I suppose the name most associated with Regency style is Thomas Hope, whose time, taste, and money allowed him to decorate his Marylebone house, his country seat of the Deepdene, and publish the results in the widely distributed Household Furniture and Interior Decoration published in 1807. A flagrant self-promoter, upon completion of his decorative scheme for Duchess Street, Hope sent tickets of admission to members of the Royal Academy, many of whom not surprisingly found this an act of hubris. Many, though, took advantage, including Sir John Soane- and were impressed with the result. Besides influence and an exercise in ego, I’m not aware that Hope’s efforts did him any material good. But, then, Hope made his money the old fashioned way- he inherited it. A bit of an irony- with Hope’s designs considered the quintessence of English Regency period fashion, Hope himself was an auslander, the scion of a Dutch banking family who fled Holland fearful of the predations of Napoleon. Although Hope was sometimes thought a parvenu and nouveau riche, but as has often been said, it is the riche that counts, and Hope’s efforts were generally well considered in his day.
And to this very day, too- with the designs of Thomas Hope arguably forming the basis of what most people consider as Regency style. Certainly Hope’s own extended Grand Tour through not just Italy but the sites of Greek antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean contributed a tremendous degree of archaeological accuracy. Not only were the forms of antiquity copied, but the popular Regency paint schemes executed in black and red and yellow ocher took their lead from the Attic pottery Hope studied.
Hope knew his work would inevitably spawn imitators, and it is thought Household Furniture…was in fact published to ensure that those who cribbed from Hope actually got it right. And imitation quickly followed, with George Smith’s Collection of Designs for Household Furniture published in 1808, only a year after Hope.
While Smith’s designs clearly owe a significant debt to Hope, what had already become standard neo-classical motifs- bellflower swags and fruit and flower garlands- were given a Regency twist when executed in a Regency period palette. The London furniture maker John Gee prominently used an ‘antique’ palette to contribute a Hope-inspired classicism to essentially English forms, like the chairback settee.