There are serpentine threads that run through interior design – and those threads meander back and forth across borders and oceans, and in an out of different disciplines. Look into the enthralling history of decoration in the US, and you’ll find repeat appearances from such luminaries as Jacqueline Kennedy, the Gettys, the Fricks, Vogue editors, and more. There are houses, including The White House, Casa Encantada, and the Elrod House in Palm Springs, there’s popular culture ranging from the novels of Truman Capote to the San Francisco Ballet to Diamonds Are Forever and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy – and, fascinatingly, there are British interior designers and decorators, stalwarts of the House & Garden Top 100 list. Yes, many of them have and continue to design homes in America – but there’s also the influence of America on them – and thus on British design history.
Nicky Haslam spent time in New York in the 1960s and explains that it coloured his attitude: “To see houses that had been done up by American designers of the 40s and 50s – Billy Baldwin, Dorothy Draper - was eye-opening. Unlike the English at that time, Americans didn’t mind modern in their rooms, they didn’t feel threatened by modern life.” Nina Campbell has written a book on the great Elsie de Wolfe and attributes elements of the design of her house in Chelsea to Elsie’s decorating tricks and techniques. Then there’s Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay citing the impact of Ann Getty – who herself learnt much from Sister Parish, who helped decorate Ann’s own houses, before Ann set up her own design studio, Ann Getty & Associates (Ann believed that interiors should be ‘witty, not fussy’, and once upholstered a room in peacock feathers.) And of course, there’s Nancy Lancaster – though that’s a whole other story.
There’s a lot we too can learn from these American masters, whether that’s to do with judicious use of mirrors, the eternal chic of ticking fabric, further encouragement to look to the Roman empire and other ancient civilisations - or simply the importance of forging your own path and style.
Elsie de Wolfe (1859 – 1950)
According to legend, it was the American-born Elsie de Wolfe who invented interior design; in 1903 she printed business cards and told people that was what she did. Let loose, she threw out the gloomily ornate Victoriana that had been so prevalent in her childhood, and replaced it with, light, clutter-free room layouts, and even made beige fashionable decades before Kelly Hoppen, falling in love with the colour the minute she saw Rome. “There is hardly a room in America or Europe that has not been influenced by the innovative ideas of Elsie de Wolfe,” writes Nina Campbell in Elsie de Wolfe: A Decorative Life, (keep an eye on eBay for a copy) listing elements of our inheritance - “chintz, mirrors, trellis, painted furniture, decoupage, black-and-white colour schemes.” The Trellis Room in Manhattan’s Colony Club, which opened in 1907, reflects many of those, has entered the pantheon of all-time greatest rooms in the history of interior design, and spawned a thousand imitations.
Other clients included the Vanderbilts, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Fricks – their house in New York is now home to the Frick Collection, and the Boucher Room – Mrs. Frick’s boudoir designed by Elsie with panels originally painted for Madame de Pompadour – is visitable. Handily for us, in 1913 Elsie published The House in Good Taste, in which she details the fundamentals of her beliefs, room by room, with a chapter given over to her eternally relevant credo: “Suitability, simplicity and proportion.” (If, on the other hand, you’d like an enjoyable romp through what it was like to be friends with her in the later, LA years of her life, I’d recommend To The One I Love The Best by Ludwig Bemelmans, which is packed with highly quotable bonmots from Elsie, such as “I used to think yellow was a colour”, as well as accounts of her checking into hotels and avoiding the bill by instead redesigning whole floors – and then charging the hotel for her services.)
Dorothy Draper (1889 – 1969)
Others argue that Dorothy Draper, not Elsie de Wolfe, invented the business of interior design. After her marriage in 1912, she and her husband started buying and selling homes; Dorothy became known for her flair for decorating, and her New York high society friends started copying her. In 1925 she started the Architectural Clearing House (later the company was renamed after her) and in the early 1930s was contracted to redecorate the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan (the same hotel where, in the 1940s, Ludwig Bemelmans – see above - painted the famous Madeline mural in the Bemelmans Bar, in exchange for a month’s stay for him and his family.)
Many more hotels followed. Her style was not what anybody would describe as minimalist rather, think bright, exuberant colours in dramatic contrast (she promoted shiny black ceilings, acid-green woodwork and cherry-red floors, saying “lovely, clear colours have a vital effect on our mental happiness), large prints, rococo scrollwork, baroque plasterwork, black and white tiling, and stripes with florals – a combination that was became known as ‘modern Baroque.’ Her 1954 concept for the café at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (dubbed ‘the Dorotheum’) featured birdcage chandeliers.
She’s another designer whose legacy includes a book: in 1939 she published Decorating is Fun! which is packed with helpful suggestions for curtains, colour and why you must never forget your door “which can contribute a great deal to your whole decorative scheme” via ornament and colour. There’s also a slew of haunting cautionary tales, such as the one about the woman’s husband who spent all his evenings at his club because she didn’t make their home comfortable enough.
T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905 – 1976)
Harry (as he was known) Robsjohn-Gibbings’s name has all but sunk from the lexicon of design – and yet, in the 1930 and 40s, he was, by the estimation of many, the most important interior decorator in America, designing houses from coast to coast for such scions as tobacco heiress Doris Duke and publisher Alfred A. Knopf, as well as running a shop on Madison Avenue. Technically English – he was born in Widnes, Lancashire, in 1903 – little is known about his early years, and, having first sailed to the US in 1929, he applied to become a naturalised American in 1940.
Harry made his mark by rejecting the prevailing tastes of his time – he described them as “an indigestible mixture of Queen Anne, Georgian and Spanish styles”, considered Bauhaus-style “fraudulent,” and, in his 1944 tome Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale, (sadly out of print, but again, you can find copies on eBay) took shots at Elsie de Wolfe, Dorothy Draper, the architect Stanford White (who designed so many of the important houses of the turn of the century, aka The Gilded Age), and “pompous European antiques.” He favoured a modern take on Ancient Greek and Art Deco – think mosaic floors, sculptural fragments and quite sparse furnishings; he was creating “modern historicism.” And, when he received the commission for Hilda Boldt Weber’s Casa Encantada in Bel-Air (a house that twice set records for the most expensive house ever to be sold in America) he incorporated sphinxes, dolphins, lions’ paw feet, and Ionic columns into the furniture, and stamped every piece ‘Robsjohn-Gibbings – sans epoque’ to emphasise the timelessness of his creations.
In 1960, Harry met the Greek cabinet makers Susan and Eleftherios Saridis, and together they created the Klismos line of furniture, which is still in production now (you can also find antiques on Pamono, 1stDibs – and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.) Harry eventually moved to Athens and became Aristotle Onassis’s designer in the years - when he was married to Jaqueline Kennedy (remember that, it becomes relevant in the next mini-story but one.)
Sister Parish (1910 – 1994) and Albert Hadley (1920 – 2012) of Parish-Hadley
Sister’s name was actually Dorothy, it was her little brother who rechristened her ‘Sister’ –which later confused a lot of people who mistakenly thought that Jackie Kennedy had employed a nun to decorate the White House. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Sister was a first cousin to Dorothy Draper, her father was a great collector of antiques, and her grandfather was a close friend of Edith Wharton (her book, The Decoration of Houses, has been called the equivalent of the King James Bible, and her influence is genuinely unmeasurable – but, she was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, not an interior designer, so she doesn’t get a proper entry here.) Sister opened her decorating business in 1933, with no training, and – as Albert Hadley recalls in Sister Parish Design: On Decorating, “only four valance designs.” But, simplicity and comfort were Sister’s watchwords, and she introduced a variation on the English country house look, and famously brought ticking into the mainstream (no one used ticking then – it was very much still a utility fabric.)
“Working with her gave me a finer understanding of elegance,” said Ann Getty, who was one of her clients. “Formal rooms don’t have to be stiff and starchy… Sister Parish always believed that there should be a piece of blue and white porcelain and some trace of chintz in every room. I always keep this in the back of my mind when I am designing,” continued Ann. (Next week, incidentally, on the 18th, 19th and 20th October, Christie’s New York is auctioning the third and final instalment of the Ann & Gordon Getty Collection, consisting of museum-quality furniture, paintings and objets from Ann Getty’s childhood home, Wheatland. Among the lots are pieces of furniture Ann bought from Parish-Hadley – including furniture Sister inherited from her father, which is pretty extraordinary provenance.)
Sister met Albert Hadley, ten years her junior, in 1962 – their first job together was the breakfast room of the Kennedy White House, and they worked together right up until Parish’s death – the US version of Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler, if you will. And, like Nancy and John, they trained up a whole new generation – including Bunny Williams, Mark Hampton (read on) and Thom Filicia (who you’ll be well acquainted with if you’ve ever watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.) The relationship with Jackie Kennedy didn’t last, not least because while much of her work for The White House was simple – rehanging curtains inside rather than outside mouldings – they still got through the entire decorating budget in two weeks, and the French decorator Stéphane Boudin was brought in to do the public rooms. (Admittedly, much of Sister Parish’s money went on installing a kitchen, pantry and dining room on the second floor – prior to this, the First family had to go downstairs to the kitchen that serviced the State Dining Room whenever they wanted anything to eat.)
Billy Baldwin (1903 – 1983)
Technically, were I to be strict about listing these decorators according to theirs dates of birth, Billy Baldwin would come before Harry Robsjohn-Gibbings, but that wouldn’t work for one of the threads that we’ve struck upon, for Billy Baldwin was Jacqueline Kennedy’s post-White House decorator of choice, i.e. he came into her life after Sister Parish. In fact, Billy and Jackie became such good friends that he flew out to join her when she was supposedly on her honeymoon with Aristotle Onassis (Ari had abandoned her on his yacht, The Christina. I think we can all understand why she might have felt compelled to call a friend.)
Billy was already very well known by the time he and Jackie met; among his clients were Bill and Babe Paley, Nan Kempner, Bunny Mellon (basically a roll call of Truman Capote’s ‘swans’ – Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, was also a ‘swan’), S.I. Newhouse Jr (then the owner and Chairman of House & Garden’s parent publishing company, Condé Nast) and Diana Vreeland (the editor of House & Garden’s sister magazine Vogue.) For Diana, Billy had designed a blood-red ‘garden in hell’ sitting room. Scarlet chintz adorned the walls and dressed the windows, while piles of patterned cushions, a thick red carpet and a variety of vermillion accessories completed the monochromatic scene. Baldwin was a colourist of generally preferred modern lines to rococo swags and believed “comfort is perhaps the ultimate luxury.” He was also a fan of the corner banquette, dark walls, cotton (including for upholstery), geometrics, pattern on pattern, wicker and rattan, and he loathed fake books, false fireplaces, satin and damask. He gave us a perfect slipper chair and an elegant brass etagere that are still in production now, and reminded us to “be faithful to your own taste, because nothing you like is ever out of style.”
Back to Jackie – she asked him to transform her new home – still unfinished and unfurnished - on Skorpios Island into a home in time for Christmas; it was the end of October, Billy had six weeks. They decided on putting contemporary furniture and corner banquette in the main room, with “lineny fabrics in brown and black and white,” and that the bedrooms would have printed cotton, and “one good piece of old furniture in each room.” Unbelievably impressively, the deadline was met. (Equally impressively, Billy once succeeded in providing Greta Garbo with wall colour the exact shade of a candlelight shining through a silk lampshade in a train dining car in Sweden.) History doesn’t recount what Harry Robsjohn-Gibbings thought of the Skorpios house, incidentally.
Tony Duquette (1914 – 1999)
The artist and set designer Tony Duquette was ‘discovered’ by Elsie de Wolfe in the early 1940s; Elsie at that point was living there with her husband, Sir Charles Mendl (it was in interesting marriage; by all accounts, Elsie was not that way inclined – but she got a title out of it, and he got an allowance, and it seems that everyone was happy.) Anyway, through Elsie, Tony became one of the leading designers in LA, creating interiors for Doris Duke, J. Paul Getty, and Elizabeth Arden (that commission was for a castle in Ireland.) Alongside, he designed for film and theatre, and the San Francisco Ballet – his designs for the original Broadway production of Camelot won him a Tony Award for Best Costume Design.
His style was unequivocally maximalist, putting chasms between him and those who trod the slick lines of modernism – he’s been described as the master of Space Age Baroque. But he was in Hollywood, and the spaces he was designing were spaces for entertaining in, and thus everything was a conversation piece – from richly textured surfaces to the surfeit of curious gilded and gem-studded objets, ostrich eggs, sunbursts, shells and coral. It sounds opulent – but in keeping with his set-design background, things weren’t always what they seemed: the coral might have been tree branches that had been spray painted red (just as Nicky Haslam spray paints things white, today, turning them into “porcelain, or plaster”), and the ingredients for a Versailles-worthy Hall of Mirrors were more than likely to have come from a basic store. There was an inspiring enchantment to it all.
Arthur Elrod (1924 – 1974)
Palm Springs has become a place of pilgrimage for enthusiasts of a certain architectural style, and one of the houses they seek to see is the Elrod House, which, oddly, is more famous than the man it’s named for, despite Arthur Elrod having designed homes for Walt Disney and Lucille Wall – and indeed defined Palm Spring modernism; he opened a shop there in 1954, and it was an immediate hit. As radical as Elsie de Wolfe had been 50 years earlier, sweeping out heavy Victoriana, Arthur cleared out the prevailing Southern Californian Spanish colonial style. Furniture became lighter and sleeker (and was often European), rooms got airier, and he brought in a palette of saturated greens, blues and yellows, inspired by the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. There were indoor rockpiles, walls were hung with contemporary art, and he worked closely with architects, enabling the homes that he designed to feature what was then sophisticated technology in terms of lighting and stereo systems.
His own home, the Elrod House, was designed by John Lautner in 1968, and was, by all accounts, the location of some legendary parties. Bill Blass held a fashion show there, Playboy did a feature – and the house was used as Willard Whyte’s mansion in 1971s Diamonds Are Forever. And then, tragically, Elrod was killed in a car crash at the age of 49, and his exquisite interiors were gradually replaced by renovations over the following decades. Hence, here we are – though certainly his approach to colour, modernist design technology has endured, albeit uncited. But, there’s a book you can buy (and should) - Arthur Elrod: Desert Modern Design.
Bill Willis (1937 – 2009)
Is it fair to group Bill Willis with his fellow American interior designers, just because that’s where he was born? We in the UK have been quick to claim the American-born Nancy Lancaster as our own, but until such a time as I’m asked to put together a list of the most influential North African interior designers (this may happen, of course) Bill will be found here – for his impact has been huge and far reaching. It is Bill Willis who fuelled our obsession with Morocco (a country in which Veere Grenney, Jasper Conran and Gavin Houghton all have homes) creating rooms so romantic as to be worthy of those famous tales told by Scheherazade. The notably unfrilly opulence of his design vocabulary included gloriously coloured tiles, intricate mosaics, billowing curtains, majestic fireplaces, orientalist domes, fountain-studded courtyards, elaborate and exquisitely decorated vaulting, and that soft polished waterproof plaster known as tadelakt.
Born in Tennessee, and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Willis arrived in Morocco (via Rome) in the mid-1960s, and simply never left. There were drugs: cocaine - “the only drug I really like,” he once said – with the Rolling Stones, hash cookies with William Burroughs, acid with Fernando Sanchez, but somehow, when combined with his admiration for the great Alhambra and Islamic and North African design motifs, great beauty ensued. (A brief disclaimer: please don’t try his method at home.) His career took off after he restored a dilapidated 18th century palace for John Paul Getty Jr and his bride, the model Talitha Getty (who, sadly, died from a heroin overdose a few short years later.) Later clients included Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Baroness Guy de Rothschild, and Marella Agnelli. There’s a film that shows his work, here.
Mark Hampton (1940 – 1998)
Interestingly, Mark Hampton – though Indiana born and bred - trained in the UK with David Hicks, before returning to work for Parish-Hadley, and then opening his own firm in 1976. Clients numbered Brooke Astor, Anne Bass, and Estée Lauder as well as numerous political and even presidential families, including George and Barbara Bush (for them he decorated their private houses, the private quarters at The White House, and The Oval Office) and Bill and Hilary Clinton.
Mark’s interiors merged tradition with a touch of crisp modernity, and tended towards English country house colours, chintzes, oriental rugs, and European and American 18th and 19th century antiques, botanical and architectural prints – “minimalism is for the very young,” he once said – but importantly, there wasn’t a ‘house’ signature. “I have absolutely no interest in a trademark style,” he said, in respect of his belief that an interior designer should be invisible, their chief role only “to balance the desire for beauty, chic and glamour with the more prosaic needs of domesticity in the same room.” This he achieved through a rigorous sense of order and proportion, and an in depth knowledge of art and architecture which largely came from visiting and studying the world’s greatest buildings – a lesson to us all in the importance of looking. Mark’s was a household name in the 1980s, and his helpful, sensible advice was distilled through various magazines. Happily,it’s still available now, via an authoritative collection of essays in Mark Hampton: On Decorating.
