CHORD blog – ‘ “Colour in the Home:” Grace Lovat Fraser as design consultant’

Zoë Hendon, independent researcher, ‘ “Colour in the Home:” Grace Lovat Fraser as design consultant’

Grace Lovat Fraser had a long and varied career as a designer and design advisor, but her work has frequently been “mentioned but denied significance” by historians.[1] This blog post is part of work in progress for a biographical/historical study of her work, which will explore the idea that she contributed to the democratization of design in the period between the wars.

In the 1920s, Grace Lovat Fraser worked within the overlapping worlds of magazines and department stores, both of which in their different ways sought to educate female consumers and encourage them to spend money on furnishings for the home. She established herself as a design consultant with an expertise in the use of colour in home decoration, and an emphasis on the needs and desires of the suburban housewife. Grace’s reputation was built on her sound knowledge of the products that were available to customers, and her willingness to offer decorating advice to a class of people who were not able to afford the services of professional interior designers. For these consumers, making the right decisions about how to decorate their homes was important because mistakes would be costly and difficult to fix.

Grace understood the needs of this female audience and positioned herself as a friendly yet authoritative voice on all matters to do with choice of paint colours, fabrics, wallpapers and furnishings.  She was a regular contributor to Town and Country Homes magazine, in which she authored an advice column on interior decorating aimed at female readers. She also made frequent appearances in local department stores around the country from the late 1920s onwards. In these live demonstrations she would furnish a room with products available from the store, providing an enjoyable spectacle for shoppers and enhancing her credibility with her readership. Occasionally, the two spaces – magazine and department – store would coincide.

Town and Country Homes magazine was a short-lived publication produced between 1925 and 1933. It initially contained a predictable mixture of the usual kinds of magazine content, with a leaning towards house plans and building advice. But by 1929-30 it had a greater emphasis on interiors and featured many pages in full colour, making it much more visually attractive than competitors such as Homes and Gardens or Ideal Homes, which (aside from their covers) were printed in black and white.

By around 1930, Grace was contributing a considerable proportion of the content for each issue, including a variety of colour features on subjects such as paint and curtains. She frequently recommended bold colour choices, such as apple green and dark metallic grey. More significant however, was her advice column: readers were encouraged to write in with their decorating questions which she answered individually by post as well as selecting some to appear in print.

Fig 1 illustration from ‘A Bedroom in Velvet’ from Town and Country Homes, November 1930

A correspondent featured in the June 1930 edition asked for: “advice regarding the furnishing of a French window of a room in which the furniture is all brown – brown hide and oak and the carpet is a Turkey. The background is red, the pattern chiefly green – there is a little blue. The walls are deep cream.”

Grace’s answer was to recommend “some material which emphasized orange and yellow,” and she went on to suggest a specific orange fabric which: “should look very pretty in your room. It is 50 inches wide and costs 6s 11d a yard.”

Grace’s answers were often specific in terms of the products recommended, but also generic enough to be applicable to other readers with similar problems. The tone of her advice was always friendly and encouraging and took account of the many limitations on people’s ability to update their living environment. For example, a correspondent might specify that a blue carpet must remain in place and ask for advice on furnishings that would complement it. The advice column was printed in black and white but much other editorial and advertising content within the magazine was printed in full colour. There was sometimes a cross-over between the products she recommended and the companies which advertised in the magazine.

At around the same time, Grace was making frequent appearances in suburban department stores in London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. In these appearances she would furnish a room in real time, in front of the audience, using products from the shop. Department stores such as Selfridges in Oxford Street had long employed techniques of theatre and spectacle to entice customers, but this seems to have been a newer idea for shops which wanted to welcome a broader audience of middle and lower-middle class shoppers. The only record we have of Grace’s performances is the newspaper advertisements which preceded them. But we can imagine that she would have drawn on her experience in the theatre, and her ability to quickly build a rapport with the audience to create a colourful and entertaining experience for her audiences.

On occasion, the two spaces of magazine and department store came together, as in October 1930 when Town and Country Homes magazine featured a design for a kitchen by Grace. On the same page it announced that: “Mrs Lovat Fraser would be pleased to meet any readers who would like advice on any questions of interior decoration on Saturday October 4^th, at her model kitchen at Marshall Roberts Ltd, High Street, Camden, NW3.” In other words, a real-life version of the kitchen was viewable in the shop, and Grace was able to step off the page and into the store, so that readers could meet her in person.  

Fig 2 illustration from  ‘Colour Comes into the Kitchen’ from Town and Country Homes, October 1930

Grace Lovat Fraser’s significance lies in the fact that she was in direct communication with ordinary shoppers, providing a direct link between retailers and consumers. Her advice bureau gave her a good idea of peoples’ budgets and preoccupations; she met shoppers frequently in department store demonstrations where she answered questions and became aware of their frustrations. In the 1930s Grace was associated with the Design and Industries Association (DIA), which frequently organized exhibitions within department stores. But, initially at least, her involvement with these stores seems to have been under her own name, without the backing of the DIA.

In conclusion, I am working on the idea that Grace represents an important yet so-far overlooked figure in interwar retailing and domestic design. She created an entirely new role for herself, drawing on her previous experience of performance and the theatre, and her knowledge of how colour worked in the home. Her work spanned the physical space of the department store and the printed space of the magazine, and she helped to make these into places of visual pleasure, spectacle, and leisure, as well as commerce.

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[1] Jill Seddon, ‘Mentioned, but Denied Significance: Women Designers and the “Professionalisation” of Design in Britain c 1920-1951’, Gender & History 12, no. 2 (2000): 426–47.

Zoë Hendon is an independent researcher who was previously Head of Collections at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. Her interests include histories of museum collections and the use of collections as inspiration for creative practice. She is working on a feminist history/biography of interwar design advisor, Grace Lovat Fraser, whose life and work touches on many of her other areas of interest, namely the history of the design of everyday domestic spaces, and consumer choices in domestic furnishings).