Her designs were light and airy, filled with French furniture, chintz, and animal prints. De Wolfe designed French villas and Hollywood mansions and wrote columns for home decorators. “I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint,” she said in her bestselling 1913 book The House In Good Taste (ghostwritten by a journalist turned decorator named Ruby Ross Wood). “But I think we can carry the white paint idea too far: I have grown a little tired of over-careful decorations, of plain white walls and white woodwork, of carefully matched furniture and over-cautious color-schemes. Somehow the feeling of homey-ness is lost when the decorator is too careful.” Draper also wrote a popular column for Good Housekeeping magazine and published a book called Decorating Is Fun!: How to be Your Own Decorator. “Decorating is just sheer fun,” she wrote, “a delight in color, an awareness of balance, a feeling for lighting, a sense of style, a zest for life, and an amused enjoyment of the smart accessories of the moment.” Her tropical chic Brazilliance wallpaper is a design classic.
