On his death in February 2012, Leslie Nicholl Walford, the man who right from the outset of his career had determined to shift Australian taste away from drab interiors filled with Victorian brown furniture, was saluted as one of Australia’s most influential interior designers. With a sensibility honed in Paris, where he attended Le Centre d’Art et de Techniques (1954–55), Walford’s preferences were more discerning and refined: the gilded elegance of fine French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, but with an appreciation also of the sleek lines of modern Scandinavian design. Over the years, from his base in the shopping village of Double Bay in the affluent eastern suburbs of his home city, he presided over a large design practice catering especially to a core circle of wealthy clients. He was the designer of choice for the Packers and the Murdochs, and he twice decorated Retford Park, the grand country mansion of James Fairfax at Bowral in the Southern Highlands. The social world in which Walford moved with practised ease – both as a member in his own right but also its servant – was later chronicled with wit and panache in the columns he wrote first for the Sun-Herald (1967–82) and later the Sunday Telegraph (1983–84). Through the 1970s he contributed a more considered ‘On Design’ column to the Sydney Morning Herald. As an influential office bearer for the Society of Interior Designers of Australia, he did much to develop interior design as a credentialled profession.