The story of the first American interior decorator Welcome back to Period Dramas, a weekly column that alternates between rounding up historic homes on the market and answering questions we?ve always had about older structures.
It's not hard to find inspiration if you're looking to decorate your home. Thanks to design magazines, websites, even HGTV and Ikea, almost endless resources are available at your fingertips. But that wasn't always the case.
The contemporary concept of an interior designer didn?t exist in American domestic life until about the turn of the 20th century. And the pioneering decorator who started it all, many argue, was the the New York-based Elsie de Wolfe.

Image courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York Collections. A photograph of Elsie de Wolfe.

Born into a middle-class American family in 1865, Elsie de Wolfe started out life as an actress. ?She was quite an aspirational actress,? says Professor Penny Sparke of Kingston University and author of The Modern Interior.
?But it was through dramatics that she met her longtime partner Elisabeth Marbury.? Marbury, Sparke explained, came from a prominent New York family and was a successful literary agent, counting Oscar Wilde among her clients.
It was in the townhouse that Marbury and de Wolfe shared that de Wolfe first started to stretch her aesthetic legs as a decorator. ?The townhouse that she restored with Marbury became her showplace of sorts. Friends would come...