[1] Being multilingual gave her the opportunity to be internationally active and to be known beyond the US as a writer, speaker, interior decorator, wallpaper designer, and collector of antique furniture.
Although not formally schooled in interior decoration, Nancy McClelland believed that her on-the-job training and study of architecture and antiques abroad, along with her experience, made her a professional.
"[2] Throughout her long career, she wrote and lectured about the necessity of training for decorators, which helped to separate professionals from the amateurs.
While at Vassar, she was an editor of the yearbook, The Vassarion, served as her senior class's poet, and frequently published her poetry for the school newspaper, The Miscellany News.
[5] McClelland first started her career as a reporter of stories of women's interests, schools, and clubs for the Philadelphia Press from 1897 to 1900.
During her stay, she met the leading French artist of the 20th century Pablo Picasso and also literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature Gertrude Stein.
[1] In 1913, McClelland returned to the US and opened Au Quartrième on the fourth floor of Wanamaker's in New York, a shop that sold mostly European antiques.
Continuing to go abroad for shopping trips up to three times a year, McClelland brought back decorative furnishings of all types, including an old English Tudor house.
[9] McClelland employed apprentices at her firm, including Mary Dunn, Inez Croom, and Michael Greer.
[9] The firm decorated interiors not only for private homes but also for public institutions such as McClelland's alma mater Vassar College.
McClelland also worked with such clients as Henry Francis DuPont, John D. Rockefeller, and Electra Havemeyer Webb.
he was responsible for finding the infamous Chinese wallpaper now in the Chinese Parlor at the Winterthur Museum[17] In addition, she restored and/or decorated various houses and museums, such as Mount Vernon, the plantation home of George Washington in Virginia, and the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, the Morris- Jumel Mansion in New York, Brompton Hall, now part of the University of Mary Washington, Blair House in Washington, D.C., and Stanton Hall in Natchez, Mississippi.
She gave lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helped with the WPA Index of American Design, and has served on committees for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
[1] She was awarded with the Michael Friedsam Medal of the Architectural League of New York for service to the cause of the industrial arts.
[1][13] According to the Quote Investigator website and urban legend researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake, McClelland wrote an article titled A Mystery of the Paris Exposition in The Philadelphia Inquirer of November 14, 1897, that eventually evolved into the Vanishing Hotel Room urban legend.