Syrie Maugham was and remains an influential designer from a time replete with ‘society decorators’, including Sibyl Colefax, Nancy Lancaster, and Elsie de Wolfe. Sadly, little but a photographic record remains of Mrs. Maugham’s work, nicely showcased just now in Pauline Metcalf’s monograph, newly published by Acanthus Press. No one in the world of design does not at least claim to know about Maugham’s ‘white on white’ room treatments, revolutionary in their departure from the gloom of late Victorian and Edwardian decorative schemes. For those of us who love early ‘30’s cinema, one cannot help but be reminded of Mrs. Maugham when watching Jean Harlow lounge in her white on white bedroom in the 1933 ‘Dinner at Eight’. As Metcalf surmises, set designers Fred Hope and Hobe Erwin doubtless considered this the height of chic and a clear encomium to Syrie Maugham.
As an antiques dealer whose trade is dependent on collectors, it is hard for me to endorse what use Syrie Maugham and others made of period pieces, with so much original finish stripped off and left plain, pickled, or painted white, with connoisseurship subsumed by chic. None of this is too surprising, though- as her designs marked such a break with the past, a thoroughgoing iconoclasm that extended to period furniture was probably to be expected. With all that, Maugham embraced contemporary makers and always included modern pieces 
in her designs. The comfortable eclecticism that we now embrace certainly finds one of its most prominent early proponents in Syrie Maugham. As she was popular and consequently a popularizer, one wonders about the level of success of Jean-Michel Frank or the Giacomettis without her patronage.
Though competitors, Maugham was yet friendly with her contemporaries, indeed was a near neighbor to Sibyl Colefax, and travelled through India with Elsie de Wolfe. Not surprising, then, that some clients and design elements would overlap, with some commissions hard to distinguish, certainly between de Wolfe and Maugham. It was a surprise to find, in Maugham’s Palm Beach project for the
Harry Payne Binghams, art moderne dining chairs identical to those we had acquired from de Wolfe’s Los Angeles commission for the Countess di Frasso.