Ruby Ross Wood

Ruby Ross Pope Goodnow Wood (26 October 1881 – 18 February 1950) was a prominent New York interior decorator and the owner of Ruby Ross Wood, Inc., a decorating company that occupied several locations between the 1920s and her death.

She was born Ruby Ross Pope in Monticello, Georgia, the eldest daughter of a cotton broker and a descendant of several families prominent in America since Colonial times, including the Washingtons of Virginia and the Carrolls of Maryland. Her first husband was Wallace Field Goodnow, an engineer from a well-known Cape Cod, Massachusetts family; by him, she had one son, Philip, who died as an infant. Her second husband was Chalmers Wood, a socially well-connected stockbroker and fox hunter. They lived at Little Ipswich, an estate in Syosset, New York, which had been designed for them by the architect William Adams Delano. The house and outbuildings of the 29-acre property were leveled in the early 1990's and replaced by a 21-home housing development now known as Pironi Estates.

Wood was raised in Augusta, but came to New York in the early years of the new century to become a reporter.

Wood began her professional life as a journalist. After moving to New York City in the early 1900s and using the byline Ruby Ross Goodnow (her first married name), she wrote fiction, poetry, and articles about interior design for The Delineator, a popular women's magazine, where her editor was Theodore Dreiser. She also wrote a well-regarded series of articles about architecture that became the basis of an equally popular book, The Honest House. Her Delineator articles under the byline of the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe formed the basis of de Wolfe's decorating manual The House in Good Taste, for which Goodnow also was the ghostwriter. Wood admired Elsie De Wolfe and began ghostwriting De Wolfe's "Ladies Home Journal" articles, which later became "The House in Good Taste". Although she admired De Wolfe, Wood had her own taste and style. She was inspired by the eighteenth-century English and American Colonial models, rather than the sophisticated French antiques favoured by De Wolfe and others. "She was a designer that chose the comforts of the past rather than the relative austerity of modernism." (Interior Design and Decoration, 5th ed. by Sherrill Whiton and Stanley Abercrombie; Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pearson Education, Inc.: 2002. p.575).

"The Honest House" was an opinionated manual on building and furnishing small houses. The celebrated architects who allowed their work to be photographed—including artists such as Delano & Aldrich. Wood would put her opinions into words, by continuing to write articles for major magazines until her death.

Around 1914, she joined the decorating staff of the John Wanamaker store in New York City, where she ran Au Quatrieme for Wanamakers. She established her own decorating firm in the 1920's. Among her clients were Alfred Vanderbilt, Rodman Wanamaker, and Brooke Astor. Her design for Swan House, in Atlanta, GA (1928) for Mrs. Emily Inman combined the restraint of fine antiques with the homeliness of colonial style. In the dining room, she juxtaposed a bold check curtain with an eighteenth-century colonial interior. She mixed American traditional styles with French and English antiques. She was the longtime employer of Billy Baldwin, who would become a leading decorator in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the undertaking failed due to New York City homeowners not being enamored of interiors inspired by the cutting-edge Wiener Werkstätte. However, Wood had found her calling. She was one of the few women in her time period that had pioneered the profession of interior decoration without training. By the 1930's the whole profession had become more formalized with the establishment of The American Institute for Interior Decorators (now the American Institute of Interior Designers).

One of the best known of all British interior decorators and designers, David Hicks (1929), worked for Ruby Ross Wood until she died in 1950. His debt to Wood is clear in his use of antiques in simple settings of plain white walls, bare floorboards and rush matting. ("Interior Design of the 20th Century" by Anne Massey; Thames and Hudson Ltd, London; p.130, 141-143).

According to Baldwin, Wood's professional credo was: "The final judgement in decorating is not the logic of the mind, but the logic of the eye."

Ruby Ross Wood died of lung cancer.