Elissa “Ellie” Forman, the youngest of three girls, is born in Brooklyn to culturally active parents. “My mother would pull me out of class to watch Renata Tebaldi perform at the Metropolitan Opera because she thought it was just as important as reading school books,” she says.
Visits Europe with her family. “As a young child, Italy and Israel had a seminal impact on me in terms of decoration and antiquities,” she says. “My father wouldn’t let us relax by the hotel pool—we were out exploring the cities and walking through churches for hours. He wanted us to learn.”
Works during summer school breaks at Brooklyn’s famed Peter Luger Steak House, which her father purchased in 1950.
Graduates from Barnard College with a degree in British civilization and marries Edgar Cullman, Jr., whom she met during her senior year.
The couple live in Tokyo during her husband’s service in the United States Army. “I’ll never forget the first time I tried to order a Coca-Cola, and no one knew what I was saying!” she recalls with a laugh. “I quickly signed up for language classes and became very good at conversational Japanese. I eventually taught English to businessmen and politicians.”
Upon returning to New York, Cullman enrolls in a master’s program in East Asian studies at Columbia University. She leaves after one year to volunteer at the Japan House Gallery, and later becomes a guest curator at the Museum of American Folk Art, where she and her friend Sandy Brant (above, far left, with Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson) mount two exhibitions, “Andy Warhol’s ‘Folk and Funk’” and “Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America.”
Cullman and her friend Helene-Diane “Hedi” Kravis pitch screenwriter Stanley Jaffe a script. He turns it down, but asks them to decorate his Park Avenue apartment instead. “He had just fired his third designer and said he loved how we had decorated our own homes,” she recalls. Cullman & Kravis is born, operating out of a spare room in Kravis’s apartment. “We knew nothing. We were very lucky and had what some people thought was talent.”
After Kravis’s death, Cullman vows to carry on with the firm. “There was no question that I would continue what we had started,” she says. “I was very committed.”
Takes on projects in New York, New Jersey, Boston, and South Carolina. In 2008, she designs a garden at 392 Hancock Street in Brooklyn for Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, which she dedicates to Kravis.
Co-authors her first book, Decorating Master Class: The Cullman & Kravis Way (Abrams), with colleague Tracey Pruzan. (They later publish two more books, both with Monacelli, in 2013 and 2017.)
Releases a line of country-inspired fabrics with Holland & Sherry. She later launches a collection of rugs with Crosby Street Studios and occasional tables sold under the label Ellie Home.
Participates in her first Kips Bay Decorator Show House. (She designs a second room in 2014 and joins the board of trustees the following year.)
Receives the Albert Hadley Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York School of Interior Design. “It was such an honor because I never went to design school,” says Cullman. “I’m forever grateful to have that seal of approval on my career from an institution that I admire.”
After nearly 35 years in business and overseeing a team of 17 employees, Cullman has no plans of slowing down. “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” she says. “They’ll have to drag me out of here!”