Margaret Jaye, interior decorator, is thought to be the first trader to be listed as an 'interior decorator’ in Sydney. She opened a store in Darlinghurst Road in 1925. Interior decoration was a novel profession throughout the world in the 1920s, and women were among its most prominent practitioners. Previously the province of male traders and architects, interior decoration had been proposed as a suitable amateur occupation for the middle-class woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many recalled Jaye’s business as a type of gift shop, but she also stocked antique and modern furniture, ornaments, hand-blocked linens, Italian brocades, chintzes and Rodier fabrics. The post-World War II decorator Margaret Lord remembered it as a 'pretty shop’ attracting 'much attention’. Jaye began retailing 'moderne’ or deco-style fittings and arranging rooms in this manner from the early 1930s onwards. In 1932 she sold a shipment of Anne Dangar 's modernist abstract-patterned pottery, made by the Australian artist in rural France. The cream and green ceramics included tea sets, bowls and jugs, which, according to Dangar, Jaye complained were 'too thick for Australian taste’. Since Jaye was charging the equivalent of fifteen francs and sending Dangar one franc per item, Dangar was moved to complain to her friend Grace Crowley : 'I guess it’s her prices are too thick for people with taste’.
As a single woman with no known heirs Margaret Jaye’s decorating career is difficult to research. According to a contemporary she employed few assistants, relying instead on her female companion. Her low profile means we are left with few images of her work in the Sydney art and society magazines. Unlike other local designers and decorators – Marion Hall Best , Molly Grey, Thea Proctor , Yolande Proctor and Hera Roberts -Jaye was not linked to the Sydney artworld. Her interiors were not featured in Home magazine. Nor did she create a room for the Burdekin House Exhibition (1929), which received extensive coverage in the art press, although she did provide hangings and rugs for its colonial Victorian rooms. Her non-art credentials, and her marked association with trade and moneymaking in people’s memories, possibly explain her absence in Ure Smith publications. Some remember her as 'a real old take’, a tough businesswoman uninterested in the meticulous detail which decorators such as Marion Best expended on her commissions, and not above buying napery in Coles to resell at a considerably higher price. As Dangar wrote to Crowley regarding the sale of her pottery: 'you can arrange it all at once or bit by bit in your studio to sell, but at honest prices – not Miss Jaye’s’. Jaye’s business may not have satisfied the artistic pretensions of the Art in Australia – Home readership, but it is for this very reason that her early contribution to the development of modern interior decoration in Australia has not been recognised.
- Writers:
- McNeil, Peter
Michael Bogle
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2012
