A GEORGE III RED JAPANNED BUREAU CABINET, SECOND QUARTER 18TH CENTURY

Mario Buatta acquired this bureau cabinet in England in the 1970s, and it remained with him in all his apartments as a focal point in the living room. The classic English japanned bureau cabinet fulfils the dual purpose of both providing both a strong vertical anchor point of rich colour and exuberant surface decoration in a room as well as serving as a functional storage piece and display vehicle for multifarious objects including antique porcelain and small boxes - things all beloved to the designer and integral elements of his decorating philosophy. Virtually every one of Buatta's major projects has included a lacquer bureau cabinet in the main drawing room.

It is likely that the designer was inspired in his love of bureau cabinets by his early mentor, Rose Cumming. The larger-than-life decorator Cumming (1887-1968) was born on a sheep farm in Australia and immigrated to New York in 1917 with her sister, the silent film star Dorothy Cumming. Her decorating office in a converted automobile showroom on Park Avenue doubled as a fabric and antique shop and specialized in flamboyant chintz patterns, chinoiserie, and Venetian, Austrian and South German baroque and rococo furniture, at a time when most New Yorkers favoured conservative English Georgian taste or at most the more conventional French Louis XV and XVI. When he was a student, Buatta worked for Rose Cumming on Saturdays, along with Tom Britt and John Robert Moore II, and at the end of the day she would always prepare them dinner. Her own townhouse was decorated with Chinese wallpaper on a silver ground, something Buatta would recreate in the painted walls of his entrance hall. Her taste had more than a whiff of Hollywood glamour and appealed to film stars - her clients included Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich