How Tented Rooms Became Design's Most Comforting—and Timeless—Decorating Device

Nothing makes one feel safer than being gently enveloped—held in another person’s arms, wrapped in a fluffy duvet, tucked in a box bed, quietly reading in a small room. Children understand this, as do cats, both gravitating toward the embrace of cardboard boxes and their small-proportioned like. Which is likely why decorators throughout time have created rooms that have the appearance of tents, and I don’t mean the Boy Scout variety.

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Inspired by the handsomely outfitted Roman military tents of ancient times, tented rooms became fashionable during the reign of French emperor Napoléon I, especially as decorators took inspiration from his army’s successful campaigns in Egypt and elsewhere. On the battlefield, Napoléon’s tents were always deluxe, whether single-room-occupancy or designed to expand into house-size installations for living, dining, sleeping, and holding meetings. Each was outfitted with handsome furnishings that could be easily broken down into component parts which would be transported, in their own special packing cases, to the next battlefield and reassembled. And they were invariably chic. One of Napoléon’s field tents is a fetching combination of blue-and-white-striped canvas on the outside, flowered cotton on the inside, and leopard-spot carpeting.

After the suave neoclassical folderol of the Bourbons fell to the wayside, patriotic—and more important, taste-conscious—Parisians swiftly fell in love with the First Empire’s military machismo, hiring such designers as Charles Percier and his partner and presumed lover Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine—the Bonapartes’ favorite tastemakers—to create tented rooms that gave their homes a dose of Bonaparte testosterone. Yards and yards of silk, cotton, muslin, and more were woven for the aesthetic cause, gathered at the center of ceilings, engineered to angle down to the nearest wall, and then allowed to cascade to the floor, the fabric left freely flowing or anchored in place.

The several tented rooms at Malmaison, created by Percier and Fontaine and adored by AD100 architect Lee Mindel, remain the ideal and still astound visitors. Napoléon’s everyday bedroom is draped with white-on-white striped silk, while Joséphine’s oval formal sleeping chamber, completed in 1812 by Louis-Martin Berthault, is a riot of flowing red panels of casimir, a thin wool, seemingly held in place by gilded tentpoles. “I never saw any room so remarkable for its decoration and so interesting from every point of view,” a British general wrote in wonder following his post-Waterloo visit to Malmaison in 1815.

Tented rooms were taken up here, there, and everywhere in the early 19th century, since Percier and Fontaine’s extraordinary taste—bold, expressive, and wildly expensive—was hugely influential. After World War II, the French decorator Madeleine Castaing created many a tented room, including dressing rooms and corridors. American tastemaker Billy Baldwin, otherwise known for his costly brand of deceptively simple chic, created a much-admired tented living-dining room for Babe and Bill Paley in the 1950s. And my 2017 Rizzoli book Fabulous! The Dazzling Interiors of Tom Britt includes more than one tented space.

“Nobody had a tented room in Rome at the time, so it caused a sensation,” Pilar Crespi Robert told me a few days ago about the colossal fabric-hung living-dining room that the cult decorator Renzo Mongiardino created in 1969 for her parents: Count Rodolfo Crespi and his American wife, Consuelo. The vivacious power couple—he was a public-relations powerhouse, she the editor in chief of Italian Vogue—had decided to rent an apartment in the 17th-century Palazzo Odescalchi and found the dark, soaring, heavily beamed space at the heart of the floor plan impossible to decorate in comfortable fashion. So much so that the Crespis had already begun to lower the ceiling, in the hopes of shaping the room into more conventional proportions, until Mongiardino sent the plasterers away.

A decorating solution that would use the entire intimidating space yet make it cozier was required, and Mongiardino, inspired by an Ottoman tent he had seen at a Stockholm museum, delivered. Visitors stepping through a small vestibule surely gasped as double doors opened onto a triple-height Orientalist fantasia that had a dining table at one end and a wall-hugging U-shape seating area made up of three sofas at the other. “When I was young and having my friends over, we would bring food into the room and pretend that we were somewhere in the Middle East,” says Crespi Robert, who, with her husband, Stephen Robert, heads Source of Hope, a humanitarian aid organization that they founded. “The pillows were extraordinary. You could actually sink into them and never get up again. My brother, Brando, and I would take naps there.” As for Mongiardino, he described the transporting space as “akin to being inside a soft, but rigidly constructed pyramid…”

The romance of tented rooms remains potent today. AD100 design firm Studio Peregalli follows in Mongiardino’s footsteps and has created memorable tented rooms. Fashion designer Adam Lippes and his life partner, Alexander Farnsworth, installed a small tented room for hanging out (they call it the “opium den”) in their Brooklyn Heights apartment, using a Richard Smith print of birds in trees. AD100 interior designer Miles Redd always has a tented room up his sleeve, including a few painted by artist Agustin Hurtado in the manner of a room inside Milan’s luxurious Casa degli Atellani. Sicily’s Palazzo Castelluccio has a delicious trompe-l’oeil tented room, known as the Salon Murat, painted by artist Delphine Nény. And so on and so on. Why not? As Charlotte Moss, the American decorator, has written, “Tented rooms are among the coziest. most romantic settings on earth, and they are as evocative as they are commonsense: All those yards of fabric can hide a multitude of structural sins.”