Making Space: Interior Design by Women

Architect Hall (Woman Made) offers an encyclopedic overview of 250 women interior designers. Among them are well-known figures like Dorothy Draper, who founded America’s first professional interior design company in 1923, as well as a few surprise additions like novelist Edith Wharton, whose only nonfiction book, The Decoration of Houses, “influenced a generation of decorators.” The book gives equal billing to contemporary designers, spotlighting, for example, Xiang Li’s whimsically surreal interior for the Loong Swim Club in Suzhou, China. Many entries reveal the source of now commonplace designs (Danish designer Ulla Tafdrup created the “precursor to the open-plan kitchen and dining room”), while others highlight ways “the interior is never neutral,” like American Sheila Bridges’s use of “imagery that confronts the colonial legacy of slavery” in her toile wallpaper designs. Hall also provides amusing behind-the-scenes anecdotes, such as French designer Madeleine Castaing’s required two-week stay with clients “to truly understand their personalities” and mid-century designer Iris Apfel’s fights with numerous First Ladies over White House renovations (“except Mrs. Nixon, whom she found cooperative”). As a whole, the volume spotlights female contributions to a field where women still battle “erasure,” despite women having dominated interior design since its beginning with the “Great Lady Decorators” of the late 19th century. It’s a valuable resource that doubles as a feminist reclamation. (Oct.)