Suzie Frankfurt

Suzie Frankfurt (née Allen; August 21, 1931 – January 7, 2005) was an American interior designer and socialite. Her work helped define an elegant, historically informed aesthetic in late 20th-century American interior design.

Frankfurt gained early recognition for redesigning the lobby of Young & Rubicam and became a celebrated decorator of Russian and Biedermeier antiques, popularizing 18th and 19th-century Russian furniture among affluent clients. Her clientele included Robert Redford and Robert Mapplethorpe, and her own Manhattan townhouse interiors were featured in Home & Garden and Architectural Digest. A friend and one-time collaborator of Pop artist Andy Warhol, she co-authored the tongue-in-cheek cookbook Wild Raspberries (1959) with him.

Early life and education Suzanne Allen was born on August 21, 1931, in Los Angeles, the daughter of Eva and Isidore Allen, who owned a linen distribution company. Through a cousin who married a son of industrialist Norton Simon, she became part of a well-connected extended family that included actress Jennifer Jones, Simon's wife, and Simon's sister, Marcia Weisman, a prominent art collector.

Although she initially decorated only occasionally for friends, by the late 1970s Frankfurt had become a prominent interior designer, known for her distinctive use of vintage Russian furniture, Biedermeier antiques, and traditional European styles. "I like anything that's a little out of the ordinary," she said. "That's why I'll place an eighteenth-century marriage chest from Damascus under an eighteenth-century mirror, top it with a thirteenth-century Tibetan Buddha — and then flank the whole effect with two Japanese military chests." David L. Paul, a Florida bank chairman who was convicted of fraud in 1993, was accused of having paid Frankfurt approximately $389,000 in bank funds to decorate his home.

Personal life

Marriage and children In 1956, Frankfurt married Young & Rubicam art director Stephen Frankfurt; the couple had two children and divorced in 1968.

Friendship with Andy Warhol In 1959, while pregnant with her second son, Frankfurt saw an exhibition of Andy Warhol's watercolors at Serendipity in New York. Warhol's mother Julia Warhola did the calligraphy for the book. Among the thousands of items offered were paintings, decorative arts, antiques, and Americana, including a Louis XVI terracotta garden figure, a Tiffany inkwell, a 45-star American flag, a 19th-century pine armoire, and a lavender-glass Coca-Cola bottle.

Frankfurt regarded her next home, a five-story Georgian townhouse at 122 East 73rd Street, as her greatest creative achievement, calling it her own "Russia." The salon featured parquet ceilings inspired by Russian floor patterns, walls glazed after those of the former Mikhailovsky Palace in Leningrad, an 18th-century Russian inlaid sewing table, Russian chairs from around 1820, and andirons by William H. Jackson. She then moved with her two Bernese Mountain Dogs to a 1780 farmhouse in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. She was survived by her two sons and four grandchildren.