Parish, Sister (1910–1994)

views updated

Parish, Sister (1910–1994)

American interior designer and entrepreneur . Name variations: Mrs. Henry Parish II. Born Dorothy May Kinnicutt in 1910; died in Dark Harbor, Maine, in September 1994; daughter of Gustav Hermann Kinnicutt (a financier) and May Appleton (Tuckerman) Kinnicutt; married Harry Parish, on February 14, 1930 (died 1977); children: two daughters, including Apple Parish Bartlett, and a son.

An untrained socialite who took up interior design during the Depression in order to preserve her lifestyle, Sister Parish was the driving force behind the renowned Parish-Hadley firm and the creator of the "American Country" look, which graced the homes of the nation's socially elite for six decades. Parish gained notoriety during the late 1950s, when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hired her to assist with various White House renovations, although the two women had a falling out before the work was finished. (Parish once shrugged off a question concerning the rift, remarking, "Jackie got along much better with men than with women.") Behind her patrician facade, Parish was a "crusty old gal" who loved to tell jokes, toted her Pekingese "Yummy" to client meetings, and gave cocktail parties to mix her old guard cronies with her younger New York friends.

Dorothy May Kinnicutt (dubbed "Sister" by her three-year-old brother) was to the manor born in 1910, the daughter of Gustav Hermann Kinnicutt, a wealthy New York financier, and May Tuckerman Kinnicutt , who was known for her "instinctive good taste" and an "innate sense of a well-ordered, properly regulated life." As a child, Parish was dressed in ermine coats to ward off the winter chill, and was shuttled between the family residences in Far Hills, New Jersey (Mayfields), and Dark Harbor, Maine. Following her coming out in 1927, she spent a year in the family's apartment on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. She married Henry Parish in 1930 and briefly lived in Manhattan, before moving to Far Hills, New York, where she raised the couple's three children. The country look Parish created for her own house—inspired by the homes of her childhood—was the envy of her neighbors, who soon began calling her for advice. One neighbor, Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, enlisted her help in decorating a new restaurant in the area. "The place was called Howard Johnson's," Parish said. "I did what I could. I dressed the waitresses in aqua, did the walls in aqua, made the place mats in aqua. I guess I must have thought it was quite chic, but I haven't done a thing in aqua since."

In the midst of the Depression, when her husband's salary was cut in half, Parish went into the decorating business officially. "She had been accustomed to living a certain way, and she was going to do everything in her power to maintain it for herself and her children," said her granddaughter. Using the intuitive aesthetic sense that had always guided her, she began designing interiors for an exclusive clientele that included Charles and Jane Engelhard , Bill and Babe Paley , Jock and Betsey Whitney , Gordon and Ann Getty , and, of course, Jacqueline Kennedy. (When Kennedy first hired Sister Parish, one newspaper headline announced, "Kennedys Pick Nun to Decorate White House.") In 1962, Parish acquired a partner, Albert Hadley, and founded the design firm Parish-Hadley.

Continuity, comfort, and character were the hallmarks of Parish's country-house designs. "As a child," she wrote, "I discovered the happy feelings that familiar things can bring—an old apple tree, a favorite garden, the smell of a fresh-clipped hedge, simply knowing that when you round the corner, nothing will be changed, nothing will be gone…. Some think a decorator should change a house. I try to give permanence to a house, to bring out the experiences, the memories, the feelings that make it a home." Parish's style encompassed vibrant colors (red walls, for example, with a different shade of red for the floor) and a savvy mix of heirlooms, custom-made furnishing, and inexpensive accessories.

While Parish was outwardly confident about her work, she was often overcome with self-doubt. "I have ached all my life, thinking I have done wrong or could have done better," she once confided. She frequently sought comfort in the restorative powers of her own houses, particularly the Parish place in Maine. She also found peace within her family, to whom she was fiercely devoted. During her husband's last summer in Maine, before his death in 1977, she nursed him by sprinkling sea water on his forehead and hands, which she fetched from the ocean in a watering can she had brought back from France.

Parish survived her husband by 17 years, dying in 1994 at her beloved retreat in Dark Harbor. In late summer 2000, her daughter Apple Parish Bartlett and granddaughter Susan Bartlett Crater published a lively, loving tribute to the designer, Sister: The Life of Legendary American Decorator, Mrs. Henry Parish II.