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"When Elsie de Wolfe began her career as an interior decorator at the dawn of the twentieth century, she set the stage for a host of other women who would soon follow in her footsteps. Prominent among these disciples was Frances Elkins, a Milwaukee native who revolutionized interiors by combining traditional and avant-garde pieces with vibrant color.\n\nVenturing out from the Midwest, Elkins joined her older brother, David Adler, in Paris, where he was studying architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Adler, who would later settle in Chicago and become the leading domestic architect for the city's affluent families, was the single most important influence on the young designer. His mastery of classical design set a standard that she would follow throughout her career.\n\nDuring her travels in Europe, Elkins was drawn to the new and the unusual, and she established strong relationships with artisans whose work became hallmarks of modern art and design. In Paris her friendships with Jean-Michel Frank and Alberto Giacometti resulted in successful collaborations, and she made suggestions for some of Frank's leather furniture and Giacometti's handcrafted plaster lamps.\n\nBack in the United States, Elkins introduced Frank's furniture and became the exclusive importer of his pieces. It was no surprise, then, that her clients' homes were repositories for his low tables, console tables and leather-upholstered sofas and club chairs.\n\nHome for Elkins eventually became the small town of Monterey, California, where in 1918 she and her husband, Felton, paid five thousand dollars for Casa Amesti, a run-down 1830s adobe house. Elkins knew that she could transform Casa Amesti into a showplace that would serve as a calling card for her burgeoning interior decorating business.\n\nShe worked with her brother on the restoration, and his influence resulted in classically detailed interiors that possessed excellent balance and proportion. For example, in the living room on the second floor, Adler added a dentil cornice, fluted door casings and a pedimented overmantel that refined the space without interfering with the patina on its thick plastered walls and   plank ceiling.\n\nAlthough the room was furnished with a mixture of English, French and Chinese pieces, a precise use of color\u2014complementary shades of blue, yellow and white\u2014unified it. Her daughter, Katherine E. Boyd, who is also an interior designer, says that this was her mother's gift\u2014she knew how to mix.\n\nOnce the restoration of Casa Amesti was well under way, Elkins's friends\u2014many of whom were building houses in Pebble Beach\u2014began asking her for professional advice. Among her earliest projects was Hester Griffin's house, an imposing Monterey Colonial designed by Santa Barbara architect George Washington Smith. With her keen architectural sensibility, Elkins created a perfectly balanced living room, where Chippendale furniture, Queen Anne mirrors and a pair of Ming screens were at home with modern lamps by Jean-Michel Frank and Salvador Dali. Griffin raved about Elkins's outstanding sense of color, such as the peach corduroy she chose for the room's scoop-back sofa and armchairs. This was shocking at the time but consciously planned for an interior dominated by shades of bone and black.\n\nAs Elkins's reputation spread, she was hired by the local Cypress Point Club to decorate its new clubhouse, which opened in 1930. For the club's living room, she used quiet tones of beige, yellow and melon, and furniture such as overstuffed sofas and French provincial pieces, including a large antique table, which seventy years later is still the primary focus of the room.\n\nHer innovative design also made a bold statement at San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939. There, her interiors for the Yerba Buena Club for Women defied tradition. Using upholstery fabrics in turkey reds and blues, Elkins transformed a Victorian-style sofa and settees that furnished the waiting room and main lounge. The late designer Tony Duquette praised her choice of a \"wonderful color of yellow\" for the velvet that draped the walls of the dining room. The project solidified her reputation in the Bay Area. She already had many friends in San Francisco, and several of them, including Lewis Lapham, Whitney Warren and J. D. Zellerbach, hired her to design their houses.\n\nElkins's taste ran the gamut, and according to Duquette, she was the first person in the United States to import country French furniture, a style she employed to create warm, informal interiors in several houses that her brother   designed along Chicago's North Shore.\n\nShe was also partial to French provincial furniture and made use of it when she collaborated with Adler on one of his most important commissions, a seventeenth-century-Norman-style   manor house designed in 1926 for advertising entrepreneur Albert D. Lasker. In the spacious Lasker living room, Adler's eighteenth-century-style pine paneling was a handsome backdrop for Elkins's selection of predominantly French pieces, which included provincial Louis XV\u2013style chairs, painted stools and   a bomb\u00E9 commode. Elkins purchased   most of these pieces during one of her many excursions abroad. She had a thorough knowledge of French antiques but also knew how to successfully integrate Chinese rugs, multitiered English tables and even a low table by Frank into the Laskers' traditional d\u00E9cor.\n\nBy now Elkins had begun the most fruitful period of her career. In Chicago,   from 1926 through the late 1930s, she worked with her brother on nine houses, whose styles ranged from Norman to Georgian to Greek Revival and Tudor. David Adler and Frances Elkins were an unbeatable combination, and the pinnacle of Elkins's career came when she did the interiors of the residence for Mrs. Kersey Coates Reed, which her brother designed on the North Shore.\n\nThe 1931 Pennsylvania German\u2013style house, in shimmering dark gray mica stone, exemplified the symmetry, balance and elegance of Adler's buildings. It had a gated forecourt, a walled formal garden and eastern views over Lake Michigan. The interiors bridged the traditional and the avant-garde, starting in the entrance hall, where a slick black-and-white-marble floor led to the ladies' powder room and the gentlemen's cloak room. Although both spaces were Art D\u00E9co, they were completely individual.\n\nIn the powder room, yellow-lacquered panels outlined in silver leaf cast a softened reflection on the mirrored walls and the Steuben glass bolection molding (a favorite of Elkins's), which edged the overmantel and dressing table alcove. Shiny aluminum squares, inserted into a black ebony floor, gave additional sheen to the room.\n\nThe cloakroom, directly across the hall, was a study in Jean-Michel Frank. He designed the room's furnishings and accessories, which included his trademark leather-upholstered club chairs, parchment-covered tables and plaster lamps and wall sconces. There was also an Alberto Giacometti bas-relief over the fireplace.\n\nElkins took a traditional approach in the living room and dining room, using floral chintz on the living room's overstuffed sofas and armchairs; in the dining room, she opted for an antique hand-painted chinoiserie wallcovering.\n\nIn the Reed library, she used a monochromatic palette to create the most extraordinary interior of her career. The room was also her finest tribute to Jean-Michel Frank. She elaborated on the Art   D\u00E9co theme of the gentlemen's cloakroom, covering the walls with panels of tan Herm\u00E8s goatskin. Bookcases were recessed into the walls, and many of the volumes that lined the shelves were wrapped in parchment covers with cutouts to expose the titles. An antique English games table, four Elkins-designed Queen Anne\u2013style armchairs (one of her specialties) and an imported carved pine mantel, doors and casings complemented Frank's sofa and club chair.\n\nReed had a high regard for Elkins's taste, living nearly fifty years in her house without altering it. Such reverence was not unusual, because Elkins's clients believed her interiors were timeless. They were content to keep the rooms as they were. One West Coast client remarked that Elkins not only introduced her to innovative design but also to a distinctive way of living.\n\n\"She was CHIC,\" Tony Duquette wrote about Elkins. \"She knew about the art of living, and the living arts and she lived, lived, lived.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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