Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950) was the first professional interior designer in America. She believed in achieving a single, harmonious, overall design statement, and felt that the decoration of the home should reflect the woman's personality, rather than simply the husband's earning power. De Wolfe introduced a startling freshness to the elaborate, heavily fringed and tasseled Victorian design sensibility of her time.

Before de Wolfe began helping her friends with home decoration around 1900, American homes had never been "designed." Upper-class women called in curtain makers, furniture salesmen, wallpaper hangers and other craftsmen, and then attempted to arrange these elements themselves. While carrying on the tradition of decorative surfaces and harmonious color combinations, de Wolfe cleared away the thickly curtained and upholstered look of the nineteenth century. Having spent summers in France, she had come to prefer the light, gilded interiors of Versailles and the delicate lines of eighteenth-century French...