Dorothy Draper was a Great Lady Decorator
Dorothy Mintrum Tuckerman was younger than Elsie de Wolfe, but they would both later work at the same time in New York. Dorothy’s parents were both descended from aristocratic American families. She made her debut in New York where she met George Draper who also was from a prominent family. They married after George finished his medical training. Fifteen hundred guest were invited to the wedding.
While George built his practice, Dorothy busied herself with child rearing and decorating her home. The latter won great praise from her friends and one, Gertrude Whitney, asked her advice about decorating her museum. To bolster the income from her husband’s medical practice, Dorothy recommended him to some of her friends. But George had little patience for these women whom he thought prone to emotional problems. Dorothy’s first cousin, May Tuckerman Kinicutt, brought her daughter, Dorothy May ( but know as “Sister”) to him because she was having difficulties in school. Dr. George told May that she, not Sister, was the one with problems. Sister would later marry Henry Parish II and become an interior decorator. Thus, Sister became a business competitor of her second cousin Dorothy. Interesting that there is a family decorating connection here, similar to Casart Coverings.
Dorothy Draper opened her business in 1925 and worked from her home. Elsie de Wolfe, Ruby Ross Wood, and Eleanor Brown of Mc Millen were all in business in New York at the time, but they did residential work. Dorothy was commissioned to redecorate the Carlyle Hotel which launched her as a commercial decorator working with architects, engineers and real estate developers. The fact that it was considered improper for women of her social strata to go into business didn’t faze her. Later she would say, “American women are divided into two classes, the happily married and the decorators.”
While Dorothy was decorating, George went to Zurich for eighteen months to study with Dr. Carl Jung. While he was gone, the stock market crashed. When he returned, he asked for a divorce and moved out the same day. George later married Elizabeth Lee who was also a decorator and Dorothy would have to deal professionally with Elizabeth Draper as well as personally in situations that involved the Draper children. Dorothy continued to have commercial contracts and her next break came when the Phipps family asked her to redesign some tenement houses on Sutton Place. She painted all the exteriors black, trimmed in white with each front door painted a different bright color-red, green , yellow, even purple! She created gardens and even tennis courts in back of the houses, which overlooked the East River.
While Dorothy was decorating the Hampshire House apartment hotel, the terms of her contract included a clause that allowed her and her children to move into a suite there at a reduced rate. At the same time, Benjamin Sonnenberg, a prominent public relations man, asked her to decorate his home. Dorothy took the job without a fee. What she received in return was Sonnenberg’s advice on franchising her name on paint, fabrics, furniture, etc.. She was the first decorator to do so.
She became known in the New York advertising world for her skill at product promotion. She designed the packaging for a line of Dorothy Gray Cosmetics called “In the Pink”. She always demanded to be in complete control of every aspect of a job. She approved news releases, designed the company logo and stationery, even match book covers. She had the final say on everything used in dining rooms including floral arrangements, their placement and size, and the staff uniforms and dress code. She published, but never wrote, a column for Good Housekeeping and hosted a radio talk show. She published a book, Decorating Is Fun! which sold 47 thousand copies and followed it with Entertaining Is Fun!
Decorating came to a halt during World War II and she took a job of decorating a resort and casino in Brazil. Using that experience, she collaborated with F. Schumacher & Co. in 1947 to create a tropical fabric and wallpaper collection they called Brazilliance, highlighting South American style.
Following the war, America was enjoying a building boom. She redecorated the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels in San Francisco and the Versailles restaurant in New York.
As soon as the Versailles opened, the investors declared bankruptcy and Dorothy Draper used her personal money to pay those who had worked for her and protect her integrity. She did have several other big jobs, including the Greenbrier, which today is little changed.
She was asked to design interiors for jet airplanes but she was growing frustrated.
Decorating was changing. Everything was being decided by boards of directors. Architects wanted to design the interiors of their buildings. Her brother convinced her to sell the business in 1960 and it thrives today. Carleton Varney, the head of Dorothy Draper, Inc., has written In the Pink about Dorothy and her signature baroque fantasy style epitomized in her design of the Hampshire House apartment hotel. Dorothy Draper died in 1969.
Good Housekeeping has an Ode to Dorothy Draper with lots of pictures and quotes from current designers about Dorothy’s influence. Here are just a few comments.
Genevieve Gorder–“Dorothy helped pave the road that all of us females can now travel down. Her sense of whimsy and playfulness are traits that inspire me greatly. She was the original design diva, long before design television existed.”
David Bromstad–“Her biggest move was making baroque fun. It’s a very heavy period, and she made it modern by simply painting it white, or painting it black — no gilding, no complexity, no glazes. You still get the beautiful lines but none of the heavy. Plus, I love one of her famous quotes, ‘If it looks right, then it probably is.'”
Kristan Cunningham–“Aside from the boldness, the baroque, and the black and white stripes, she was writing so 100 percent about woman empowerment in Good Housekeeping. She was sending out these newsletters to teach regular women how to be more fabulous in their regular life. This is when women still weren’t wearing pants!”
– Lorre Lei
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