The singular interior design of Eltham Palace was once British art deco’s best-kept secret. Behind the former Tudor palace’s curved limestone entrance walls, lacquered dusty pink and mint-green rooms champion a neat 1930s modernism. The design was masterminded by one of British society’s legendary figures of the 20th century, Lady Virginia Courtauld, the Romanian-born, twice-married socialite and peer of King Edward VIII’s controversial wife, Wallis Simpson. Newly married, in 1933 Stephen and Virginia Courtauld took out a ninety-nine-year lease on the palace in London’s Greenwich neighborhood that had originally been built in 1066. The illustrious, art-collecting couple immediately set about adding their well-traveled eye to the historic property.
The newlyweds took on the property with the stipulation that they could add a modern extension to the architecture of the building, which had been redeveloped periodically throughout its history. It was no surprise to the Courtaulds’ social circle—which included Queen Mary, composer Igor Stravinsky, singer Gracie Fields, and politicians Rab Butler and Leo Amery—that the glamorous couple didn’t want to follow British tradition in making their mark on Eltham Palace, which was still mired in the remnants of late-Edwardian design and preoccupied with the giddy romanticism of art nouveau.
The Courtaulds designed the extension to contrast with the antiquity of the space, which had hosted a young Henry VIII at the height of its late-Tudor glory. The extension was overseen by British architects John Seely and Paul Edward Paget, who had remodeled neighboring Lambeth Palace after World War I, and Virginia worked alongside the designer Piero Malacrida de Saint-August to design interiors that both impressed and inspired.
Saint-August had a reputation that preceded him even more than Virginia’s did. His playboy and dandy characteristics were legendary in London, and he and the countess formed a formidable pair, with the designer encouraging his client to take the maximalist route across the board. For Virginia’s primary bedroom, they fashioned maple veneer walls and matching boudoir powder tables, a sprawling ensuite bathroom that included marble-lined walls and a statue of Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul, and a walk-in wardrobe with the best views of the garden in the whole palace. The dining room boasted rosewood inlay panels complemented by thick pink curtains, and two bathrooms covered with floor-to-ceiling turquoise and gold tiles each featured gilt mirrors and a marble bath.
The Courtaulds knew the benefits of impressing through the extravagances of the home. In their social circle, Lady Virginia was considered ahead of her time and won both admiration and scorn for her approach to fashion—androgynous and often borrowing her husband’s wardrobe. With their extension of Eltham Palace, the Courtaulds played with bold new frontiers in British interior design. Edwardian designers Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Louis Comfort Tiffany had filled homes with heavy wood-paneled furniture and large classical lighting, but Virginia turned to the buzzy furniture designers and interiors makers of the moment for her rooms, calling on young artist Marion Dorn to execute Moroccan-inspired textile designs conjured from Virginia’s time living in Tangiers, and the sculptor Gilbert Ledward to create his bold nude reliefs.
Swedish creative Rolf Engströmer designed a sleek entrance hall, still hidden by the grand stone Tudor entryway, that featured a wood inlay Roman soldier alongside the London skyline of St. Paul’s Cathedral and Big Ben. In front of it, Virginia placed a huge abstract circular rug alongside rosewood and leather armchairs to greet guests. Stained-glass windows by George Kruger Gray installed in the entrance hallways in 1936 nodded to the palace’s British heritage. Throughout the house, tchotchkes from the couple’s various trips abroad to Egypt, South Africa, Ceylon, and the South China Sea covered all available surfaces. Virginia’s ring-tailed lemur Mah-Jongg, whom she had bought from Harrod’s in 1923 and who accompanied her throughout London, even had his own room fitted with bamboo wallpaper and tiny radiators so he didn’t get cold.
The house and its lacquered rooms were designed for entertaining grand events that came with scrutiny and the severe, piercing eye of the British upper class. It was a gaze that Virginia suffered under, despite her consistent attempts to please. In the dining room, next to sideboards heaving with champagne and glacé pineapples, guests would listen with gossipy curiosity to Virginia’s stories while eating off Meissen china. After dinner, guests would be led to the map room, a small space covered in floor-to-ceiling world maps rendered in leather.
Since opening to the public in the 1990s, Eltham Palace has become one of London’s most-loved places to see art deco rendered with an edgy subtlety—a quality pioneered by Virginia Courtauld that many examples of the era lack. An adorned bathroom that once raised eyebrows at dinner parties is now the most popular room, along with Virginia’s dressing room, whose pomp and grandeur have made an urban legend of Virginia herself.
Grace Banks is a London-based journalist and editor. She is the author of Play with Me: Dolls - Women - Art.
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