Jan Showers, is an American interior designer. She is also the owner and proprietor of a showroom in the Dallas Design District where she curates and sells antiques purchased on buying trips to Paris, New York, London and Venice. In January 2014, Architectural Digest named Jan Showers & Associates to the AD100 list of top design & architecture firms. [1] Showers operates the Jan Showers Collection, a line of high-end luxury furnishings. [2] In 2009, Abrams Books published Glamorous Rooms, a book about Showers’ perspectives and ideas about interior design. Glamorous Rooms is in its 8th printing. [3] In October 2013, Jan's second book, "Glamorous Retreats" showcases the designer's most luxurious interiors Veranda magazine has called Showers’ style “glamour without pretense.” [4]
Jan Showers was born in Hillsboro, TX. In interviews she has discussed the influence of both her mother and her grandmother in the early development of her style and taste. In an interview with Southern Accents she said, “My mother was a huge influence on my career―she had a good eye and good taste. She constantly told me, ‘Strive for perfection. Details matter.’’ [5] She received a Bachelor of Science in Business from Texas Christian University in 1963. Showers married James Andrew Showers, an attorney, [6] in 1961 with whom she has two daughters, Susanna Showers Moldawer and Elizabeth Tolbert Showers. Elizabeth is a Dallas-based jewelry designer [7] and Susanna a writer, stylist and mother of three. Showers and her husband divide their time between a country house and Dallas, TX.
Showers learned her craft as, throughout the 1960s, she took small jobs designing houses for friends and relatives. [8] In 1977, she formalized the first incarnation of her business identity with Jan Showers Interiors, which was changed to Jan Showers & Associates in 1996. [9]
Showers has decorated houses in the United States and Canada, including projects in Palm Beach, Aspen, San Francisco, Nantucket and Toronto.
Showers has mentioned as inspirations the decorators Billy Baldwin, Francis Elkins and David Hicks. [10] To Southern Accents she described Billy Baldwin as such: “He embodied clean, simple glamour―such wonderful understatement. I love the living room he did for Mary Wells Lawrence at La Fiorentina in the south of France―those blue sofas and French woven blue-and-white rugs will be forever in my memory.” [11]
Her work has been published and photographed extensively, in such magazines as Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, [12] Veranda, [13] Traditional Home, [14] Southern Accents [15] and Western Interiors. [16]
Named as one of the top designers by both House Beautiful [17] and Western Interiors, [18] Ms. Showers also won the Lifetime Achievement Award in Interior Design from Fashion Group International in 2008. [19]
She has been honored by the Andrew Martin Interior Design Awards twice, in 2004 and 2005.
In 1994, Showers partnered with clients to open Out of Africa, her first retail storefront. The store, located in Dallas, featured African art mixed with traditional furnishings.
Showers opened her own boutique and showroom in the Dallas Design District, which more-than-doubled in size over the next 10 years. Well known for mixing 18th and 19th century designs with mid 20th century pieces, [20] Showers curates and sells furnishings and design accessories from a variety of locales purchased. The contents of the showroom are acquired by Showers on semiannual buying trips to Paris, Venice, London, and New York City. [21] Architectural Digest featured her showroom, saying, “In every vignette there’s at least one mirror.…….It’s airy and has the same glamour as the movies of the 1940s.” [22]
Unable to consistently find the kind of furnishings she and her clients wanted, Showers established a furniture collection in 1999. [23] Within 2 years, she was represented by 7 showrooms across the United States. The Collection is currently featured in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Dania. [24] The Jan Showers Collection consists of over 150 pieces, including a variety of furnishings as well as Murano glass lighting. [25] Veranda said “ The collection reflects the designer’s affinity for Neoclassicism and mid-century modern design.” [26]
In 2005, Jan Showers was asked to design a limited edition collection of seven different glass accessories, signed and numbered for Neiman Marcus. [27] They were produced in Murano, Italy.
Showers designed a collection of custom made cowhide rugs for Kyle Bunting in 2010. [28] and in 2014 Showers designed a ceramic lighting collection in collaboration with ceramist Paul Schneider, as well as a collection of Oushak rugs for Moattar, Ltd.
Jan Showers, Carleton Varney (Dorothy Draper) and Laura Hunt designed showhouses for the Robert A.M. Stern Residences at the Ritz Carlton Dallas in the spring of 2010 [29]
In 2009, Abrams Books published Glamorous Rooms, a photography-centered book featuring Showers’ design projects and emphasizing her attention to detail, and her trademark blending of Hollywood high style, mid-century modernism and classic pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries. [30] American fashion designer Michael Kors wrote the foreword for the book. Kors said, “What impresses Jan isn’t what looks hot right this second, but what will look great years from now. I find this focus on timelessness is likewise utterly apparent in the rooms she creates. The fact that they will still look amazing decades from now speaks to her real success as a designer.” [31]
Abrams published her second book, Glamorous Retreats, in fall of 2013, which will feature vacation/second homes from Palm Beach, Nantucket, Vail, Telluride, Malibu and Toronto, as well as many other locales.
Showers serves on the board of trustees of the Dallas Museum of Art. [32] In 2009, Showers co-chaired Two X Two with her daughter, Elizabeth Showers, a gala benefitting AmfAR and the Dallas Museum of Art. [33] She also has served on the board of The Elisa Project, an organization dedicated to promoting healthy body image.
Interior design is the art and science of enhancing the interior of a building to achieve a healthier and more aesthetically pleasing environment for the people using the space. An interior designer is someone who plans, researches, coordinates, and manages such enhancement projects. Interior design is a multifaceted profession that includes conceptual development, space planning, site inspections, programming, research, communicating with the stakeholders of a project, construction management, and execution of the design.
Miuccia Bianchi Prada is an Italian billionaire fashion designer and businesswoman. She is the head designer of Prada and the founder of its subsidiary Miu Miu. As of October 2021, Forbes estimated her net worth at US$4.8 billion. In June 2021, Bloomberg estimated her net worth to be $6.62 billion, ranked 464th in the world.
Tessa Georgina Kennedy is a British interior designer, whose clients include multi-national corporations, royalty, celebrities and many European hotels, restaurants and clubs. Her elopement with society portrait painter Dominick Elwes made headlines in 1957.
Jean Louis was a French-American costume designer. He won an Academy Award for The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956).
Kelly Wearstler is an American designer. She founded her own design firm Kelly Wearstler Interior Design in the mid-1990s, serving mainly the hotel industry, and now designs across high-end residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces. Her designs for the Viceroy hotel chain in the early 2000s have been noted for their influence on the design industry. She has designed properties for clients such as Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz and Stacey Snider, and served as a judge on all episodes of Bravo's Top Design reality contest in 2007 and 2008.
Julia Clancey is a London-based fashion designer. Her clothes have been shown at London Fashion Week and featured in magazines including Vogue and ELLE.
Mary Douglas Drysdale is an American interior designer whose namesake company, Drysdale Design Associates, was founded in 1980. Her areas of expertise are in commercial and residential interior design. Her offices are located in Washington, D.C. The projects undertaken by Drysdale extend throughout the United States and abroad.
Mick De Giulio is an American designer, author and product designer widely recognized for growing the discipline of kitchen design. His highly customized rooms and furnishings met the rising importance of the kitchen in late 20th Century interior design with a dual focus on elevating its craft and functionality. Experimenting with open plans that allow for multiple family cooks to share work within a widening range of opportunities for gathering, he promoted the kitchen as the home's versatile new locus for entertaining. His designs often reveal their full art and flexibility in use, employing movable surfaces and fine architectural detail to alternately hide or draw eyes to kitchen activities. De Giulio's legacy to industry practices includes his innovations to the kitchen's range of products and furnishings for instance, and his avid promotion of the kitchen designer as a profession beyond that of the cabinet seller. He is the author of two books on kitchen design, KitchenCentric and KITCHEN.
Elena Nazaroff was one of the founders of "Ev & El" during the 90s.
Sandra Nunnerley is a New Zealand-born, U.S.-based interior designer, whose firm, Sandra Nunnerley, Inc., is headquartered in New York City, New York. Her work is known for its attention to architecture and its incorporation of art, as well as for a mix of styles and materials. Nunnerley works primarily on residential projects, both in the U.S. and international locations.
Ada Zanditon is a fashion designer born and based in London. She is a graduate of the London College of Fashion. She was featured regularly in the Esthetica showcase of the London Fashion Week from 2009 - 2013. She has also displayed her collections at the Berlin Fashion Week in 2013. She is also an advocate of fair trade practices and environmental awareness.
Donna Moss is an interior decorator and designer in Dallas, Texas. A former contestant on HGTV's Design Star, Moss currently hosts HGTV's Donna Decorates Dallas. She has been featured in People, InStyle, Fort Worth Dream Homes and Indulge, and has been listed in the Great Women of Texas (2012).
Hollywood Regency, sometimes called Regency Moderne, is a design style that describes both interior design and landscape architecture characterized by the bold use of color and contrast often with metallic and glass accents meant to signify both opulence and comfort. It is named for the movie-making industry of southern California as typified by the glamorous homes and estates of the actors and actresses of Hollywood's "Golden Era", roughly from the 1920s through the 1950s, and typified by the work of designers such as Dorothy Draper and Billy Haines. The term "Hollywood Regency" appears to have originated with Draper in the 1920s. It remains a current and lively area of design work both inside and outside of southern California.
Penny Drue Baird, the owner of Dessins, LLC, based in Paris and New York, is an interior designer, also known for her architectural work.
Melanie Kahane (1910–1988) was an American interior designer and 1985 inductee of the Interior Design Hall of Fame. She was first recognized in the design world as the pioneer of one of the first colored kitchen appliances: a shiny red stove. This move kick-started her reputation as a designer of boldly colored rooms, although she spotted early the possibilities of television for promoting design. Throughout her career she became one of the most notable high-end designers in New York City. She was most influential as a designer from the 1940s to the 1960s, although her career lasted half a century.
Barbara D'Arcy (1928-2012) was one of the most important visual merchandisers of the 20th century.
Scott Salvator is an American interior designer.
Miles Redd is an American interior designer based in New York City. He studied fashion design at the Parsons School of Design and film at New York University, and served as the creative director of Oscar de la Renta Home from 2003-13. Redd started his own interior design practice in 1998 after honing his skills with antiques dealer John Rosselli and decorator Bunny Williams.
Rose Tarlow is an interior designer, a furniture and textile designer, and an author based in Los Angeles, California. She is known for having designed elegant residences for a small number of notable clients. She is the author of Private House, a memoir of her interior design activities, first published in 2001.
Las Saetas is one of the great examples of Pueblo Revival architecture in the American Southwest. Rebuilt in 1935 from the ruins of the 1873 Post Traders Store the design-build project was led by Dutch-born artist Charles Bolsius, with Nan and Pete Bolsius. The project included hand-carved doors, exposed beams, carved corbels, adobe fireplaces, hand-hammered tin, and a heightened sense of romanticism. The property and its transformation over a 150-year-span reflect the changing culture and economic milieu of Southern Arizona and the American West.