Dorothy Draper's Four Rules for Entertaining

I’m in Savannah, helping prepare for a cocktail party are giving for my father’s 75th birthday—not the huge blowout for the whole extended family that my mother originally envisioned, but still a sizable event for all local friends and family—so I thought I would share some of Dorothy Draper’s advice on entertaining. Draper, of course, was one of the most important American interior designers of the 1930s-50s—her exuberant use of colour and print a continual marvel and the genesis of the Hollywood Regency style. I love her work so much that my early pandemic elopement took place at The Greenbrier, the luxury resort in West Virginia that Draper redesigned in the late 1940s at great expense ($4.2 million in 1948) and whose decor since 1963 has been maintained by her protégé Carleton Varney (who passed away this July).

Dorothy Draper (second from right, in hat) at a late 1930s party hosted by James Amster, with Muriel Draper, Ruby Ross Wood, Billy Baldwin, William Pohlman, and Eleanor Brown.

Draper provides her four rules for entertaining followed by short case studies for four types of hostesses. Though the US hadn’t yet entered WWII, even Draper and the society-types she writes of couldn’t deny the continuing war in Europe, hence why she speaks of expensive, over-the-top productions as “hardly in key with the times”—within a year, she would be designing houses for defense workers in her monthly Good Housekeeping decorating section. Draper also emphasizes how a hostess should learn to use what she has lying around while also concentrating on learning to do one kind of entertaining or cooking one type of dish particularly well—good advice for all of us, even those who will never have the kind of help mentioned in the case studies below.

Published in Vogue’s April 15, 1941 issue, this article accompanied the launch of Draper’s book, Entertaining is Fun! How to be a Popular Hostess. Still published today, I highly recommend that anyone interested in giving parties pick up a copy.