The Greenbrier hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, whose interiors were designed by Dorothy Draper in 1948.

In the mid-1920s, Draper ran her interior-design business from her East 64th Street town house, in Manhattan.

Views of the Camellia House dining room at Chicago’s Drake Hotel.

The lobby of 770 Park Avenue in New York.

Details from the Greenbrier hotel, which today remain just as Draper designed them, in 1948.

The Palácio Quitandinah hotel, in Rio de Janeiro.

A drawing of Draper’s final project, the Dorothy Draper Westinghouse Dream Home, for the 1964 World’s Fair.

In the 1930s, Draper designed the interiors for the Arrowhead Springs Hotel, *top,* in San Bernardino, California. *Above,* the Hampshire House, on New York’s Central Park South.

Draper designed salons for the Coty company, including this one in Los Angeles.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, Draper transformed a Roman-art gallery into a self-service restaurant.

Draper designed a bold Baroque entrance for the Drake’s Camellia House.

The Hampshire House has kept several of Draper’s original designs.

Draper remains remembered for making the radical move to paint this building, on New York’s Sutton Place, pitch-black.

The Draper Touch

The 20th-century decorator Dorothy Draper transformed the interiors of Manhattan’s Carlyle hotel, West Virginia’s Greenbrier, and more with her signature Hollywood Regency style

Known as the “duchess of decorating,” Dorothy Draper was the ultimate maximalist. She was born into the wealthy Tuckerman family in 1889, and her childhood saw her moving between stately turrets in Tuxedo Park, a large town house in Manhattan, and a cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. Her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt sometimes came over for tea.

Dorothy came out in 1907 and was married five years later to the handsome young doctor George “Dan” Draper. Despite a busy social calendar, she yearned for more. At the same time, it became clear she had a knack for decorating. When Draper experimented with a room, her friends would go back to their own estates and copy her.

A tumultuous split with her husband in 1930 changed everything. He went off with a younger woman; she went to therapy and a plastic surgeon. Draper’s new nose was a definite turning point. And her developing designer’s eye was fed up with the dispiriting palette of gray, brown, and black. These colors were just “gravy.” It was time for something new. She struck out on her own.

“Lovely, clear colors have a vital effect on our mental happiness,” Draper mused. The Carlyle hotel, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was one of her first projects, and it struck a chord that was bold yet balanced. Then the assignments began to pour in—apartments, houses, hotel interiors. In 1941, Draper designed the Camellia House dining room in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. In 1942, as W.W. II ravaged Europe, Draper traveled to Brazil, where she ran a $10 million redesign of the extravagant Palácio Quitandinha, in Rio de Janeiro. Then came her magnum opus, in 1948, the Greenbrier hotel, in West Virginia.

A tumultuous split with her husband in 1930 changed everything. He went off with a younger woman; she went to therapy and a plastic surgeon.

Draper’s design dogmas were strict and uncompromising. She chucked out clutter, used black-and-white tiles for energy, adored Baroque motifs blown up to huge scale, and employed color unforgettably. Her work is emblematic of the Hollywood Regency style.

In The Draper Touch, a new book by the late Carleton Varney, a protégé of Draper’s who bought her company in 1964, five years before she died, archival photographs and illustrations provide a look into her dazzling life. Draper “conveyed a glamorous, bright and cheerful attitude,” writes Varney, “despite the chaotic and dark times.” —Elena Clavarino

Elena Clavarino is an Associate Editor for AIR MAIL

Photos: Michel Arnaud (Greenbrier); Richard Davis (Draper at desk); courtesy of Dorothy Draper & Company Inc.(Camellia House table, black and white; 770 Park Avenue; Palácio Quitandinah; Arrowhead Springs Hotel; Metropolitan Museum of Art, black and white; Camellia House entrance; Hampshire House, both; Sutton Place); Michel Arnaud/Courtesy of Steve and Julie Lazarus (Camellia House table, color); Michel Arnaud/Courtesy of Dorothy Draper & Company Inc. (Greenbrier details); from the collection of Steve and Julie Lazarus (Dorothy Draper Westinghouse Dream Home drawing; Coty salon; Metropolitan Museum of Art, color)

Filter by

Popular Cities

Discipline

Date

More!

Sort by

The Arts Intel Report

The Draper Touch