Carleton Varney, Interior Designer Known as Mr. Color, Dies at 85

Carleton Varney, the ebullient interior designer whose enthusiastic use of color in motels, castles, palaces and the habitats of film and theater royalty — and one particular president — attained him the nickname Mr. Shade, died on July 14 in Palm Seashore, Fla. He was 85.

His son Sebastian verified the dying, in a hospital, but did not specify the trigger.

Mr. Varney was properly trained by the maximalist decorator Dorothy Draper, who was acknowledged for her Hollywood Regency thrives — monumental stripes, sizzling shades and swirls of plaster relief — and whose organization he finished up obtaining in the 1960s. (Describing Mrs. Draper’s model, columnists normally became entangled in hyperbole: “Close your eyes and visualize the most hanky-swanky movie set you’ve at any time noticed,” a single wrote about the Palácio Quitandinha, a Brazilian hotel she built in the 1940s. “Multiply by 6 and add ten.” Esquire magazine explained of her work, “One inhales class, and right after one straightens one’s tie, 1 exhales it, too.”)

From Mrs. Draper, Mr. Varney realized that every room wants a contact of black, and probably a mirrored wall. He learned to blend at least three or 4 prints and designs for each space he also uncovered that vertical stripes make any area appear to be taller.

Mrs. Draper normally declared, “Show me almost nothing that appears like gravy!” Mr. Varney inherited her aversion to the bland and the beige, which he believed was terrible for the psyche.

“I after went to a hotel on my way back again from Bora Bora, and the carpet was a knobby gray, and the walls had been beige with white trim, and the curtains were being grey-beige,” he informed The Washington Article in 2020. “Even the art was beige. I went into the travertine bathroom, and when I came out, I assumed I was naked in a bowl of oatmeal.”

Mr. Varney’s consumers have been as bold as his colours. For Ethel Merman, who exhibited a totally decorated synthetic Xmas tree all year round anywhere she lived, Mr. Varney dressed an condominium in patriotic red, white and blue. Judy Garland’s color plan was lime green and dazzling yellow. For an unnamed male consumer, he swathed a bedroom in peacock blue velvet and satin and created a closet to suit the man’s selection of S&M equipment. (The home was featured in a French pornographic journal.)

Joan Crawford preferred yellow and orange she also favored white walls, other than in her bedrooms, which she normally experienced painted a pale pink. She told Mr. Varney, he noted in “Houses in My Heart” (2008): “A pink bed room in no way stripped a gentleman of his masculinity. It only enhanced it.”

She also insisted that all her upholstered household furniture be covered in effortless-to-clear plastic. “Joan experienced additional plastic on her furnishings than was used at the meat counter at the A.&P. grocery store,” Mr. Varney said.

But he was fond of his eccentric customer, who at the time asked him to be her everlasting escort. (He declined.) He recalled her advising him, “I invented me, and you can invent you.” As a result, he explained, he formulated a signature appear, favoring purple socks and multicolored silk scarves, often by Hermès, that had been sliced in half by a tailor and that he would knot and wear like a tie.

“Dorothy Draper would reduce anything in half — paintings, antique household furniture — it did not issue,” he stated, “so I guess I am performing the exact same.”

Mr. Varney “looked like his interiors,” Cindy Adams, the caustic veteran New York Metropolis gossip columnist, reported in a cell phone interview. “Casual and colorful and a tiny overdone. He cherished his consumers, and he liked to communicate about the prince of this or that, but extra than everything he loved publicity. I adored him.”

Stephen Drucker, a previous editor of Home Beautiful and Martha Stewart Residing, mentioned that Mr. Varney was one particular of the last hyperlinks to “the excellent girl decorators who launched the profession” and to “the aged New York earth of Hampshire Residence, the Colony Club and Sutton Position.”

He added: “I try to remember religiously looking at his newspaper column from the ’60s, and his option to every challenge was to paint it coral pink, delphinium blue or daffodil yellow. Dorothy Draper was tame compared to him. His use of colour was psychedelic, and you can make pleasurable of it, but it takes a pretty special reward to be able to create rooms as he did.”

All through the Carter administration, Mr. Varney was a style and design consultant to the White Household, decorating condition dinners and other events. When the Israel-Egypt peace treaty was signed in 1979, President Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, hosted a meal for 1,340 individuals on the South Garden of the White Home Mr. Varney covered the tables in a forsythia pattern and set them in an orange tent. He also decorated the Carters’ log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in an early Americana type — nevertheless Mr. Carter manufactured much of the furniture himself, including the couple’s 4-poster bed.

In 1980, Mr. Varney developed souvenirs for the Democratic National Convention, at Madison Sq. Yard. These involved tote bags, umbrellas and scarves, all created from a quilted fabric printed with white and green stars and stripes (environmentally friendly was Mr. Varney’s most loved colour, and a favored of President Carter’s, far too).

However the conference was a bumpy just one — Senator Edward M. Kennedy was angling to take the nomination from the incumbent, and his aides and President Carter’s practically came to blows — Mr. Varney’s contributions went off without a hitch.

About the many years, Mr. Varney designed material, home furnishings, footwear, hats, and tabletop accessories like napkins, trays and candles, as well as looking at glasses in sweet colors and, in the 1960s, cigarette lighters that seemed like gold-plated ice product cones.

In 1974, a enterprise that owned a fleet of New York Metropolis taxis employed Mr. Varney to spruce up its Checker cabs, which he did with dazzling red seatbelts, sky-blue interior paint, green and white checked vinyl seats and green bounce seats. “Drab Taxi Goes Fab,” Time journal declared. One particular delighted cabby informed The New York Occasions he was earning $4 a lot more in tips each individual working day driving his refurbished hack.

Carleton Bates Varney was born on Jan. 23, 1937, in Lynn, Mass., and grew up in close by Nahant. He was named for his father, who owned a sporting goods retail outlet his mother, Julia Catherine Mary Raczkowskos Varney, was a homemaker.

He majored in Spanish at Oberlin University in Ohio, and in 1960 he earned a Master of Arts degree from the New York University University of Training, now the Steinhardt College of Society, Schooling and Human Development. He put in a calendar year instructing Spanish, English and background in Westchester County. He was also an artist, and when he satisfied Leon Hegwood, a decorator from Texas who had taken about Mrs. Draper’s enterprise, he was employed as a draftsman. (Mrs. Draper remained with the corporation for a time. She died in 1969.)

In addition to his son Sebastian, Mr. Varney is survived by two other sons, Nicholas and Seamus his partner, Brinsley Matthews, vice president of Dorothy Draper & Enterprise a grandson and a sister, Vivian Varney. His marriage in 1968 to Suzanne Lickdyke, who was also a designer, ended in divorce.

Mr. Varney was the creator of far more than 30 guides on decorating, as perfectly as two novels. His most current reserve, “The Draper Contact: The Large Life and Significant Design of Dorothy Draper,” was revealed this thirty day period. His weekly suggestions column, “Your Family members Decorator,” ran for additional than 50 yrs and was syndicated for a long time. It appeared most lately only in The Palm Beach front Day-to-day Information.

Of the hundreds of accommodations Mr. Varney had a hand in decorating — among the them a Sheraton in Waikiki, for which he employed Margaret Keane to paint portraits of extensive-eyed Indigenous Hawaiian waifs — the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., is most likely his most extravagant.

Components of it have been first crafted in 1778 by the 1940s it was a enormous resort that Dorothy Draper termed “a Brobdingnagian monster of a bowling alley” just before she labored the location in excess of from stem to stern. She remained its decorator right up until Mr. Varney took on that function in the 1960s, and he amped up its Draperisms: introducing curtain valances that look like massive bow ties, redoing lobbies and full wings (it now has additional than 700 rooms), gilding bas-reliefs, painting walls turquoise or tomato crimson, laying down psychedelic carpeting of his own style and design, amongst a lot of interventions over the past half-century.

“I have put in 54 yrs hoping to open up the home windows and doorways of The usa to shade,” Mr. Varney said in 2020. “I imagine coloration has a overall result on people’s heads, minds and attitudes. A lovely sunny area tends to make persons delighted. I consider kids who develop up in rooms that are rather and colorful and magical are greater individuals.”