At Home with Thea Porter

Inspired by “Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors,” an exhibition that just opened in the Museum at FIT’s ground floor history gallery, which explores and celebrates the interplay between female fashion designers’ work and their homes/ateliers, I thought I would share with you about Thea Porter’s London home. For those who don’t know, I wrote a book on Thea and curated a museum exhibition on her work—spending many years researching every aspect of her life and work. Considering she was a female fashion designer who started in interior design, whose homes were near constantly profiled in period shelter magazines, and whose work MFIT has some particularly fine examples of in their collection, I was surprised she wasn’t included; in many ways, she seemed a better fit than some of the other designers featured.

Thea in her mirrored dining room, setting up for one of her famous dinner parties. Photographer unknown.

A very abbreviated biography to set the stage for her homes… Thea was born Dorothea Noelle Naomi Sigel in Jerusalem (then under British Mandate) in 1927—her father a Russian Jew raised in Palestine, who converted to Anglicanism, and her mother was a Tunisian Jew—they met in London and moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a missionary. After her father converted to Irish Presbyterianism and became a priest, the family moved to Damascus, Syria, where Thea was raised. Other than boarding school and two years of university in England (from 1946 to 1949), all of Thea’s early years were in the Middle East. When she left Royal Holloway College early (likely dismissed for concentrating more on clothes and parties than on her studying), Thea joined her family in Beirut where they had just moved. There she met and married a British diplomat, Bob Porter. Thea lived a wildly glamorous life as an embassy wife in Beirut, then known as the Paris of the Middle East, or in Thea’s words, “a combination of Paris and Beverly Hills: the sex and glamour of the French capital allied to the hedonistic climate of California.” Inspired by Parisian couture and local textiles, she ran up substantial dressmaker bills for her own creations, which she wore out every night—flitting between politicians, artists, writers, spies, and journalists at the popular nightclubs of the time. Thea began painting in the late 1950s, having several solo shows in Beirut, before deciding to leave her marriage and Lebanon: “I left Beirut in May 1964, a Beirut of ceaseless parties, beautiful days on beaches long picnics in the mountains every Sunday; mornings drinking coffee at the Horseshoe… It was too much pleasure I felt I had to work…”

Settling in London, she sought to establish herself as an interior designer, which she began immediately by decorating friends’ apartments with a mix of Western and Middle Eastern furniture. After a brief period working for a traditional English decorator, she rented a first-floor showroom in Soho in 1965 where she sold imported furniture and decorative objects mostly from Syria; “I stocked up with lengths of furnishing fabrics, huge embroidered cushions, assorted Indian bedspreads, pieces of pearl-encrusted Ottoman furniture, wall hangings to cover the damp patches, and a couple of incense burners, my somewhat hazy ambition at the time being to launch myself as an interior decorator.” A year later she opened Thea Porter Decorations on Greek Street, stocked with “mother-of-pearl furniture and ornaments from Damascus; embroidered Syrian table-cloths in sensuous blends of red, white and gold; magnificent Kurdish rugs; onyx and marble from Turkey and French-inspired fabrics from the Lebanon”—all highly appealing to members of the nascent hippie movement. Porter was in a unique position—she could interpret authentically this Western fascination with Middle Eastern cultures, and hence offer chic Londoners an expertly curated, highly styled sampling of wearable traditional Middle Eastern heritage. Originally planning to cut up some antique kaftans into cushions, she found the kaftans themselves were suddenly in fashion—Thea ran up some copies and found herself in the clothing business—making Middle Eastern-inspired garments using imported textiles (upholstery, carpets, tablecloths) that seamlessly blended the many influences of her life. The unexpected flood of fashion commissions that followed this early publicity prompted Porter to stop working as an interior decorator—from 1967 to the end of her life in 2000, the only interiors she designed were her homes and stores.

The early years of Thea’s Bolton Street living room. Photos by Michael Wickham for House and Garden, February 1969.

In London, Thea’s world revolved around her Greek Street shop and her maisonette on Bolton Street, off Piccadilly. There she created a world as heady and exotic as the Orient of her childhood. “The first impression of her flat is already of a knockout richness. Parts of it are like a gorgeous tent, with big patterns sprawling over the low ceilings of the bedrooms. The second impression is of intricate workmanship—the number of foreign objects beautifully inlaid or embroidered and the way English craftsmen, for Thea Porter, have carpeted and papered and braided and finished to match.” Up through 1969, the L-shaped living room was lined in white corduroy, the windows hung with mid-blue organdie curtains over blinds in patterned Persian silk. One leg of the L held three wide sofas, “covered with flower-worked fabrics and floppy cushions”; the other contained a Turkish chest of drawers inlaid with mother of pearl and a small office set-up. The downstairs bath was “tented in pink-striped Madras cotton.” Up some winding stairs were four attic rooms: a red kitchen with black floor and ceiling papered with a reproduction of the vaulting of a Coptic church; a matte black bathroom; her daughter, Venetia’s bedroom—all graphic black and white; and Thea’s bedroom.

The ceiling of Thea’s kitchen. Photo by John Benton Harris for the New York Sunday News, August 22, 1971.

Claudia Bruce and Bruno Masa in Venetia’s black-and-white paisley bedroom. Photo by Aubrey Powell, 1969.