What Is Hollywood Regency Style?
Do you love classic Hollywood films with all their over-the-top glamorous interiors? Then Hollywood Regency may be the design style for you. Hollywood Regency is a look virtually synonymous with the Golden Age of film from the 1920s to the 1950s when the big movie studios like MGM, Warner Bros and RKO, and directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, created some of the most lasting, iconic films we still celebrate today. Films like Bringing Up Baby, Design for Living, Trouble in Paradise and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals epitomized the elegant sweet life that many Americans of the time aspired to. Those movie studios and Hollywood directors helped fix an idea in Americans' brains of what glamor and elegance looked like. Film stars of the time like tastemaker Joan Crawford took this style created by Hollywood set designers, used it in their own homes and launched a living, breathing iteration of a style we now know as Hollywood Regency.
Pictured above: One of the godmothers of Hollywood Regency was designer Dorothy Draper, the designer of this fabulous draped swimming pool for luxe The Greenbrier resort where she was the in-house designer from 1945 to 1960.