One of America’s first interior decorators was Ruby Ross Goodnow, known today as Ruby Ross Wood, the last name of her 2nd husband, Chalmers Wood. Ruby Ross Wood started out her career as a journalist, ghostwriting Elsie de Wolfe’s books, then running the interior design department at John Wannamaker’s retail store, Belmaison, and then later forming her own interior design firm in the 1920’s, where her clients included Brooke Astor, Alfred Vanderbilt and Rodman Wanamaker. Her most famous employee and collaborator was today’s famed designer, Billy Baldwin. Ruby Ross Wood died in 1950 of lung cancer.
Her path reminds me of how some designers today have started out their careers, first, as bloggers and/or working in retail furniture stores and have then developed into interior decorators and designers. Everyone’s path is unique but one thing that the finest designers and decorators of today possess is an unerring eye for proportion, harmony and scale.
Imagine if Ruby Ross Wood woke up in today’s world of blogs and social media having clients like Brooke Astor? She would be the world’s most famous designer, but today, outside of New York City, many don’t know her name. I hope today’s post changes that a bit.
Ruby Ross Wood was known in her day as the *working designer* and her most well known design commission is the Swan House, today a museum, but then a classical mansion set on 28 acres in Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead neighborhood, and the home of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Inman. Her famous dining room pictured below, with its gorgeous handpainted chinoiserie wallpaper and plaid silk taffeta curtains is still today a fine example of timeless design.
She was well known for establishing a leitmotif for her wealthy clients, an archetypal symbol of their personalities, that she then used to personalize each of their homes. In addition, she was the first interior designer to use white wicker furniture on a Palm Beach veranda.
Wouldn’t it be fun, exciting and educational to visit the Atlanta History Center, curator of the Swan Mansion, pictured below as it looks today, during WITHIT‘s upcoming Leadership Development Conference in Atlanta, August 11-13th, where the Senior Marketing VP of Home Depot is the keynote speaker or the 2015 Design Bloggers Conference, also being held in Atlanta, in Buckhead, Feb. 25th-27th, 2015? The Atlanta History Center also offers tours of the Margaret Mitchell house, birthplace of the novel, Gone With the Wind, located just five miles away! #Swoon!
The rooms in the Swan Mansion that Ruby Ross Wood designed still contain the furniture and colors she specified.
~ Investing in the finest quality will always yield #TimelessDesign ~
After Ruby Ross Wood’s death, Billy Baldwin, now widely considered the *Dean of American Decorating*, kept her firm going only until all of their projects could be completed.
It wasn’t until the partnership of Sister Parish with Albert Hadley that another male/female design partnership as productive and exciting as that of Ruby Ross Wood and Billy Baldwin was formed.
Today, Ruby Ross Wood, Billy Baldwin, Albert Hadley and Sister Parish are not with us anymore, but in Albert Hadley’s personal papers from 1947-1999, held at the New School on 5th Avenue in New York City in the Kellen Design Archives, we find this note in Ruby Ross Wood’s own handwriting.
If you’d like to find out more about Ruby Ross Wood and the great lady decorators between 1870-1955, that formed the interior design industry as we know it today, and whose timeless designs still inform today’s designers and tastemakers, THE GREAT LADY DECORATORS by Adam Lewis, { illustrated by Jeremiah Goodman }, available here, would be a lovely addition to your personal design library.
And today, Charlotte Moss, a contributing editor to House Beautiful magazine, whose MEMPHIS side table for Century Furniture is the prize in our 1st #TIMELESSDESIGN Summer Sweepstakes giveaway, is widely considered one of the *Great Lady Decorators.* The legacy of great female decorators lives on through the generations and many of Charlotte’s rooms and design compositions have awed millions, like this vignette in the famous bedroom she designed, inspired by Pauline de Rothschild, for the 2008 Kips Bay Show House.
Charlotte Moss today
Charlotte’s own online design magazine, where she shares some of the stories she’s written for other magazines and other items of interest to her readers, FLAIR, is a pleasure to read.
Our sincere appreciation to Century Furniture for making her beautiful MEMPHIS side table available to Hadley Court readers as the 1st item in our summer sweepstakes giveaway series. If you’d like to see Century Furniture’s exquisite MADE IN THE USA furniture and Charlotte’s new collection for Century, please click http://centuryfurniture.com
If you’re not familiar with Century Furniture:
And if you’d like to enter to win Century’s MEMPHIS side table, designed by Charlotte Moss, one of today’s *Great Lady Decorators* and destined to become a #TimelessDesign classic of tomorrow, finished in gold leaf and antique mirror, please click https://hadleycourt.com/sweepstakes/.
It’s easy to enter and we’ll choose one randomly drawn winner July 2nd and announce it on the blog, July 3rd.
GOOD LUCK!
~~~
Leslie Carothers
for
Leslie Hendrix Wood
Decorator
Chancellor Interiors
Midland, Texas
Founder, Editor In Chief
Hadley Court
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Gracious Living. Timeless Design. Family Traditions.
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For more information on Ruby Ross Wood, please see this excellent blog post on her career:
http://tdclassicist.blogspot.com/2011/08/ruby-ross-wood.html