Gladwell & Patterson Feature in Sean Symington's Withdrawing Room at WOW!house

Canadian-born, Cotswold-based designer Sean Symington took as his starting point a distinctly Georgian idea: the withdrawing room, that most convivial of spaces, where guests would retire after dinner to play cards, drink champagne and linger in easy conversation. His interpretation, created in collaboration with textile brand Zardi & Zardi, is anything but a period recreation. "I didn't want to do the classic English countryside look," he explains, "but I loved this idea of creating this cosy end-of-the-night space — a manor house combined with the sophistication of a city apartment, tying in my North American roots, too."

The entire room flows from a single exuberant gesture: the 'Primavera' wallpaper by Zardi & Zardi, which covers walls and ceiling alike, setting the palette and mood for everything that follows. From there, Sean has layered in opulent colour, warm lighting and a studied maximalism, an approach partly inspired by an early encounter with a client's bridge room, and by the layering and maximalist sensibility of American decorator Miles Redd. All of it is filtered through his own signature aesthetic of "classic with a fresh whimsy." Part of the pleasure of the project, he notes, was the freedom it afforded: released from the usual functional considerations of a real commission, he could focus on the purely decorative, experimenting with more glamorous, opulent colours than he might otherwise deploy.

Lighting plays a central role in establishing the room's mood. Rather than rely on overhead light, Sean has kept illumination low and layered through table lamps, floor lamps and wall lights, working together to create the kind of warm, intimate atmosphere the withdrawing room concept demands. The approach reflects his broader view that the best lighting schemes balance the functional with the beautiful, and that decorative lighting, handled well, is as much a part of the room's character as the furniture or the art on the walls.

Two works from Gladwell & Patterson feature in the room.

La Falaise de Mers (1935) is a late landscape by Maximilien Luce, a painter who came of age in the Pointillist circle of Seurat, Signac and Pissarro, and who brought to that movement an unusual warmth and social conviction that set him apart from his more theoretically minded contemporaries. Trained first as a wood-engraver and later at the Académie Suisse, Luce exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants from the late 1880s and built a reputation across six decades for vibrant, physically engaged painting - industrial Borinage, Haussmann's Paris, the building of the Métro - before discovering, in his later years, the tranquil light of the Seine valley and the Normandy and Picardy coasts. The subject here is the chalk cliffs at Mers-les-Bains, a stretch of coastline he returned to repeatedly. By 1935 he was in his late seventies, and the handling reflects that maturity: looser and freer than his Pointillist works of the 1890s, suffused with the quiet assurance of an artist who had nothing left to prove. Gladwell & Patterson holds original Maximilien Luce paintings for sale with full provenance, and this work is among the finest examples of his late coastal period currently available on the market.

READ MORE

Composition au Verre et aux Fruits (c. 1900) is a Post-Impressionist still life painted at the moment when the genre had been most thoroughly transformed by Cézanne's rethinking of form, structure and pictorial space. Where earlier still life painting prized illusionism and surface finish, Cézanne and those who followed him were concerned with something harder to articulate: the weight of objects, the geometry beneath appearances, the painting as a constructed thing in its own right. This work belongs to that moment — modest in subject, considered in execution, and quietly authoritative in the way it holds the eye. For collectors seeking Post-Impressionist works of this period, Gladwell & Patterson offers a carefully selected inventory.

READ MORE

WOW!house 2026 is open to the public throughout June and into July. We warmly encourage you to visit Sean Symington's withdrawing room in person, and to see these two works in the context for which they were so thoughtfully chosen.

Discover WOW!House