Think Pink

Last week, the only place to be in the New York City decorating world was the Museum of the City of New York (www.mcny.com), a towering Federal-style brick structure on Fifth Avenue, near the boundary between the tony Upper East Side and grittier Spanish Harlem. The event was the gala opening of “The High Style of Dorothy Draper,” an exhibition devoted to the work of an American interior decorator who turned her couture-clad back on conventional good taste to pioneer the notion of interior design as an exercise in personal style. In Draper’s larger-than-life world, the curtains were made of fabric printed with roses the size of soccer balls, the walls were painted with foot-wide stripes of green and white, and undistinguished wood furniture was smartened up with shining coats of glossy black enamel and loads of brilliant gilt trim.

In additional to maximal, eye-popping décor, Dorothy Draper also had a passion for pink, a color that, then as now, is rarely part of any home’s larger decorating lexicon, perhaps because it is considered too feminine for anything but a little girl’s bedroom. But she saw pink – along with sky blue, emerald green, and fire engine red – as one of the color wheel’s happy shades, and for her, a room that made you feel optimistic was the ultimate goal. That feel-good sensibility is still practiced by her firm, Dorothy Draper & Company, www.dorothydraper.com, which was founded in 1925 and is now owned by her former associate, Carleton Varney.

Draper, who was born in 1889 and died in 1969, went through a period of personal depression in the 1920s, a decade of upheaval that saw her career blossom at the same time that her marriage to Dr. Dan Draper – one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio doctors and a founding father of the study of psychosomatic illness – was coming to an end. After several years of intensive psychoanalysis, however, she resurfaced as a new woman, determined to create only rooms where brilliant colors sang, sometimes discordantly, but always with conviction. As the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York proves – the show, which opened on May 2, runs through September – pink was paramount in the decorator’s vision, whether she was decorating a massive hotel-and-casino complex like Quintandinha in Pétropolis, Brazil, or her apartment on Central Park South in New York City. The main room of the exhibition is painted a shade of pink so bright you might want to pack a pair of sunglasses for the journey. (For the gala event, the museum surprised everyone by serving Rhododendrons, a tart rose-pink cocktail that is a specialty at the Greenbrier, www.greenbrier.com, a Draper-decorated hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. And the boxwood-edged flower beds in the entrance of the museum were planted with ‘Dorothy Draper’ roses from Jackson & Perkins, www.jacksonandperkins.com.)

Frankly, I’ve always been partial to pink, though I grew up in houses whose rooms were heavily freighted to brown, red, cream, and blue. I once collected pink Venetian glass vases, the only flowers I really like are old-fashioned pink roses, and I always have a few bottles of an elegant Moroccan rosé wine called Gerrouane Gris around the house. My favorite articles of clothing are a bold pink gingham shirt from the coincidentally named British shirtmaker Thomas Pink (www.thomaspink.com) and shocking pink socks from Anniable Gamarelli, a darkly paneled little shop in Rome whose primary clientele is the Roman Catholic clergy, including Pope Benedict XVI. My partner and I also have a four-year-old daughter whose favorite color is any shade of pink and who likes when she and I dress to match, more or less. But when it comes to using pink in decorating, I’ve always steered clear of anything in the pink category, be it rose, blush, or salmon. But this summer, that’s all about to change.

Decorating choices are often as much about exposure and education as much as personal preference. In a recent meeting with the London furniture designer Christopher Hodsoll (www.hodsoll.com), he was showing me photographs of his new collection, some of which was displayed in his house. One image illustrated a sitting room whose once strong pink walls had faded to a pale mottled color that, depending on the light, read either as blushing beige or the pink of slightly faded cherry blossoms. Now, that’s the kind of pink I can live with – aged, beaten up, worn down, uneven, a bit soiled. It is a pink with some character to it, a pink with unexpectedly rough edges. Unfortunately, that particular shade doesn’t come out of a can. Nor can it be specially mixed by the corner hardware store. It’s the kind of pink that develops over time. So I’m going to bite the bullet and buy a few gallons of a strong, clear, medium pink for the walls of my sitting room and be patient and let the years, and the sun, take their toll.

Pink can be saccharine in major doses, so I plan to control the potential perkiness of the walls by furnishing the room with some gutsy elements – a well-worn brown leather wing chair, natural linen curtains with broad bands of madder-red paisley at the ends, a tarnished bronze end table. Along one wall will stand a circa-1860 American Empire mahogany console, and the floor will be painted with snow-white deck paint and partially covered with a seagrass carpet. Further breaking down the pink background will be a motley assortment of art, from a large 1960s oil of the Grand Canal to a sketchy watercolor by the artist Ruben Toledo depicting a lady in sunglasses and a bubble-shaped hat. If my plan works out as conjured in my head, the pink walls will still be in view but the color’s role in the room will be as a glow rather than a shock. And, yes, I will be serving lots of Rhododendrons this summer. Stay tuned.