Sibyl Colefax: British Interior Designer and Social Hostess

This article forms part of the Decorative and Applied Arts Encyclopedia, a master reference hub providing a structured overview of design history, materials, movements, and practitioners.

Sibyl Colefax and Rex Whistler, acclaimed portrait painter; Ashcombe, 1930s by Cecil Beaton
Sibyl Colefax and Rex Whistler, acclaimed portrait painter; Ashcombe, the 1930s by Cecil Beaton

Sibyl Colefax (1875 -1950) | Encyclopedia Design

Sibyl Colefax (1875 – 1950) was a British collector and interior designer and was professionally active in London.

At Onslow Square and Argyll House, she opened salons. Lady Oxford, Lady Asquith, Lady Cunard, and Lady Ottoline Morrell were her rivals as hostesses. She also entertained the likes of Winston Churchill, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Neville Chamberlain at the couple’s Palladian Argyll House on King’s Road, London. She continued to entertain on a small scale at her house, Lord North Street, London, after her husband, Arthur Colefax, died in 1936.

Bloomsbury Group

She began cultivating the Bloomsbury group of artists in 1922, and they regarded her with contempt. She started working as an interior decorator in 1933. Virginia Woolf gave the paper “Am I a Snob?” at the Memoir Club in 1936, mocking Colefax’s social pretensions, though the two remained friends.

The library of Sibyl Colefax's house at Lord North Street
The library of Sibyl Colefax’s house at Lord North Street

The Lady Decorator

As director of Colefax and Co., which she co-founded with John Fowler in 1934, she designed minutely detailed interiors in unusual colours. Between the wars, Colefax worked as a “lady decorator” in London, “assisting” with decorating wealthy friends’ homes.

Lady Sibyl Colefax Ltd specialises in comfortable interiors based on the English country house style mingled with touches of Regency in the pale, tasteful colour schemes inspired by Adam. Sybil Colefax also specialized in English chintz, and her business became so lucrative that in 1938, after Munster had left, she took on a new partner, the decorator John Fowler. At the end of the Second World War, Colefax sold her share of the business to Nancy Lancaster (1897-1994), the niece of the American Lady Astor. The firm continues today as Colefax & Fowler, an exclusive interior decorating company based in London, still selling Sybil’s signature chintzes.

Before her association with Colefax, John Fowler, a prominent decorator, ran her shop on King’s Road in London, near Lady Colefax’s and Syrie Maugham’s homes. Both Maugham and Colefax had courted him to join their companies.

Sources

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The design encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing.

Colefax, S. (2020, February 18). 1930s Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. https://www.sibylcolefax.com/our-history/1930s/.

Massey, A. (2022). Women in Design. United Kingdom: Thames and Hudson Limited.

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