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PAST, PRESENT, PERFECT 100 YEARS OF ICONIC INTERIOR DESIGN
In the beginning, there was Elsie de Wolfe. The beginning, that is, of American interior design as we know it today. Hailed by Architectural Digest as “the American pioneer who vanquished Victorian Gloom,” de Wolfe, who began designing in New York around 1905, is considered America’s first interior designer, and her light, airy interpretation of late 18th-century French décor— revolutionary at the time in its eclecticism and touches of bright, feminine chinoiserie, chintz, and trellising—were all the rage, with a celebrity client list that spanned the globe.
It wasn’t, though, the imprimatur of clients like Condé Nast, Cole Porter, or even the Duchess of Windsor that cemented de Wolfe’s place at the top of the pantheon of American interior design history, but rather her belief that interior design was not the exclusive domain of an elite class of tastemakers. Great interior design, de Wolfe proselytized, is a means to elevate even the humblest home to a place of comfort and refinement.
Sleek and glossy, Art Deco style took 1920s interiors in a completely new direction.
First published in 1913, de Wolfe’s book on the subject, The House in Good Taste, reads as a veritable manifesto for the democratization of interior design. “I know of nothing more significant,” she wrote, “than the awakening of men and women throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses.” A nearly instant best seller and still in print today, The House in Good Taste launched a young century into an age of a wholly new American aesthetic in which staid devotion to “period” and “style” was abandoned, and Old World ideas were reimagined for every home. It is an ethos that has stood the test of time over the last century, as these iconic periods in American interior design attest.
The Art Deco style uses clean lines, symmetry and geometry to striking effect.
ART DECO
By 1925, America was roaring into the future, The Great Gatsby’s Jazz Age was in full swing, and a sleek new Art Moderne style had exploded onto the scene at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Now commonly referred to as “Art Deco,” Art Moderne’s arrival introduced an utterly unique new design vernacular that seemed to mirror the no-looking-back cultural and social tempo of the times in its sleek, high-gloss, and streamlined finishes.
While Art Deco owes its incarnation to France, a quick glimpse at the New York City skyline and Hollywood films of the time reveals the magnitude and rapidity of the style’s transatlantic foothold. Deco-infused films like Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and construction of the Chanin, Chrysler, and Empire State Buildings (all commenced between 1927 and 1929) heralded an era in which Art Deco would dominate design in the United States for more than two decades. Its influence continues to reverberate throughout virtually every facet of creative design today.
Dorothy Draper’s Modern Baroque is bold, brash and colorful, as seen in her designs at West Virginia’s Greenbrier Resort.
As architects remade the country’s skylines in Art Deco’s image, Hollywood’s art designers—most notably Cedric Gibbons (who attended the 1925 Exhibition in Paris), William Menzies, and Hans Dreier—reshaped Americans’ views of interior design. The glamorous, modern Art Deco aesthetic quickly took up residence in Hollywood sets and celebrity homes, and, in short order, designers from Palm Springs to New York to Miami Beach were abandoning de Wolfe’s chintz for the glossy symmetry, metallic finishes, geometric patterns, rich colors, and highly finished details of Art Deco.
AMERICAN COUNTRY AND MODERN BAROQUE
Perhaps a predictable reaction to two decades of the elegant austerity of Art Deco, the desire for a comfortable and familiar-feeling home overtook American design in the late 1940s and 50s, and a postwar homeyness came to define the era.
With designers like Dorothy Draper and Sister Parish at the forefront, this new take on a traditional aesthetic echoed de Wolfe’s reimagining of classic decor for a modern, comfortable home. These designers, however, shared a love for a new American vision of the English country house: overstuffed chairs and sofas, flowers spilling from vases, uplifting colors, bold prints, and oversized flowered chintz abounding.
While Draper brought bold tones and brash juxtapositions of color to her over-the-top and highly designed “Modern Baroque” style, Parish’s “American Country” style embraced a sense of nostalgia and well-heeled comfort that felt both practical yet luxurious and “undesigned”—as if the décor had organically grown up around its occupants over the years.
Draper’s designs for the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, exemplify her Modern Baroque style at its apex, and her eponymous firm (in business today under the leadership of her protégé Carleton Varney), continues to design the hotel’s interiors. Most famously, Parish designed for the Kennedy home in Georgetown and was briefly involved in the First Lady’s renovation of the White House, but even with a client list that included Gettys, Vanderbilts, and Mellons, it is the designer’s own modest summer home in Dark Harbor, Maine—bursting with quilts, color, needlepoint, chintz, and a jumble of prints—that is credited as her masterpiece of American Country style.
Mid-Century modern design is cool, uncluttered and sculptural, incorporating molded wood and natural elements.
MODERNISM AND THE MID-CENTURY
“Mid-Century Modern,” a phrase coined sometime in the 1980s, remains, at its core, a reference to the Bauhaus modernist influence that began creeping into American .” interior design in the 1950s. – An egalitarian reaction to the blue-blooded overstuffed interiors of the 1940s and early 1950s, the modernists echoed the practical optimism of a booming postwar economy in which materials like steel, fiberglass, molded wood, and plastics, plastics, plastics unleashed a universe of design possibilities. Mid-Century design luminaries like Hans and Florence Knoll, Eero Saarinen, Ray and Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and Herman Miller— familiar today to most anyone assembling their own version of the mid-century aesthetic—were artists, architects, and furniture designers whose work carried Mid-Century’s functional elegance and simplicity at the core of its DNA. Their aesthetics inspired a new era of interior design that lasted into the 1970s in its heyday, and was revived with unparalleled vigor in the early 2000s. The cool, uncluttered, streamlined, and sculptural design aesthetic first took root in “California Modernism” through the work of architects like Eames, Saarinen, Richard Neutra and John Lautner, but rapidly spread to virtually every living room and corporate headquarters in America—where it remains a ubiquitous design element today.
BILLY BALDWIN AND AMERICAN STYLE
Although reports that Ikea’s iconic Billy Bookcase was named after American interior designer Billy Baldwin don’t stand up under scrutiny (Billy, it seems, refers to a colleague of the bookcase’s designer), the mix-up is understandable: Baldwin, a well-known fan of bookcases in his designs, looms so large over 20th century interior design that having a bookcase named for him would hardly bear notice amid the accolades this legendary figure has racked up over the years. An icon in his own right, no list of iconic American interior design would be complete without him.
Billy Baldwin designed Woodson Taulbee’s Manhattan apartment in the 1960s, incorporating his iconic Billy Baldwin Slipper Chair. Image by Horst P. Horst.
A champion of uncluttered, simple rooms that fluidly mixed styles and periods of décor, Baldwin’s singular eye produced interiors that were somehow unpretentious in their simplicity, but sophisticated and elevated in their effect. “The Dean of American Decorators,” as the New York Times dubbed him (he disliked the term “interior designer”), Baldwin’s aesthetic featured groupings of furniture to best suit comfort and conversation, eye-pleasing arrangements of objects and books, an intermingling of the ordinary with the exotic, built-in bookcases, shutters, slipcovered furniture, and a fondness for cotton and organic embellishments like rattan, wicker, tortoiseshell, and bamboo. His design for Cole Porter’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria is often cited as an example of Baldwin at the height of his powers.
Despite a fulsome list of clients that included most of the Social Register, it is within Baldwin’s work that de Wolfe’s call for a democratizing force in interior design blooms fully realized in a new American Style. Accessible to all, unpretentious and relaxed, but “comfortable and refined,” Baldwin’s impact can be found not just in the work of many designers who name him as their go-to inspiration even today, but in the very uninhibited ethos that underpins 21st century interior design writ large. As Baldwin would tell his clients: “Be faithful to your own taste, because nothing you really like is ever out of style.”
