Herman Schrijver (1904-1972)

"All draperies must be heavily fringed and trimmed"

One of the curious features of the early history of the BBC is that advice on domestic matters for housewives was almost entirely dispensed by queens. Among those employed to poove away on the airwaves were the chef Marcel Boulestin, the knitting expert James Norbury and the interior decorator Herman Schrijver, a firm guide to the perils of skimpy pelmets and the ruinous effects of hefty furniture and covered radiators.

Schrijver at home in Onslow Square, London	Decoration for the Home by Herman Schrijver

Born in Holland into a family of Jewish diamond merchants, Schrijver moved as a boy to Preston Court, a large Italianate villa at 253 Preston Road, while his father was involved in a scheme to employ local war veterans in a diamondpolishing factory.

Herman was by his own account a precociously gay child who delighted in picking up men in the local park and spending their gratuities on gifts of flowers for his mother; the scene of these early pleasures was possibly the nearby Preston Park.

In 1922 his father's company collapsed, the victim of swindlers, and Schrijver was forced into uncongenial employment as a clerk in a Swiss bank. He soon found happier work in the soft furnishings department of Peter Jones in Sloane Square and then an antique shop in Brook Street before launching his influential career as a decorator with Elden's Limited, designing for such exalted clients as Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere.

The London lounge of of Patrick Bellew; Schrijver's scheme is 'blue and white throughout'.

Schrijver's taste - austere with touches of opulence - is documented in his 1939 compendium Decoration for the Home. Alongside Wells Coates' and Marion Dorn's designs for Embassy Court in Brighton are illustrations of Schrijver’s favoured mixing of modern and traditional styles in the likes of silver-gilt Queen Anne chairs upholstered in zebra skin.

Readers wanting further details of this charming man should seek out Charles Burkhart's Herman and Nancy and Ivy: Three lives in art and Hilary Spurling's Secrets of a Woman’s Heart which documents his friend Ivy Compton-Burnett's pleasure in his 'flightiness, cheerfulness, unfailing pessimism and wild overstatements'.