Janetta parlade biography for kids

“What I have is a good eye; about good taste…I do not like to use that expression because good taste is something so relative and so difficult to define.”

“More than good taste what one must posses is a good eye to see things. In other words: The capacity to enter a place and see something that you are interested in and that you like. To tell you the truth in my particular case, what I see and what catches my attention has more to do with eccentricity than with the quality of a piece of furniture or an object. At the end of the day I must say that I am quite crappy (cutre), I like poor art, I cannot stand shine… all I do is scrub and scrub to remove the shine.”

These are some of my favourite quotes from the iconic Spanish decorator Jaime Parladé, Marques de Apezteguia, who sadly left us in January this year. Dubbed “The doyen of Spanish designers” by Architectural Digest magazine, Jaime and his English wife Janetta, were dear friends of my mother Mary Melián. They met in 1962 when we moved to Andalucía while my father Alfredo (Freddy) Melian Zobel was beginning the groundwork and search for what was to become the gated community of Sotogrande.

Just two days ago I was archiving some of my mother’s boxes of correspondence and found many receipt from 1965 and 1966 from Jaime’s legendary shop La Tartana. Receipts for azulejos, a table, some chairs, some lebrillos (flat wide and large earthenware bowls,) wrought irons, two big white rugs from La Alpujareña factory in Granada… Jaime’s shop was exquisite and specialized in local antiques, andalusian earthenware, oriental rugs and fabrics and unpretentious furniture. Few and well chosen pieces that were more about local arts and crafts and tradition than bling. La Tartana opened in 1958 in the heart of the old Marbella, as Jaime began his interior design career and soon his shop, run or rather reigned

Janetta Parladé, the Marquesa de Apezteguia, figured in the biographies of many of the Bloomsbury set and their extended social circle and also played a role in the lives of people ranging from Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon to Cyril Connolly and Paddy Leigh Fermor.

She was born in 1921. Her father was the Rev Geoffrey Harold Woolley, the first British Territorial Army officer to be awarded the Victoria Cross (at Ypres) and later chaplain of Harrow.

Her mother was Janet Beatrix, widow of Captain George Culme-Seymour, killed in 1915. Parladé’s half-sister, the daughter by her first marriage, was Angela Culme-Seymour, who died in 2012 and whose famous multiple marriages and liaisons overlapped disastrously with her own. The Woolleys also had a son, Rollo.

The Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge and her husband Ralph first met Janetta “as a very attractive girl of 14, in Spain at the start of the civil war. Young enough to be our daughter, she became instead one of our closest friends”.

Much of the published information about Parladé comes from her diaries. They were introduced in April 1936 by Frances’s friend, Gerald Brenan, who was so taken with Angela Culme-Seymour that he was eager to meet her mother. Jan Woolley’s marriage to Geoffrey was on the rocks and Janetta was finding her father stifling. Anne Chisholm, Frances’s biographer, describes the young Janetta as “lovely-looking, with dark blonde hair and long legs”. The Partridges’ “life at Ham Spray,” Chisholm said in her 2009 book Frances Partridge, “expanded to include Jan, Rollo and Janetta. They liked Jan – it did not seem to trouble Frances that she became, briefly, Ralph’s lover – and were always kind to Rollo; but for both of them, there was something irresistible about Janetta”.

She more or less lived at Ham Spray at half-terms and holidays, and Frances discussed her schoolwork and her hope to go to art school. At new ye

Reading the news I learned that our former MP and PM, David Cameron, and his wife, Sam, had been holidaying at one of the resorts designed by Jaime Parladé. And that reminded me that the obituary of him  I wrote for one of the British national newspapers, the Telegraph, was never published. I knew Jaime slightly, and liked him, and it is sad that this fascinating man’s life has not been remembered as it ought to have been. So prompted by the Camerons, I’m posting my obituary now.

Jaime Parladé y Sanjuanena, 3rd marquess of Apezteguia, who has died in his native Spain, aged 84, was a celebrated international decorator. Via his wife, Janetta, he had ties with survivors of the Bloomsbury group, particularly the late Frances Partridge, in whose published diaries they often feature. Though he had no training or academic qualifications, and was guided solely by his own taste, his clients included plutocrats and pop stars, as well as other aristocrats and grandees with great houses. Parladé refused corporate commissions; his clients either began as friends, or, owing to his great charm, became friends. He decorated a country house in Connecticut for Diana Ross of the Supremes, did up a place in Moorish Caprice style for the Duchess of Alba, Jacob Rothschild’s olive mill in Corfu, and Santa Margarita in Marbella for the Baron Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. He hated being referred to as an “interior decorator,” as he considered what he did to be modest labour “only two rungs above hairdressing and one above dressmaking.” He began as an antique dealer, opening his first La Tartana shop in 1958.

There are examples of his work in the 2014 book, Jaime Parladé, A Personal Style, and many others can be seen online. Though he would sometimes hang the walls of clients’ draughty drawing rooms with gorgeous tapestries or gilt-framed portraits, he was equally capable of suggesting to a

British socialite and artist (1921-2018)

Janetta Parladé (born Janet E. Woolley; London, 31 December 1921–London, 9 June 2018) was a British socialite, painter and aristocrat.

Woolley was profiled in DJ Taylor's 2019 book Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951.

Family origins

Her parents were Geoffrey Harold Woolley, VC, OBE, MC (1892 - 1968) and Janet Beatrix Orr-Ewing. Her brother was Harold Lindsay Cathcart “Rollo” Woolley (1919-1942), Flying Officer of the RAF during World War II and killed in action over Tunisia.

Life

Woolley was pulled from school at age 14 by her mother, and the two moved to Torremolinos, Spain by the mid-1930s. Her mother was an acquaintance of Gerald Brenan and Gamel Woolsey, who were connected with the Bloomsbury Group. There, Woolley met Ralph and Frances Partridge, who became like parents to her. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Woolsey, then 17, and her mother returned to England. As a teenager, Woolley became pregnant and underwent an abortion.

Woolley was a member of the circle of clerks and secretaries of Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, founded and edited by Cyril Connolly during the World War II. There, she earned the nickname 'Miss Bluefeet', as she tended to walk around barefoot in the magazine's office. She also worked in a munitions factory during the war. In 1949, she and David Astor served as the witnesses for the marriage of Sonia Brownell and George Orwell.

In the 1950s, Woolley and her then-husband, Derek Jackson, rented homes in both Ireland and France.

In the 1960s she moved to Spain. There, along her partner and