Sister Parish; Kennedys’ Interior Designer

Sister Parish, the venerated interior designer whose career took her from housewife and mother to a one-room New Jersey business and then on to refurbishing the White House for the Kennedys, has died at age 84.

Mrs. Parish died Thursday at her home in Dark Harbor, Me., after a lengthy illness, said her daughter, Dorothy B. Gilbert.

During her six decades in the business, Mrs. Parish became not only the grande dame of American interior decorating but a symbol of success to professional women nationwide.

In addition to the Kennedys, she worked for many of America’s best-known families: the Astors, Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Whitneys.

Mrs. Parish was “the most famous of all living women interior decorators . . . (her) ideas have influenced lifestyles all over America,” Vogue magazine once wrote.

Her business started in a one-room office at a farmhouse in Far Hills, N.J., and evolved into the pricey Manhattan-based Parish-Hadley Associates. (Her partner had been Albert Hadley.)

Born Dorothy May Kinnicut in Morristown, N.J., she was dubbed Sister as a child and the name stuck. Her interest in decorating was first aroused by a visit to Paris, where she was impressed by painted French furniture.

She married Wall Street stockbroker Henry Parish in 1930 and moved to Far Hills, where she was a wife and mother before establishing her firm, which she originally called “Mrs. Henry Parish 2nd Interiors.”

The White House was her biggest coup. She had met Jacqueline Kennedy in the late 1950s and redecorated the Georgetown home she shared with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy.

When Kennedy became President, Mrs. Kennedy named Mrs. Parish as a consultant in redecorating the White House and placed her on a committee to furnish it with 19th-Century pieces.

Mrs. Parish--whose father collected antiques that she called “awful English brown,” was a champion of the American country style, which dovetailed with Mrs. Kennedy’s wishes. The First Lady was a person of “simple tastes who wants to create a home,” Mrs. Parish said.