Hutton Wilkinson - Tony Duquettes Dawnridge

Magic was the highest word of praise that Tony Duquette could bestow upon object, experience, or person. He was a design alchemist who could take base materialsfish bones, snail shells, tree barkand transform them into objects of wonder and delight. I want everything to have spontaneity, to move and laugh, he once said, and as a young artist, his exceptional gifts soon saw him taken up by the chic Hollywood decorators Billy Haines and Jimmy Pendleton. Erelong, Duquette was the protg of the even more celebrated Lady Mendl, whose career as the actress Elsie de Wolfe was distinguished only by the lan with which she wore the latest fashions on stage. She found her true calling, however, as the blue-rinsed doyenne of interior design taste. Mendl encouraged Duquette to create a moible for her and the resulting meublea grand lacca povera secretary filled, as Vogue noted at the time, with his jeweled fetishesbecame a centerpiece of After All, Mendls trendsetting Los Angeles home, and a calling card for his talents.

The great Gilbert Adrian was one of those who came calling. Adrian, as he was known, honed his art as the fashion director of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, shaping the on-screen style of Garbo, Crawford, Lombard, Shearer, and Hepburn. In the early 1940s, with America cut off from Paris fashion news during the Occupation, Adrian astutely began to bring his talents to off-screen fashion, selling his designs via the most exclusive department stores across the countryand his own high-style salonto a legion of deep-pocketed customers who werent afraid to make an entrance. Amaze me! was Adrians injunction to Duquette, and the young artist obliged with decors for the designers salon and fashion shows of eclipsing fantasy and charm. Duquette was made for Tinseltown, the land of illusion, and for the director Vincente Minelli he created movie decors as fanciful as the homes that he invented for himself and his wife, the ethereal artist Elizabeth Johnstone.

Duquette was fearless. He built Dawnridge in a cleft in the hills above the rolling, palmy lawns of Beverly Hills and created a universe of his own where Venice met Shangri-La. I can never forget walking into what seemed to be a candlelit anteroom to a palace here. It was elaborately paved in faceted antique mirror, which on closer inspectionand if truth be told, really only when it was pointed out to mewas in fact made from the pressed aluminum foil dishes in which the Chinese take-out orders were delivered, and did not lead to the promised imperial splendors but to a useful tool shed instead. With a wave of Duquettes wand, a collection of industrial lamps, stacked one above the other, was thus miraculously transformed into a sacred object that might be found dangling from a temple ceiling in Lost Horizons, and served to illumine the lights of elephant-high obelisks crusted with abalone shells. Next to these wonders, old-fashioned trash cans were mounted one above the other and pierced with gothic openings until they resembled ancient Cairene minarets. Through tricks of scale and trompe loeil and false perspectives, a distant pavilion across a broad lake was, in reality, little more than a set-builders facade artfully set into a shallow ledge in the ravine on the far side of a modest basin of water. Inside, Duquettes eye-tricking skills with a paintbrush created convincing simulacrums of malachite and lapis and porphyry, and of jaguar spots and ermine tails and angel wings, when there was nothing but cloth and plaster and wood and canvas and pipe cleaners and a great, roiling ocean of imagination.

Hutton Wilkinson, Duquettes pupil, protg, and collaborator since the early seventies, and now his spiritual heir, worked with the master for clients including Dodie Rosekrans, for whom they evoked a maharajahs throne room in a prim apartment on Pariss rive gauche, and transformed the piano nobile of the storied Palazzo Brandolini on a majestic turn of the Grand Canal in Venice. Here, the Duquette-Wilkinson interventions included a bedroom like a mermaids grotto with walls of iridescent net layered over Mary Pickfords Chinese wallpaper. The curves and volutes of elaborate, impasto eighteenth-century plasterwork framing the mirrors in the immense reception gallery, meanwhile, proved insufficiently whimsical to Duquettes purpose, and so he and Wilkinson spent laborious hours embellishing it with a thousand tendrils of deep-sea coralnot, as it happens, plucked from the sea but instead carved in Thailand from rattan.

Hutton Wilkinson, the acolyte turned master, who learned the craft at Duquettes side through the decades, has subtly transformed the original structures of Dawnridge into a sort of shrine to the Duquettes and their works that Wilkinson has been gifted or assiduously sought out through the yearssleuthing the auction rooms and antiquaires around the country. They now form a unique collection that is a work of art in itself and serves as a moving testament to Tony and Beegle Duquettes febrile and unbridled imaginations, their invention, and their artistry.

To set off these imaginatively presented works, Wilkinson has rationalized Dawnridge, spiriting away its cobwebs and dust and letting in the diamond California light. Original fabrics have been rewoven from fading scraps to replicate their intended splendor, and Wilkinson has re-edited Duquette pieces such as the free-form gilded consoles that writhe like great sea serpents and the pagoda lamps that seem to have been fashioned from Brobdingnagian blocks of pale jade or alabaster, but are, in a Duquette-ish sleight of hand, cast from workaday resin.

Hutton, his wife, Ruth, and their scampering dogs have no need of living in a museum, so he has created a second stage set for themselves, a new house that hovers in the clouds above Dawnridge, and showcases his own dashing brand of Duquetterie, with its leopard underfoot and gold leaf overhead, and lacquered cinnabar in the great heights in-between. Here, ancient icons are mounted on Japanese screens in a riot of old gold, scarlet, and ebony paint and lacquer; Chinese pictures hang against carved Chinese screens glimmering with shards of mother-of-pearl; and a series of Venetian paintings depictingwhat elsethe Festival of the Redentore, with its gondolas and fireworks and moon-lit splendors, are set against a wall of gold. The alchemy continues.

HAMISH BOWLES