Sir Charles Allom | |
|---|---|
 1913 caricature of Allom aboard his yacht Istria | |
| Born | 16 June 1865 Kensington, London, England |
| Died | 1 June 1947 (aged 81) Potter's Bar, Middlesex, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Decorator and architect |
Sir Charles Carrick Allom (1865–1947) was an eminent English decorator, trained as an architect and knighted for his work on Buckingham Palace. He was the grandson of architect Thomas Allom and painter Thomas Carrick. Among his American clients in the years preceding World War I was Henry Clay Frick, for whom Allom furnished houses in cooperation with Sir Joseph Duveen, the eminent paintings dealer. Allom furnished the Henry Clay Frick House at 71st Street and Fifth Avenue[1] which today houses the Frick Collection, and the neo-Georgian house, Clayton, in Roslyn, Long Island, designed by Ogden Codman Jr., that was bought for Frick's daughter-in-law.[2] For the grand rooms of parade in Frick's New York house,[3] Sir Charles, whose London workshops produced the plasterwork and boiseries, kept the furnishings muted, not to compete with Frick's collection of paintings. In 1925, when William Randolph Hearst purchased a real castle, St. Donat's in Wales, his choice to furnish it fell upon Sir Charles.[4]
- ^ Francis Morrone, "The house that Frick built", The New York Sun 8 December 2006
- ^ Martha Frick Symington Sanger and Wendell Garrett, The Frick Houses: Architecture, Interiors, Landscapes in the Golden Era 2001.
- ^ Elsie de Wolfe, who had pressed for the prestigious commission, was hired to decorate the family rooms upstairs, where Sir Charles provided three eighteenth-century chimney pieces (John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages 2007:204.
- ^ St. Donat's: A History of the Castle and Its Owners" Archived February 24, 2011, at the Wayback Machine