Chic designer Ruth Lane Poole brought style and influence to Canberra in its earliest days

The Lodge - the quaintly gracious mini-mansion in Georgian Revival style - bore hardly any traces of its original designer. There were plenty of overlays, of course, from successive refurbishments over the decades, but the woman who had planned the home's first interiors was quite absent.

Hired in 1926 to design the interiors of The Lodge and Government House, Ruth Lane Poole was an Irish-born interior designer with a flair for eclectic furnishings, a devotion to Australian timbers and furniture makers, a disdain for matchy-matchy lounge suites, and a knack for a party.

But her carefully chosen colour schemes, tableware and bespoke furnishings had been all but subsumed in the years since The Lodge's first occupants, Stanley and Ethel Bruce, moved in. There were, instead, shades of Patty Menzies, Zara Holt, Bettina Gorton and Tamie Fraser, all of whom had put their own stamp on the place.

Having grown up in a Federation house herself, Hazel Hawke, wife of designated resident Number 23, was worried the Lodge had lost its original character. And so, with the help of an adviser from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, she started looking into the very earliest days of Canberra, and the family that, in the inter-war years, was a linchpin in the social and cultural life of the nascent capital.

Thirty years on, that same adviser, Margaret Betteridge, once in charge of Fine Arts and Gifts in the Hawke government, now a heritage consultant, has curated an exhibition about the life and times of Ruth Lane Poole, a woman who left her distinctive mark on early Canberra, if only we know where to look.

The exhibition brings together personal items that highlight the development of Ruth's design philosophy and the legacy of her Irish associations, as well as her love for Australian timbers. The show includes furniture from the official residences, alongside loans from Ruth's descendants and Canberra's national cultural institutions.

Born in Ireland in 1885, Ruth was one of 11 children, whose parents divorced in 1890. Ruth became a ward of her cousin Susan Yeats, of the celebrated Yeats family, which included the poet William Butler Yeats. Growing up with them in London, Ruth was exposed to the artistic and literary way of life that would inform her career in Australia.

She met Charles Lane Poole, then a trainee forester, in Ireland; he proposed to her via letter. When they married, it was William Butler Yeats who gave her away. The couple lived apart for several years while Charles worked in Sierra Leone, and they moved to Perth in 1916, where he took up the position of Conservator of Forests. They returned to Ireland in 1922 with two young children, and had a third there, and Charles worked in Papua and then New Guinea. It wasn't until he was appointed the Commonwealth's forestry adviser in 1925, charged with setting up the Australian Forestry School, that the family was able to properly settle down together in Melbourne.

With three young children, and her husband often in Canberra, Ruth established herself as an interior designer. She began writing articles for the Australian Home Builder (later renamed Australian Home Beautiful). She also wrote regularly on interior design for magazines and newspapers, and advised clients of Melbourne's Myer Emporium on interior decoration. Meanwhile, she was moving in influential, creative circles, mixing with artists like Thea Procter and Ethel Spowers, architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear, and the Stonehaven family (Lord Stonehaven was the first governor-general to live in Canberra, moving into Government House in 1927).

Betteridge says while the records don't show exactly how things transpired, when the Federal Capital Commission was building The Lodge, it became clear that the architects didn't know much about interior design.

"Interior decorating wasn't really something that was a career for people until the 1950s, but I think Ruth must have impressed Mrs Bruce," she says.

By March 1926, the commission had hired Ruth to design and furnish both The Lodge and Government House, a job that included all colour schemes, furnishings, tableware and linen, as well as designing the furniture and supervising the construction. Both residences had to be ready for the opening of Parliament House on May 9, 1927.

So it was that Ruth found herself travelling between Melbourne and Canberra, often leaving her three young daughters at home, to get the job done. By the end of that year, the Lane Pooles had moved to Canberra and into Westridge House on Banks Street, Yarralumla, where Ruth also did the interiors as it was the new residence for the head of the Australian Forestry School.

Betteridge says Ruth had a distinctive aesthetic that she applied to both her own residence, and the official homes she was hired to furnish.

"First of all, she was adamant that Australia had beautiful timbers for furniture, and so she was very proud when she finished her commission to note that there wasn't a piece of imported furniture, or timber, in the houses," she says.

"She commissioned from the leading manufacturers in Melbourne ... But she was very skilled in understanding the historical chronology of furniture - she knew her furniture styles.

"...She was not frightened to mix the styles. In the interior images of the rooms that she furnished in 1927, she uses a combination of Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture in the same room as Queen Anne or Arts and Crafts furniture."

That confidence was evident in her own home; she wasn't over-decorating for the likes of the governor-general. Conversely, she was giving people permission to emulate the fine, elegant and comfortable homes that were fit for a prime minister.

"She was quite happy to furnish the houses in that sort of suburban way that they were being furnished according to what's in the stores and what she was writing about," Betteridge says.

Meanwhile, once the homes were furnished, Ruth was busy organising tennis parties for students at the forestry school, creating decorative schemes and flower arrangements for annual balls, raising money for the Red Cross and generally being chic and sociable.

The couple's three daughters were also entrenched in society, with the eldest, Charlotte, becoming the first woman in the ACT to get her motorcycle licence.

Betteridge is also particularly touched by the fact that the family was heavily involved with skiing.

"Charles was the founding president of the Canberra Alpine Club, and with a number of other people, raised enough money to buy or to build a Mount Franklin chalet," she says.

"They were really very, very keen skiers. The girls competed, and I think it was Charlotte who represented New South Wales in state game championships. And this is something that I think is absolutely fantastic - Charles set his students a project. They had to make skis out of Australian hardwood timbers. And all the members of the lodge had to make their own skis. And he also ran public classes teaching people how to make skis."

The Lane Pooles left Canberra at the end of the war, which was also the end, for many, of Canberra's first chapter and the start of the second, with the post-war revival of the original capital project. The family settled in Manly in Sydney, where they lived for the rest of their lives; Charles died in 1970, and Ruth four years later at the age of 89.

But it was those heady inter-war years that so enthralled Hazel Hawke in the early 1980s. A keen pianist, she was particularly chuffed to discover that the original Beale baby grand piano - that Ruth had commissioned in Queensland maple - was being used as a practice piano over at the School of Music. Hawke arranged for it to be restored by students at a technical college in Melbourne, and invited them to the Lodge for tea and a recital.

Betteridge herself was by then well-versed in large-scale restoration projects, having worked as a curator at the Mint and Hyde Park Barracks.

"That had been a big restoration project to turn those two buildings into museums. And so I was very familiar with the work that had been done in that sort of restoration and conservation of interiors," she says.

"I started some research about the history of the Lodge and found in the National Archives and the National Library photographs of what the interiors had looked like in the 1920s when it was completed.

"That was really where we started, and being good government departments, they hadn't thrown a lot of the furniture away or sold it. The storerooms out at Queanbeyan had some of the original furniture, and we were able to find quite a few pieces in store and bring them back into the house."

It must say something about Australia that our prime minister's official residence was only ever meant to be temporary. The city's original designers, architects Walter and Marion Griffin, had plans for three grand residences; for the prime minister, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president of the Senate. But none were ever built, and the original "cottage" was knocked up in 1926-27 "until such time as a monumental prime minister's residence is constructed, and thereafter to be used for other purposes".

But no "official" residence has materialised in the 90-plus years since, although a Yarralumla site has been put aside for the purpose.

Canberrans, meanwhile, have grown accustomed to a wide spectrum of attitudes towards the Lodge. In the years since John Howard declined to move his family to Canberra in 1996, it's been regarded almost as an optional extra for the country's leader. And it can be instructive to listen in on one of the home's pre-Covid open house tours, and hear what the regular punters have to say about the 40-room mansion that still feels oddly low-key.

Betteridge says this could well have been part of Ruth Lane Poole's democratic approach, as she set about furnishing the home with pieces that were both elegant and accessible, finely designed, but likely to be seen in many other well-to-do homes.

Today, facing a major Canberra motorway and glimpsed through the gates by thousands of Canberrans each day, the home looks mellow, and comfortably settled, with rambling gardens and a relatively discreet security detail.

Ruth Lane Poole might well have been quite pleased at how well the home has fared over the years, at least for what it may say about us as a people.

"I think it reflects a little bit of the Australian psyche, that we're perfectly fine," says Betteridge.