The Flora-Filled Dining Room of London Set Designer Oliver Messel

Flowered antique china framed by airy trailing vines in a dining room that is thickly garlanded with pink, yellow, and red roses doesn’t sound especially Yuletide but that’s what Oliver Messel (1904–1978), the celebrated British set and costume designer and amateur architect, delivered for the December 1963 issue of Vogue. The effect is high summer, actually, given the preponderance of luxuriant flowers. Editorial disconnect aside, Vogue observed that the intimate gala dinner for six staged for its pages in Messel’s London house was “flatly, outrageously pretty.” That would also be a perfect description for Messel in his youth, by the way, since he and his sister, Anne (mother of the photographer Lord Snowdon and grandmother of Lord Oxmantown of Ireland’s Birr Castle), were celebrated beauties among the Bright Young People of prewar days. Just check out some of the “Portraits by Oliver,” an exhibition of Messel paintings of friends, family, and more that is on view at Nymans, his ancestral home in West Sussex, through June 3.

Given that many magazines have a lead time of three-plus months, it’s highly likely that the polychrome romanticism that stunned readers in December 1963 had been photographed the previous summer, when roses would have been in ample supply. Henry Clarke was behind the camera, the same American-born, Paris-based Clarke better known for his fashion photography, especially his glamorous snaps of model Suzy Parker. Offscreen, too, though thoroughly present in the article, was Messel’s lover and manager, Vagn Riis-Hansen, a commanding silver-fox Scandinavian known far and wide as “The Great Dane.” He served as the article’s mouthpiece, participating in a lengthy question-and-answer interview about Messel’s (and by, extension, his) entertaining habits, preferences, inspirations, menus, and the like. It is the interview—tape-recorded, Vogue pointed out, perhaps to make the chat seem more with-it—that undoes the purported Christmas theme yet without undermining its sense of fantasy. As The Great Dane explained to Vogue, roses seemed de rigueur for a summer centerpiece while at “Christmas, you might use holly and ivy.” Neither of which, plainly, are visible.

After myriad romances, including affairs with actor-director Peter Glenville and millionaire arts patron Peter Watson (splendidly biographied in Queer Saint: The Cultured Life of Peter Watson), Messel ultimately settled down in the mid-1940s with Riis-Hansen, a man so gruff that Messel’s mother observed, after meeting him, “It’s so easy to love one’s loved ones—but not so easy to love one’s loved ones’ loved ones.” The couple’s London digs, 17-19 Pelham Place, was actually two circa-1840 terrace houses joined into one, and they lived there until selling up in 1966 and moving to Barbados, where Messel designed Storybook Caribbean houses for the high-society likes of Pamela Harriman and Drue Heinz.

Outwardly, 17-19 was relatively sober, its white-painted stucco façade frosted with cast-iron balconies and scored with rustication on the ground floor; the architect was George Basevi, a cousin of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and a gifted pupil of the great Sir John Soane. Indoors, though, it was a garden: AD100 interior designer Nicky Haslam called it “a flower bower of a house,” a description that reminds one that Messel designed the Tony award–winning sets for Truman Capote’s 1954 Broadway musical House of Flowers. A few doors away lived Cecil Beaton, Messel’s lifelong frenemy in social, romantic, and set-design spheres, and he had a more jaundiced view of Messel’s domestic environment. “Oliver should have employed a decorator,” he sniped.

With its brown velvet walls, swoopy yellow silk curtains, tasseled star-spangled valance, rococo gilt-wood console, and Aubusson carpet in succulent tones that bring to mind crushed raspberries spooned over vanilla ice cream, Messel’s dining room actually recalled, on a smaller scale, Beaton’s own over-egged, Edwardian-style rooms at his country place, Reddish House, in Wiltshire. Messel’s space, though, seems more like a set for a play, with diners framed by a portiere-cum-proscenium. The decorative effects seems to have been as casually engineered as they were visually rapturous. Messel’s nephew Lord Snowdon once told a reporter that the building “nearly collapsed” during a party in 1950, when a guest, “staggering with celebratory cocktails, leaned on a false pillar which wobbled and threatened an interior earthquake.”

The theatricality of Messel’s dining room made a perfect setting for the kinds of dinners that he and Riis-Hansen planned for their circle, a flamboyant, high-octane group made up of theater stars, artists, designers, aristocrats (sister Anne married the sixth Earl of Rosse), and the occasional royal (Princess Margaret was Messel’s niece-in-law).

Now that the chill of winter is giving way to the warmth of spring, followed by attendant thoughts of entertaining, it’s worth taking inspiration from the hospitality at 17-19 Pelham Place, as detailed by Riis-Hansen. (Messel took such an interest in tableware, in fact, that he patented a knife design with the U.S. Patent Office in 1965, at the same time he was sprinkling Barbados and Mustique with British Colonial–style villas.) Though only an obsessive would enjoy preparing a dessert called Uganda Coconut Surprise—imagine gutting, scraping, and polishing individual coconuts “so they look like old mahogany” before filling them with mocha ice cream, sliced fried bananas, a sprinkling of instant coffee, and flaming brandy—Riis-Hansen’s enjoyably opinionated (and, yes, somewhat gruff) interview does include timeless takeaways, a dozen of which are listed below.

1. “When I arrive [for a dinner] and find the hostess is calm and collected, I get suspicious. If she’s nervous, as she should be, then I know that she has taken trouble with the food.”

2. Ditch the rectangular table with guests facing each other à la Downton Abbey. “A round table is much better, and eight or ten people are enough for dinner.”

3. “A rule, I guess, is not to get people all of the same interest. Somebody has to have a different interest or conversation is dead immediately…. With a diversified group, all you have to do is throw one subject in the middle of a round table and it’s off and running.”

4. Always use a tablecloth, because they “gather up the party, eliminate the clatter, and frame the picture.”

5. “Mass-produced, mass-hired” glassware is “the kiss of death. Better by far one’s own jumble of crystal, tall, short, thick, thin. No matter that they may look a job lot before people arrive, you’ll find they have spontaneous charm.”

6. Hors d’oeuvres, in general, are to be avoided, especially nuts, which “fill guests up and bother teeth.”

7. A favorite starter soup is “a blend of purée of peas with consommé, a hint of lemon, a tot of dry sherry—then added, at the last minute, a froth of whipped cream [and] a quart of Champagne.”

8. When dining in the kitchen, Messel and Riis-Hansen used “colored tablecloths—with a leaf print, for instance—and small, star-shaped candlesticks, found years ago at a ten-cent store in New York. They cost next to nothing—perhaps eight of them on the table along with pottery bowls. For the kitchen table, tough flowers–dahlias, for example. Or massed green leaves.”

9. Pan-cooked salmon steaks might sound old hat but Riis-Hansen knew how to shake them up: “Into a pot of whipped cream fold fresh-grated horseradish—it must not be bottled and it must not come from a can. If it is not fresh, it lacks its distinction. Then put it in the freezer. When the salmon is served, it has horseradish ice cream with it—a wonderful shock of hot and cold.”

10. The couple’s favorite centerpiece for anchoring a round buffet table was “a three-tier stand; you can bank it into a pyramid of fruit, but I find the dark colors of vegetables often more dramatic… The centerpiece catches the eye, and keeps your guests on the move by leading them on to look at what’s round the corner.”

11. “You can drink anything with anything. The idea that white wine goes with fish and red with meat, etcetera, is to be completely disregarded.” Messel and Riis-Hansen particularly liked serving Danish aquavit in “old Russian vodka cups” with the first course, “whatever that course consists of.”

12. Relax and savor: “There’s an enormous amount of time involved in eating well. No meals are served one-two-three at [our] house; a few minutes are allowed between courses.”

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