Colour pioneer Rose Cumming, the sheep farmer’s daughter from Australia with a love of brilliant green, who became the go-to interior designer for Hollywood movie stars
The daughter of a sheep farmer who became a celebrated interior designer to the Hollywood elite
‘Either you have a flair for the beautiful,’ Rose Cumming, decorator to the stars during the 1920s and 1930s, once proclaimed, ‘or you haven’t.’ She, naturally, had plenty. This was fortunate, because her path to design was far from straightforward.
Rose was born into a family of prominent Australian sheep farmers in New South Wales in 1887. When she was 30, she boarded a ship with her sister Dorothy, a silent film actress, and set out eastwards, bound for Europe. This was in 1917, the height of WWI, and very few ships were venturing across the Atlantic: they could only make it as far as New York. Still, they found the city suited them, so there they remained, mixing with a fashionable, bright and creative set. It was one of these friends, Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, who Rose approached when it became clear that, if she were to remain in New York, she would need to find a job. After a thoughtful pause, he suggested that she would make a fantastic decorator. ‘Perhaps I would,’ she replied, ‘but first tell me what it is.’
His response is lost to history, but whatever it was, she did not need it: Rose was a natural. She had eclectic tastes and a genius for mixing styles together to create a harmonious whole, laced with touches of surrealism. Chinoiserie with French antiques and frog ornaments; apothecary bottles with chandeliers; chintz with everything. The glamour and drama inherent in her style attracted a celebrity clientele, including silver-screen stars Marlene Dietrich and Norma Shearer, the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and society figures like Jacqueline Onassis and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
She was fearless in her use of colour and materials, favouring those that reflected light. Extravagant use of mirrors and metallic features and finishes allowed her to deploy bold colours without rooms becoming dim or forbidding. Swathes of silver lamé were draped round beds as canopies; sheets of cellophane were hung in place of curtains. When, in 1960, an earnest New York Times interviewer mentioned ‘muted tones’ to her, she screamed. ‘They are my enemies!’ she replied, hand clutched to her chest in horror.
Her home featured a living room with silvery, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper lit with black candles and a library with a purple sofa, red lacquered furniture and brilliant green walls. This latter hue was a recurring motif, appearing often, both on its own and as accents in the floral fabrics she designed. ‘Parrots are blue and green,’ she once announced, ‘why shouldn’t fabrics be?’