Research Paper On Martha Stewart

Before Martha Stewart was Martha Stewart the megabrand, there was Dorothy Draper, the queen of decorating and Good Housekeeping’s design Director. She shot to fame with her 1939 book “Decorating Is Fun!”.

Dorothy Draper was an American Interior Decorator born on November 22, 1889 in Tuxedo Park, NY. She was the first one ever to make Interior Design a profession.

Born into the aristocratic Tuckerman family in one of the first gated communities in the United States, Dorothy Draper (maid name Tuckerman) learned glamour and elegance since her early years. Her parents were Paul Tuckerman and Susan Minturn. Her great-grandfather, Oliver Wolcott, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Her cousin, Sister Parish also became a major interior

The opposite of minimalism, soon her designs were incorporated in homes, hotels, restaurants, theaters, and department stores. The Draper bedroom scheme of wide pink and white wallpaper, chenille bedspreads, and organdy curtains soon became ubiquitous across the country.

Draper was again hired by Douglas Elliman to redecorate a block of former tenement homes to motivate buyers, as people were not purchasing the homes. This area is known today as Sutton Place. She painted all the buildings black with white trim and added colors to the doors.

This job opened a door for Dorothy to do a great deal of hotel design, including Sherry-Netherland in New York, the Drake in Chicago, and the Fairmont in San Francisco. During the Great Depression, Draper spent $10 million dollars designing the Quitandinha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

She had already started a column in the local newspaper, Ask Dorothy. During the Depression, her column ran in 70 newspapers. She advised people to “take that red and paint your front door with it” (Depression Class). Many people followed her advice and continued supporting her success by buying more than a million yards of her signature cabbage rose

As Carleton Varney says "Dorothy Draper was to decorating, what Chanel was to fashion. The woman was a genius; there'd be no professional decorating business without her." (Collins) Aside from the boldness, the baroque, and the black and white stripes, she wrote about woman empowerment in Good Housekeeping to teach regular women how to be more fabulous in their regular lives (“If it looks right, it is right”). Free-spirited, impossibly beautiful, and larger than life, Dorothy Draper, the Queen of Interior