Katherine Rhinehart Prince Taylor
Work History:
- Interior renovation of a few homes on Division Street in Chicago, likely including her own, at 59 East Division Street in Chicago, Illinois
Additional Information:
Katherine Rinehart Prince Taylor (1871-1934) was an interior decorator who renovated several Chicago houses (inside and out). Born and raised in Bloomington Illinois, Katherine Rinehart attended Illinois Wesleyan University. She married Lieutenant Leonard M. Prince in 1894, and the following year, she gave birth to a son. Her husband died later that year. After moving in with her parents became, Katherine Rinehart Prince became a leader in Bloomington Society and she occasionally wrote for the local newspaper. In 1904, she married George H. Taylor, a Chicago attorney and real estate dealer. The couple bought a row house dating to the 1880s at what is now 59 E. Division Street in Chicago. Two years later, House Beautiful published an article “A House Designed by a Woman,” asserting that “Mrs. George Halleck Taylor has designed two houses.” One of them was her own home. The article indicated that Katherine Taylor “studied a year at the Chicago Art Institute in order to fit herself to the task of house-building.” An exterior photograph and several interior views were included. (As the American Contractor reported that George H. Taylor hired architect M.L. Beers to prepare plans for his home in 1904, it seems likely that Katharine Taylor worked collaboratively on the renovation project.) In 1915, the Chicago Tribune asserted that it is “chic to take an old house and build it over,” and suggested that “Mrs. George H. Taylor has done this with great success to two or three houses in East Division Street.” When Katherine Rinehart Prince Taylor died in 1934, her Chicago Tribune obituary indicated that she had been a consulting interior decorator in the antique galleries of Marshall Field & Co. for the last decade.
Research provided by Julia Bachrach Consulting.