Candace Wheeler (née Thurber; March 24, 1827 – August 5, 1923), traditionally credited as the mother of interior design, was one of America's first woman interior and textile designers. She helped open the field of interior design to women, supported craftswomen, and promoted American design reform. A committed feminist, she intentionally employed women and encouraged their education, especially in the fine and applied arts, and fostered home industries for rural women. She also did editorial work and wrote several books and many articles, encompassing fiction, semi-fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children. She used her exceptional organizational skills to co-found both the Society of Decorative Art in New York City (1877) and the New York Exchange for Women's Work (1878); and she partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany and others in designing interiors, specializing in textiles (1879–1883), then founded her own firm, The Associated Artists (1883–1907).

Throughout her long career Wheeler contributed to the Colonial Revival, the Aesthetic Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement, She was considered a national authority on home decoration, and gained widespread recognition for designing the interior of the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Candace Wheeler was born Candace Thurber on March 24, 1827, in Delhi, New York, west of the Catskill Mountains, but spent her first seven years in Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario. Her parents were Abner Gilman Thurber (1797–1860) and Lucy (née Dunham) Thurber (1800–1892). Candace was the third born of eight siblings: Lydia Ann Thurber (1824-?), Charles Stewart Thurber (1826–1888), Horace Thurber (1828–1899), Lucy Thurber (1834–1893), Millicent Thurber (1837–1838), Abner Dunham Thurber (1839–1899), and Francis Beattie Thurber (1842–1907).

Wheeler had a happy a childhood, though she expressed annoyance at how their father raised them "a hundred years behind the time." Abner was strictly Presbyterian but also a strict abolitionist. He ensured that the family never used any product made by slaves: the family used homemade maple sugar instead of cane sugar and linen woven from flax they grew on their farm instead of southern cotton. Looking back, Candace was convinced their farm had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Abner also loved nature and poetry, and shared these passions with Candace, a kindred spirit. Candace attended an "infant school" in Oswego, where at age six she stitched her first sampler. On return to Delhi she attended and graduated from the Delaware Academy.

On a trip to New York City in 1843, Candace met Thomas Mason Wheeler (1818–1895). Relatively well educated and interested in the arts, he had been a surveyor in the developing Midwest. He was the brother of the Thurbers' minister's wife, whom Candace admired as the first "cultivated" person she had known. Within a year, Tom and Candace married: he was 26, she 17. Candace's marriage and relocation to New York City upended her constrained, rural life. Tom worked for Candace's brothers' wholesale grocery business, then became a "weigher", transferring shipments in the port of New York, and eventually an owner of warehouses in Brooklyn, the Atlantic Docks, a lucrative business during the Civil War. The couple had four children:

Wheeler died on August 5, 1923, at the age of 96.

Wheeler's first professional activity was writing for the American Grocer, a trade publication owned by her wholesale-grocer brothers, when edited by her husband Tom in 1874. The following year she created the "Home Department" for that journal, a pull-out section for grocers' wives and children, which she edited and to which she continued to contribute articles and semi-fiction based on her experiences to date. She hired both her son Jim, who would become a journalist and author, to write stories that reflected his stint as a mariner in the South Pacific, and her sister Lu to write articles about homemaking and home decoration, as well as humorous satires evoking their older relatives, exploiting the rural/urban tensions of the time. Much of Wheeler's life experiences before 1876, including travels abroad, may be gleaned from these early writings.

In 1876, Wheeler visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. She was impressed by the Royal School of Art Needlework's elaborate display, including designs by her favorite designer, Walter Crane, as well as by an exhibit of more practical items embroidered by English women. It was not merely the artistry of the needlework that inspired her; she embraced English idea of needlework as a business that benefited women. While still in Philadelphia, Wheeler conceived of an American version of the Royal School that would include "all articles of feminine manufacture." In her opinion, this model could help "educated" but impoverished women (implying class bias). Years later, in a letter to her niece, Wheeler described herself as "jumping at the possibility of work for the army of helpless women of N.Y. who were ashamed to beg & untrained to work."