Charles Allom
British decorator
Sir Charles Carrick Allom (1865–1947) was an eminent British decorator, who trained as an architect being knighted for his work on Buckingham Palace.
The son of Arthur Allom, he was a grandson of architect Thomas Allom and painter Thomas Carrick. Among his American clients in the years preceding World War I was Henry Clay Frick, for whom Allom furnished houses in cooperation with art dealer, Sir Joseph Duveen. Allom furnished the Henry Clay Frick House on 71st Street and Fifth Avenue which today houses the Frick Collection, and the neo-Georgian house, Clayton at Roslyn, Long Island, designed by Ogden Codman Jr., that was bought for Frick's daughter-in-law. For the grand rooms in Frick's New York house, Sir Charles, whose London workshops produced the plasterwork and boiseries, kept the furnishings muted, not to compete with Frick's collection of paintings. In 1925, when William Randolph Hearst purchased an ancient castle, St. Donat's in Wales, his choice to furnish it fell upon Sir Charles.
Biography
In 1914, Allom and Charles Ernest Nicholson of Camper and Nicholsons, a boat-building firm, formed the Gosport Aircraft Company. The firm built a number of flying-boats for the British Government and proposed a series of designs during 1919. The venture closed in 1920 following the death of its chief designer, flying boat pioneer John Cyril Porte.
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