Walford, who had only recently celebrated his 85th birthday, created a new world of Regency stripes, bright calico colours and French antiques.
Beginning in 1957, with purchases he made in Paris he set up as an antique dealer in Knox Street, Double Bay, he slowly concentrated more on the decorating side.
His first invoice was to James Fairfax for a French table.
William Dobell and Hal Missingham (then director of the Art Gallery of NSW) gate crashed the opening slightly inebriated.
Born in Sydney into a family which had its roots in the First Fleet and land grants in Hobart, Walford spent most of his youth in England being educated at Winchester School and Oxford University and serving a spell in the British army.
His mother took him from Sydney to England for his schooling and from there he went to Paris to study design.
His interest in antiques developed when he began buying them for his mother Dora's flat in London.
After returning to Sydney in the early 1950s he began buying antiques to bring to Australia .
He participated in some of the first Sydney antique fairs at the National Trust property of Lindesay in Darling Point in the late 1960s .
With a plummy, measured but relaxed accent English accent which occasionally tended to soliloquise and wearing elegant menswear, often pinstriped, his Australian roots appeared well disguised.
But his great contribution to Australian taste was recognised with the award of the award of an AM.
It was in Paris that he developed a passion for period furniture studying in a private museum run by the Nissim family.
Leslie won numerous design awards and was a foundation member of the Society of Interior Designers and National President from 1965 to 1966 and again from 1978 to 1979.
In recognition of his contribution to the profession, Leslie was made a Life Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia and in 2008 he was inducted into the DIA Design Hall of Fame.
His dazzling yellow curtains for Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney, over which he laboured for weeks were taken down in 1994 when the Historic Houses Trust took over the property.
This was part of a a major re- interpretation of the house which had been assiduously and elegantly furnished by Walford and Sydney antique dealer Paul Kenny to give an idea of the grandeur that could be associated with houses of that late Regency style.
The furniture was auctioned off and the curtains put into storage.
The great Australiana collector, the late Caroline Simpson, and a leading light in the National Trust, protested loudly but the HHT persisted in returning the look of the house into a historical one.
Fortunes did not shine on the McLeay family and rather than the grand country house it had been, the house was returned to sackcloth.
Oddly a dry cleaner's one memory of him was bringing in a pair of bright yellow flares in 1970.
He created one of Australia's greatest literary hoaxes in January 1981 when he wrote one of his much followed About Town columns for the Sun Herald.
The column was one of the longest in the Fairfax press's history being printed from 1967 to 1984.
In his column Hot line to the surf he said he had a call “out of the blue” from Marquesa Sandra de Santa Cruz, ..” a stunner, a social not a celluloid star”.
Brought up in Roseville, Sandra moved “when but a bud, years before the blooming, to Killara with her ambitious family.
“After marrying a Spanish count she returned to sydney with her cook and her maid to arrange for a copy of her Killara home to be built as a pool house in the gardeden of her latest castle near Toledo in Spain."
The news was brought to him on a 400 meter cord placed on a mattress under candy striped awning on the beach at his Palm Beach weekender.
It would have been a great story for April Fools day but it was January 11, 1981.
A society matron rang to ask how she could contract the Marquesa to invite her to dinner while another reader insisted he knew the Marquesa well, and was very disappointed he had not been advised of her arrival in town.
He told one matron who asked how she could possibly live in a room where he had opened up to lots of natural light.
“Wear sunglasses,” he said.
He would have been amused by the headlines above but his death was a merciful release from the pain of extended illnesses including diabetes and finally bone cancer.
Although bold in its day, his decorating may have come to look traditional and conservative in later years. But the look was continued and developed and the business flourished for many of his later years in conjunction with his business partner Cornelius Horgan.
Walford's life partner Colin Davies created an outreach for the pair in the Old Fort in Galle in Sri Lanka where many friends have enjoyed their hospitality.
