Mark Hampton: An American Decorator
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Product Description
A celebration of the career of the late interior designer Mark Hampton (1940–1998), whom the New York Times called “an icon of American Style.”
In the tradition of Albert Hadley and David Hicks, this is a comprehensive look at the career of the late Mark Hampton, one of the most legendary and admired American interior designers of the twentieth century. A classic American success tale, Hampton grew up in tiny-town Indiana and went on to worldwide fame. He started his career effective for some of the greatest interior designers of the age: Mrs. Henry Parish II, David Hicks, and McMillen, Inc. He later went on to design for such clients as Brooke Astor, Estee Lauder, Jacqueline Onassis, and the Henry Kissingers, in addition to his work on the White House, Camp David, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the American College in Rome. Known for the tremendous depth and breadth of his knowledge, Hampton refused to be pigeonholed into a trademark style, moving effortlessly from sleek modernism to English country and back again. A highly well loved lecturer who drew crowds, Hampton was also the leader of two books, as well as a designer of both furniture and fabrics.
Rich with original materials including Hampton’s watercolors, sketches, and notebooks, as well as hundreds of images of Hampton’s vital commissions, and impeccably researched and intimately written by his widow, Duane Hampton, this will be a visual feast for everyone interested in interiors as well as an vital addition to the history of interior design.
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Dissapointing book. It could have been better.
His work was permanently nice, and I remember a lot of projects from magazines publications.
But it doesn’t come across.
But his work is vital within American decorating history.
His Drawings were gorgeous. If he was living today,
he would do more gorgeous and ecclectic work
, and probably less classical.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
MARK HAMPTON: AN AMERICAN DECORATOR is a biographical book as well as a decorating book. The incredible thing about Mr. Hampton is that he was an elegant gentleman as well as an amazingly gifted decorator. The thing I like about his work is that he made wonderful rooms that never had that “decorated” look and personality. His designs were the kind that you or I or whoever could sit down and delight in and feel comfortable in. This wonderful biographical expose by his wife is fantastic reading and fantastic decorating at its best. Go buy it!
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I grew up in a Mark Hampton house, so the theme is near and dear to me. The book publisher needs to do a bit of spell checking though.
Also several of the photographs are printed backwards.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Talk about being born for the job! When Mark Hampton was wearing shoes, his feet were exactly 12 inches long — he could pace off a room lacking a tape measure.
In every traditional way, though, you look at his background and marvel how he became the most celebrated American decorator of the 1980s and 1990s. He was born and raised in Indiana. His father was the local undertaker. In boyhood summers, he swam in a creek. As a teenager, he rode a tractor and helped with the harvest. And then, after college, he went to law school before switching to art history.
This is not, you reflect, the background of a name who will grow up to make gorgeous yet comfortable homes for President and Mrs. George H.W. Bush (including the White House, Blair House, the residence of the Vice President, Camp David and more), Brooke Astor, Carter and Susan Burden, Anne Bass and a gaggle of Fifth Avenue gazillionaires.
And yet…. there were signs.
When he was six years ancient, he told one of his mother’s friends, “Jean, that dress doesn’t do a thing for you.”
When he was twelve, he refinished the shutters of his bedroom window.
And then he set about learning everything about everything.
I met Mark and Duane Hampton and their delightful and ubiquitous daughters in the early `80s. For the first few years, I kept my mouth shut and just listened as, over dinner, Mark talked about everything but decorating. One night, prompted to speak by some self-destructive impulse that years of therapy had rumor has it that not cured, I ventured an opinion about a certain painting by the German artist Max Beckmann. This was, I thought, way outside Mark’s expertise. Well, didn’t I get schooled that night….
Mark’s intellectual range was a circle, ever widening. ”I have absolutely no interest in a trademark style,” he clarified. ”Some would say, ‘He has no style, no look.’ Well, I don’t get it. That isn’t what I set out to do. I just set out to be a decorator, to do a excellent job and have fun. I’ve wondered with envy at people who like one thing and work at it and it becomes their realm. Persons people who can say, ‘I like Winterthur but I despise Lyndhurst,’ people who have these enormous, refined senses of despise. I like Winterthur, Lyndhurst, Greek Revival and French houses. Of course, I daydream constantly about English houses, and persons shingle-style American houses…”
Okay, so he didn’t have a style. Of course he had some preferences — English-tinged rooms, with chintz-covered chairs and some swag in the curtains, obelisks and urns on tables — but he had a Midwestern resistance to gaudy showplaces that looked as if they only lacked fee tags. Hanging a set of plates on a wall was about more than aesthetics: “I took fantastic pains to place the nails in a dark part of the pattern of the paper because I thought (hoped) that in a few years I would probably be taking the plates down and hanging posters of Bruce Springsteen or whomever and I wanted to be sure the nail holes from a previous era would go unnoticed.”
Mark Hampton died — he was just 58 — in 1998. Because he was smart in every area of his life, he’d had the excellent sense to marry a natural American beauty who writes extravagantly well. And now Duane Hampton has produced “Mark Hampton: An American Decorator”, a combination biography, analysis and catalog of his work that is thick as a college yearbook and ravishing as the flowers in the dining room of the Carlyle Hotel.
You can be dazzled by these pictures and conclude, “Gorgeous, yes, but every client is so rich, every room is so huge — there’s not a single thought here that I can use.” And you’d be right. This isn’t a book for do-it-yourself decorators who want to make champagne rooms on a beer budget. It’s something else: a high-wire act, balancing money and taste but caring less about either than about comfort.
Mark Hampton’s first fantastic gift was friendship, and that was the entrance to his creativity. His clients were rich and celebrated, but they were also fraught. For these are rich people, regularly fleeting on gratitude, regularly hard to please and proud of that. Mark Hampton befriended them, and amused them, and calmed them down. And then he pleased them, just not reasonably in the way they anticipated — he gave them rooms in which they could drop some of their cares.
“We all know that interior decoration is seen by many as a frivolous career full of ruffles and flourishes and preposterous fashion statements,” he wrote. “Yet to transform the bleak and the lonely into welcoming places where one can live seems to me an vital and worthwhile goal in life. Sometimes the transformation can stun the eye, sometimes simply gladden it, but these are not frivolous pursuits.”
In fact, they are not. Which is why this book isn’t really about decorating — it’s about art. Indeed, it is art.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5