Dorothy Draper's Design Legacy
It might not be immediately apparent, watching her 1957 TV appearance with Edward R. Murrow, but Dorothy Draper, the so-called, duchess of decorating, was her era's Martha Stewart.
"We always say in our organization that if it looks right, it is right," she said then.
Draper may look and sound like your grandmother, but there was nothing stodgy or old-fashioned about her. Draper is known for putting weird colors together, like red chairs next to purple walls. She loved bright striped wallpaper, bold black and white checkerboard floors and extravagant flower print fabrics. To see some examples of her work, go here.
"We have no respect whether the things are old or not, we just cut anything we want if it looks better," Draper told Murrow.
Donald Albrecht, curator of the Dorothy Draper exhibition currently at the Museum of the City of New York, said Draper avoided beige at all costs.
"Draper is, unlike Martha Stewart, is very, very exotic," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "In one interior you'll get Arabian nights, colonial revival, Chinese style, neo-classicism, all jumbled together to give you this eclectic, theatrical style."
"That's the draper style, the draper touch," Albrecht said as he showed off a Draper sofa. "It makes you want to laugh. This is a sofa that Dorothy Draper designed when she redid the cafeteria of the metropolitan museum of art in 1954."
Imagine lunch under one of Draper's giant birdcagey looking chandeliers, or looking up from your coffee at sprites and flying fish, dancing across a reflecting pool. The space was officially "the roman court," but everybody called it the dorotheum after draper.
She was a debutante, born into a life of old money and privilege. John Singer Sargent drew her. She married and divorced President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt's polio doctor.
She was born in 1888, twenty years before the model t came out and ended up the first woman ever to design the interior of a jet airliner
Noted decorator, Carleton Varney, went to work for Dorothy Draper when he was 22. He bought her company after draper died in 1969, and has just published "in the pink," about her life and work.
"She made interior decorating a profession," he said. "Generally she worked in large spaces, big hotels, restaurants, aircrafts, shopping centers, whatever it was that was a big, Herculean job."
The big. Showy objects she created to put in those spaces were often not what they seemed.
"One of the interesting things we discovered when the bigger pieces of furniture arrived, like that black and gold cabinet in the back; they're just stage props," Albrecht said. "It looks as if the gold is a handle, and if you look closely, you'll see a little groove. It's totally fake. Those are not handles, and those are not doors."
By the end of the 1930's Dorothy Draper baroque was synonymous with sophistication.
"For some people who maybe yearn for the era of Cole Porter, which was the time for Dorothy Draper, this is the physical embodiment of that era," Albrecht said. "If Porter's music is the sound of it, Draper is the look of it."
The Joan Crawford movie "Grand Hotel" mimicked what draper was doing in actual hotels.
"Dorothy was Hollywood," Varney said. "She was the movie star of the decorators, because she lived in that period// people long for Hollywood, real Hollywood and she gave it to them. I mean, she lived it. In many senses she was -- fantasized that kind of thing about what Hollywood sets were like."
The grandest of the hotels she decorated is the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. It is unmistakably Draper to this day. A resort since the revolutionary war, the Greenbrier was used as a military hospital during World War II.
Draperizing 600-plus guestrooms and all the public areas took 45,000 yards of fabric, 15000 rolls of wallpaper and 40,000 gallons of paint. Draper utterly transformed the Greenbrier in just 16 months. Everybody who was anybody was invited to the grand re-opening in April, 1948. The Duke of Windsor played the drums, Bing Crosby sang in Draper's pink ballroom.
Draper designed a world where people made glamorous entrances through great doors.
"To me this is one of the most beautiful doors in the whole hotel," Varney said. "Every doorway had to be important. Doors were it."
Still in place are the doors she designed for the entrance to the camellia house, a restaurant she did at the drake hotel in Chicago.
"The door itself is a classic Dorothy Draper door," Albrecht said. "Black and white, huge, overscaled and then on top of than a big neo-baroque plaster or wood door surround -- so it's frames, within frames, within frames."
Typically, she left no detail untouched.
"She not only designed the interior, but also designed the menu, the matchbooks, invitations to the various events, the coasters, the napkins, the swizzle sticks" Albrecht said. "Absolutely everything was designed, in this case around the theme of the Camellia."
Way ahead of her time, Draper was her own brand. You could buy everything from Dorothy Draper Christmas paper to her how-to books. In newspaper and magazine columns she actually talked about her "decoration of independence."
If you look at some of today's hottest designers, from Philippe Starck to Kelly Wearstler, it's apparent that Dorothy Draper's flamboyant style is inching back into fashion.
Last week the Greenbrier held it's first-ever Dorothy Draper weekend. Varney said Draper's appeal endures because she designed things that people would remember.
"When you went to a Dorothy Draper decorated hotel and you left the front door, and you went back to Boise, you were for damn sure going to remember what it looked like because you had to take the elements of this swashbuckling bravado of it, of color and magic," he said.