Today marks the beginning of Women's History month. They say it's hard to know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.

With that in mind, we wanted to take a look at the women in history who opened the door and paved the way for interior designers and creatives everywhere.

Elsie de Wolfe

De Wolfe is at the top of everyone's list, and for good reason. She boasted a lifestyle as glamorous and rebellious as her decor. Born in New York City in 1865, her history reads not as one wild romance and adventure novel, but many different novels. By around 1887 she shared a “Boston marriage” - the term for two single women living together, attributed to Henry James’s The Bostonians - with renowned literary agent Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury.

It was during that time that she successfully restyled the house she and Marbury shared on Irving Place - a history-making event indeed! She avoided the stuffy Victorian decorating approach of her day by decluttering, simplifying, and warming up its uninviting and too-busy interiors. That directly led to a commission to decorate the Colony Club—the New York City’s first elite social club exclusively for women—which would list members with surnames like Whitney, Morgan, and Astor. De Wolfe blazed a trail as she became the most popular decorator of her time, handing out business cards emblazoned with her signature wolf and floral motif.

Elsie de Wolfe, 1880

Dorothy Draper

Boldly colorful, elegant, cheerful, and full of life describer the "Draper touch." If you’re ever feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by the world of interior design, take a page out of Dorothy's 1939 book, Decorating Is Fun!:

Straight from the horse's mouth, “Almost everyone believes that there is something deep and mysterious about interior decoration or that you have to know all sorts of complicated details about periods before you can lift a finger. Well, you don’t. Decorating is just sheer fun: a delight in color, an awareness of balance, a feeling for lighting, a sense of style, a zest for life, and an amused enjoyment of the smart accessories of the moment.”

In 1925, Draper opened what is arguably the first official interior design business, Architectural Clearing House. She extended her “modern Baroque” style to many public buildings, including the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels in San Francisco, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, most famously, a total redesign of the Greenbrier in West Virginia. Some of her rooms have a restrained color palette of classic black and white, while others showcase a wild mash-up of greens with pinks, orange, and turquoise.

Beverly Loraine Green

Beverly Loraine Green became America's first licensed Black female architect in 1942. Facing discrimination and lack of opportunity, Greene moved from Chicago to New York where she got her break as the very first hire for the Stuyvesant Town housing project in Manhattan, a development African-Americans weren’t even allowed to live in at the time. After earning her Master’s Degree from Columbia University, she went on to achieve incredible feats.

Among her most celebrated contributions include the arts complex at Sarah Lawrence University and the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France. Greene only lived to be 41 years old but her legacy of paving the way for so many incredible women to follow in her footsteps endures to this day.

Frida Kahlo 

Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter and activist, was not an interior designer herself, but my goodness, did she inspire so many of us to live as boldly and vibrantly at home as she did. La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo's famous “blue house,” wasn't always blue.

In 1904, Frida Kahlo's father, Guillermo, built it in the colorful Colonia del Carmen district of Coyoacán in Mexico City. The building featured a French-inspired design and white walls. 

When Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera remarried, they moved into her childhood home and redecorated it, giving it new life. They filled its courtyard with Pre-Columbian statues, built a sunny art studio upstairs, and famously covered its white façade in a coat of cobalt blue paint. She expressed herself with colorful fabrics strewn throughout the casa, implementing Mexican traditions of woven quilts and terracotta pots to hold her green cacti and plants. She lived as vividly as she painted.

La Casa Azul played a prominent role not only in the artist's life, but in the lives of her many aficionados across generations, including Dominican American interior decorator, Stephanie Watkins. Today it proudly “preserves the personal objects that reveal the private universe of Latin America’s most celebrated woman artist.”