The House in Good Taste by Elsie De Wolfe Reviewed by Terry Castle
The Atlantic Monthly
"The late Mario Praz ? dandy, scholar, eccentric chronicler of interior decorating styles through the ages ? once observed that human beings could be divided into those who cared about such things and those who didn't. An avid, even ensorcelled member of the first group, he confessed to finding people who were indifferent to décor both baffling and somewhat sinister. To discover that a friend was content to dwell in 'fundamental and systematic ugliness,' he wrote in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau, was as disturbing as 'turning over one of those ivory figurines carved by the German artificers of the Renaissance, which show a lovely woman on one side and a worm-ridden corpse on the other....' " Read the entire The Atlantic Monthly Review.