Book - In the Pink by Carleton Varney

Dorothy Draper is a famous American decorator. 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 is a great book. 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.

Carleton Varney at a book signing

Interiors created by Carleton Varney, using Dorothy Drapers influence.