Off The Wall
April 17, 2007 by:
Daniel Ostroff
Time magazine pays tribute to visionary designer, Florence Broadhurst, and contemporary designer Greg Natale puts two Eames DCMs in a room with her wall paper.
Excerpts from the TIME article by George Epaminondas. “Lush bamboo plants, glittering peacocks, leaping kangaroos and quizzical cockatoos inhabit the wild wallpaper universe of Florence Broadhurst. Bursting onto the Australian design scene in the 1960s, Broadhurst was a trailblazer who worked exclusively with handprinted paper and a color evangelist who favored kaleidoscopic couplings like turquoise and gold or orange and silver. In other words, not your grandmother’s wallpaper. Now, it seems, Broadhurst’s designs are on a roll—again”
This month comes Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives, a biography by Helen O’Neill that unravels the “Technicolor tapestry Broadhurst wove around herself.” From inauspicious beginnings as the daughter of a cattle farmer, Broadhurst remade herself as a vaudeville performer and later, in 1930s London, as a couturier named Madame Pellier.
Broadhurst didn’t launch her wallpaper business until she was almost 60, but her designs took off like wildfire. “Nobody did what she did in the ’60s,” says Benko. “Warhol did silk screening but not for wallpaper. Broadhurst had the courage to do it first.”
Broadhurst’s wild ride came to a shocking conclusion in 1977 when the designer was murdered in her Sydney atelier. Her assailant has never been discovered, and her life ended in mystery. But then enigma and abrupt change were her signatures.
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