Cousins Rhoda and Agnes Garrett were suffragists and trailblazing professional interior designers. A plaque at 2 Gower Street marks the home they shared, which was also the base for their successful business.

Rhoda Garrett was born on 28 March 1841 in Derbyshire, the middle child of three. When she was 19, her father remarried, and Rhoda had to look after herself and her siblings. She was treated like a sister by her cousins in Suffolk, and became especially close to Agnes Garrett, the seventh of eleven children, who was born on 12 July 1845. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the suffragist, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the doctor, were Agnes’s siblings.

The Suffolk Garretts supported Rhoda to receive education and find employment and she moved to London to work in a bank, and then as an editor and secretary. Agnes spent time working for her father’s business and then in 1871 joined Rhoda in London. The Garrett cousins studied with a furniture maker for a couple of years before going on to work with an interior designer. They learned both the theoretical and practical aspects of running a business. Later, Agnes Garrett stressed the importance of a proper apprenticeship, and the cousins took on trainees themselves.

In about 1874, the cousins set up R. & A. Garrett, House Decorators. They worked in the ‘Queen Anne’ style popular with the middle classes at the time and offered interior decoration services as well as designing furniture and furnishings. Their key principles for design were modesty and lack of pretension. They advised people to use neutral colours as well as patterns and to let materials show. 

Gower Street and the firm

In 1875, Rhoda and Agnes moved to 2 Gower Street in Bloomsbury. The house is at the end of a terrace of houses built around 1780 that became a hub of women’s political activity due to its proximity to Bedford College for Women. Their neighbours included landscape gardener and suffragist Fanny Wilkinson and social reformer and anti-suffrage campaigner Violet Markham. 

The house’s interiors were created by the cousins and pictured in various magazine articles. One of the elaborate hand-painted ceilings is still in place. 

The Garretts developed an extensive independent business specialising in the decoration of private houses. Among their clients were the scientist Lord Kelvin; Catherine Buckton, author of Comfort and Cleanliness; the writer and horticulturalist Lady Dorothy Nevill; and Hubert Parry, the composer, and his wife Maude.

The cousins also worked on institutional commissions. They decorated the New Hospital for Women on the Euston Road, set up by Agnes’s sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. When the hospital opened, the Illustrated London News celebrated how in the interior decoration, ‘everything is artistically beautiful and suggestive of good hope and cheer’.

The Garretts used publications to reach a wider audience. In 1876, their book Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork, and Furniture tapped into the growing middle-class market for home decorating advice. It went into six editions by 1879, selling some 7,500 copies. It is perhaps the best remaining record of their own work and is illustrated with six images of rooms at 2 Gower Street.

Suffragism

Rhoda and Agnes were, like other family members, leading suffragists. They were active in the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, formed in 1867. Agnes was one of its honorary secretaries and from the early 1870s, Rhoda was a frequent and effective and speaker on behalf of women’s rights.

The significance and importance of Rhoda and Agnes Garrett as house decorators is bound up with their work on behalf of women’s rights. Rhoda and Agnes argued that women should be able to work professionally, with proper training, in their chosen fields. R. & A. Garrett was the first decorating firm to be run by women and the title of a 1925 article in The Woman’s Leader – ‘Agnes Garrett: Pioneer of Women House Decorators’ – emphasises their innovative influence.

Later life and work

Rhoda died aged 41, of typhoid fever and bronchitis, on 22 November 1882 at 2 Gower Street. Agnes carried on the business, albeit unwillingly at first, until 1905. It continued to be named R. & A. Garrett. From 1888 until 1931 she also served as a director of the new Ladies’ Residential Chambers Company, which built several blocks of chambers in Bloomsbury and Marylebone for independent working women, such as teachers.

When Agnes’s sister Millicent Garrett Fawcett was widowed in 1884, Millicent and her daughter Philippa joined Agnes at 2 Gower Street, which also bears a plaque to the suffragist leader. Agnes died at the house on 19 March 1935. The family connection to the building had lasted some 60 years.

Further Reading

• Serena Kelly, ‘Garrett, Agnes (1845–1935) and Rhoda Garrett (1841–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)
• Lizzie Broadbent, ‘Agnes Garrett (1845–1935)’, Women Who Meant Business (2021) (accessed 13 February 2025)
• Judy Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home 1870-1914, p96-102
• Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Agnes and Rhoda Garrett’, maharam.com (accessed 13 February 2025)