Ruby Ross Wood
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Ruby Ross 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.
Her career began at the turn of the century when she moved to New York from Monticello, Georgia, where she had been born Ruby Ross Pope, 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.
In the early 1900s, under the byline Ruby Ross Goodnow (her first married name), she wrote fiction and articles about 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. She also ghostwrote a series of Delineator articles under the byline of the decorator Elsie de Wolfe, which formed the basis of de Wolfe's decorating manual The House in Good Taste, for which Goodnow was the ghostwriter.
Around 1914, she joined the decorating staff of the John Wanamaker store in New York City, where she worked until the mid 1920s, at which time she opened her own design business. Among her clients were Alfred Vanderbilt, Rodman Wanamaker, and Brooke Astor, and she was the longtime employer of Billy Baldwin, who would become a leading decorator in the 1960s.
Ruby Ross Wood's credo was: 'The final judgement in decorating is not the logic of the mind, but the logic of the eye."
Her first husband was Wallace Field Goodnow, an engineer of 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.
Ruby Ross Wood died of lung cancer.
