Helen Hughes Dulany (1884–1968)

A 1937 newspaper series called “Women at Work” narrates the story of how Helen Hughes Dulany started her design career: during the Great Depression, Dulany was compelled to economize and reluctantly dismissed her butler. Regretting her decision, she asked her domestic employee to stay and determined that she needed to hire—not fire—workers. Her enterprise began when the dishes she designed for herself caught the eye of a friend who then purchased a set from Dulany for fifty dollars. Within weeks, exclusive shops in New York were carrying Dulany’s dishes. Encouraged by the retailers’ interest in her designs, she founded Helen Hughes Dulany Studio above her Lake Shore Drive apartment and opened a factory that produced her household goods. During her career, she designed “vases, kitchen stoves, lamps, vacuum cleaners, stream-lined train interiors—and the appointments of her own home.” General Electric, Republic Steel, Buffalo Potteries, and the Burlington railroad retained her as a designer.

While her socioeconomic status was advantageous to her career, she faced serious health challenges before her ascension in the field of design at the age of forty-five. Afflicted with an undisclosed health condition, Dulany underwent sixteen operations in the United States and abroad. She was bedridden for almost eighteen years and considered an “invalid” in early twentieth-century terminology. In 1931, doctors informed her she was near death. While hospitalized at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, she experimented with clay and crayons as a diversion and discovered her aptitude for design. She had no professional training as an artist or designer.

Helen Hughes was born in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1885. Her father, General Alexander Hughes (1846–1907), served as territorial attorney general from 1883–84 and made a fortune from electric utilities. Her mother Mary Elizabeth Hughes (1848–1935) was the daughter of Samuel Higginbotham (1826–1863), a physician in South Bend, Indiana. Helen Hughes was one of six children, among them, George A. Hughes, president of the Edison General Electric Appliance Company. 

On May 10, 1913, Helen Hughes married George W. Dulany, Jr., a wealthy lumber merchant whose father and grandfather had made their money in the same industry in the Mississippi Valley. Dulany, Jr. is also known for starting the so-called “joke” Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George” in 1914. In a retelling of its origin story, Dulany grew tired of hearing customers of Pullman cars shout his first name when they called for a porter. Pullman porters were predominately Black, and the practice of calling them “George,” no matter their actual name, was a Jim Crow-era practice that alluded to the renaming of enslaved people with the names of slaveholders. As journalist Larry Tye explains, “Being called ‘George’ was no laughing matter for George Mortimer Pullman, whose first name had been borrowed, in the manner of the plantation, as a moniker for his Negro porters.” The society was open to white men named George, and at one time it boasted 31,000 members. 

Helen Hughes Dulany and George W. Dulany, Jr. moved to Chicago in 1920. Dulany’s designs were exhibited at A Century of Progress Exposition, held in Chicago in 1933–1934. Sponsored by the lumber industries of the United States (an industry she knew well as the wife of a lumber executive), the House of Lumber promoted the infinite uses for wood in a dry-built home. Entering the redwood doors of the House of Lumber, fair goers walked through an entrance hall paneled with Louisiana cypress, followed by a living room with walls clad in Appalachian white oak. The dining room was fitted with panels and flooring made from Tennessee walnut. For her contribution, Dulany designed wooden dishes, including a berry bowl, salad bowl, and place plates constructed from dull-finished bird’s eye maple and steins of walnut and maple. In keeping with the theme of the house, grapes and pears sculpted from walnut served as the table centerpiece. As one journalist observed, attendees of various backgrounds were charmed by the centerpiece: “Helen Hughes Dulany, an artist of note, is responsible for this unique idea of table decoration, and from the comments I heard from the men and women of all classes strolling through the house, her clever creations seem to strike the fancy of everyone who enters the place.” The plate, manufactured by Dulany’s studio, is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art.

When the Edison General Electric Appliance Company discussed hiring Dulany in the 1930s, the choice surprised the company president, her brother George A. Hughes. Hughes did not expect them to offer a contract to a woman, much less his sister. Advertisements for the Hotpoint Electric Range by General Electric (1936) credit Dulany by name in the copy, promoting her a tastemaker: “Styled by Helen Hughes Dulany, foremost woman industrial stylist, it typifies the thinking of modern women in kitchen appliances.” General Electric opted not only to hire a woman designer, but also to use her status as a woman to establish her authority as a designer who knew what the modern housemaker desired.  

Dulany’s housewares, designed with entertaining and hosting in mind, appeared in multiple issues of Art and Decoration in 1934. The materials, price point, and New York City stockists indicate for whom Helen Hughes Dulany Studios designed: A walnut and birch board for serving cheese sold for nine dollars at Arden Studios at 460 Park Avenue. A dozen after-dinner coffee cups made in clear and frosted glass could be purchased for twenty-five dollars at Alice Marks at 19 East 52nd Street. A glass, oven-to-table serving dish with four compartments, also at Alice Marks, retailed at thirty-five dollars. One dozen frosted glass service plates with a lustre centre sold for sixty-five dollars. Frosted and clear glass stemware for water, champagne, and sherry ranged from twenty-two to twenty-four dollars per dozen. However, not all magazines or shops properly credited her as the creator of her design objects, according to Dulany. To prevent appropriation, Dulany decided to only show her designs in Chicago, where “the field [was] less crowded” and she could stand out as an individual.

While Dulany’s tableware for the House of Lumber and chic hostesses demonstrated her talents in more traditional materials, she also implemented more novel materials such as stainless steel, silver-plate, and rhodium. Their properties of reflectiveness, strength, and sleekness were well suited to the modern aesthetic she first sought for her own home. After she moved into her Lake Shore Drive apartment, “none of the family heirlooms would fit gracefully,” so she endeavored to design “furnishing that wouldn’t quarrel with their background.” Dulany could envision an object, but its production required the knowledge and expertise of craftspeople, such as Charles Cadman, to manufacture it.

She designed stainless steel dishes and table utensils for the Burlington Zephyr train, a spherical, chromed metal caviar server now in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum (ca. 1930), and a silver-plated, two-tiered candelabra (1935) owned by the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1935, Dulany designed a rhodium belt buckle that functioned as a case for cigarettes and matches. A large photograph accompanying the announcement of the new design shows a woman modeling the smoking accessory. Attached to her belt, the buckle is opened horizontally. Nestled inside the case, an orderly row of cigarettes reflects in the mirror-like finish of the interior. Dulany’s belt buckle captured the attention of Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who was designing a dress to be worn with the buckle. At the peak of her design career, Dulany “earned $100,000 fashioning art objects.”

Seventy-nine years after the “Women in Work” newspaper series by the AP Features Service highlighted Dulany, the online design magazine Core77 wrote a profile on Dulany for its “Designing Women” series. Her career had a meteoric rise, but her active years as a designer were relatively brief: “After 1937 Dulany all but disappeared from design, apparently as an unfortunate consequence of her divorce one year earlier. In the decades since, her designs have become difficult to find outside of a handful of pieces in a few American museums.” Delany filed for divorce in December 1936 and testified that her husband George W. Dulany, Jr. had deserted her on November 8, 1935. Their divorce was widely publicized in national newspapers that frequently noted her profession as an eminent designer. 

After the divorce, Dulany went on a South American cruise and vacationed in England, Scandinavia and Honolulu. One year later, Dulany moved from Chicago to California. In January 1938, Helen Hughes Delany wed Atherton Richards in small ceremony in Pasadena. Their wedding ceremony was held in a bungalow at the Hotel Huntington, where Dulany had been living since December 1937. Richards was president of the Hawaiian Pineapple company—the same company that had commissioned designs from Dulany in 1935. The couple planned to live in Honolulu. 

In November 1942, Helen Hughes Richards was an active member of the Women’s Committee for the Community War Fund, living part-time in Washington, D.C. with her husband. She was also busy furnishing their luxurious Shoreham Hotel apartment with other people’s designs and visiting with her friend from San Francisco, the celebrated textile designer and weaver Dorothy Liebes. While her career in design may have ended in the late 1930s, Helen Hughes Richards found another profession as an editor-at-large for the popular magazine Reader’s Digest. She filed for divorce from Atherton Richards on June 30, 1955. Despite the grim prognosis given to her by doctors in her forties, she lived to be eight-four. Helen Hughes Richards died on November 18, 1968 in New York City.

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Veit, Rebecca. “Helen Hughes Dulany, 1930s Socialite Turned ‘Over-Worked Genius’ of Industrial Design.” Core77, February 10, 2016. http://www.core77.com/posts/46465/Helen-Hughes Dulany-1930s-Socialite-Turned-“Over-Worked-Genius”-of-Industrial-Design.

“Woman Designer Sues for Divorce: Desertion Charged by Helen Hughes Dulany—Settlement Arranged.” The Indianapolis Star, December 7, 1936.

“World’s Fair Vignettes: The House of Lumber.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 30, 1933.