Emily Malino papers

Emily Malino was an interior designer, an outgoing woman working in a man's world in the mid-to-late 20th century. Shortly after she graduated from Vassar College in the late 1950s, she founded her own firm, Emily Malino Associates, in NYC. At the same time, she was a U.S. Congressman's wife and mother of four, so for much of her life commuted between New York and Washington D.C. Over her prolific career she designed urban housing, hospital wards and facilities, residential interiors, and commercial interiors. For years, she consulted for Monsanto and Sears Roebuck and Co., giving lectures and conducting workshops across the US. Always with a passion for working on a tight budget and coming up with simple solutions to everyday problems, for over 25 years she wrote a weekly column, "Design for People", that was nationally syndicated in newspapers such as the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune; with this platform, she brought clever, modern design to every home across America.

Over her long career she published a book called "Super Living Rooms" (1976), consulted for Sears and Monsanto, was on Nixon's National Design Counsel (and traveled to Moscow on behalf of the federal government to help design an "American" art collection there), was Vice-President at Perkins and Will for over a decade, lectured to groups and at conferences across the United States, even had her own television show for awhile, among many other achievements. She was a dynamic, democratic, socially conscious voice for cost-effective innovation in the design industry, and is a designer who deserves to be better recognized for all she accomplished.