Syrie Maugham's best

"The moment I stepped into the bedroom, I was in a fairy tale, my task to find and awaken the sleeping beauty. It was a very tall room, made even taller and airier by the large white bed whose slender bedposts seemed to reach to the ceiling - it looked as if the bars had been taken off a giant bird cage. The room was almost square and had an open, delicate, almost ephemeral quality, enhanced by the dreamy fragrance of white petunias blooming in profusion in the garden below.

"Since there was an adjoining dressing room for clothing, the bedroom's only real furniture consisted of the bed, with its white coverlet, a few chairs upholstered in white raw silk and arranged on a sculpted white wool rug, a low upholstered silk stool, and a comfortable large wooden bedside table, stripped and treated with glazed white paint. At the windows hung practically nonexistent curtains of unlined white voile.

"The color - and the only pattern - was in the wall covering, a contemporary Swedish rough linen just this side of white, crudely stenciled with a scroll design in quite a strong grass green. Only white flowers were allowed in this room but they were, as in all of Syrie Maugham's rooms, extravagantly everywhere."

From Billy Baldwin Remembers.