Rose Tarlow is an interior designer, a furniture and textile designer, and an author based in Los Angeles, California. She is known for having designed elegant residences for a small number of notable clients. She is the author of Private House, a memoir of her interior design activities, first published in 2001.

Life

Tarlow graduated from Emerson College in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science in Theater Arts. She married in 1961, after which she attended classes at the New York School of Interior Design and the Parsons School of Design, and established an interior design shop in Englewood, New Jersey. In 1971, having divorced and moved to California, she married the lawyer Barry Tarlow (1939–2021). She established Rose K. Tarlow Antiques. Ltd. in 1974, and Rose Tarlow Melrose House in 1981.

Interior design

Tarlow is known for creating rooms with highly refined wood, plaster and stone finishes, furnished with antiques (typically English, French, and East Asian), and infused with a personal blend of minimalism and romanticism. In her own house in Bel Air, she clad her dining room floor with reclaimed stone from France, installed wide wood floor boards made from 17th-century French oak in her living room, and added ceiling beams throughout, taken from an 11th-century church in Kent, England. Like much of her work, the house has a romantic character: in 1994, the writer Susan Orlean opined that "the place had the rugged, sunny, otherworldly ambience of a California mission." In 2001, the architecture critic Julie V. Iovine wrote of Tarlow's passion for creating "rooms of haunting luxury packed with enough rarities and idiosyncratic touches to upstage a Zeffirelli opera set." In 2004, the editor Marian McEvoy wrote in Veranda magazine that Tarlow, Albert Hadley, Jacques Grange, Michael Taylor, Renzo Mongiardino, and John Stefanidis, were six interior designers who had an "enormous impact" on "the design world."

Representative projects

Written works