Hollywood Regency

i'm laurence llewelyn bowen and i'm about to offer you a unique opportunity glamorous guided studio tour of the history culture and alchemy of a-list aesthetics and the good news is we have a special audience with the father the daughter and the holy ghost of Hollywood Regency style [Music] [Music] do me a favor cast your eye around while you're sitting down are there per trance any pineapple shaped accessories flamingos palm trees or perhaps a banana leaf I am willing to wager a shiny silver shilling that as a person of taste and distinction your home is currently hosting at least an element or two from this list of decorating exotica which means my friend that you have succumbed to the current contagion for Hollywood Regency it is a style that has dominated the luckier corners of lala land since lala land was naught but a twinkle in the eye of the original Hollywood moguls who first set up the tinsel TASMAC dream factories in the Californian desert just before the First World War and it is a style that despite aggressive onslaughts from Brutalism modernism post-modernism minimalism and then simply won't go away ETS as tenacious as eternal as glamour and now in 2020 it is draping it's lovely voluptuous plump yourself over more glossy magazine spreads than ever before and in he's looking lovely and lush thanks to designers like Kelly West LA David Collins parents Llewellyn burn Nicky Haslam and with clients like Madonna Jennifer Lopez and of course I'd like us to explore this extravaganza of eleganza of other work of its in my view three key aesthetic elders as William Billy Haynes Dorothy think pink Draper and Tony more is more Duquette it's big is bold it's dense it's colorful its theatrical its dramatic it's jazz hands it's vampy it's campy and it hits you between the eyes with a giant turn off - all of which I say Olustee whose are from the start Hollywood Regency always was ante good taste leave understatement to the Hamptons Cape Cod and the other East so fabrics faded by decades of wasp sunshine in a subdued palette of old money pastels really no thank you Hollywood Regency is a celebration of lovely shiny new money why have rickety old antiques from the oldie worldly old-world when you can have a Shazam of all the best bits from history that have a vaguely Georgian flavor to them there's something childlike about Hollywood Regency it's how kindergarten kids draw palaces black and white marble floors huge extravagantly draped curtain äj-- and chandeliers the size of a b-52 nose cone and it grows directly out of the faltering first steps of the movie industry this is where it gets its immediacy its impact and its sheer size eNOS until the 1920s Hollywood was a quaint quiet bucolic vista of ramshackle vineyards overnight it had to transform itself into a bow on one week or Alexandria the next Kremlin palace or Windsor Castle so it used ornate door cases fret cut from plywood monumental drapes of common or garden burlap that have been dipped in plaster and painted or an acreage of black no floor brought to an obsidian shine when flooded with yacht varnish period detail and historical accuracy well they weren't welcome at this feast were spectacle scale and above all glamour with of and as the studios churned out historical blockbusters so the property developers churned out block after block of budget-busting suburban villas for the good the bad and the just plain ornery of Hollywood's failing film industry breathing the same aesthetic oxygen as the nearby studios houses were built in a in an array of fantastical fantasy styles too to be 'then Spanish colonial Louie Kalka shows Roman Imperial Venetian Palazzo but but the one style that didn't sell in fantasy land was modern that is the background of the Hollywood Regency style so let us now start on the story of one of its earliest proponents William Haynes eventually William Haynes incorporated would top-to-toe refurbish than White House for Ronnie and Nancy Reagan but in the early 1930s Eames was staring disaster in the face but surprisingly for the time Haynes was uncompromisingly out and proud he had been regarded as one of the brightest stars of the MGM matinee idol firmament until an unfortunate and actually unproven moment on a Santa Monica beach with a neighbor's youngish son and attachment to avoid public scandal the studio wanted to broker a lavender marriage but our Billy refused and in a brave and rather beautiful gesture sashayed away into the arms of his long-term partner Jimmy shields they in fact remained together until Haines's death in 1973 Joan Crawford called there's the strongest marriage in Hollywood actually Haynes had been career moonlighting for years his acting had always been a tad erratic and to fill the time between roles he'd been running a very successful antiques business mongering moldy old European tat to fellow starlets there was an insatiable appetite to see the Hollywood glitterati in natural habitat and Haynes had built a below the counter business helping his fellow actors by sprucing up their duplexes creating perfect glossy domestic backdrops for the schmancy at home features the pressed using his own furniture and all the experience of set dressing that can only come from being well part of that set dressing William Haynes became stratospherically successful so Yabu sucks to you MGM he is Joan Crawford a lifelong friend in an early Haines interior like la Crawford assault bone structure architectural elements in shades of georgeanna providing a climbing frame for some really rather dramatic Regency draping but the sucker punch is that giant maggot of upholstery in front of the mantelpiece Hollywood Regency loved scale and also rather enjoyed strange collisions so amongst all that Ed's ATS historicism why not throw in a huge modern caterpillar for your cocktail party guests to bertrand twitter on in fact big seating was a Hanes trademark look at how he's taken a a perfectly unsuspecting early Georgian Camelback sofa and bent it into a massive chintzy possum I particularly liked what he did for Studio Chief Jack Warner here at Warner Castle schmack having been fired by Warner's bitter business rival Louie B Meyer at MGM Haynes is obviously making sure he's making a design point and as a revenge design goes this is magnificent now I think Hanes was of our Hollywood Regency design Trinity definitely the most sophisticated and certainly the most aesthetically literate his style actually evolved unlike the other two and as he matured he started to create much more acha textual schemes that came to kind of define the luxurious but much more modern design language that the Palm Springs set like Sinatra Monroe and the young Elizabeth Taylor all adored there was plenty of antiques for sure there were artifacts and huge ornamental lamp bases but fewer and fewer historicized references there was lots of plutonic ly expensive finishes but simple architectonic planes and almost sculptural forms and of course as many places as possible to perch with a whiskey sour and a finger sandwich our next luminary is Dorothea Draper and in many ways that Dorothea Draper look is the icon Hollywood Regency look that the world will turn to et's Hollywood Regency my dear pink in tooth and claw poor Dorothy never could keep the lipstick off her teeth bumptious overbearing and very very full of salford Dorothy Draper room is the very doppelganger of its author s it's also where we'll find the Regency in Hollywood Regency now don't go confusing the historical Regency style with good taste it was a hot mess of fabulous hooked on immediate impact shiny gold black and white floors and over scaled over direct curtains textbook Regency style spans the late 1790s until the 1830s it was named after the Prince Regent George who would eventually become George the 4th and George would have loved Hollywood in fact he was pure Hollywood just look at this monument to kitsch that is his Brighton Pavilion now I filmed there so often and I'm still amazed by how wobbly everything is fabulously over embellished but as rickety as a Hispanic daytime soap set anyway Dorothea Draper greedily gobbled up the shapes and the silhouettes and the outlines of classic Regency decorating and then she inflated them to five times their natural size with a Stuart pump she was born into a gilded gated world of upper-middle class prosperity dot very much fitted the identikit cliche of pioneering early 20th century interior decorator hugely well-connected and Bossier than a toddler she'd rather bomb clients over with her tsunami slipstream as she hurtled from one job to another Authority was impregnable her opinions immutable but her smile was as all agreed radiant which is just as well really I get the feeling that nobody was ever brave enough to question her anyway classic Draper needs a huge nurse of scale so all too often the best is to be found in those sprawling resort hotels that sprang up through the 30s and 40s or in the monumentally marbled department stores the plain Jane's from the plains and girls next door from well next door absolutely loved Draper's swooshing staircases trademark ornately decorated door cases it gave their entrances into the hotel lobby or the department store hat boutique a faint reflection of Hollywood glory mirror and lacquer made Draper schemes dazzle and she'd used the broadest of broad brushstrokes to evoke up across social spaces that the suburban market to whom she was speaking wouldn't normally be given access to her color schemes were bold to the point of simplistic and her steamroller in love a black-and-white and a tough love chamomile lotion pink made her look immediately recognizable and therefore in brand terms hugely it's a hearty slightly jolly hockey sticks do-over of classic Hollywood set dressing and it made the aunt small hotel residence or the tiny shoppers is scuttled in and out of a Titanic plaster scroll feel as if they were actually in the movies themselves and the joy of the Draper Empire was that those little Audrey drone aunts could actually take Dorothy home with them because Draper's no nonsense Brooke no dissent opinions on taste style and frilly pail nuts could be bought by the yard of the magazine stand or the bookstore and her frankly carnivorous looking fabric designs also came by the yard from the hardware store it is her High Street Hollywood Regency that we today still see cluttering up our charity shops with white painted wrought iron telephone tables and gilt pineapple ice buckets our last musketeer of the Hollywood Regency the final person I'd love you to meet the Holy Ghost is our most thoughtful soulful and craftily Artie exponent yet Tony Duquette started in advertising he specialized in shop windows and display he freelanced for Billy Haines and then he went on to become right hand handbag carrier and aesthetic factotum for the great I'll see you dwarf she was credited with being the 20th century's first proper interior designer thereby making her the first-ever interior designer transatlantic LC slithered from Belgravia to Fifth Avenue on a snail trail of ghastly good taste and hands on Tony delighted her with the pseudo baroque sconces and Rococo trinket boxes that he made from shells beer bottle tops semi-precious stones plaster alabaster and sticking-plaster probably with the famed DeWolf wind in his sails Tony was quickly pounced on by Hollywood it was his whimsical romanticism and his fiddly twiddly Faerieland confections because they were the perfect dressing for those vast dreamscape dance numbers that were beginning to pepper the musicals of the 40s and 50s he brought a new palette of inspirations to Hollywood Regency style that drew on much more sophisticated European precedence from classic Regency and the Brighton Pavilion Tony lifted a love of the exotic and he filled rooms with gilt bamboo screens and brightly colored porcelain mandarins that nodded at you as you passed he loved domed four-poster beds and encrustations of broken mirror coral and glass beads like the original Regency designers he he used his love of richly colored and patterned materials like malachite lapis a mother-of-pearl but he also introduced abalone shells from the Pacific which he used as a an iridescent mosaic across an entire wall to kep rooms always look very difficult to dust and there's nothing more decadent than dust Venice with its sequins it's carnival and its opera box architecture was also an important element for Tony and his new wife Elizabeth as was Paris where they'd lived for a few years and then he took from the modern world surrealism or more accurate Dali ISM Salvador Dali was a highly cultivated man annoying beyond belief in a frightful show of but interwoven through his elephants on stilts art was a passion for the quirky at corners of 18th century design history which was a peccadillo that was shared by and very much refined by Tony Duquette by the time that Tony was designing for Vincenzo Minnelli and his daughter Liza and Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor all the more arty end of the Hollywood a-list he was creating a star language that floated through a constellation of eclectic Starbright influences and he was in the old school tradition a Renaissance man and he made by hand much of the sprinkle chisel that defined his style he was the one that made the gilded plaster monkeys that held the wire coat hangers bent to look like Venetian candelabra he designed the gowns in which he wanted his glamorous clients to greet their guests and the jewelry in which they were to glitter he decorated their parties he arranged their flowers he became impresario of their entertainments he was the one that gave Hollywood Regency a boho hippy shot in the arm that lifted its stylistic fortunes after that the heavy bush war affectation of hands of Dorothy Draper he found room in this dressing up box style to shoehorn in the oriental the Rococo and after he designed the smash hit Broadway production of Camelot even delicate Sleeping Beauty medievalism what is fascinating that although all three of our Regency rigs are dead each still has a thriving company an inked in their name so in the perfectly arranged Valhalla of American decorating these three may be enthroned Cora netted and togood in posthumous majesty but back here on earth mortals may worship at the altar by offering burnt dollars as sacrifice to their brands there we are Hollywood Regency and after all of that I don't have actually [Music]

Channel: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's School of Flock

Views: 10,059

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Id: 5YnRKCruSuo

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020