Dorothy Draper's Design Legacy

Draper Made Ornate And Flamboyant En Vogue

(CBS) 
"To me this is one of the most beautiful doors in the whole hotel," Varney said. "Every doorway had to be important. Doors were it."

Still in place are the doors she designed for the entrance to the camellia house, a restaurant she did at the drake hotel in Chicago.

"The door itself is a classic Dorothy Draper door," Albrecht said. "Black and white, huge, overscaled and then on top of than a big neo-baroque plaster or wood door surround -- so it's frames, within frames, within frames."

Typically, she left no detail untouched.

"She not only designed the interior, but also designed the menu, the matchbooks, invitations to the various events, the coasters, the napkins, the swizzle sticks" Albrecht said. "Absolutely everything was designed, in this case around the theme of the Camellia."

Way ahead of her time, Draper was her own brand. You could buy everything from Dorothy Draper Christmas paper to her how-to books. In newspaper and magazine columns she actually talked about her "decoration of independence."

If you look at some of today's hottest designers, from Philippe Starck to Kelly Wearstler, it's apparent that Dorothy Draper's flamboyant style is inching back into fashion.

Last week the Greenbrier held it's first-ever Dorothy Draper weekend. Varney said Draper's appeal endures because she designed things that people would remember.

"When you went to a Dorothy Draper decorated hotel and you left the front door, and you went back to Boise, you were for damn sure going to remember what it looked like because you had to take the elements of this swashbuckling bravado of it, of color and magic," he said.