(After ninety years, The House in Good Taste by America's ...)
After ninety years, The House in Good Taste by America's "first lady of interior decoration," Elsie de Wolfe, still offers timeless design advice.
Compiled from her articles in newspapers and magazines and first published in 1914, The House in Good Taste is a seminal book on interior design with ideas that have lasted a century because they influenced not only the wealthy clients of Park Avenue and Palm Beach, but popular taste as well.
De Wolfe advised Americans to shun ostentation and clutter in favor of simplicity, to dismantle the draperies in order to let in the light, and to replace garish colors with beige and ivory. "I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint," she declared, "comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth and flowers wherever they 'belong,' mirrors and sunshine in all rooms." The rooms that Americans inhabited in the middle of the twentieth century still today owe much to de Wolfe's tastes.
Elsie De Wolfe was an American actress and interior designer who is best known for her innovative and anti-Victorian interiors.
Background
Elsie De Wolfe was born Ella Anderson De Wolfe on December 20, 1865 in New York City. She was the only daughter and second of five children of Stephen De Wolfe and Georgina (Copeland) De Wolfe. In the cluttered Victorian household maintained by her physician father's erratic finances, Elsie grew up with an oppressive sense of her own plainness, which she identified with the dowdiness around her. When, at age fourteen, she visited her father's French-style ancestral home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where the de Wolfes, an English family of Huguenot stock, had moved in 1761 from New England, she began to see an alternative to nineteenth-century design. Upon her return home, her Scottish-born mother sent her to live with a cousin, Doctor Archibald Charteris, in Edinburgh, where she attended school. Three years later Charteris, Queen Victoria's chaplain at Balmoral, arranged to have her presented at court.
Education
De Wolfe was educated privately in New York and in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she lived with maternal relatives. Through that connection she was presented at Queen Victoria’s court in 1883 and introduced to London society. Soon after her return to New York in 1884 she became a devotee of amateur theatricals, then a popular form of charitable fund-raising.
Career
In 1890 De Wolfe turned professional when her father's death left her family in need of money. Her first role was the lead in Victorien Sardou's Thermidor, for which she prepared at the Comedie Française before her debut, in 1891, at Proctor's Twenty-third Street Theater in New York. In 1894 she joined producer Charles Frohman's Empire Theatre stock company and gained a reputation as an actress of promise and as the best-dressed woman on the American stage. Despite her success in The Bauble Shop (1894), The Marriage of Convenience (1897), Catherine (1897) and later with her own company in The Way of the World (1901), which Clyde Fitch wrote for her, she was unable to escape a sense of her own mediocrity as an actress.
Demanding more of herself and of life, she left the stage after the failure of A Wife Without a Smile in 1905. A period of uncertainty followed. The career in which she would achieve distinction was one she created for herself and other women. At the suggestion of her closest friend, the agent Elisabeth Marbury, she turned her lifelong interest in design into a profession, becoming America's first female decorator. Her success in decorating the small Greek Revival house at Irving Place which she shared with Marbury established her reputation for taste, and she was soon launched. De Wolfe strove to provide homes for her clients that would afford, as she later put it, "breathing-space" from the jarring pace of America's development. Drawing her inspiration from eighteenth-century principles of unity, simplicity, and serenity, she added her own love of vibrant color and airiness to create her anti-Victorian interiors.
The de Wolfe colors were greens and yellows and whites; her fabrics, muslins and chintzes. She favored mirrors for the effect of space and light they provided and challenged the convention of uniformity of period by creating visual harmony among furniture of different styles. De Wolfe's revolt against the dark hangings and crowded arrangements of Victorian decor remained controversial until her imaginative decoration, in 1906, of New York's first women's social club, the Colony Club, established her reputation. With the publication of her The House in Good Taste (1913) she became an arbiter of American design. Carrying her rebellion against drabness into her personal life, Elsie de Wolfe acquired a reputation for experimentation.
When, in 1903, the opportunity arose to purchase the graceful Villa Trianon in Versailles, the two women, joined later by Anne Morgan, committed themselves to its restoration. As her firm prospered, de Wolfe spent more and more time at Versailles. With the coming of World War I, Elisabeth Marbury returned to the United States, eventually relinquishing her share in the villa. Determined to stay in France, de Wolfe distinguished herself at the Ambrine Mission for the care of gas burns and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.
In the 1920s, Elsie de Wolfe's hospitality at Versailles became a cornerstone of international social life. Known for the inventiveness of her parties, she was hostess to diplomats, artists, and aristocrats and was a celebrity in her own right. On March 10, 1926, she married Sir Charles Mendl, press attache at the British Embassy. Sir Charles, a genial man devoted to Anglo-Saxon comforts, was unable to share his wife's passion for artistic affect. Theirs was a warm relationship, but they maintained the habits of a lifetime of independence. Lady Mendl presided at Versailles, and her husband continued to give his own quiet dinner parties at his apartment in Paris. With the outbreak of World War II, Sir Charles and Lady Mendl - who regained her citizenship by an act of Congress - moved to southern California. Ever youthful and determined, she re-created the life she had led at Versailles and inspired Ludwig Bemelmans' tribute, To the One I Love Best (1955). After the war she returned to Versailles, where she died five years later at the age of eighty-four.
Achievements
Elsie De Wolfe is best remembered as the person who introduced the world to the art of interior design, and also as the author of the influential book The House in Good Taste. She also became, in 1908, one of the first women to fly, when she went up with Wilbur Wright in France.
During World War I De Wolfe won the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour for her hospital relief work, particularly among gas-burn cases.
(After ninety years, The House in Good Taste by America's ...)
Politics
Although not generally interested in politics, De Wolfe was an early supporter of the woman's suffrage movement, shocking her friends by marching up Fifth Avenue in the great spring parade of 1912.
Views
De Wolfe saw the home as a medium for self-expression.
Personality
De Wolfe devoted most of her leisure time to the creation of a second home in France.
Her great friendship with Elisabeth Marbury was rooted in a common love of French life. As early as the 1890s, they traveled regularly throughout the French countryside. When, in 1903, the opportunity arose to purchase the graceful Villa Trianon in Versailles, the two women, joined later by Anne Morgan, committed themselves to its restoration.
Connections
On March 10, 1926, De Wolfe married Sir Charles Mendl, press attache at the British Embassy. Sir Charles, a genial man devoted to Anglo-Saxon comforts, was unable to share his wife's passion for artistic affect. Theirs was a warm relationship, but they maintained the habits of a lifetime of independence. Lady Mendl presided at Versailles, and her husband continued to give his own quiet dinner parties at his apartment in Paris.
With the outbreak of World War II, Sir Charles and Lady Mendl - who regained her citizenship by an act of Congress - moved to southern California.
