[10] After she was appointed Dean and Professor of English, M. Carey Thomas took up residence at Bryn Mawr College in 1885 in the small five-room house which would become known as the "Deanery.

[12] An advocate for women's education, Thomas played an active role in the planning of the college's organization and academic curriculum.

[15] In her forty-eight years at Bryn Mawr College Thomas continued to maintain a home in the Deanery, overseeing several expansions and renovations, as well as decorating the interior with items collected from her international travels.

[23] Thomas' relationship with the two women was already strained when Gwinn shifted her affection to Alfred Hodder, a fellow Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.

[29] In addition, Thomas and Garrett decorated the interior and garden of the Deanery with art that they collected during their many travels from all over the world, such as the pair of stone dogs from a Mandarin's palace in Manchuria and inlaid tables from Damascus.

[30] When Joseph W. Taylor purchased 40 acres of land for the campus of Bryn Mawr College in 1878, three Victorian cottages were located on the property, later known as the Deanery, the Betweenery, and the Greenery.

[32] The residence underwent a minor expansion in 1888 – the first of three renovations – when two small rooms were added to the rear of the house for the storage of books and records.

The Philadelphia firm of Cope and Stewardson had been commissioned to design and construct several campus buildings in the 1880s and 90s, including the dormitories Radnor (1885) and Denbigh (1891).

A large northwest wing was also added to the existing house, located off of the original dining room and containing the kitchen, pantry, and storage areas.

It was an elegant residence where M. Carey Thomas could entertain the college's important guests, students, and alumnae, as well as her own immediate family and friends.

M. Carey Thomas convinced the Board of Trustees to give control of the Deanery and its property, which technically belonged to the college, to the Alumnae Association, pursuant to the same conditions on which she herself had held it.

[51][52] The design and decoration of many of the Deanery's interior spaces was entrusted, in large part, to the American artist Lockwood de Forest.

A student of the landscape painter Frederic Church, de Forest enjoyed moderate success as an artist, exhibiting his work at a variety of venues including the National Academy of Design in New York.

[54] By 1883, de Forest had set up his own import business, based in New York City, which distributed carved teakwood furniture, tracery panels, jewelry, and textiles, some of which were produced in his workshop in Ahmedabad, India.

[63] In the third expansion of the house in 1908, de Forest decorated the ceiling of the Dorothy Vernon Room with thin sheets of patterned brass in a variety of East Indian designs.

The decoration of the Blue Room was inspired by Japanese art, a departure from the East Indian influence that permeates the majority of de Forest's designs in the Deanery.

[67] Throughout the Blue Room a number of small works of art were also on display, including etchings by the nineteenth-century artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Charles Méryon, and a fifteenth-century bronze bust of Dante Alighieri.

[68] The Deanery's Blue Room is often considered one of the best American examples of an Aesthetic Movement interior, alongside The Peacock Room by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, now located in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[69] In 1904 Mary Garrett moved into the Deanery with M. Carey Thomas and brought with her art and furnishings from her home at 101 Monument Street in Baltimore.

[70][71] In addition to linens, silver, and works of art, Garrett relocated with a selection of furniture, some of which was designed by Lockwood de Forest.

[79][80] The Dorothy Vernon room in the Deanery was designed by the architects of the second renovation, Archer and Allen, and Lockwood de Forest.

[83] Several pieces of "deliberate Anglo-Indian design" were created for the Dorothy Vernon Room, consisting of a sofa (Deanery.354), two armchairs (Deanery.355–356), and two side chairs (Deanery.357–358).

[84] These pieces were made of dark wood decorated with panels of perforated copper and stenciled designs in black paint on the frame.

From a 1908 photograph of the room, one can see some of Garrett's teakwood furniture from Baltimore (e.g. Deanery.382–383), as well as the swing settee by de Forest and his Ahmedebad Wood Carving Co.

The settee is composed of intricately carved teak panels and hangs from four elaborately designed brass chains that depict three-dimensional birds, elephants, and human figures.

"[91] Three spaces in the Deanery were decorated with Mercer's tile: the vestibule, the Dorothy Vernon Room, and Mary Garrett's bedroom.

These decorative additions included two stone lions from a Mandarin palace in Manchuria, sixteen bronze copies of figurines from Herculaneum, and three hundred yellow and white Murano glass lanterns.