The Great Lady Decorators
by Adam Lewis
Rizzoli
Reviewed by Andrew Myers

The Great Lady Decorators has many attributes. First and foremost it chronicles the lives and careers of a small group of American and English women of privileged background who broke class and Victorian-Edwardian social conventions to (gasp!) go to work and make money — and who thereby built their reputations while creating an entirely new professional field dominated by the distaff. In this respect, author Adam Lewis makes clear a distinct and distinctive category that could as easily be called The Founders of Modern Interior Design or, given the flamboyance and joie de vivre of these pioneers of l’art de vivre, The Stiff Spines, Cool Eccentrics and Big Mamas Who Did Décor (Along With Bons Mots).
While many of the women in this 12-chapter pantheon are well known — Elsie de Wolfe, Dorothy Draper, Syrie Maugham, Nancy Lancaster, Madeleine Castaing, Eleanor Brown and Sister Parish — others, such as Ruby Ross Wood, Frances Elkins and Rose Cumming are relatively less so, and still others, such as Elsie Cobb Wilson, Marian Hall and Thedlow (a company comprised of three women: sisters Lottie Handy and Theresa Chalmers, and Edna de Frise) are likely unknown outside the smallest coteries of dec arts aficionados.
If The Great Lady Decorators did nothing more than record the existence of these seminal but lesser-known designers (Anne Urquhart, Dorothy Marckwald and Pauline Jessup among them) and document some of their projects, it would be a required presence in every design library. As Lewis writes: “Some of the most important women decorators who worked in the first half of the 20th century left no records of their business. We only know about them through the archives of The New York Times, the Condé Nast library, the archives of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society. In these resources, we are able to see black-and-white photographs of their work, but there is little or no written information.”
Therein lies a paradox for a glossy, oversized design book. While Lewis has done these women and the history of design a great service, the paucity of photographs and visual records leaves the reader frustrated. Ditto the pictures selected for the best known of the great lady decorators, many of whom have been the subjects of monographs boasting extensive pictorial documentation, most often in black and white but occasionally in color as well (especially of the designers’ later projects). To give but one example, in the 24-page chapter on Dorothy Draper — a designer renowned for her bold use of matte and high-gloss white contrasted, matte and high-gloss black and combinations of (as Lewis writes) pink and red with polished leaf green, bold stripes, aqua blue, and fabrics printed with oversized bouquets, mostly roses — only one photograph of an interior is shown in color. This is a pity. Perhaps aware of this deficit, Lewis, who is also the author of Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style and Albert Hadley: The Story of American’s Preeminent Interior Designer, has augmented this book with 12 original paintings by noted interiors illustrator Jeremiah Goodman, which add both atmosphere and allure.
Quibbles aside, The Great Lady Decorators — nine years in the making according to Lewis — is impressive, always informative and interesting. When Lewis recounts the challenges faced by these women, and the humor and one-liners with which these challenges were met, it is often inspirational and hysterically funny as well. In the spirit of many of these lady decorators, many of whom were emphatic, even dictatorial in disseminating opinion and advice: Buy it! (Or rather: Buy it, darling!)