RENAISSANCE MAN
The polymath Willie Landels has masterminded creations from iconic magazine covers to modern homeware Birley homeware launches online (www.birley.com) in September.
Back in the Sixties, a young Willie Landels, newly arrived in London from his birthplace of Italy, pitched up at the Harper’s Bazaar headquarters in Victoria to renew his mother’s subscription to the magazine. ‘I waited around until the receptionist didn’t know what to do with me,’ the dapper 94-year-old tells me over a cappuccino in Mayfair. ‘Then, a lady – in excellent gloves, and very elegant, which was unusual because people at that time were quite dowdy – said I’d better go with her.’ He was shown into a chic office, with a vast desk and mirrored walls. ‘I said, “I love this office. What is your job here?” She replied, “I am the editor.”’ This was the eminent journalist Anne ScottJames, and Landels told her: ‘This job seems good. I think it’s the kind I would like to have one day.’
That, years later, he managed to get that job is testament to Landels’ multidisciplinary virtuosity and refreshing sense that anything is possible. He spent his boyhood on the shores of Lake Como, where he says he received no education except for a little Greek and Latin, before moving to Milan at 16 to be a scene-painter at La Scala, then transferring to London to work in an advertising agency. After a successful stint as an art director at J Walter Thompson, he side-stepped into glossy-magazine publishing.
Landels brought continental verve to this title – he was something of a magnet for mavericks, befriending Cristóbal Balenciaga and commissioning Peter York, who went on to invent the ‘Sloane Ranger’ with Ann Barr, the magazine’s features editor. At the heart of his milieu was Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the future Lord Snowdon, whom Landels had first hired at the agency to try to add lustre to a ‘very dull’ client’s campaigns after he tired of Cecil Beaton. ‘I used Cecil twice and then thought he was boring. So I went to Tony and said, “Can you do it?” And he could. He’d build a whole set for each actress who came, and work with them charmingly.’
Since leaving the magazine in 1985, Landels has continued to define style, creating modern furniture pieces for the cult design brands Zanotta and Aram. Having helped his friend, the entrepreneur Robin Birley, with logos for his sandwich shops in the Eighties, Landels has been overseeing the artfully maximalist interior decoration at the Birley Group members’ clubs, including 5 Hertford Street, for the past 12 years.
Thus the rooms of the club’s Mayfair townhouse are replete with objects that spring from Landels’ imagination. Happily, from this month, both members and non-members alike will be able to buy these bright, joyful pieces online, and bring some of the Hertford Street magic into their own homes.
The collection will continue to expand, as Landels shows no sign of slowing down. I wonder at the fertility of his thought process. ‘I have the great advantage of never having been to school,’ he says, and there is a glimpse of that wide-eyed young man, looking around the
Bazaar editor’s office 60 years ago, liking what he saw and turning his wish into reality. ‘The way I see it, anyone can design anything.’ cb