Ten decorators who turned arranging a room into a profession and a language, from de Wolfe’s open windows to Putman’s black-and-white hotels.

At the start of the 20th century there was no such job as interior decorator. Wealthy families handed their rooms to architects, upholsterers, and antiques dealers, and the result was the Victorian interior: dark, crowded, and heavy with plush. Then a former actress hung out a shingle, and within a few decades a whole profession existed, complete with its own magazines, its own celebrities, and its own arguments about taste. Over the century that followed, decoration learned to do things it had never done before. It moved into hotels and offices, it swung from all-white austerity to acid-bright pattern and back, and it taught ordinary homeowners that a room could be composed as deliberately as a painting.

The ten designers here were chosen for influence rather than fame alone, though most had plenty of both. Each one changed how rooms were made or how they were understood, and together they span the century’s range: American country and English grandeur, French luxury and French minimalism, the private drawing room and the public lobby. Six are women and four are men, which fairly reflects a field that women largely invented. A couple may be discoveries even for people who love design, which is the point. They appear in no particular order, because ranking them would flatten how differently each one thought about the same four walls.

1. Elsie de Wolfe

America’s first decorator

A former actress who all but invented the profession, de Wolfe declared war on Victorian gloom and won. Her breakthrough came around 1905, when she was hired to decorate New York’s Colony Club, the city’s first social club for women, and answered its dark interiors with pale walls, painted furniture, chintz, and mirrors that pulled in the light. As she later put it, she opened the doors and windows of America and let the air and sunshine in. Her 1913 book, The House in Good Taste, made her the first design celebrity and gave the ordinary homeowner a manual. Start there: it still reads like sensible advice from a very sharp friend.

2. Syrie Maugham

1879-1955

If de Wolfe let the light in, the English decorator Syrie Maugham drained the color out. She opened her own shop on London’s Baker Street in 1922, and a few years later she unveiled the room that made her name: an all-white drawing room in her house on the King’s Road, Chelsea, with pale carpets, bleached and pickled furniture, and even the canvas curtains dipped to a chalky tone. It caused a sensation and launched a decade of white rooms across two continents. Married for a time to the writer Somerset Maugham, she built shops in London, New York, and Chicago on the strength of that single idea. Start with the surviving photographs of the white room, an entire aesthetic in one space.

3. Dorothy Draper

1889-1969

Draper took decoration out of the private house and into public life. She founded what is often called the first incorporated interior design firm, in 1925, and turned her back on good-taste restraint in favor of a style she named Modern Baroque: cabbage-rose chintz the size of dinner plates, black-and-white checkerboard floors, plaster scrollwork, and colors she chose for their effect on the spirits. She brought that boldness to hotels, restaurants, and department stores, most famously in her postwar overhaul of the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, where she designed everything down to the matchbooks. Her 1939 book carried the perfect title, Decorating is Fun! Start with the Greenbrier’s corridors, still riotous today.

4. Jean-Michel Frank

1895-1941

The Parisian Jean-Michel Frank invented what we would now call quiet luxury, decades before the phrase existed. His rooms were nearly bare, but every surface was extraordinary: walls sheathed in parchment, screens in straw marquetry, tables in shagreen and mica, all in shades of ivory and sand. He created spare, luminous interiors for clients like the Vicomte de Noailles, collaborated with the sculptors Alberto and Diego Giacometti on lamps and plaster, and lent his name to the flush, square-legged Parsons table born in his Paris orbit. A Jew fleeing occupied Europe, he took his own life in New York in 1941. Start with the photographs of the Noailles salon, richness disguised as emptiness.

5. Madeleine Castaing

1894-1992

Where Frank subtracted, Madeleine Castaing layered. An antiques dealer as much as a decorator, she revived the unfashionable furniture of the Napoleon III era and wove it into rooms full of romance: a particular inky teal now known as Castaing blue, leopard-spotted carpet running up the stairs, wallpaper printed with little branches. Her cramped shop in Saint-Germain-des-Prés became a pilgrimage site for designers, and her passions ran to painting too, as she and her husband amassed the greatest private collection of the painter Chaïm Soutine. Her look feels current every time eclecticism comes back into style, which is often. Start with her country house at Lèves, near Chartres, the fullest statement of her world.

6. Billy Baldwin

The dean of American decorators

Baldwin, a Baltimore-born tastemaker often called the dean of American decorators, prized comfort and clarity over grandeur. He loved cotton over silk, dark lacquered walls, and slim brass furniture, including the airy brass bookcases he designed for the songwriter Cole Porter’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers. His client list read like a century of American style, from Diana Vreeland, for whom he made a scarlet drawing room she called a garden in hell, to Jacqueline Kennedy. He believed a room should serve the people in it, not intimidate them. Start with photographs of Porter’s library, brown and glinting and endlessly copied.

7. Sister Parish

1910-1994

Dorothy May Kinnicutt, known to everyone as Sister Parish, made the well-worn, lived-in room a mark of taste rather than a lack of it. She opened her business in 1933 in a tiny office in Far Hills, New Jersey, and built a look out of painted floors, rag rugs, patchwork quilts, chintz, and wicker, the ancestor of what later got called American country. In 1961 she was chosen to decorate the private quarters of the Kennedy White House, giving the First Family’s rooms a warmth the state floors below could not. Her firm, later Parish-Hadley, trained much of the next generation. Start with the Yellow Oval Room, her handiwork softened by everyone since.

8. Albert Hadley

1920-2012

If Parish supplied the warmth, her partner Albert Hadley supplied the backbone. A courtly Nashville native trained in modern design, he joined her in 1962 and brought a discipline of line and structure to her cozy rooms, a marriage of restraint and comfort that became the house style of American decorating for a generation. His most quoted room is the library he did for Brooke Astor, its walls lacquered a deep glossy red and lined with books, elegant and unpretentious at once. Through Parish-Hadley he mentored designers who still shape the field. Start with that red library, proof that a single confident color can carry a whole room.

9. David Hicks

1929-1998

The English designer David Hicks dragged decoration into the 1960s with clashing color and hard geometry. He mixed fine antiques with modern furniture and contemporary art, hung acid pinks against oranges, and designed the bold hexagonal and grid carpets that became his signature, one of which turns up on the floors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. He also popularized the tablescape, his own word for a surface arranged with objects as carefully as a still life. His clients ranged from Vidal Sassoon to the Prince of Wales, whose first rooms he decorated. Start with his own books of the era, whose photographs still look like instructions from the future.

10. Andrée Putman

1925-2013

The Frenchwoman Andrée Putman closed the century by reintroducing the one before it. In 1978 she founded Ecart, a firm that reissued the forgotten modernists of the 1930s, among them Eileen Gray and Jean-Michel Frank, and put their work back into circulation. Then in 1984 she designed Morgans in New York, widely called the world’s first boutique hotel, whose small rooms and black-and-white checkerboard bathrooms taught the entire hospitality industry that style could matter more than square footage. Her graphic, monochrome elegance later reached from the cabin of the Concorde to a French minister’s office. Start with the photographs of Morgans, the blueprint for every design hotel since.

Final thoughts

What these ten share is not a style, since their styles openly contradict one another, but a conviction that a room is something you author. De Wolfe made decoration a job, Draper made it public, Frank and Maugham proved how much could be said with almost nothing, and Hicks and Castaing proved how much could be said with a great deal. Between them they took an activity that barely had a name in 1900 and left it, a century later, as a recognized art with its own history, its own masters, and a place in how millions of people imagine their homes.

Any list this short leaves the door ajar. Nancy Lancaster, the American-born doyenne who perfected the faded English country house look and its most famous buttery-yellow room in London, missed the cut by a whisker, as did Michael Taylor, whose airy, oversized California Look brought the outdoors in and pointed toward how we live now. Consider them numbers eleven and twelve, then keep exploring: the furniture these designers chose and the wider story of the modern interior both run all through CreARTivity’s design coverage.