Rorimer Brooks Company
The Rorimer Brooks Studio of Cleveland, Ohio was one of the first American firms to design and execute entire residential and commercial interiors. The company was founded by Louis Rorimer in 1896 as Rohrheimer Design. In 1917 he purchased a competitor, the Brooks Household Arts Co. from its owner, retiring Edward Brooks, to create the largest interior design firm of its time west of New York City.
Louis Rorimer was the seventh and youngest child of Jacob and Minnie Rohrheimer, German immigrants who settled in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1849. He legally changed his name to Rorimer in 1917. After study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, he returned to Cleveland in 1896, opened a studio, and taught design and interior decorating at the Cleveland School of Art.
The Rorimer Brooks Studio was best known for their skillful blending historical styles into fresh interpretations. Personally Rorimer was fascinated with the art moderne style, particularly Art Deco, and created several stunning public spaces – hotels, restaurants & apartment buildings – will his modern creations.
In assessing Rorimer’s career, the Cleveland Plain Dealer called him “the dean of high style in Cleveland in the first third of the 20th century…” James Irving, a decorator with a fifty-year career in Cleveland added, “”I consider Louis Rorimer to be the Louis Comfort Tiffany of furniture,”
Rorimer died at the age of 67 in 1939 from what may have been a cancer. The family name went on to gain even more luster on the national scene as his son James became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city and author of Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War, about his World War II service as one of the Army’s “Monuments Men” who traced and recovered Nazi looted artwork.
For further information see Pina, Louis Rorimer: A Man of Style.
Reference note by p4A editorial staff, January 2013.