State of Gracie

How the antique paper in Condé Nast’s 1920s ballroom became a beloved decorator deep cut

HANNAH MARTIN

The 18th-century Chinese wallpaper that decorator Elsie de Wolfe installed in publishing tycoon Condé Nast’s Park Avenue ballroom around 1925 lived a long life before landing in the Big Apple—it was unearthed in the attic of the English mansion Welbeck Abbey and hung at Beau Desert Hall, the Marquesses of Angelesey’s estate in Staffordshire. By the time the scene depicting a dreamy walled garden was mounted in the magazine man’s Manhattan party pad, it served as a backdrop for fashionable functions of all sorts (Nast owned Vogue 3 and several other titles, after all), cementing it in the memories of aesthetes then and now. Fast-forward to the 1950s: After Nast’s death, Gracie, the hand-painted and antique wallpaper dealer, purchased that famed surround and, in 2011, sold the remnants to interior designer…

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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024

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