Barbara D’Arcy White, an interior decorator whose eclectic sense of style helped change Americans’ taste in home furnishings in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when she was a design and merchandising guru at Bloomingdale’s, died on May 10 in Southhampton, N.Y. She was 84.


Her death was confirmed by her husband, Kirk White.


Ms. D’Arcy, as she was known professionally, made an early mark as the chief decorator of the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale’s flagship store at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Those rooms, usually seven or eight roped-off areas on the fifth floor, became a mecca in the 1950s for those who aspired to learn what was stylish, sophisticated, well-made but not too expensive in a living room set or a window treatment.


From 1958 until 1973 she designed hundreds of model rooms. Each was like a stage vignette, with the decorating trend of the moment its star: sleek Danish teak and rosewood living rooms in the 1950s; rooms painted pink, outfitted with inflatable orange furniture and shag rugs in the 1960s; brightly tiled Valencian kitchens in the 1970s; and rooms in rattan, wicker and cane in every decade.


“I would go through the rooms we were doing at the time and dream up personalities, to be able to develop a room’s personality around a kind of person — say, ‘I think this would be a perfect setting for Ernest Hemingway,’ ” Ms. D’Arcy said in a 1986 oral history interview for the Fashion Institute of Technology Archives, describing how she came up with her ideas.


But no matter how fanciful the creative process, she said in another interview, in 1978, the goal was always solidly commercial — “to present things so that people see something and feel that they can’t live without it.”


Ms. D’Arcy was credited with creating or popularizing several styles that still resonate in the American home, including steel and glass furnishings, plaid curtains for children’s rooms, and what she called the Country Fresh look, consisting of faux antiques and cozy clutter.


In the ’50s and ’60s she gave the color orange — her favorite, she said — one of its early moments in the high-style spotlight.


“If European-accented country furniture and glass and steel tables have become national decorative clichés,” Marylin Bender wrote in The New York Times in 1974, “it is because Barbara D’Arcy pioneered and pushed them in her lavish model room settings in the ’60s.”


Ms. D’Arcy, who became a merchandising executive in 1975, traveled in Europe and Asia as part of a Bloomingdale’s team of design scouts. She was among the first Americans to visit the People’s Republic of China on business after its relations with the United States were normalized in 1972. When she found a piece of furniture or an object she liked — she and others sometimes bribed museum guards to let them carry historic pieces of furniture into a courtyard for better light in sketching, photographing and measuring them — she arranged for it to be reproduced, usually by Italian manufacturers. “She and I visited furniture factories in Italy, where she would have to teach them to make a piece of furniture that looked old instead of new, how to stress it,” Marvin Traub, the former chief executive of Bloomingdale’s, said in an interview on Thursday. “It was a new idea to them, but they caught on.”


Mr. Traub, who coined the concept of “retail as theater,” said Ms. D’Arcy was modest about her work early on. “But over time she came to recognize her influence,” he added. “She had enormous impact on the entire American home furnishings industry.”


Barbara D’Arcy was born on April 3, 1928, in Manhattan, the youngest of three children of Ida Marie and James J. D’Arcy. Her mother was an art teacher, her father a manager for a Manhattan moving and storage company whose clients included many of the city’s wealthiest families.