Designer(s) of the Month: Mary and Russel Wright

Part 2:

Ah yes, the Guide to Easier Living.[1] Doesn't the title of this book make you feel better already? Just look at those happy, relaxed people on the cover.

Published in 1950, Mary and Russel Wright's Guide to Easier Living provides tips for making housework and entertaining easier and more efficient, while putting a new and modern spin on domesticity, with the aim to “increase the enjoyment and satisfaction of life in your home by drastically reducing the time and labor required in running a home”.[2]

This book was especially unique for its time in that, while the housewife is still the focus of the guide, the entire family and the ways in which they can help around the home is taken into consideration as well.

In the Guide to Easier Living, The Wrights openly criticize proponents of what they call an “ill-fitting and outmoded cultural pattern,” stating that the “the entire fiction of ‘gracious living’ is a cruel charade, imposed on us by a set of standards we should have discarded long ago”, and that the new American home will be much simpler, with “its size and furnishings…determined by the family’s needs, not by the arbitrary dictates of fashion”.[3]

The Wrights used their own townhouse in Manhattan as a laboratory, exploring the ways in which the modern family, many of whom were living in much smaller spaces during the post- World War II period, could best make use of limited room, advocating for the flexible, open-planned home as the ideal living space.[4]

An example of this new type of living space is the all in-one-room (shown above), which the Wrights used as an illustration of the best model for family life. [5]

The Guide to Easier Living as well as the designs and ideas for living sold by Mary and Russel Wright became the fashion of the time. In the process, the Wrights successfully defined a way of living for the American family that was halfway between convention and informality, and was definity ahead of its time.[6]

And there you have it folks; easier living for all! Next week, I'll show you guys some of the Wright's now iconic dinnerware, furnitue and textiles designs.

[1] Mary and Russel Wright, Guide to Easier Living, A Design Classic Reprint (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003).

[2] Ann Wright, 2003 forward to Guide to Easier Living, Mary Wright and Russel Wright, A Design Classic Reprint (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), viii. Ann Wright, 2003 forward to Guide to Easier Living, Mary Wright and Russel Wright, A Design Classic Reprint (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), viii.

[3] Mary Wright and Russel Wright, Guide to Easier Living, A Design Classic Reprint (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 4-5.

[4] Donald Albrecht and Robert Schonfeld, introduction to Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, ed. Donald Albrecht, Robert Schonfeld, and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 18.

[5] See appendix, illustration 2. Mary Wright and Russel Wright, Guide to Easier Living, A Design Classic Reprint (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 48-9.

[6] Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, “A Man and His Manners: Resetting the American Table,” from Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, ed. Donald Albrecht, Robert Schonfeld, and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 23-4.