Bunny Mellon (far right) — in her everyday outfit: skirt, espadrilles, bucket hat and Schlumberger bracelet — gives a tour of her Basket House. (Photo courtesy Thomas Lloyd)
Quiet luxury, a trend in fashion, fine jewelry and interior design today, is nothing new. It’s all about classic silhouettes made of the finest materials, maintaining a low profile. The late Rachel Lowe Lambert, aka Bunny, Mellon, a master of the style, could have written the book on it. The noted horticulturalist, philanthropist, gardener and art collector was guided by the mantra that “nothing should be noticed.”
Although Mellon, who died in 2014, ran in the highest echelons of society, she was an intensely private person. When Sotheby’s auctioned her legendary collections — art, furniture, jewelry, antique books, etc. — later that year, her grandson, Thomas Lloyd, decided to learn more about the extraordinary woman he knew simply as Granbunny. With the aid of Bryan Huffman, a good friend of his grandmother’s, he delved deep into her world.
“For me, it was really a journey about getting to know her more. Frankly, she was such a private person that, even as her grandson, I really didn’t have a chance to understand more about her other than what most people knew about her publicly. I wanted to really get a better sense of some of her influences, and people and things that were part of her childhood, that shaped who she was,” Lloyd says.
Image © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Used with permission of Isabelle Rey
Lloyd and Huffman’s new coffee-table book, “Bunny Mellon Style,” introduced in Richmond during Historic Garden Week this spring, not only profiles the major influences in her life, it highlights her immense talents, explores her creative collaborations with couturier Hubert de Givenchy and master jeweler Jean Michel Schlumberger, and gives the reader a glimpse of the rarefied world she created and inhabited.
“Interestingly enough, my grandmother wanted the opportunity to go to college. She approached her father at the time — she had finished up her studies at Foxcroft, and she wanted to become a set designer for Broadway,” Lloyd says. “She was very creative. And her father sort of knowingly listened but said, ‘You’re not going to college. Here’s a list of available men to marry,’ and … that again is an acknowledgement of the time. But it didn’t deter her when she did marry Paul Mellon ... it created an opportunity for her to showcase not only her own creative skills, but it taught her that she had to learn things on her own.”
Mellon, a gifted gardener who redesigned the White House Rose Garden for President John F. Kennedy and helped to restore Louis XIV’s vegetable garden at Versailles, had a lifelong love of nature and the outdoors, inspired by her grandfather, Arthur Lowe. She studied gardening and landscaping as a girl by shadowing the Olmsted Brothers landscape team overseeing the gardens at her father’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, and studying horticultural tomes.
Her homes were designed with an eye for restraint, Huffman says, recalling that he was struck by the understatement of it all. “You could go in, and there was an unframed Van Gogh [“Green Wheat Fields”] over the fireplace with a slipcovered sofa out of some kind of cotton chintz, with a grass sort of rug and painted floors.”
