Verdict: The book lavishly illustrates for first time Dorothy Draper's most important projects and illustrates why Draper continues to influence designers today.

Has there ever been an American decorator as famous as Dorothy Draper?

Like Martha Stewart, Draper was a preacher and teacher whose how-to books and Good Housekeeping columns provided middle-class housewives with affordable ideas for making their homes more functional and comfortable.

Thanks to her originality as a stylist and her daring as a businesswoman, she became one of the most respected career women in the United States. She shocked the design world in 1937 when she decorated the thirty-seven-story Hampshire House apartment hotel on Central Park South in New York City, delivering a project that became indicative of her signature touch “baroque fantasy.”

In the Pink: Dorothy Draper, America’s Most Fabulous Decorator, by Carleton Varney, lavishly illustrates for first time Draper’s most important projects. From the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and Quitandinha in Brazil to her important fabrics for F. Schumacher & Co. and her automobile and airplane interiors of the 1950s, Draper continues to influence designers today.

Varney, who is uniquely positioned as the author of this book, joined the Dorothy Draper, Inc. in 1960, when he was twenty-nine years old. Forty-two years later, he continues to keep her legend alive.

Reviewed by IR Staff