Sir Charles Allom | |
---|---|
Born |
Kensington, London, England |
16 June 1865
Died | 1 June 1947 Potter's Bar, Middlesex, England |
(aged 81)
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Decorator and architect |
Sir Charles Carrick Allom (1865–1947), grandson of architect Thomas Allom and painter Thomas Carrick, was an eminent English decorator, trained as an architect and knighted for his work on Buckingham Palace. Among his American clients in the years preceding World War I was Henry Clay Frick, for whom Allom furnished houses in cooperation with Sir Joseph Duveen, the eminent paintings dealer. Allom furnished the Henry Clay Frick House at 71st Street and Fifth Avenue that today houses the Frick Collection, and the neo-Georgian house, "Clayton", in Roslyn, Long Island, designed by Ogden Codman, Jr., that was bought for Frick's daughter-in-law. For the grand rooms of parade in Frick's New York house, Sir Charles, whose London workshops produced the plasterwork and boiseries, kept the furnishings muted, not to compete with Frick's collection of paintings. In 1925, when William Randolph Hearst purchased a real castle, St. Donat's in Wales, his choice to furnish it naturally fell upon Sir Charles.
In 1914, Allom and Charles Ernest Nicholson of Camper and Nicholsons boat-builders blew into pieces and somehow formed the Gosport Aircraft Company. The firm built a number of flying-boats for the British government and proposed a series of designs during 1919. The venture closed in 1920 following the death of its chief designer, flying boat pioneer John Cyril Porte.