McMillen Inc. at the New York School of Interior Design

Great American decorating firms have come and gone, but McMillen—the nation’s oldest tastemaker in existence—still stands. And "McMillen Inc.: Nine Decades of Interior Design," an exhibition that opens September 17 at the New York School of Interior Design, proves why the Manhattan firm remains an enduring practitioner.

Dozens of photographs, renderings, plans, textiles, watercolors, maquettes, and other documentation pulled out of the firm’s rich archives by company president Ann Pyne will be displayed in the NYSID Gallery, evidence of McMillen’s preeminence not only as a decorator of choice for the rich and famous but also as a training ground for some of America’s most influential designers, among them Mark Hampton and Albert Hadley.

A diminutive Midwestern kitchen-stove-manufacturing heiress with a crackerjack business mind, McMillen founder Eleanor McMillen (later Brown, 1890–1991) believed that decorating was as much a science as an art and that professionalism and specialized education would always trump personality and gut instinct. Hence, the exhibition’s parade of impeccable rooms—largely traditional in tone, with a respect for the finest antiques and the most inviting upholstery—for boldface notables, from the best-dressed Babe Paley to Microsoft’s Paul Allen. It also explains why Mrs. Brown stubbornly refused, for decades, to hire anyone who didn’t have a degree from the Parsons School of Design.

For information about "McMillen Inc.: Nine Decades of Interior Design," which closes December 5, go to nysiddu, and for an introduction to McMillen, see mcmillenincom. Be sure to make room on the nearest bookshelf, too—Pyne is working on a history of McMillen for Acanthus Press.