American interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe (also known as Lady Mendl) was an original in more ways than one. Believed to have ...

you learned it from Elsie de Wolfe. Back before the advent of Instagram and bare brick walls and hanging plants and copper light switches, there was a time before interior design existed.

For the past seventy years Lady Mendl has always been well known for something—principally for being Miss Elsie de Wolfe. When she was a child in the then stylish West Thirty-fourth Street ...