Long after her death in 1950, the fashionably flamboyant Elsie de Wolfe remains an epochal figure in 20th Century interior design–a household goddess revered for a style that blended elegance, simplicity and, above all, personality.
“A lightning rod” for younger generations is how R. Louis Bofferding, a former curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art who lectures on de Wolfe, recently summed up her long career. Even as we make our way into a new century, she is still the popular subject of books and articles on the decorative arts.
Indeed, collectors from all over the world came to Christie’s Los Angeles in September to bid on a collection of her furniture, paintings and personal memorabilia. The auction offered convincing evidence of de Wolfe’s classic but innovative taste: the Louis XVI chaises, the Biedermeier-inspired Lucite chair covered in leopard, the intricately carved benches from Southeast Asia.
Thanks to de Wolfe, interior designers emerged as solo performers, sharing the spotlight with big-name architects, said Bofferding, a private decorative arts dealer in New York.
It was de Wolfe who succeeded in taking interior design away from the giant firms–often Paris– or London-based–that dominated the field at the turn of the century with their fleets of carpenters, gilders, painters, drapery-makers and upholsterers. She broke up this arrangement by being an independent operator and popularizing her work through self-promotion, a skill learned as an actress in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Although she catered mainly to the rich and famous–such as industrialist Henry Clay Frick, financier J.P. Morgan, historian Henry Adams, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor–de Wolfe shared her ideas with the middle class through magazine articles and other writings.
When she started her design career in her native New York–de Wolfe, then in her late 30s, had retired from the stage–America was still firmly in the grip of Gilded Age opulence. The mansions of the rich appeared to be trapped in seas of dark furniture, bric-a-brac, portierres, matching upholstery and draperies that snuffed out any trace of daylight. Domestic life, in short, aspired to the baronial.
Influenced by her sojourns abroad among the new sophisticates, de Wolfe sought to brighten interiors with painted woodwork; paler fabrics and colors; and Neoclassic furniture, preferably French. She banished clutter, no matter how artfully arranged or precious, to the attic. Whenever possible, she brought plants and other accoutrements from the garden indoors.
For one of her first clients–the Ogden Armours of Lake Forest–she placed at the center of the home a winter garden, which she described many years later in her memoirs:
“It was a trellised room, done in green and white, with a black-and-white marble floor. The sofas were eight-feet long. Their covers, specially woven, were of white velvet striped in a design of green leaves. At each end was a zinc-lined receptacle holding flowering plants. The tables were of green and black and white marble to match the floors and mantel.”
Reflecting the client
Her reputation as an interior designer grew out of work on her own house in New York, an early 19th Century residence near Grammercy Park that once belonged to author Washington Irving (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Teamed with another pioneer businesswoman, theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury in the late 1890s, she refurbished the three-story house, where their Sunday salons attracted celebrities and socialites who helped launch her design career.
The dining room, in particular, reflected the new taste. Decorated in a medley of gold and white tones, the room was stripped of its racks of fancy plates and other objects that could distract guests from the dinner menu and conversation. A mellow Chinese rug covered the floor, and flanking the table were caned chairs painted ivory like the woodwork.
In an otherwise dull hallway, de Wolfe installed a large mirrored panel, a signature touch that would be used throughout her career to create a sense of spaciousness in a room. She also popularized the use of furniture with mirrored surfaces.
On her own turf, she practiced what she preached: A client’s personality must be part of the design equation. The pale blue and white bedroom of housemate Marbury, for example, reflected her conversion and devotion to Catholicism: a crucifix, Italian religious paintings and a carved prie-dieu.
Her own bedroom, done in a cozy rose hue, featured a carved bed from a French chateau, which a visitor once commented could have been “employed as a barricade in the event of a riot or revolution.” Nevertheless, the overall effect seemed “warm, radiant and poetic.”
As de Wolfe catered to a growing clientele, she moved around Manhattan to new homes–one of these was an Uptown brownstone, which she brightened by removing the high stoop and constructing a courtyard with hedges at the basement level and a new grander entrance.
James Abbott, the decorative-arts curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, attributes de Wolfe’s success to her ability to project her clients’ personalities into their homes. “She stands very strong today because she could translate individual taste into a decorated environment that was timeless and not the same everyone else had.”
People today, Abbott said, “seek out a Mark Hampton or a Mario Buatta look and you see the designer in all the rooms rather than the owner’s personality or taste.” He is the co-author of the 1997 book, “Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration” (John Wiley & Sons, $50).
During World War II, she temporarily camped out in a Beverly Hills estate–typically done in greens, silver and white–with the husband she had acquired in Paris during the 1920s, Sir Charles Mendl, along with the title Lady Mendl. Hollywood stars came calling and paid tribute to the aged de Wolfe, whom author and pal Ludwig Bemelmans described as “a very rich little Christmas tree, beautifully ornamented, delicately glittering here and there with jewels. . . .”
Very French, very Elsie
With the passage of time, de Wolfe’s interiors have all but vanished and the furniture scattered. One surviving example is the boudoir of Mrs. Henry Clay Frick, now called the Boucher room, in The Frick Collection in New York. Edgar Munhall, the museum’s curator, authored an article, appearing in the January issue of Architectural Digest, about de Wolfe’s work at the one-time Frick residence on Fifth Avenue.
Former Chicagoan Julia Henry Armour, who now lives in Coconut Grove, Fla., remembers her mother giving her a pair of de Wolfe chairs, which she described as “small, plain and French,” from the family estate in Philadelphia. Her mother, Julia Rush Biddle Henry who died in 1979, was a Francophile and “got along well with de Wolfe.” Henry continued to make annual treks to Paris couturiers even in her 90s.
Of all her houses, de Wolfe maintained a lifelong passion for her French home, the Villa Trianon at Versailles, purchased with Marbury in 1905. It was transformed into a fabled showplace of de Wolfe’s design skills.
Although dwarfed by the nearby French royal palace, historian Jane S. Smith of Evanston recalled its “welcoming quality,” even though it had been empty for years. “Whether it was the dining room, the ballroom or gardens,” said Smith, “they all seemed to function as a series of living rooms.
The villa was very French and very Elsie, recalled Smith, with parquet flooring taken from the Versailles palace. Ever vigilant to the historic and decorative value of old paneling and flooring, de Wolfe had picked up the pieces when the palace was being repaired.
Smith remembered, in particular, the garden “with its green lawn, topiary animals, winding paths and series of surprises,” such as the mirrored garden wall that looked like a gate.
An adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, Smith is the author of the definitive biography of the legendary tastemaker, “Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style” (Atheneum, out of print) and had visited the villa for her book.
“It’s hard to capture how really revolutionary de Wolfe was because what she did now seems the norm,” said Smith.
“She wanted to live both aesthetically and practically,” Smith added. “She created a vision of the world, then convinced everyone else it was the best vision–and that they should pay for it. It was aesthetic dictatorship in a fairly benign way.”
