Monika Apponyi
Interior designer who forged a reputation around the world with her eye for tradition and comfort
MONIKA APPONYI, the interior designer who has died from cancer aged 72, combined creative talent with an eye for detail, hard work, efficiency and plain dealing that over 30 years brought her commissions from around the world and earned her the regard of professionals in her field.
Known principally for her work in private houses, she undertook projects all over Europe, as well as on the East Coast of America. Rooms she created were featured in journals and books about interior design and won awards.
“Grand but not pompous, classical but not stiff, comfortable but not fussy or overcrowded,” is how one commentator described her style. Sensitive to trends, she adapted readily from the opulent interiors of 1980s taste to the sharper and less elaborate look that followed.
Whatever the mood she sought to conjure, she achieved it with an eye to tradition and comfort, often with continental accents.
She was meticulous in the preparation of presentations and estimates for clients, and once a general idea had been established she worked best when she was left to immerse herself in the details of a project and to get on with the job without too much interference.
Where a less thorough designer might, say, provide a joiner with a photograph of the kind of bookcases desired for a particular space, Monika Apponyi would produce precise drawings of exactly the bookcases she wanted.
Her underlying aim, she said, was to make a house work for the client; and while relishing the creative side, she also enjoyed dealing with builders and artisans.
She was born Monika Luger on August 13 1945 at Bad Goisern, Austria, the elder child and only daughter of Alfred Luger, a soldier turned businessman, and his wife Helga (née Steinert). She attended schools in Goisern and Vienna and, for a year on exchange, America.
She recalled that as a child she wanted to be an interior designer and was always fiddling around with her room. Interior design as an occupation was then all but unheard of in Austria and her father doubted if Monika could make a career of it.
In 1969 she married Count Alfred Apponyi de Nagy-appony, and over the next decade lived in Vienna, Frankfurt and London. In London, by now a mother, she attended the Inchbald School of Design and in 1979 established Double Décor, her first company.
Her first commission was a flat in Montague Square, in the Marylebone area of London, with a budget of £30,000. She set out to prove her worth. “I did my absolute best,” she said. “I worked myself to death.” The result was a happy client and a business that took off.
During a spell in Frankfurt she set up, in partnership with Bergit (“Mausi”) Countess Douglas, MM Design, the name of her practice from that time on. She returned to London in the mid-1980s and in time earned a place in House & Garden’s list of top 100 designers.
Two years running, in 1990 and 1991, rooms she created for the British Interior Design Exhibition in London were voted Favourite Room by the visiting public.
This was all the more remarkable given the contrasting moods of the two rooms: in 1990, a sumptuous red sitting-room with velvets, silk damask and antique textiles; in 1991, a bedroom of startling lightness and restraint. The bedroom also won an award from House & Garden.
After her marriage ended, Monika Apponyi met Henry von Eichel, who ran a hops business in America. They married in 2004. After living between Washington DC and Europe, in 2009 they settled in an old house by the Irrsee in Austria.
In 2007 Monika Apponyi was joined at MM Design by her daughter Geraldine. Together, they edited the book Living in Style London (2012).
Kind, generous and steadfast in friendship, Monika Apponyi could on occasion be fierce. To get into a conversation with her about politics or, worse, politicians, was not for the faint-hearted.
Henry von Eichel died in 2012. Monika Apponyi’s daughter, her son, Alexander, and three stepchildren survive her. A younger son died in infancy.
Monika Apponyi, born August 13 1945, died February 25 2018