Rose Cumming

Rose Cumming (=1968) was a flamboyant and eccentric interior decorator whose career was based in New York.

Born in Australia, she and her sister, the silent-screen actress Dorothy Cumming arrived in New York in 1917, at the close of World War I. Following advice of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair Rose set up in 1921 as a a decorator and opened a design firm and an antique shop, trading on her native verve and wit, her poise and her eye for design and color. For decades her shop stood on the prominent corner of 59th Street and Park Avenue.

She was known for chinoiserie, displayed in the Chinese wallpapers of her often-photographed drawing room, and for baroque and rococo Venetian, South German and Austrian furniture, at a time when conservative New York tastes ran to Louis XV and English Georgian furnishings. Her color sense favored saturated, dramatic tones. She brought chintz to informal dressing rooms and bedrooms, inaugurated the vogue for smoked mirrors veined with gold and extended her love of reflective and lacquered surfaces to lacuered walls, satin upholstery and the metallic wallpapers she invented.

After her retirement, her great-niece Sarah Cumming Cecil carried on the atelier "Rose Cumming Design", now based in Portland, ME, presenting a stripped-down simplified style.