Watercolour, 'Design for a drawing room', drawn for William Henry Haynes & Co., late 1920s

Drawing of a design for a living room. Double-doors at far left, a pottery lamp on a side table, a Japanese-style screen and blue sofa at left, a pottery lamp on a reproduction candle stand and an armchair at right. Rug on the floor. Walls are covered in Georgian-style panelling.

By the 1920s it was possible to obtain from firms of interior decorators whole panelled rooms, fully furnished in the 'early Georgian' style. This example, shown in a drawing made for the catalogue of a small interior design firm, reduces to a manageable middle class formula the more elaborate schemes of bigger firms. The furniture is a mixture of modest old pieces and modern reproductions, notably the sofa based on a famous seventeenth-century example at Knole in Kent. The modern pottery lamps stand on antique tea tables and a reproduction candle stand. The wall panelling is new, but is inspired by the quantities of old panelling then available from demolished Georgian houses. It is shown without paint, a fashion partly inspired by the display in the Victoria and Albert museum of panelling which had been stripped of its original paint for instructional purposes.
[Michael Snodin, 'British Design at Home', p.111]

The decoration firm of William Henry Haynes & Co. offered the latest in traditional period schemes, revived and adapted for the smaller domestic environments but with modern touches. The early Georgian panelling, including an elaborate fireplace, is stripped in the fashion of the unhistorical preference of the day. This taste was influenced by a display of 18th-century panelling at the V&A in the mid-1920s, in which the paint on the panelling had been intentionally removed to reveal the surface of the wood and the technique of the carving underneath.

E.6-1977