Betty Sherrill, Interior Designer to New York Elite, Dies at 91

Betty Sherrill, the doyenne of Manhattan interior designers who for more than six decades led the prominent New York design firm McMillen Inc., has died. She was 91.

She died on May 12 at her home in Manhattans East Side, her grandson, John Pyne, said. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

As McMillens president and later chairman, Sherrill oversaw interior design for a roster of clients that included titans of industry, celebrities and families of wealth. Among them were Laurance and Mary Rockefeller, CBS Inc. Chairman William S. Paley, singer Diana Ross and Alice Walton, billionaire daughter of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton.

Petite and with a southern drawl from her New Orleans upbringing, Sherrill cut both an imposing and charming figure in New York society.

She was a longtime resident of 1 Sutton Place South, a co-operative apartment built in 1927 with views of the East River. As chairman of the co-op board, Sherrill acted as a social gatekeeper at the building that has been the home of designer Bill Blass and socialite C.Z. Guest. Sherrill also had residences in Hobe Sound, Florida, and Southampton, New York, where she planted 40,000 daffodils.

McMillen was founded in 1924 by Eleanor McMillen Brown, whose firm soon became fashionable among New Yorks elites.

Sherrill arrived in the city in 1952 as a recently-married and lightly-schooled former design student.

Her first job was opening the door and passing out pamphlets for McMillens Paris 52 exhibit of contemporary postwar designers.

She used to say, I got my foot in the door and I never took it out, Sherrills granddaughter, Elizabeth Pyne, said in a telephone interview. Pyne is the third generation of Sherrill women to work at McMillen where her mother, Ann Pyne is president.

Ann Pyne, writing in an e-mailed tribute, characterized her mothers style as Wasp chic, though not the shabby side of it, with special touches including animal prints, bay windows and Portuguese needlepoint rugs.

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Betty Sherrill, Interior Designer to New York Elite, Dies at 91