There is obviously no work for you there. We must get you away from there as fast as we can. By 1935 his work had caught the famous eye of decorator Ruby Ross Wood, who implored him: 'I feel I need a gentleman with taste and I have found him in you, wasting away in Baltimore. Platt, where 'I was given by my parents the present of the wonderful experience of doing my room entirely over, including the furniture.' After briefly studying architecture at Princeton and then grudgingly selling insurance in his father's agency, he made the ineluctable leap into hometown decorating. William Williar Baldwin, Jr., was born in 1903 to an old Baltimore family and grew up in a house designed by the eminent New York architect Charles A. Regis Hotel he covered in shirred paisley) Kenneth's hair salon (a riot of color and pattern inspired by Brighton's Royal Pavilion) and Greenwich's staid Round Hill Club. Paleys (whose high-ceilinged living room in the St. Other cardinal clients included the Paul Mellons Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (for whom he decorated houses in Middleburg, Virginia, and on the Greek island of Skorpios) Diana Vreeland (whose vermilion 'garden-in-hell' Park Avenue living room was one of his most audacious creations) the William S. His pet aversions were jumble and clutter, satin and dam-ask, ostentation of any kind, fake fireplaces and false books (real books he regarded as a capital decorative element).īaldwin's timeless triumph (he, too, considered it the coronet on his career) remains Cole Porter's Waldorf Towers apartment, with its decisive library of Directoire-inspired tubular brass floor-to-ceiling bookcase-étagères arrayed against lacquered tortoiseshell-vinyl walls.

Other Baldwin staples were cotton (he was, he claimed, one of its 'most active promoters since World War II') plain draperies white plaster lamps off-white and plaid rugs pattern on pattern geometrics corner banquettes his own curved version of the low, box-based armless slipper chair dark walls (his legendary one-room Manhattan apartment was lacquered a style-setting high-gloss brown) Parsons tables wrapped with wicker ('I certainly made a lady out of wicker,' he once quipped) and straw, rattan and bamboo.

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