Sister Parish
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Sister Parish (born Dorothy May Kinnicutt, 1910-1994) was an American interior decorator and socialite. She was the first interior designer brought in to decorate the Kennedy White House, a position that was soon usurped by French interior designer Stephane Boudin.
A stately and occasionally eccentric white-haired lady with an aquiline profile that reminded some observers of Gilbert Stuart's fabled portrait of George Washington, Parish was the design partner of Albert Hadley, a Tennessee-born decorator, with whom she co-founded Parish-Hadley Associates (1962-1999). Both were equally influential, Parish for her homey, cluttered traditionalism and passion for patchwork quilts, painted furniture, and red-lacquer secretaries and Hadley for his clean-cut, cerebral and soigné take on modernism.
As the only daughter in a five-child family, Parish acquired the nickname "Sister," which lead to her being mistaken in the press as a nun with a talent for arranging furniture. Married in 1930 to Henry Parish II, an investment banker with whom she had three children, Parish opened her firm (then called Mrs. Henry Parish II, Interiors), in suburban New Jersey in 1933 as part of a plan to help the family finances during the Depression. Briefly, she worked as the American business partner of London-based tastemaker Nancy Lancaster, the Virginia-born owner of the eminent British decorating firm Sybil Colefax & John Fowler.
In addition to the White House, Parish's clients included the philanthropist Jane Engelhard and the socialite and art collector Betsey Whitney.
One of Parish's cousins was another influential 20th-century interior decorator, Dorothy Draper.