“The ‘chuck out your chintz’ Ikea campaign was in the early 1990s, wasn’t it? And everything was off-white after that. But in the past five years that’s changed; maximalism is back in, as a reaction to what’s gone before.”
Lucinda Oakes is offering an explanation why the order book for her bespoke murals and wall decorations is currently so full. Cyclical decor trends may have something to do with it, but so has the delicacy of her brushwork and the spirit-lifting quality of the natural scenes she recreates indoors.
Her work ranges from small over-door panels and chimney screens — to cover fireplaces in the summer months — to whole immersive roomscapes. It can be seen in several rooms in Ballyfin Demesne hotel in County Laois in Ireland. Smaller murals are painted in situ, directly on to the plaster, but for larger projects, which take several months, she favours marouflage. This involves painting on expanses of paper or canvas in scuff-resistant acrylic paint in her studio in a Georgian house in Hastings, on the Sussex coast. The finished pieces are shipped off to be hung like wallpaper by experts in the client’s home.
But even this remote work is preceded by time spent judging the light and mood of a space. “I have done work for Americans where I haven’t needed a site visit,” she says, “but I had really good measurements, down to an 18th of an inch.”
When I visit on a bleak January day, one wall of the studio is hung with a 9ft by 9ft canvas panel, one of 15 that will fill a room in an Oxfordshire house. Under a warm summer sky, a garden framed by trees stretches away to a gazebo in the middle distance, in a scene influenced by the Italian master Tiepolo. On a stone parapet in the foreground, between pots of nasturtiums and echeveria succulents, a pile of books is topped with a pair of gardening gloves, as if their owner has left the scene moments before.
Commissions come either directly from clients or, more often, from interior designers. She works to briefs that vary from the broad — “just a colour reference” — to the highly specific; one of the book titles on the piece she’s working on was requested by the client.
After gaining an MA in fine art, Oakes followed a path marked by her father George Oakes, himself a celebrated decorative painter, design director at the most English of interior designers, Colefax and Fowler, and who was commissioned to decorate the Audience Chamber at Buckingham Palace. He remains an influence on her work, along with mainly 17th and 18th-century painters and muralists. But she is constantly gathering reference images for work from all over the world — one crowded Pinterest board on her tablet is headed “Birds on doors”.
Oakes’s talent for trompe l’oeil, seducing the viewer into thinking the painted design exists in three dimensions, is uncanny. The shadowing on her monochrome grisaille decorations that mimic plaster mouldings has been known to confuse autofocus cameras, she says. She has been tempted sometimes to try a freer, more impressionistic style, “but I think people wouldn’t like it. If it’s me, they want to see detail; they’re not happy with just brush marks”.
Mural prices from £8,000; timeframe 10 days to 10 months; lucindaoakes.com
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