7 Legendary Interior Designers Everyone Should Know

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7 Legendary Interior Designers Everyone Should
Know
Of course, you could choose a piece designed by
Kelly Wearstler from a home decor line and you
could tell your friends if Estee Stanley, Miles
Redd or Mary McDonald would be your dream
designer. But do you know the people who inspired
them? These seven interior icons are the most
influential masters of the 20th century, the true
founders of today's profession, and these are
the names every design lover should know.
Elsie De Wolfe Known as "America's First
Decorator," De Wolfe boasted of a lifestyle as
glamorous as her decor. Born in New York City in
1865, her story reads not only like a crazy
romance and adventure novel, but like several
different novels. In her youth she was educated
in Scotland and was introduced in court to Queen
Victoria, but soon after she returned to the
United States and became a professional actress.
Around 1887 he shared a "Boston marriage" (a
term for two single women living together,
attributed to Henry James' The Bostonians) with
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successful literary agent Elisabeth "Bessie"
Marbury. And later in life, she even won the
title of Lady when she married British diplomat
Sir Charles Mendl at the age of 61. But early in
De Wolfe's life, it was his onstage style and
wardrobe - Parisian haute couture ensembles -
that caught people's attention more than his
acting skills. He successfully redesigned the
house on Irving Place he shared with Marbury,
eschewing the stifling Victorian decorating
style of his day by ordering, simplifying and
warming his drab and overly busy interiors. This
led to a commission to decorate the Colony Club,
the city's first elite social club exclusively
for women, which could include members with last
names like Whitney, Morgan, Harriman and Astor.
De Wolfe broke new ground by becoming the most
popular decorator of her time, Modular Kitchen In
Gurgaon handing out business cards adorned with
her iconic wolf and bodice design. De Wolfe then
decorated a house she and Marbury bought in
Versailles for social gatherings, and undertook
large decorating projects for clients like Conde
Nast, the Fricks and the Hewitt. His pioneering
anti-Victorian style of rooms brighter, more airy
and more refined and refined than the dictated
era is still celebrated today.
Jean-Michel Franck Artists are inevitably
inspired by the world around them, and it's hard
to imagine a richer environment than that of
Paris in the 1930s, when Jean-Michel Frank was
the most famous decorator and designer of the
time. His projects often involved decorating
rooms with Picassos and Braques hanging on the
walls, and his circles included everyone from
Parisian artists to members of high society,
from Man Ray to the Rockefellers. But Frank's
style is hard to describe. He's known as a
minimalist, but it's his layer of maximalism
that makes his work so interesting and complex.
He was sober and understated in the forms of the
furniture he designed, but he often dressed it in
opulent materials ornate mica lampshade, brass
doors, quartz lamps, as well as the dressing
table covered with shagreen and the armchair.
cubic sheepskin club he created for Hermès. .
Frank's favorite color was white, which made him
both understated and rich. And he's credited with
designing one of the most iconic minimalist
furniture of all time, the Parsons table, but
he's often coated tables in the most luxurious
finishes. Despite his keen eye for design and
quality, Frank found the elements of everyday
life to be the key to any space and believed
perfect taste to be the recipe for a soulless
room. A distant cousin of the famous chronicler
Anne Frank, he fled France around 1940 to escape
Nazi occupation, and worked and traveled in South
America and the United States. Sadly, he
committed suicide by jumping from a Manhattan
apartment building in 1941, at the age of 46. But
his work is still celebrated in museums today,
and you can purchase reproductions of some of
his most iconic furniture designed for Hermès.
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Albert Hadley Combining glamor and functionality
can be a difficult task for any designer, but
it's a relationship that Albert Hadley has
mastered. "The Dean of American Decorators", who
died in 2012 at the age of 91, had high society
names like Rockefeller, Astor, Getty and Mellon
on his client list, but he always graced a
democratic decorating spirit. Names are really
not the main thing, he told New York magazine
in 2004. It's what you can achieve for the
simplest person. Glamor is part of it, but the
glamor is not the essence. Design has to do with
discipline and reality, not with fantasy beyond
reality. " Hailing from Tennessee, Hadley became
known for his modern style, skillfully
incorporating a mix of design styles thanks to
his seemingly innate sense of balance and what
worked together. Never less, never again was
his overall design philosophy. Hadley partnered
with Sister Parish in 1962. Parish-Hadley
Associates designed the homes of America's elite
for decades, but is probably best known for
redecorating the Kennedy White House, as well as
the Kennedy family's own homes. . But Hadley
didn't stop after Parish died or with age. In
honor of her 85th birthday, The New York Times
asked one of its clients, Diana Quasha, why she
had just chosen him for her project. It's still
the most modern thing there is, he said. I
don't want it to be modern and I don't want it to
be traditional. I want it to look interesting.
Who else would you ask?
Sister Parish Well connected and wealthy, Dorothy
May Kinnicutt (the childhood nickname "Sister"
eventually replaced her first name) was born in
1910 to parents living in Manhattan, New Jersey,
Maine and Paris. She attended Chapin School in
Manhattan and married Henry Parish in 1930, in a
wedding which the New York Times said featured "a
representative gathering of old New York
families." When the fortunes of Parish's father
and stockbroker husband were hit by the Wall
Street crash of 1929, she opened her own
interior design store in Far Hills, New Jersey.
His style was a counterpoint to the heavy, dark
brown furniture of his antique collector father
he preferred stripes, glazed chintz, quilts,
hooked rugs and upholstered chairs to formal
antiques, and credits him with the popularization
of this American country aesthetic in the
1960s. His designs for clients like Brooke Astor
were romantic, warm, and elegant, but his tactics
were precise and demanding - his relentless
assessment of a client's space before starting
any design project involved rolling a tea cart
around it. part and modify any element. which
did not have their approval. Parish's conception
relationship with Albert Hadley lasted over 30
years, until his death in 1994 at the age of 84,
and is considered one of the most successful
partnerships in the world of the interior. .
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Dorothée Clothier Boldly colorful, elegant,
playful and full of life - these are the
hallmarks of the "Draper touch". If you've ever
been intimidated or overwhelmed by the interior
design world, grab a page from his 1939 book,
Decorating Is Fun! Almost everyone thinks
there is something deep and mysterious about
interior design or that you have to know all
kinds of complicated details about the time
before you can lift a finger. It's not like
that. Decorating is pure pleasure a pleasure of
color, an awareness of balance, a sense of
enlightenment, a sense of style, Modular Kitchen
In Gurgaon a zest for life and a fun enjoyment
of smart accessories from the moment. " Draper,
a cousin of Sister Parish, opened what is
arguably the first official interior design
firm, Architectural Clearing House, in 1925. She
extended her elegant "modern baroque" style to
many public buildings, including the cafeteria of
the Metropolitan Museum in London. art. , the
Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels in San Francisco
and, most importantly, a complete overhaul of
the Greenbrier in West Virginia. Some of its
rooms have a subdued color scheme of classic
black and white, while others feature a wild
Technicolor mix of pinks with greens,
turquoises, and oranges. Draper's protege,
Carleton Varney, perhaps said it best of
decorating legend Dorothy Draper decorated
everything Chanel was in fashion.
David hick David Nightingale Hicks, born in
Essex, England, in 1929, a graduate of the
Central College of Art, was designing cereal
boxes for the J. Walter Thompson advertising
agency when he published a magazine article
about the makeover that 'he made in his mother's
house in London. launched his career as a
decorator. Hicks rallied around the overpriced
and stifling decorating treatment often given to
old English homes, instead becoming a master at
mixing colors, patterns and periods of furniture
and decor to achieve a cohesive look with
elements rather than d others would have found
it shocking or contradictory. . (For example, her
infamous living room designed for American
cosmetician Helena Rubenstein paired purple tweed
walls with Victorian furniture trimmed in
magenta leather.) His cool style broke the
English mold and made Hicks a darling of the
design world in the 1960s. His impressive list
of projects included bedrooms for young Prince
Charles and Princess Anne (who, along with the
Queen Mother and the Prince Philip, attended
Hicks' wedding to Lady Pamela Mountbatten in
1960), as well as a nightclub on the ocean liner
QE2 and a yacht for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In
the 1970s, David Hicks Ltd. produced wallpaper,
fabrics and bedding for its prolific offices and
shops in eight countries.
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Hicks retained his smart and eclectic style until
his death in 1998, but lives through his
daughters, model Edwina Brudenell and design and
lifestyle guru India Hicks, as well as his
London-based designer and architect son. , Ashley.
Billy baldwin Don't refer to Billy Baldwin as an
"interior designer". He hated the term. Which is
strange, considering that his holistic approach
to the house went far beyond his role as
decorator, his favorite title. Comfort and
quality were Baldwin's most important principles,
but he considered the good framing of a space
a higher priority I have always believed that
architecture is more important than decoration.
Scale and proportions provide an eternal
satisfaction that cannot be achieved with the
icing on the cake alone, he said. Baldwin was
inducted into the International Best Dressed List
in 1974, and his interiors were as immaculate
and immaculate as his perfectly tailored suits
and polished ensembles. And while many great
decorators of his day insisted on throwing away
everything the client owned and starting from
scratch, Baldwin worked with pieces his clients
already owned. He even took into account his
wardrobes, adding that he had "a natural
interest" in women's clothing "insofar as they
had to be worn in the rooms where he
worked". Whether Baldwin is reworking the
interiors of Cole Porter's Waldorf Towers
apartment, Jackie O's home on the Greek island
of Skorpios, or renovating Diana Vreeland's
living room on Park Avenue, scale and
proportions remain his top priorities. .
Furniture upholstered to the floor (he
considered the appearance of the bare feet of a
chair "restless") bold dark wall colors and
the integrated and selected shelves are other
basic elements of the Baldwin design that remain
relevant today. His 1972 book, Billy Baldwin
Decorates, is still considered a must-read for
practical decorating tips. Are you looking for
5 RULES OF DECORATING FROM SCRATCH Get by
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