Curating Taste in Canadian Homes and Gardens: Minerva Elliot’s Decorating Advice, 1925-40

In the first half of the twentieth century, Minerva Elliot was recognized as a prominent Canadian interior decorator. Despite her successful and influential career, she is relatively unknown today. Through archival research and the analysis of Elliot’s works featured in the popular upper-middle class magazine Canadian Homes and Gardens from 1925 to 1940, this paper will investigate how Elliot professionalized the role of the interior decorator in Canada and helped to shape notions of identity, class, and taste. Launched in 1925, Canadian Homes and Gardens targeted female consumers by publishing expert advice on home furnishings, decoration, architecture, entertaining, and horticulture. Elliot was considered a Canadian authority on the subject of interior decoration and regularly contributed to the magazine, often publishing photographs of the lavish Canadian interiors she decorated. Despite studying European architecture, Elliot built a career as an interior decorator first by working in the home furnishing departments at Eaton’s in Toronto and Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia before starting her own decorating business. Conventional codes of femininity at the time, including women’s domestic experience, made them fittingly capable, it was reasoned, to work in home decoration. This research will help identify the role both women and women’s magazines played in promoting the trends and taste that shaped the Canadian interior, a subject that is often overlooked in architectural history. Moreover, the ephemerality of interior decoration and its association with women situates it as inferior to the sturdy permanence of architecture, evident by our recognition of famous architects but not of famous decorators.