Lean and tall, with Apollonian looks and an Olympian temper, Tom Parr was the eminence of English decorating. From youthful beginnings selling antiques at General Trading Company, he became, in the 1960s, chairman and guiding light of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, the London firm famous for chintzing up rooms for the likes of Grace, Countess of Dudley, and the 11th Duke of Beaufort, to name just two of Parr’s titled clients. His proudest, most personal achievement, lovingly maintained by his family, can be found on a distant shore: La Casella, a 1960 Côte d’Azur house that architect Robert Streitz modeled on Madame de Pompadour’s 1753 Fontainebleau pavilion, though he dressed his simulacrum in ocher stucco rather than pale limestone.
When Parr died seven years ago, at the age of 81, he left La Casella (Italian for “little house”) to his niece Minnie and her husband, Anthony Lindsay, Lord Balniel, a wealth-management powerhouse, passionate gardener, and heir apparent to the earldoms of Crawford and Balcarres. Today the London-based couple and their four grown children spend as much time there as possible and let it when they can’t.
A bedroom at La Casella, the Côte d’Azur home of Lord and Lady Balniel, inherited from Tom Parr of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler (sibylcolefaom).
In contrast to the recherché façade, the foyer of La Casella has a raw modernity, its chic brutalism offset by the severe luxury of black-and-gold furnishings, which include a superb Regency mirror. The decorating of the salon, however, is absolute English-gentleman: yellow trompe l’oeil paneling, Colefax and Fowler’s iconic Old Rose chintz, and a cosmopolitan blend of French and English pieces.
“Would you care to see the house?” Parr asked me on a long-ago visit after a vitello tonnato lunch. Chairs were pushed back, and the tour commenced. We parsed the line of a chair, the cut of a valance, and I learned that Cole Porter had given the humble novecento creamware on the dining room walls to the jeweler Duke Fulco di Verdura, Parr’s late companion.
By the time that Parr and his ultimate life partner, Claus Scheinert, a retired German motor-parts salesman, bought La Casella in 1984, there had been more than one false start with Anglo-Saxon gardeners. Scheinert had never handled a trowel before but stepped up to the plate with Teutonic resolve. That he came to master the horticultural arts, late in life and faute de mieux, revealed his true calling. Pebble-dash walks and elegant flights of stairs link eight descending terraces, and Scheinert, who died in 2015, planted walls of cypress and Euclidean spheres of box. The palette is green, rich in hue and texture, yet enlivened with lashings of white wisteria and tumbles of blue plumbago that are echoed in the master bedroom’s chintz.
The Balniels have conserved this legacy with the help of Parr’s onetime colleague Wendy Nicholls, who can identify every chintz that had ever caught Parr’s roving eye. Thus, his and Scheinert’s sun-spangled paradise has come into its second golden age, albeit one with a lively, expanding family splashing in the pool. lacasellacotedazurom
