Description
Eight-drawer dresser designed by Dorothy Draper for the Greenbrier Resort, C. 1946, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The dresser is in original condition and is an important piece of design history. The Greenbriar hotel was one of Dorothy’s famous designs, she designed everything from matchbook covers to menus to staff uniforms. She created a new style known as “Modern Baroque” adding a modern flair to a classical style. In exchange for her work at The Greenbrier, Draper picked up the highest fee ever paid a decorator The $4.2 million renovation was unveiled at a house party featuring such society guests as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Bing Crosby.
Dorothy Draper (November 22, 1889 – March 11, 1969) was an American interior decorator. Stylistically very anti-minimalist, she would use bright, exuberant colors and large prints that would encompass whole walls. She incorporated black and white tiles, rococo scrollwork, and baroque plasterwork, design elements now considered definitive of the Hollywood Regency style of interior decoration. Dorothy was born into the upper-class Tuckerman family in Tuxedo Park, NY, one of the first gated communities in the United States. Draper’s first big break came in the early 1930s when Douglas Elliman hired her to redecorate the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. This would be the first of many important hotel commissions.[Draper did a great deal of hotel design, including the Sherry-Netherland in New York, the Drake in Chicago, the Fairmont in San Francisco. At the height of the Depression, she spent $10 million designing the Palácio Quitandinha in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Also during the Depression, she wrote the Ask Dorothy Draper column which ran in 70 newspapers, and advised people to “take that red and paint your front door with it,” and many people followed her advice.
In the early 1950s, Packard hired Draper to harmonize the colors and fabrics of their automobile interiors. Draper’s 1954 concept for the cafeteria at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, dubbed the Dorotheum, featured birdcage chandeliers and a skylighted canopy. One of Draper’s last projects was the 1957 International Hotel at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy Airport) in New York
