His son Sebastian Varney verified his demise but did not cite a lead to.
Mr. Varney was the president and owner of the Manhattan-dependent company Dorothy Draper & Co., the namesake of the venerable decorator who hired him as a draftsman when he was in his early 20s and schooled him in the unabashedly vibrant eyesight of design and style that grew to become his calling card.
“Mrs. Draper didn’t like anything at all that appeared like it could be poured above a turkey,” Mr. Varney once advised the Houston Chronicle. “No fabrics that glance beige, gray or mousy or gravy-like,” he recalled to a different interviewer.
Mr. Varney bought the Draper business in the mid-1960s. Above almost 6 decades, he offered friends at White Home state dinners, his marquee non-public clientele, and guests to resorts which includes the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. — a person of his signature tasks — a vivid antidote to the neutral shades of the modern world.
“I when went to a lodge on my way again from Bora Bora, and the carpet was a knobby grey, and the partitions were beige with white trim, and the curtains had been grey-beige,” Mr. Varney told The Washington Article in 2020. “Even the art was beige. I went into the travertine toilet, and when I arrived out, I considered I was bare in a bowl of oatmeal.”
Mr. Varney’s tales about his clients had been as almost as vibrant as the coverings he ordered up for their walls. Crawford hired him to enhance the condominium she obtained when she could no for a longer period afford to pay for the $3,000 every month upkeep of her previous just one.
She known as him in tears, Mr. Varney reported, when her monthly bill came owing and she could not pay for the reason that the sale of her penthouse was not nonetheless remaining. In the end, Mr. Varney explained, she compensated each and every penny she owed. She also offered him a career as her “permanent escort,” which he declined.
For Ethel Merman, Mr. Varney created an apartment in a crimson, white and blue motif for the emotionally fragile Judy Garland, he recalled, he “put tender yellow backgrounds in her home … that manufactured her pleased.”
His shade strategies drew admirers far further than Hollywood, which include in the comparatively staid environs of Washington, in which Mr. Varney was a go-to designer for President Jimmy and very first girl Rosalynn Carter. With only five days’ observe, The Write-up described, he arranged a supper to rejoice the Camp David Accords in between Israel and Egypt. Underneath a yellow, white and orange tent, guests dined at tables bedecked in cloths bearing a forsythia sample.
The Carters hired Mr. Varney to adorn their home in the Plains, Ga., as well as their next home, a log cabin in the Ga foothills. In subsequent Republican administrations, Mr. Varney did perform for the Reagans and the Quayles, proving that the attraction of vivid colour transcends occasion strains.
Mr. Varney oversaw the refurbishment of the Sequoia, the onetime presidential yacht that Carter offered as an “unjustified and unwanted frill,” as effectively as official places together with the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
Apart from the Greenbrier (whose shade palette experienced been set by Dorothy Draper), the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, the Colony Palm Seaside in Florida and the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan all bear his mark.
That mark was not to everyone’s liking.
“The Greenbrier is nearly anything but refined,” a Put up reporter wrote some many years after a $50 million renovation curated by Mr. Varney. “The vacation resort … feels like the aftermath of a paintball recreation held during a yard social gathering. Whack — mint green. Splat — canary yellow. Oof — teal blue.”
But the design was inimitable, and it was his.
“I have spent 54 years attempting to open up the windows and doorways of The usa to shade,” Mr. Varney claimed in 2020. “I think shade has a overall result on people’s heads, minds and attitudes. A lovely sunny home would make people today satisfied. I believe small children who improve up in rooms that are rather and vibrant and magical are improved folks.”
Carleton Bates Varney Jr. was born in Lynn, Mass., on Jan. 23, 1937. His father ran a sporting items retail store, and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Varney was a 1958 graduate of Oberlin Higher education in Ohio and gained a master’s diploma in education and learning from New York College in 1960.
He taught at personal educational facilities in New Rochelle, N.Y., and in Manhattan in advance of performing briefly in style and then embarking on his structure job. He experienced hoped to be a theatrical established designer, he reported, but located no this kind of career offered devoid of a “connection. ”
When he joined Dorothy Draper’s business, he “did all the things — vacuuming the flooring and emptying the wastebasket,” he told the Chronicle in 2018. “In point, I nonetheless do all of that.” Draper died in 1969.
Mr. Varney’s style empire also included the textile and wallcovering business Carleton V Ltd.
He hosted the exhibit “Live Vividly” on the Property Purchasing Network and wrote a lot more than 3 dozen books, among them “There’s No Put Like Dwelling: Confessions of an Interior Designer” (1980), “In the Pink: Dorothy Draper, America’s Most Magnificent Decorator” (2006), “Houses in My Coronary heart: An Intercontinental Decorator’s Colorful Journey” (2008) and “Mr. Color: The Greenbrier and Other Decorating Adventures” (2011).
Mr. Varney’s relationship to Suzanne Lickdyke ended in divorce. Survivors include their three sons, Nicholas Varney of West Palm Seaside, Seamus Varney of Edmeston, N.Y., and Sebastian Varney of Stanfordville, N.Y. a sister and a grandson.
Mr. Varney’s flavor for bright hues prolonged to his sartorial alternatives. He was partial to green pants (inexperienced was an “influential color” in his daily life, he explained) and purple socks. He wore a scarf as a tie.
“I’m not trying to change the globe,” he explained to the New York Times in 2012, “but I’m attempting to make individuals mindful of the one particular issue I consider most in — that color is magic.”
