The American designer Candace Wheeler was deeply associated with the Clemenses and their home, both as an important participant in the interior redecoration and later as a family friend.

Inspired by a British movement to teach needlework skills to women, she founded the New York Society of Decorative Art in 1877 and the New York Exchange for Women’s Work in 1878. In 1879 she and Louis Comfort Tiffany, a scion of the jewelry family, founded the interior design firm Tiffany & Wheeler, which with the addition of other artists became Louis C. Tiffany & Company, Associated Artists. Wheeler was responsible primarily for the firm’s textile designs, and is mentioned briefly in Clemens’s journal in relation to the 1881 redecoration of the house, but the family friendship did not blossom until the mid-1880s.

As one of America’s first female interior and textile designers, she became known as the “mother” of interior design, opening the field to other women and supporting their right to work and exercise economic independence. While Wheeler wrote several books on design, her career as an artist lay mainly in textile and wallpaper design, modeling colors and patterns on American flowers.

Wheeler’s daughter, Dora Wheeler Keith, painted portraits of Clemens family members and others in Hartford, including the portrait of Samuel Clemens displayed on the third-floor landing of the house today. The Clemenses paid a visit in the summer of 1890 to Wheeler’s artistic colony, the Onteora Club, in New York State. In later life she was highly regarded as a designer, and directed the interior decoration of the Women’s Pavilion of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her 1880s “Honeycomb” and “Spiderwebs” wallpaper designs were used in the 2016 restoration of the “Mahogany Room” guest suite in the Mark Twain House.