Interiors and furniture by American decorator Tony Duquette are a special world: redundant, fantastic and incredibly attractive.

He was friends with all of America’s business and cultural elite in the 1950s, and worked for them, designing films, plays, and private homes, and did so with extraordinary daring and inventiveness.

Neither before nor after him did decorators demonstrate such an abundance of techniques and a riot of imagination, such a penchant for excesses and did not indulge in these excesses with such taste. And such a success: Duquette was a trendsetter, a star, the first master who, during his lifetime, was awarded a solo exhibition at the Louvre in 1951.

He won a Tony theater award for costumes for the musical Camelot, worked with Hitchcock on the film To Catch a Thief, and managed to infuriate Nikita Khrushchev with the decor for the film musical Can-Can. “This is the most decadent thing I have ever seen in my life!” Nikita Sergeevich said. In a way, he was right. But in the excessive and insane decor, Duquette was captivated by the fact that he did not prevaricate – Tony was one of those artists who themselves live according to the ideology they preach.

Anthony Michael Duquette was born in 1914 in Los Angeles into an artistic family: his mother was a cellist, his great uncle worked with William Morris. At the dawn of his career, Tony designed shop windows. The success began with an acquaintance with the designer James Pendleton, on whose order Duquette made serving for the ceremonial dinner.

Duquette went through life as if dancing – arranged balls, flew around the world from friends to friends and at the same time managed to work. In addition to theater and film projects, he created sculptures, designed furniture, and designed jewelry – they are still produced according to the original samples by his business partner Hutton Wilkinson (he co-authored a book published about Duquette in 2007 by Abrams).

The pagoda in the garden of the Sortilegium ranch was decorated with deer and elk antlers Duquette often used them in projects.

But the apogee of Tony’s excess aesthetic was the interiors. “A person always has a hungry look,” Duquette said. He lacks visual impressions. Interiors should be full of surprises – things that you only notice on your second or third visit to the house.” Photographs of projects—his own homes in California, an apartment designed for socialite columnist Kobina Wright, Palazzo Brandolini designed in Venice for John and Dodie Rosenkrantz—are rife with strange and fascinating things.

Arbors made of deer antlers, chandeliers made of shells and old tin cans, frames made of coral, sculpted candlesticks (Duquette was firmly convinced that decorative flowers could grow from any litter, and once made a necklace from emeralds and the skin of a rattlesnake killed with his own hand) … I want to rub my eyes at the sight of these interiors – it seems that these are not real houses, but a scene from some especially fantasy production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.