While I wouldn't be the first person to advocate a really rococo decorative style (hell to clean), and I strongly suspect that one person's decadence is another person's idea of terrible taste, it's a joy to turn the pages of Stephen Calloway's latest book with nary a stripped wood floor in sight.
One would expect nothing less from Calloway, who is the sort of chap to sport Edwardian attire and a finely waxed moustache to go to the shops on a wet Wednesday. A design historian, part-time curator of paintings at the V&A and self-confessed aesthete, he chooses to describe himself as "an elderly roué" on the fly leaf of this latest book, and even manages to hold his own in the furthest reaches of the modern world: his email address is "cyberdandy".
Calloway's book is called Divinely Decadent. It's a fitting title for these 200 gold-edged pages detailing the exotic interiors of 50 or so homes from around the world, owned by people with equally luscious names - Ramuntcho de Saint Armand, for example, or (my personal favourite) Rémy Le Fur. What distinguishes these interiors is their effusive style; profusion of artefacts; wanton superfluity of finishes and fabrics and furbelows. They are celebrations of people's desire to acquire, their deep love of stuff, and in some cases of an inability not to add a flourish to anything that isn't actually moving.
In a world where uncluttered surfaces and clean lines are the order of the day, there is something rather wonderfulabout a thickly swagged crimson velvet curtain. And something even more wonderful about a thickly swagged crimson velvet curtain trimmed with mink. You're thinking about covering a part of a wall with crackled glass? What's wrong with doing the entire room, ceiling included, like Niki de St Phalle. Why not park your Harley in the salon, if there's plenty of space? And who says that a seamless blend of surrealism and Second Empire doesn't work?
"The hallmark of the true decadent is that they are not concerned with practicalities," says Calloway, who knows that most visitors to his own home must wonder how on earth he lives in it. It is, he says, like the Sir John Soane Museum, "only with more junk". But then his downstairs neighbour, he adds, has her bed right in the middle of the room which should be the sitting room. "She likes to have an empty room, you see. So the bedroom is just that, completely bare with a Persian rug on the floor. It might sound strange, but when you see it, you think 'how logical'."
Funnily enough, I came to look at this book after visiting an incredible apartment in a part of London I once heard referred to as the SW-small numbers (and I don't think they were talking about Stockwell). It was vast and overwhelmingly modern: a clean, serene 5,000 sq ft of limestone-clad space, broken only by priceless antiques and state-of-the-art technology. No ribbons, satin covers or velvet, then, but without a shadow of a doubt, it was one of the most slyly decadent places I'd ever visted.
Divinely Decadent, By Stephen Calloway, is published by Mitchell Beazley on September 27, priced £30.
