The Persian Room

Susan Brown

Fig. 2 Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1950; Interior design by Henry Dreyfuss (American, 1904–1972); Drapes laced with tiny electric lightbulbs and woven blinds designed by Dorothy Liebes; Henry Dreyfuss Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1972-88-1; Image © Smithsonian Institution

“Samarkand with wattage” was how one critic described Henry Dreyfuss’s re-design of the famed Persian Room nightclub at the Plaza Hotel. [1] The revamped club, which opened in 1950, evoked a starry evening in a Persian pleasure garden, with a turquoise and cobalt color scheme, mural of a Persian hunter on horseback, and ceiling studded with tiny, twinkling lights (Fig. 1).

To address the vast expanse of windows—“eight windows, twenty feet high, on two of its walls” [2]—Dreyfuss turned to his close friend and frequent collaborator Dorothy Liebes (Fig. 2). The draperies needed to create a sparkling backdrop not only for dining and dancing in the evening, but also for lunch during the day.

Liebes’s handwoven drapes incorporated the blue-green palette of the space, together with warm neutrals (Fig. 3). During the day, the drapes were pulled back to reveal Liebes’s woven metallic blinds, each finished with a large red tassel she sourced in Japan. But in the evening, the drapes really sparkled: they incorporated sapphire-blue and emerald-green Lurex yarns and braids, and as if that weren’t enough, they were also fitted with tiny lightbulbs. As Dreyfuss wrote, “I requested Dorothy Liebes, who was doing the fabric, to interweave thousands of tiny electric-light bulbs of the type used in delicate surgical instruments. These flickering lights simulated the flight of fireflies during certain dance numbers.” [3] The lights must have been patched into the club’s dimmer board; the influential American trade journal Interiors reported that the club’s draperies boasted “dozens of ‘grain of wheat’ bulbs that represent a miraculous array of falling stars, rising champagne bubbles, or fireflies floating to the left or right, according to the operator.” [4]

By the time the draperies needed to be replaced in 1960, Liebes was no longer doing production handweaving in her studio. She re-designed the drapes, now woven on power looms, in a slightly more vivid color palette and replaced the tiny bulbs with even more Lurex yarns, now in irregular vertical stripes (Fig. 4). Light reflected off the varied textures of the Lurex yarns for a scintillating effect.

NOTES

[1] “Samarkand With Wattage, or the Progress of an American Designer,” Design 4, no. 43 (July 1952): 36.

[2] Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Grossman, 1974, rev. ed.), 146.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “The Iranian Room,” Interiors 110, no. 4 (November 1950): 182.

Black-and-white image of a dining room centered around a circular dance floor. There is diamond-patterned wallpaper and large figures on horseback on the back wall. The ceiling is studded with tiny twinkling lights.

Fig. 1 Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, New York City, circa 1952; Photograph by Richard Averill Smith; Box 18, Folder 14, Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Fig. 2 Black-and-white image of a dining room that features large windows that are covered in horizontally striped curtains that have small twinkling lights.

Fig. 2 Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1950; Interior design by Henry Dreyfuss (American, 1904–1972); Drapes laced with tiny electric lightbulbs and woven blinds designed by Dorothy Liebes; Henry Dreyfuss Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1972-88-1; Image © Smithsonian Institution

Woven drapery in shades of blue and green with horizontal stripes of blue and green metallic yarns.

Fig. 3 Drapery panel for the Persian Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1950; Designed by Dorothy Liebes; Various fibers, Lurex (aluminum foil, plastic-coated); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Dorothy Liebes Design Inc., 1973, 1973.129.3; Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, image source: Art Resource, NY (Note that the original drapes had tiny electric lightbulbs woven throughout; this example does not include the bulbs)

Woven drapery in shades of blue and green with vertical stripes of blue and green metallic yarns.

Fig. 4 Power-loomed drapery fabric for the Persian Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City, ca. 1960; Designed by Dorothy Liebes; National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, TE.T15564; Photo by Jaclyn Nash

Susan Brown

Susan Brown is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, where she has curated over a dozen exhibitions including Fashioning Felt (2009), Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (2011), Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse (2016), Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints that Made the Fashion Brand (2021) and A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (2023).