4/15/2024 0 Comments King size poster bedRead More Rita Notes: how to choose bedlinen ‘It fits floor to ceiling in our small cottage and feels almost like an organic part of the room,’ explains Benedict. Antiques expert Benedict Foley, of Foley and Prin, and his partner Daniel Slowik, of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, own the slender 17th-century cobalt-blue four poster restyled for the aesthete Cecil Beaton by the interior designer Syrie Maugham. The interior designer Veere Grenney is all for them: ‘Four-posters are so glamorous and everybody always says how well they have slept in them.’ They are wonderful for spare rooms, he observes, because sleeping in them for the first time is like ‘a holiday or a treat’. Happily, the four-poster has gone on adapting with the times, through the chintz-frilled mahogany hippos of our Victorian ancestors to contemporary models of utility and beauty. In the 21st century, country houses are ‘settled’ places, enfolding nature and entailing love and childbirth, family and companionship, and thousands of hours of life-enhancing sleep. There is no place for such ostentation now. In his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh stages the end-of-an-era demise of Lord Marchmain in one of these – ‘a vast velvet tent like the Baldachino at St Peter’s’ – with columns of twisted gilt and velvet and a canopy crowned with plumes of dyed feathers. This design reached its costly climax with the ceiling-scraping 18th-century confections created for England’s grandest stately homes by Chippendale and Sheraton, as swiftly obsolete as the fashions and lifestyles they serviced. From practical medieval plank beds enclosed in woollen curtains, they evolved into the Tudor four-poster decorated with fertility symbols or heraldic beasts and lidded by a tester. Beds have been important heirlooms ever since furniture was invented: William Shakespeare notoriously bequeathed only his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife.
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