Get Inspired: Millicent Rogers

Space: The living room of Millicent Rogers, 21 Sutton Place, New York City, New York.

Year: Circa 1935

Occupant: Rogers (1902 — 1953) was arguably the most glamorous of all the Standard Oil heiresses. Adventuresome too. She identified the genius of American couturier Charles James early on his career and acquired his clothes with the eye of a curator. She learned to forge gold so she could design and make barbarically chic jewelry, including a pair of gold-nugget-like cufflinks she created for Clark Gable, one of a string of lovers that included the future author Roald Dahl. She collected, with discernment, Biedermeier furniture, Navajo turquoise jewelry, Native American artifacts, and terrific paintings (Renoir, Corot, Fragonard). Rogers also had an astoundingly good eye for interior decoration, creating extraordinarily personal decors for her residences in Austria; Washington, D. C.; New Mexico; New York; Jamaica, and Virginia.

Elements: Located in the famous riverside tenements smartly renovated by Dorothy Draper during the Depression and decorated for Rogers by McMillen & Co. — Billy Baldwin gives some credit to Van Day Truex too, though surely the photograph records Rogers's exacting taste and no one else's — the room looks overstuffed at first glance. Especially to modern eyes, what with the exuberant Victorian needlework rose garden rolled out underfoot and the walls dressed with deep red satin cascading from cloak pins in early-nineteenth-century European fashion. (Note the cast-iron steam pipe in the left corner of the photograph, disguised to blend in with the fabric.) The space is actually quite minimally furnished, however, with about ten pieces of furniture, none of which takes up much room or is at all superfluous. Two tailored modern love seats with down-stuffed cushions. A pair of Chinese Chippendale tables holding Victorian glass lamps converted to electricity. A brace of papier-mâché side chairs glimmering with gilt and mother of pearl, which could be pressed into service in the adjoining dining room. A couple of Régence fauteuils covered in velvet (surely silk, given Rogers's superlative taste and bottomless pocketbook). Oh, and a low black-lacquer cocktail table set with crystal ashtrays. That's about it.

Lessons Learned: Even if the sumptuousness of the setting is out of your financial league, the takeaway is texture. It's all about juxtaposition. Sleek satin played against lustrous velvet. Crisp modern upholstery relieved by a double dose of old-fashioned button tufting. Smooth lacquer alongside nubby needlework. Don't forget the animating qualities of gilt frames and crystal candelabra either. Every room needs a bit of dazzle to keep its spirits up, even if it's just a trail of golden nail heads tracing the curves of a chair. As for the Victorian table lamps, they are pure camp — and the room is all the better for their quirky presence.

Details Count: No-Nail Pictures

Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers at home with one of her several dachshunds. Photograph by Richard Rutledge for American "Vogue," 15 March 1945.

Most people simply pound a nail into a wall when they decide to display a photograph or a painting. Sadly, however, that's where those framed treasures usually stay for time immemorial, often losing their power to attract the eye through daily familiarity. But leaning a work of art against a wall rather than displaying it conventionally on the wall is always more interesting. (And I'm not talking about utilizing those narrow picture shelves popularized by mail-order catalogues.) Casual placement on tabletops, mantles, even the floor, is curiously potent. It implies a certain dégagé attitude toward the treatment of one's possessions as well as, conversely, a sense of deep attention to the intended effect. Even if the work of art in question isn't particularly compelling or valuable, propping gives it more gravitas. Plus, this kind of deployment allows works to be moved around at will without resorting to a hammer.

The impossibly stylish Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, shown above, propped several giltwood-framed paintings on a Greek-key-ornamented desk in her living room in the 1940s. Curiously the table lamps partially obscure the art, tempting one to step forward and take a closer look. (Sometimes great design is about seducing others to experience the world way you do.) The leaned pictures also break up the formality of the installation, loosening the stays, as it were, of the matching lamps and the symmetrical display of nineteenth-century paintings on the wall above.

Tastemaker Pauline de Rothschild, another charter member of the propped-art school, often displayed a small Bonnard painting on a chair carefully placed at her bedside, so it was the first thing the American-born baroness saw when she woke. Precious, but why not? Real style embodies a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.

A great friend of mine, a lady of highly evolved aesthetics, has set a beautiful representation of a flower — I'm sure it's an antique, a Redouté perhaps? — on the floor of her spare but perfectly decorated sitting room overlooking the East River in New York City. The rather small artwork, no bigger than a standard magazine cover, is beautifully framed and placed so low and with such modesty that coming upon it is a delightful surprise. Seeing it out of the corner of one's eye, leaning against the baseboard, is like a gift.