Tom Britt, a maximalist designer known for his swaggering, lavish interiors that could evoke the court of Louis XV or the palace of a maharajah or a Venetian palazzo — “operatic décor,” as one design critic put it, “that was also slightly bonkers” — died on Jan. 4 at his home in Astoria, Queens. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by Julie Britt, his former wife.
Mr. Britt could do modern, but more often than not his interiors were a mélange of elements from more opulent periods, including Venetian grotto-style dining chairs, silver lattice panels modeled after those at the Taj Mahal, blue-black lacquered walls that required 20 coats of paint, gold-leaf ceilings, rooms tented with yards of fabric to resemble Moroccan pavilions, and lots and lots of mirrors. Also: Roman busts! Curtained beds! Napoleonic prints!
Mr. Britt loved oversize architectural details, and objects and artworks in multiples.
“Pretty rooms are pretty boring,” he wrote in the introduction to “Fabulous!,” a 2017 book about his work. “Why be ordinary?”
Mr. Britt was as theatrical as his rooms, with a gruff, gravelly baritone and a staccato delivery that colleagues and design writers loved to mimic. Mitchell Owens, the author of “Fabulous!,” described Mr. Britt’s voice as a “Damon Runyon growl” with overtones of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.
“The étagères were bang! bang! bang! bang! on the four walls here. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!” was how Mr. Britt was quoted in 2007 in New York Social Diary, the society blog. (The writers noted that they had overtaxed the exclamation points on their computer keyboards while transcribing the interview.)
“He was all about the voice,” Stephen Drucker, the veteran lifestyle magazine editor, said. “He could turn the word ‘precisely’ into about 18 syllables.”
The designer Richard Keith Langham, attempting to replicate Mr. Britt’s signature rasp in an interview, started out strong but gave up after running out of breath. Mr. Britt’s catchphrase, Mr. Langham said, was “Get the picture?” — typically deployed at the end of an emphatic and lengthy monologue.
“If you dared to interrupt the tirade,” Mr. Langham added, “he’d say, ‘Shut up and listen, you’ll learn something.’”
Mr. Britt, a Kansas City, Mo., native, had trained at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, studied art history at New York University and been mentored by Rose Cumming, the flamboyant, Australian-born decorator known for her idiosyncratic self-presentation — elaborate hats, plunging décolletage and blue hair — and her equally eccentric interiors that might feature metallic wallpaper, antique bird cages, curtains made from Indian saris and lampshades crafted out of Indonesian parasols. Her Upper East Side store was a salon of sorts frequented by Andy Warhol, the Duchess of Windsor and Rudolf Nureyev.
After Mr. Britt and his wife graduated from Parsons, where they had met, they became Ms. Cumming’s unofficial assistants, folding fabric and moving furniture while Ms. Cumming, who was born in 1887, regaled them with tales of her early days in the business.
When Mr. Britt visited on his own, he told New York Social Diary, Ms. Cumming would say: “Lock the door. I don’t want to be interrupted when I’m with young Mr. Britt.”
Mr. Britt’s clients included well-heeled residents of Missouri, members of a California wine dynasty, the Rajmata of Jaipur, ambassadors and counts, various banking and real estate moguls and their families — and his own contractor.
For his contractor, who lived in a modest apartment in a former tenement building on the Upper East Side, Mr. Britt designed an interior that resembled, as Mr. Owens put it in “Fabulous!,” “a neo-Romantic set for a Sophocles play or, perhaps, a small temple in Asia Minor converted for domestic use.” (There was a lot of classical statuary and faux marble.)
Mr. Britt was one of the “mandarins of American interior decoration,” as William L. Hamilton of The New York Times wrote in 1997, an old guard that included, but was not limited to, Mario Buatta, otherwise known as the Prince of Chintz; Albert Hadley, one half of the venerable firm Parish-Hadley; and Mark Hampton, who gave the corporate raiders of the 1980s the trappings of European and English royalty.
Theirs was an era in which the expression “quiet luxury” would be considered an oxymoron.
“Tom Britt represented a time in New York City in the ’70s when everybody was in full bloom,” Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York magazine, said. “And he was really in full bloom, a larger-than-life personality who would do larger-than-life interiors, as if people were living in palaces and palazzos. Restraint was not in his vocabulary.”
Mr. Britt’s own habitats and habits were perhaps the best expression of that maximalism. For four decades, he lived on three floors of a limestone Beaux-Arts mansion on East 63rd Street amid a riot of statuary, gilded plaster and mirrored walls. (The building was rent stabilized, and, in 2018 when he moved out, the rent was $3,025 a month.)
“You couldn’t do anything in it but have a party,” Mr. Owens said of the apartment’s music room, which had walls that were lacquered blue-black and panels, doors and fanlights that were mirrored. “It wasn’t about being comfortable, it was about being glamorous, with lots of guests reflected into infinity in those mirrors. You couldn’t tell where the room started and where it ended.”
In Water Mill, N.Y., on Long Island’s East End, Mr. Britt commissioned the architect Peter Cook to design a replica of a neo-Classical villa in Poland that had been modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. The rooms were inspired by an early 19th-century French chateau, Burmese holy sites and an 18th-century Swedish country house, among other influences. There was also a Moroccan tent on the lawn. Mr. Britt was an enthusiastic host, even after he got sober in the 1980s.
“His parties were intoxicating,” Mr. Langham said. “He didn’t have to drink. Tom created his own elixirs, his own rousing moments. He was a mad magician with enormous heart.”
Thomas Burgin Britt was born on March 4, 1936, in Kansas City, the eldest of two sons of Ruth (Burgin) Britt, a minister’s daughter from San Antonio, and James Thomas Britt, a lawyer.
Tom was artistic and handy, a scholar of decorating magazines like House & Garden and House Beautiful, and his family let him have his head to an astonishing degree. As a child, he painted an image of an apple tree in full bloom on the furnace in the basement of the family home. At 12, he was given free rein over the third floor of his grandparents’ house, and he painted it black and silver. At 15, he was allowed to redesign his parents’ house while they were on vacation. He moved walls, installed pilasters in the dining room and painted his father’s bedroom red; his mother’s bedroom, he swathed in mattress ticking.
“My mother kind of loved it,” he told The Times in 1998. “My father was enraged.”
In 1954, he won a scholarship that paid for his first year at Parsons, which included traveling to Europe by ship with the freshman class. He and Julie Creveling fell in love on that trip. They married in 1959, the year Mr. Britt graduated from N.Y.U., and he started his firm in 1964.
“We were crazy about each other,” said Ms. Britt, who went on to have a career as a fashion stylist, working with photographers like Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber. “I loved his enthusiasm. He could do anything. He changed my whole life.”
But Mr. Britt’s drinking took its toll on the marriage and they separated, sort of, in the late 1970s. They remained friends and traveling companions, sharing the property in Water Mill, where Mr. Britt built her a house he called the Jewel Box. When she moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the East 70s of Manhattan in 2004, he decorated it for her. They finally divorced a few years ago.
Mr. Britt is survived by his brother, Robert.
“You have to have confidence,” Mr. Britt told New York Social Diary, adding, “You can create anything out of nothing, if you know how to do it.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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