We all have Idols.
Maybe it’s Frank Gehry.
Or Ryan Seacrest (I’m joking)
Or Freddie Mercury (I’m not joking)

Mine – Lady Mendl, Elsie de Wolfe

Gotta love a chick that comes up with the brilliant idea to put her name on a business card, pass it around to her eclectic circle of friends and do what she was built by birth to do:  Paint a beautiful indoor landscape.  She is the first Interior Decorator.  Let’s learn from her.

American Decades opines that Elsie “was probably the first woman to dye her hair blue, to perform handstands to impress her friends, and to cover eighteenth-century footstools in leopard-skin chintzes.”

Quite poetic coming from someone so over the top – but what was Elsie’s real message?

Elsie was all about harmony, balance, scale, and proportion.  She did it with mirrors, plush animal skin textiles, color and balance… and the knowledge that less is more.

“The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.”

Less truly is more.  If you find something you love, that’s great… but use it sparingly in your design.  Don’t bludgeon it to death.  Its power is in its Simplicity.  So many times I am invited into a home and find every wall, every surface, every dimension occupied with ‘stuff’.

Remember there is a balance between positive and negative space.  Less is more.  That which is not decorated finds its voice.  The essence of ‘space’ is in its substance of non conformity.

Take it from a brilliant blue haired artist who single handedly transformed some of the most prestigious spaces in NYC – Elsie knew when to stop… and so should we.