Queer Places:
91 Pimlico Rd, London SW1W 8PH, UK
Geoffrey Bennison (1921
– October 8, 1984) ranks among England’s most influential designers, defying conventional notions of style to conjure up magnificent settings for discerning clients who loved his theatrical and romantic sensibility. The master of the layered look, he used antique textiles with his own fabrics to achieve a complex mix of scale, pattern, and color in inventive shades such as his evocative Red Riding Hood Red and Prussian Blue. His talent for combining eclectic objects, his unerring eye, and his deep knowledge of antiques earned him a reputation for sophisticated originality equaled by very few.
Geoffrey
Bennison was born in Ashton- under-Lyne, in the north of England near Manchester, where his father, Arthur, was a building contractor. After the elder Mr. Bennison's death, his wife, Ethel, ran a small fabrics business.
In 1940, Bennison entered the Slade School of Art in England and excelled as a painter and stage designer. Later he contracted tuberculosis, and spent eight years - from 1942 to 1950 - in sanitariums in England and Switzerland.
He returned to England in the early 1950s and opened a modest stall in London's Portobello Road antiques market. This was followed by various shops in the Islington and Pimlico areas. Although his reputation as a designer grew, Bennison continued to keep an antiques shop. At his death, he had a shop at 91 Pimlico Road.
Bennison took up decorating in the early 1960s, when a friend asked him to design London’s first sophisticated Chinese restaurant, the Lotus House. Among its fashionable regulars were model Jean Shrimpton and her boyfriend, actor
Terence Stamp, the latter of whom hired Bennison to furnish his Mayfair flat. Thrilled with the results, Stamp called upon Bennison yet again when he upgraded to a dazzling set of rooms at Albany, one of the city’s smartest addresses, where the decorator installed 18th-century furniture, bookcases filled with gilded leather-bound books, and engravings of British monarchs.
At first his name was known only to the cognoscenti of the decorating world, but as the 1980s progressed into the 1990s, a gradual undercurrent grew, at first barely discernible, its ripples widening at the watershed of the twenty-first century. Now, thirty years after his untimely death, Geoffrey Bennison is recognized as one of the greatest interior designers of the twentieth century. He ignored the accepted views on style and taste to evoke a particular ambience, combining antique textiles with his own hand-printed fabrics to create richly beautiful interiors for his sophisticated and discerning clients. His gifts as an interior designer were based on solid foundations – formal art school training, a deep knowledge of antiques, and an unerring eye. His flair and originality ensured that he was in constant demand as a decorator, with a legacy that lives on to this day.
A PAIR OF REGENCY MAHOGANY AND PARCEL-GILT SETTEES, IN THE MANNER OF MOREL AND HUGHES, CIRCA 1820, THE FABRIC SUPPLIED BY GEOFFREY BENNISON, PROVENANCE
Captain J.S. Frazer; Christie's, London, 20 December 1950, lot 234.
The Collections of Peter Glenville and Hardy William Smith; Christie's, New York, 18 October 2003, lot 75.
Acquired by Ann Getty from the above.
A LACQUERED-BRASS FIVE BAY BOOKCASE
DESIGNED AND SUPPLIED BY GEOFFREY BENNISON, CIRCA 1974, THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE LORD WEIDENFELD GBE: A LIFE OF IDEALS AND IDEAS
Known primarily to a select roster of clients, Bennison created dramatic, yet eminently comfortable and liveable rooms in which rich and varied textures and objects were juxtaposed.
''Geoffrey Bennison was primarily an artist,'' said John Richardson, the art historian and a friend of the designer for more than 40 years. ''He had a marvelous sense of color, a unique sense of tone and a feeling for drama, which enabled him to evoke an atmosphere that was both opulent and cozy.''
The first apartment Bennison decorated was in New York in the 1950s for
Peter Glenville, the movie director. Soon thereafter, he designed the London home of Lord Weidenfeld, the publisher. He was then asked to work for the younger members of the Rothschild family and decorated the Paris apartment of Baron David de Rothschild and his wife, Olimpia. The decorator
last completed the New York apartment of Baron Guy de Rothschild and his wife, Marie-Helene.
Famously picky about his clients, Bennison accepted only 11 major commissions, along with three of his own homes. To win his approval, prospective clients had to be charming, sympathetic, and prepared to spend lavishly for exquisite objects, textiles, and skilled craftsmanship. “They had to have the handbag,” Newberry says, using Bennison’s favorite euphemism for vast wealth. “He didn’t want to be restricted by a budget.”
For Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild (niece of
Hélène van Zuylen), the doyenne of French high society, Bennison transformed both Dar Zuylen, her palace in Marrakech, and a glamorous Manhattan duplex, where he painted the library a voluptuous dark red he dubbed “sanguine crayon.” In Paris he designed a magnificent apartment for Princess Firyal of Jordan, creating a chinoiserie dining room with faux-marbled walls inset with antique black-and-gold-lacquer panels.
All of Geoffrey’s interiors have a sense of relaxed grandeur. A notable
exception was the small terraced house in London’s Belgravia district that he
outfitted for Miranda Morley, a passionate horticulturist and garden designer,
who is now the Duchess of Beaufort. Taking his cue from her love of nature,
Bennison cocooned the drawing room in one of his own floral fabrics, a
glorious tree-of-life motif with a subtle pink background. ''The man was a genius in that he was able to create an incredible theatrical background for people to live in,'' said Mario Buatta, the New York interior decorator.
''He was definitely one of the most prominent decorators in the world today,'' said Lou Gropp, editor in chief of House & Garden magazine. ''It was his way with artisans and craftsmen that gave him such a unique place in the field of decoration.''
Bennison's monograph, written by Gillian Newberry, the head of Bennison Fabrics, and published by Rizzoli, Geoffrey Bennison: Master Decorator, shines an overdue spotlight on the man and his influential projects. A natural comedian, the gossipy and erudite designer kept his devoted circle of clients and friends in stitches. One of those confidants was Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson, who was first captivated by Bennison’s remarkable talents when they were fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Richardson wrote the book’s affectionate preface, hilariously describing the decorator in his later years as the “bouffant Tiresias of latter-day Pimlico—bewigged, caftaned, and outrageous.”
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