Colour pioneer Barbara D’Arcy White, who loved orange and made Bloomingdale’s a trendsetting mecca
The New York interior designer who brought bold hues and endless creativity to Bloomingdale’s ‘model rooms’
In the Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating, published in 1973, Barbara D’Arcy White suggested anyone thinking of restyling a room should write down their likes and dislikes. In her case, the latter was short: ‘Imitation brick, phony wood panelling, pressed wood graining, plastic flowers…’. Her likes, however, ran to four long paragraphs. ‘All rooms need books,’ she said in one. Another mentioned ‘fabric-covered walls and rooms with many levels. I like unexpected combinations of things, like a Louis XV chair upholstered in men’s suiting fabric, contemporary fabrics in crisp, clear colours’.
A love of colour and an appreciation for fine furniture ran in D’Arcy White’s blood. Born on 3 April 1928 in New York, her mother was an art teacher and her father the manager of a Manhattan removals and storage firm. He was, she later said, a discerning judge of furniture and passed his skill and passion on to his daughter. She joined Bloomingdale’s, New York’s venerable department store, as a junior decorator in the fabric department in 1952 and spent her entire career at the firm, retiring in 1995.
Twice a year, from 1958 until well into the 1970s, D’Arcy White was responsible for creating sets of ‘model rooms’, a theatrical and dream-like way of selling furniture that captured imaginations and was widely publicised in the press. As a result, the fifth floor of Bloomingdale’s – her particular domain – became a trendsetting mecca. Although she is perhaps most famous for her love of the ‘Country French’ style that she popularised, she was more daring than this suggests. Influenced by her travels to Europe and Asia as one of the store’s design scouts, she created spaces that included a cave room, inspired by the work of French architect Jacques Couëlle, fashioned out of chicken wire. In 1970, she used ‘inflatables, polyurethane foam upholstery, vinyls and other plastics… There is even a room whose décor is constantly changed by slide projections’. Very groovy.
The interior designer also never shied away from bold colour. In the 1960s, for example, she advocated ‘no-colour shades’, such as ‘brown tinted with purple or olive, or a deep, bland mustard’. Her favourite hue, however, was orange. She used it liberally. The New York Times, reporting on her first model rooms in 1958, approvingly noted the preference, before describing one room with ‘off-white walls, an orange-topaz furry rug, dulled gold chenille on a black rattan day-bed, an orange tweed on an armchair and a sheer linen, striped with oranges, golds and white, at the window’.
D’Arcy White was content that not all her model rooms would suit everyone’s taste. Her work, she hoped, would free people to think about what they wanted. The furniture and furnishings that might suit them. Their likes and dislikes. ‘I like,’ she wrote, ‘lavender and orange. Together.’