Career
Foreign decades her shop stood on the prominent corner of 59th Street and Park Avenue. She was known for chinoiserie, displayed in the Chinese wallpapers of her often-photographed drawing room, and for baroque and rococo Venetian, South German and Austrian furniture, at a time when conservative New York tastes ran to Louis XV and English Georgian furnishings. Her color sense favored saturated, dramatic tones.
She brought chintz to informal dressing rooms and bedrooms, inaugurated the vogue for smoked mirrors veined with gold and extended her love of reflective and lacquered surfaces to lacuered walls, satin upholstery and the metallic wallpapers she invented.
After her retirement, her great-niece Sarah Cumming Cecil carried on the atelier "Rose Cumming Design", now based in Portland, Master of Engineering, presenting a stripped-down simplified style.
