by Lady Diana Cooper, some Rooms

Diana in Trompe l'oeil 
from The Englishwoman's House

Lady Diana Cooper amongst the Trompe l'oeil panels in the Dining Room of her London home
image above and below from Rooms

the Syrie Maugham decorated Cooper residence
photograph from EEE here

Their Bits of finery : feathers, a decidedly familiar looking garden hat, playing cards, a lucky horse shoe, portraits and replicas of the famous Offering of Diana and Diana the Huntress adorn the Dining Room walls. A discussion of these panels at Emily Evans Eerdmans blog clarify the artist to be Martin Battersby-around 1951 for the Coopers' French chateau in Chantilly.



 

(the settee appears in the Maugham decorated room above)

the young Diana painted by Ambrose McEvoy.

a Hall into Drawing Room
from the ROOMS book, photograph by Derry Moore

Excerpts from The Englishwoman's Bedroom, Derry Moore photographer, Alvilde Lees- Milne-editor
 ~ by Diana Cooper (who better ?), penned most eloquently and poignantly all her words in quotations and italics-



"I think I will write about bedrooms, of which I have had quite a number in my long life. It is the room most houses to which I'm the most attached-offering repose, sleep, privacy, or receiving of friends, clustered or singly, round a bed in which I weightless lie."

 Drawing Room- Little Venice London

photograph by Derry Moore

The Drawing Room

portrait of a young Diana by James Jebusa Shannon

(see it top right hanging above)

"I spent more time in bed because I developed a muscular disease which lasted me three or four years. Stairs were forbidden, so my next bedroom was about as beautiful as reception-room as you could  hope to find: mirrored walls, massively but delicately garlanded with chains of metal-gilded flowers... At lunchtime being carried into carried to my mother's ed next door... I was cured by the age of eleven and lost my sensational reception bedsitter."

the Elizabeth Saloon at Belvoir

Louis XIV style Matthew Wyatt ceiling

In her ancestral castle Belvoir* Diana Manners had the first bedroom of her own.
"Black painted wall, a scooped alcove washing basin, self painted to look as if under water, with a stone cockleshell (protruding) to hold the soap and sways of 'everlastings' in little bunches, and the narrowest, highest, reddest four-poster to the ceiling."

from The Bystander,1906 

image here

painted just after her marriage to Duff Cooper in 1919

Her incredible life took her from the bedrooms of  stately homes, a home in Bloomsbury, hotel rooms while touring the States during her acting days, to Admiralty House- with a bed designed by Rex Whistler. Her husband's career took her to Singapore & Algiers. The Lady remembers her bedroom in Algiers as "the club"often finding Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh having breakfast on her bed. She also found it cozier to sleep in her "valuable" mink coat.

  Duff and Diana Cooper

British Embassy in Paris

 As the Second World War ended, she was off to Paris as the Ambassador's wife-finding her bedroom there to be quite the thing. It was restorative-after she added the bath-a tented affair-in a space just outside the door. She did recover a few pieces of the crimson silk chairs in the fully swathed bedroom, reputed to be that of Pauline Borghese. 

image from Emily Evans Erdmans here

 "The bedroom itself was sensational-walls, curtains, screens, sofas and chairs all of the same crimson red silk and a vast bed crowned at all but ceiling height by an imperial eagle and supported by retour d'Egypte figures "

Lady Diana Cooper

photographed by Cecil Beaton at the British Embassy

From the Borghese bed it was off to Chantilly- and a bedroom with a view-
"I looked south onto well-tended grass sloping down to an important lake, fed by an even more important cascade. No traffic, no tourists- only woodland groves, peopled by beautiful silent statues."



"I came home after about ten years,alas! alone, and found myself a house I would exchange with no other in the best of all quarters- Little Venice-whose bedroom, whence I scribble now, I still find the room of the rooms in the house I like best with forest trees in the garden, a big bed and tiny dog-still, and as always a refuge."

A little hall

the walls covered in silk , intaglios and candle sconces

bronze at right of Lady Diana

(see link of similar)

Diana's small elegantly papered bath

Lady Diana's Bedroom full of small drawings and photographs
photographed by Derry Moore

A delightful photograph of Lady Diana ensconced in her bed, surrounded by photographs, paintings, many books, telephone & on her bedside table- a tantalus and document box create a command post effect. There must be a sort of compact and very red lipstick on that table as well. The bed hangings are an exquisite lace finished off in an exotic looking fabric on the canopy
.

"This is my life today and nearly every day and has been since I lost my independence- independence being my faithful little mini car, which I am too old to drive. Thus one comes back to one's beginning, but without independence or agility and with failing senses-consciously worsening instead of the unconscious bettering from earliest childhood."

Lady Diana Cooper with her tiny little dog

photograph by Bernard Lee Schwartz 1977

image from the NPG here

reality check-see it today here 

Belvoir is pronounced Beaver
Belvoir here
read more about the trompe l'oeil from Emily Evans Eerdmans here

read more about the bedroom and see photographs, again- at Ms. Eerdman's here
read Rose C'est La Vie's homage to Lady Diana here

Books,  ROOMS, Derry Moore photographer,Carl Skoggard, The Englishwoman's House-edited by Alvides-Lee Milne
.