own with some backing from a client. In decorating, as in architecture, everything depends on the quality of your client list and Mlinaric’s is sans pareil.
But he started modestly and it is his diligent hard work and measured applica tion that has satisfied clients as demanding as Lord Rothschild at Waddesdon and Spencer House, a Rolling Stone in France and a duchess or two at Chatsworth.
What is not stated but emerges discreetly is the charmed circle of friends, dealers and clients around Mlinaric, who know, help and recommend each other. They all have similar taste and judgment — Christopher Gibbs, Piers von Westenholz and the late Geoffrey Bennison are all acknowledged presences in these pages. Historians and collectors too have helped Mlinaric behind the scenes, especially when he is working in important National Trust houses, at the National Gallery, the V & A’s British Galleries or restoring the interior of the Royal Opera House. There is a respect for history and for craftsmanship in his work, and this thorough book is very fair in acknowledging that much of his success is due to highly qualified experts.
This beautiful book is also a social history of a certain fortunate milieu at a certain moment of growing prosperity. It is detailed in such a way that you can learn from it how to make the world a more beautiful place. I was touched at the end of the book — after we have swept through embassies, Italian castles and urbane apartments — to read that Mlinaric feels we need to learn again an appreciation of simplicity. As ever, he is in tune with the times. q
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