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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1938, Janet Flanner profiles Elsie de Wolfe
In 1921, at the pinnacle of her decorating career, Elsie de Wolfe sued one of her clients for neglecting to pay her for seventeen thousand dollars' worth of furniture. De Wolfe had never before set foot in a courtroom, but cross-examination presented no terrors for a woman who, at the age of fifty-six, was plucky enough to perform headstands in public. When the opposing attorney asked whether she had written a certain letter, she replied that she was not a stenographer. When asked whether she had overseen the furniture shipment, she replied that she was not a shipper. "Well," the lawyer asked, "what do you do, Miss de Wolfe?" In her autobiography, de Wolfe recalled, "I looked at him, as though he had been graciousness personified, and said in a voice of milk and honey, 'I create beauty.' "
De Wolfe is credited with single-handedly inventing the profession of interior decorating. She envisioned the home as a medium for self-expression and herself as a kind of life-style artist. A tiny woman who liked to wear short white gloves and to carry at least one little dog, she furnished homes from Manhattan to Paris, Saint-Tropez to Beverly Hills. Though a shrewd business sense and a sharp eye for antiques allowed her to amass a fortune, she based her style not on material goods but on her own principles of taste: a vision of refined yet comfortable living that she insisted was attainable by all. She distilled this sensibility in columns she wrote for The Delineator, one of the turn-of-the-century "pattern sheets" that evolved into the genre known as the ladies' magazine. The columns were collected and published in 1913 as "The House in Good Taste," and the book became a best-seller. Defying the Victorian fashion for dark furniture and heavy draperies, de Wolfe repeatedly exhorted her readers to embrace "simplicity and suitability." In what might be taken as her artistic credo, she wrote, "I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint, comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth and flowers wherever they 'belong,' mirrors and sunshine in all rooms."
Now back in print, more than ninety years later, "The House in Good Taste" (Rizzoli; $26) testifies to the potency of de Wolfe's influence. Her assertion that "we take it for granted that everyone is interested in houses" feels truer than ever, after a decade that saw the fad of "cocooning," the creation of hip life-style magazines with names like Nest and Dwell, and the exponential multiplication of Pottery Barns all over America. Inevitably, her advice on the arrangement of furniture in the drawing room or the placement of electric lights in the boudoir is as charmingly dated as her penchant, in old age, for tinting her hair blue or lavender to match her outfit--one of many trends that she initiated. But both her streamlined aesthetic and the assumptions underpinning it are as relevant now as they were at the turn of the century. In an era when conspicuous consumption reached newly...
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