This interior was originally the Drawing Room of No.11 Henrietta Place, part of a terrace designed by James Gibbs and built between 1722 and 1727 on the London estate of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford. He bought the leases of four plots in the new street, using one for his own house and three, including number II, four houses for letting.
Although the exterior of the house was plain, the ceiling of this room was elaborately decorated. the main panels may be by the Italian-born painter Vincenzo Damini, the plasterer decorated by the Swiss-born plasterworkers who frequently worked with Gibbs.
My name is David Mlinaric, and I'm an interior designer and decorator. I've always been involved mainly with buildings of historic interest in England and abroad. And in the context of the V& A British Galleries, I'm part of the design team, with special responsibility for decoration, which specifically includes the period rooms. There are certainly advantages that make it easier to work in a museum room, the main one of which is that you don't have to think of the inhabitants' requirements; you don't have to concern yourself with whether they can watch the television; you don't have to hide a lot of present day things that people consider to be essential. Some of the effects that you see were researched, and some of them were invented as being appropriate to the atmosphere and character of the room in the context of its time. We know that the walls of the room were covered in cloth; we know that the curtains at the windows were probably in a similar cloth, and the doors were ivory and white. We don't know that the walls were blue, but we know that at that time this kind of blue was very popular with people of this status. There's an element of show about this room; it is quite elaborate, it's quite showy. I should think that the man who made it wanted to show that he was in tune with the current fashions and decorative arts of his time. I would be very content to live in the Henrietta Street room, because of the sense of scale and proportion which I find particularly harmonious; the relationship of the doors to the windows and to the fireplace; the height of the dado rail; the colour stretching from the frieze down to the dado rail; and I personally very much like the blue.
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