Homekeeper's Library: Decorating is Fun!

Quick, finish this sentence: before there was Martha Stewart, there was . . .

Who did you think of? If you thought of cooking, maybe Fannie Farmer or Julia Child? If you thought of homekeeping business empires, perhaps Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, even Betty Crocker? If you're a student of homekeeping letters, knowing that what became this distinctive area of scholarship was earlier a way for women to study amongst themselves, perhaps Catharine Beecher? Or, justly, did you think of all of the homekeepers, some famous but most of them not, who worked tirelessly to transform the simple need for shelter into the artform of creating and maintaining a home?

If you thought of good taste, then along with Martha there are two American icons to know: Russel Wright and Dorothy Draper. Among design scholars, Wright's influence on the American century is as fundamental as that other Wright who also worked in the discipline of making domiciles, with Russel's legacy so commonplace today that it is all the more remarkable that it was groundbreaking at the time.

Equally groundbreaking, but somehow less widely acknowledged, was Dorothy Draper. Draper was an interior designer whose influence as both an aesthete and a business person equaled, in her day, that of Martha Stewart's today. Draper invented interior design as a legitimate American business, opening the first such in the United States in 1923. In so doing, she also asserted the right for women to go into business, at a time when this was at best a risky position to take. She then had the audacity to make a profound success of it. At the height of its success, Draper's business was exerting a broad influence, from the design of products including textiles, transportation and cosmetics to the design of crucial private and public spaces, including The Carlyle, The Greenbrier, The Drake and the famous Dorotheum -- the dining room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But this success was possible because at its core was Draper's faultless good taste. Draper's dramatic style became a signature known as "the Draper touch." She was fearless with color but flawless in her instincts about it, a combination of talents that allowed her take what others would have considered risks but were to her obvious choices that always paid off. In an era where subtle monochrome was the hallmark of good taste, Dorothy played with vibrant color combinations, a breaking of the mold that went on to comprehensively inform American design, and which she wielded with such authority that it never jumped the fence into the arena of vulgarity. In an era where tasteful pattern meant delicate prints, Draper believed in bold stripes, fat sexy flowers, ornate moldings and the power of black and white tiles. But most importantly, she did not believe in the dictum -- again, then a hallmark of good taste -- that a well-, correctly, tastefully decorated room was one in which details were slavishly exact to period. By breaking away from the rules of the period room, Draper opened the door for style that would eventually become known as "eclectic," the legacy of which not only remains today but is a reigning aesthetic of American design.

Some of her output as a writer has been re-released in appropriately high-style reproductions. To read Decorating is Fun, first released in 1939, is to encounter the marvelous style and sensibility of a tastemaker who was equal parts maverick and matron. Her premise -- its significance highlit considering that as a business person and an aesthete Draper came of age during the Jazz Age and weathered the Great Depression, before going on to influence the Greatest Generation and its postwar aftermath -- was that a home should be a cheerful, comfortable refuge.

This position, tellingly both practical and aesthetic in tandem, became fundamental to what would eventually become known as "modern." To us now, that modern touch is the stuff of nostalgia and admiration. If you doubt, witness the current cultural influence -- not the least of which is style -- of another Draper who exerted influence over mid-century America. Whether you read it as a homekeeper reading for practical advice on design, or as a design aficionado reading for insight from one pro to another, Decorating is Fun is as important as a historic aesthetic treatise as it is as a practical guide to realizing your vision.