ABSTRACT
Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1924, Tennant travelled to Switzerland, Bavaria and Italy on several occasions and for protracted periods to help cure his ailing body. However, Wilsford was for him his true fantasy playground, a safe haven that, as time passed, served to attenuate his continued depression, ill health and disassociation with the outside world. Photographed numerous times by friend and fellow ‘Bright Young Thing’ Cecil Beaton (1904-80), Tennant’s incessant (re)decorating of his beloved family manor became an all-consuming passion that at once materialized his ill health, insatiable patterns of consuming and idiosyncratic design vision. Inspired by, and an avid collector of, the modernist bleached, pickled and stained furnishings of Syrie Maugham, amongst the work of other famed decorators, Tennant undertook his fi rst major redecoration of the manor in the early 1930s, a project that extended over several years. Here I use biographies, an estate auction catalogue and press coverage to attempt a queer cultural biography of Tennant’s things ( Kopytoff 1986: 64-91 ) and interiors by exploring the intersections of mental health, perception, consumer culture, celebrity, the modern interior and queer aesthetics. The complicated, but much neglected, legacy left behind by the Hon. Stephen James Napier Tennant provides a unique and rich queer case that troubles normative understandings of the function, histories and celebrity of modern interior design.
