Parish, Dorothy May Kinnicutt (“Sister Parish”)

(b. 15 July 1910 in Morristown, New Jersey; d. 8 September 1994 in Dark Harbor, Maine), one of the most influential interior designers of the twentieth century, whose most famous work was done for the Kennedy White House.

Parish was the daughter of stockbroker and antiques collector G. Hermann Kinnicutt and homemaker May Appleton Tuckerman. The only daughter, she grew up with three brothers. Her brother Frankie gave her the nickname “Sister,” by which she was known her entire life. The family was privileged and owned homes in Morristown, New Jersey; New York City; Dark Harbor, Maine; and Paris. Her forebears included the famous Puritan leader Cotton Mather and Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The comfort in which she was reared would influence the types of clientele she served as a design professional. Her father graduated from Harvard and with his uncle formed the brokerage firm Kissell, Kinnicutt; later it merged with Kidder, Peabody and Company. In 1920 the family moved from Morristown to Mayfield in New Jersey, where her room was the only one decorated in a French style. This helped shape her decorating taste.

Parish’s formal education was limited. She graduated from Miss Chapin’s School in New York City after the eighth grade and attended the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, from which she never graduated. According to Parish, efforts to broaden her education through fencing, dance lessons, and piano lessons proved fruitless; she described herself as “untalented and graceless.”

In 1928 she had an epiphany while visiting the family apartment in Paris. “Something stirred in me,” she later said. She went from room to room, seeing the place in “new, more careful ways…. I realized that a deep, abiding belief in all things inherited, and all things of lasting quality, had been awoken in me. I was finally beginning to understand beauty and the role it would play in my life.”

On 14 February 1930 she married Henry “Harry” Parish II, a Harvard graduate and stockbroker. They had three children. In 1933, during the Great Depression, Harry came home and announced that his salary at work was being cut. His wife decided to help the family by starting her own decorating business. She went to Stroheim and Roman, a well-known fabrics firm, and was able to persuade the head of the company to sell her materials on credit. A few weeks later, she rented her first office, in Far Hills, New Jersey, for $35 a month. She named the firm Mrs. Henry Parish 2d Interiors. When Parish began the business, individuals were seldom hired for decorating jobs; firms were employed. Her earliest clients came from her social set, which was an enormous boon to a young, inexperienced business woman. The first client at the Far Hills office had a decorating budget of $100,000 in the midst of the depression.

When World War II came, Parish closed her business, did volunteer work, and from 1941 to 1943 worked for the company Budget Decorators, then resurrected her own company. After the war she entered into an agreement with the British decorating firm Colefax and Fowler. They sent her furniture, which she sold in New York, and she sent them tassels and other accessories that were hard to get in postwar England. Sibyl Colefax, John Fowler, and Nancy Lancaster, all affiliated with the firm, were major influences on Parish.

In 1962 Parish hired Albert Hadley, a graduate of the Parsons School of Design, to assist her in the business. At that time she was considering retiring, but that changed with the engagement of Hadley. In 1964 he became a partner in the firm, and it became Parish-Hadley. His formal training and his leaner, more modernist style, combined with Parish’s more “romantic” style, produced one of the most successful decorating businesses of the twentieth century.

Parish’s signature style, the “American country style,” included flowered chintz, crocheted throws, needlepoint pillows, mattress ticking for slipcovers and throw pillows, hooked rugs, rag rugs, and starched organdy. She used vibrant colors to brighten rooms; three of her favorites were robin’s egg blue, coral, and shrimp. She painted walls in bold colors such as reds and yellows. She also utilized four-poster beds, painted floors, and hand-woven bedsteads in her decorating. These innovations replaced the dark, heavy furniture that was a trademark of the Victorian look.

Parish was admired for her skill in placement and the ease, warmth, and comfort that she brought to the rooms that she decorated. She preferred that her work have an “unstudied,” even cluttered look, and she is said to have “felt” her way around a room. Parish admitted that the ability to reach into the past and reintroduce something that was good and beautiful was a trademark of innovation. She has been called “a force informing and articulating tastes in interior design.” She also introduced “tea carting” into the decorating lexicon. She would enter a client’s room and would fill up a teacart with any accessories that she deemed to be unsuitable. It did not matter how expensive they were, or how much the client valued them: they would be removed.

Parish gained greater visibility when Jacqueline Kennedy hired her as a consultant in the White House redecorating project. Other clients among the wealthy and powerful included the William Paleys, Brooke Astor, Edith Haupt, Oscar de la Renta, Al and Tipper Gore, and Happy Rockefeller, as well as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Gettys, and Mellons. The firm’s impressive array of alumni include David Anthony Easton, John Robert Moore II, William Hodgins, Marinette Hirnes Gomez, Mark Hampton, Kevin McNamara, Bunny Williams, and Libby Cameron. Parish herself received the title of charter member of the Interior Design Magazine Hall of Fame in 1985.

Sister Parish’s impact on decorating can be summarized partly by the comments made in 1995 by Lou Gropp, editor of House Beautiful: “There is no question that Sister Parish was one of the biggest influences on decorating in the United States.… She dominated the decorating of the 1970s and ’80s, and many of her ideas that were fresh and new in the 1970s are now in the mainstream of American decorating”

Parish died at the age of eighty-four from pneumonia complications. She is buried in Dark Harbor, Maine. The firm of Parish-Hadley continued for five years after her death, until Hadley closed it at the end of 1999.

Parish’s daughter May Appleton Parish Bartlett compiled Parish’s memoirs, as well as comments and tributes from friends, relatives, and clients, in Sister: The Life of Legendary American Decorator, Mrs. Henry Parish II (2000). Parish-Hadley: Sixty Years of American Design (1995), by Sister Parish, Albert Hadley, and Christopher Petkansas, is a good source on Parish’s work, containing essays by Parish and Hadley as well as numerous examples of their decorating styles. Suzanne Trocme, Influential Interiors (1999), has profiles of important twentieth-century interior designers including Sister Parish. Articles of note include Jura Koncius and Patricia Dane Rogers, “Doyennes of Decor,” Washington Post (20 Oct. 1994); Martin Filler, “Remembering Mrs. Parish: Sister’s Legacy, “House Beautiful (Jan. 1995); “Designer’s Designer,” Sr. Louis Post-Dispatch (17 Aug. 1995); Julie V. Iovine, “Albert Hadley Draws the Shades,” New York Times (30 Sept. 1999); and Steven M. L. Aronson, “Sister Parish: The Doyenne’s Unerring Eye for Warmth and Grace, “Architectural Digest (Jan. 2000). Obituaries are in the New York Times (10 Sept. 1994), the London Independent (26 Sept. 1994), and Interior Design (Oct. 1994).

Jennifer Thompson-Feuerherd