Mention “Major Alley” and I’m triggered, as is almost every house-obsessed type with any knowledge of Palm Beach. I’d been trying to get behind its walls for 50 years at least—long before I considered a career in architecture or (as it turned out) decorating. It’s a just few steps from the town’s epicenter—the labyrinthine and romantic shopping “vias” off Worth Avenue—and the sprawling, picturesque Everglades Club.
The Mediterranean style was the fodder for renowned Palm Beach architect Addison Mizner and his direct disciples. But Howard Major’s eponymous alley is cut from a different cloth; he looked to the Anglo-Colonial—more specifically Bermuda—idiom. His plainer, less exotic style may have been anomalous at first, but it took root and formed its own chapter in Palm Beach’s architectural lexicon. It’s recognizable in much of the work of other exemplars, such as John Volk and Maurice Fatio.
Major gets the prize for discretion, suitability, and charm. His signature Palm Beach work is a cluster of six urbane but tropical cottages arranged around a meandering alley, each with its own walled garden. Contiguous to them, though somewhat larger and behind its own wall, is the house he built for himself. When I got the call to come look, I did not hesitate.
With its entry off a private passageway, Howard Major’s own house is adjacent to his eponymous and widely acknowledged architectural masterstroke—Major Alley.
Quadrille Fabrics re-scaled their Lyford Trellis pattern and printed it on coarse natural grasscloth. Kojima Shoten, Kyoto, supplied the custom-sized and -shaped paper lantern.
In the living room, the watercolor over the sofa, Breadfruit by Idoline Duke, was comissioned by the decorator—the artist’s brother. The cushions on the wickerand-rattan Bonacina armchairs are covered in Quadrille’s Tropical Damask.
Sunshine-yellow encaustic tiles from Popham Design frame the kitchen passthrough, which looks into the family room.
In the morning room, early 19th-century botanical studies of palms by João Barbosa Rodrigues are framed in white for added graphic punch on the chocolate grasscloth walls.
The primary bedroom, and the sitting room are tied together by the same soothing blue paint.
The nostalgic and retro Beverly Hills Hotel banana-leaf wallpaper came with the house and seemed too on point to change.
A downstairs guest room opens directly onto a cloistered lap pool. The pair of wall lanterns flanking the doors were first designed by the decorator for the Lyford Cay Club.
The loggia is accented with a perennial favorite, Peter Dunham’s Fig Leaf print. The green armchairs, from IKEA, are two of a set of 12. The rest are stacked out of the frame and are sometimes set around the outdoor Ping-Pong table for dinner parties.
The house didn’t need much structural work; it had been updated from its mildewed 1920s charm by someone else only a few years back. Its rooms and courtyards were left generally intact, though there is now a swimming pool with which a true purist might quibble. I’d guess that the upstairs had been reconfigured, as there are now only three bedrooms, but it also includes an elaborate primary suite boasting his-and-her dressing rooms and his-and-her sitting rooms, hardly an arrangement the original architect could have predicted the need for.
The client spends her winters in Hobe Sound—a mere 35 miles to the north—in a one-story, elaborately landscaped, chicly formal house that looks west over a broad stretch of the inland waterway. There’s golf and a beach club, so it’s not exactly isolated, but it has a “country life” vibe. The winter season is long up there, and now she can break it up with trips to “town” with its bridge lunches, restaurants, and another social subset she can entertain.
She’d had several houses decorated by Mario Buatta over the years, so she wasn’t shy about approaching a decorating project full-on. Her directive was to make it “Palm Beach-y” but young and easy (the town isn’t generally known for youthfulness), a place her daughter and grandchildren would find fun to visit—and eventually inherit.
