The House in Good Taste

Elsie De Wolfe didn't just decorate rooms, she invented the idea that ordinary people deserved beautiful ones. Published in 1913, this pioneering volume collects her newspaper and magazine articles into the first serious American handbook for making a home not just livable, but expressive. De Wolfe arrived at a moment when American houses were dark, heavy with drapery, and choked with ornament, and she declared war on clutter. Her philosophy was radical in its simplicity: let in the light, choose comfort over ostentation, paint everything white, and fill the rooms with what you actually love. "I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint," she wrote. "Comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth and flowers wherever they belong." This isn't a coffee table book of impossible rooms, it's a manual for real living, arguing that your home should be a mirror of your personality rather than a museum of other people's tastes. A century of American interior design flows from these pages, but the advice remains startlingly current: create spaces that make you happy, not spaces that impress others.