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Since her death in 1950, the age of 90, the reputation of the pioneering American interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe has devolved into a caricature so profound that it has thrown her professional insights, as well as her bemedalled service as a nurse on the Western Front during World War I, into the deepest shadow. The ceaseless chatter, brazen avariciousness and enthusiastic plastic surgeries. The leopard prints, zebra stripes and acres of mirrored glass. The pastel coiffures, the dyed-to-match poodles and the taffeta cushions, stitched with twee aphorisms. De Wolfe’s famous witticisms now ring idiotic. ‘Beige, my favourite colour!’ she cried out upon seeing the Parthenon for the first time. Somewhat irritated, the politician and diarist Chips Channon corrected her exclamation in his journal, noting that the Greek temple was actually ‘a superb amber-pink’.
Tomfoolery aside, De Wolfe – aka Lady Mendl, thanks to a title-hunting marriage when she was close to 70 – possessed a granular approach to domestic life so sensible that her only decorating book, The House in Good Taste, retains much of its freshness. Published in 1913 as an outgrowth of a series of popular-magazine columns ghostwritten by Ruby Ross Goodnow – a Georgia-born journalist who, as Ruby Ross Wood, became an important decorator in the 1920s – the title offers much good value. So much so that several reprints have appeared, most recently in 2020. Original editions can be downloaded from online sources.
An early critic noted that The House in Good Taste made readers ‘want to run out and decorate’. It still does, in 32 highly opinionated and only slightly dated pages. (Who among us furnishes a bedroom with a washstand or frets about ‘careless’ maids?) Francophile décors loosened up with flowered chintz were De Wolfe's speciality in the early 1900s, and while that attractive vocabulary may be out of fashion now, one cannot argue with her principles of comfort, practicality and, to use one of her favourite words, suitability.
Of course, a large living room should have multiple seating areas – but De Wolfe, a nuanced hostess, takes that rule a step farther: ‘No one chair should be isolated, for some bashful person who doesn’t talk well anyway is sure to take the most remote chair and make herself miserable.’ She admires antiques but praises exacting reproductions, since, she cheerily observes: ‘The effect is the thing you are after, isn't it?’ As for grandly scaled bedrooms, as puzzlingly desirable then as now, De Wolfe recalls insisting on cosier accommodations at the Paris Ritz after a ‘despairing morning toilet spent in taking many steps back and forth from dressing-table to bathroom, and from bathroom to hang-closets…’
On and on the famous stage actor turned ‘America's Most Successful Woman Decorator’ goes, in 20 chapters that take the detailed measure of everything from colours to the arrangement of a bathroom. De Wolfe's clients were invariably affluent – ‘First find your millionaire,’ she told nascent practitioners – but one chapter offers smart advice for residents of small apartments, namely ‘young people who are beginning housekeeping’. How smart? Looking back on my own address hopping, I wish I had known to interview potential neighbours about the pros and cons of a building or street before relocating.
One of De Wolfe's valuable lessons – and one especially relevant to this new column about design guides of the past worthy for today's shelves – is her insistence that books are among the first things that a householder should acquire. Especially anyone who fancies himself a collector in the making. ‘You can't begin collecting one thing without developing an enthusiasm for the contemporary things,’ she counsels, adding that such books should be read often and obviously so. ‘You can judge people pretty well by their books and the wear and tear of them’.
A version of this article also appeared in the April 2022 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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