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Mlinaric on Decorating

Back to simplicity

Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric
Frances Lincoln, 320pp, £35,

Colin Amery

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric

I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with it at the dining-room table, where I discovered the rather encouraging information, as I looked at the paint peeling from my Doric columns, that he, the man I had always thought of as the great high priest of the perfect interior, was in fact the begetter of the decorating style known as ‘shabby-chic’. That was at the beginning of his designing career, when England was emerging from austerity, hedge-funds had scarcely been invented and owners of crumbling old houses weren’t sure whether to prop them up or tear them down. He showed the world that it was possible to improve your surroundings without necessarily spending a fortune. Like the wonderful and much missed Mariga Guinness, who made Irish Georgian chic with economy, Mlinaric developed an eye for beautiful, simple furniture and inexpensive textiles and created a palette of restrained elegance.

Mlinaric decided early on in life (he was born in 1939 to an English mother and a Yugoslavian father) that he cared about buildings more than anything else. When he announced to his headmaster at Downside that he wanted to be a decorator he was firmly told, ‘Interior decoration: that’s not a real profession’. So he was advised to study architecture at the Bartlett School of University College, London, the last bastion of the Beaux Arts teaching method, where students studied architectural history and learned not only drawing but also the ancient and forgotten art of sciagraphy, which teaches you how shadows are cast and the effect they have on architecture.

Mlinaric, as all his friends will tell you, is modest and quiet. He has often been asked why he didn’t write a book before this. He says that he has always been too busy decorating or that it was too early in his career. When he ‘retired’ from his firm (he now works solo for selected clients) he started to write, but he disliked having to use the first person so much — ‘the word “I” appeared in every sentence’ — that he had to find a co-author. It was a good move to write this huge book in partnership with Mirabel Cecil; it is a duet that works.