(This month, I have been hosting my annual High Style sale at Brooks Books Etc on eBay. It is a celebration of all things glamorous and chic, focusing on books relating to the Beautiful People, High Society and American aristocracy: the Vanderbilts, Astors and Whitneys. Such divas of elegance as Diana Vreeland, Millicent Rogers and Slim Keith. I’ve also included a batch of tomes on interior design and architecture, offering works by Billy Baldwin, Elsie de Wolfe and Dorothy Draper (all sold by now, alas). I met Billy Baldwin back in the 70s while staying in Key West. I invited him and his friend Michael Jardine to dinner back at my guest house. I nearly killed them both with a jambalaya I concocted that was so heavily spiced, they had to leave the table and lie down upstairs in my bedroom. You can’t help but laugh about such things in hindsight.

Another of those stylish figures that I got to know back when was Mark Hampton, the legendary interior decorator. I wrote the following article about him in March 1988 for Quest magazine. It was an early piece for me and admittedly not one of my best. But I guess he didn’t mind it too much since he agreed to pose for the cover of another issue of Quest a few years later when I edited its New York Look special issue. Sharp-eyed visitors to this website might even notice that the trim on my front page is derived from one of Mark’s books. I later worked with his lovely wife Duane Hampton on a separate piece for Quest. She was a bright spot in a difficult time for me. I’ll always be grateful to both of them for their kind friendship and good will.)

Master of the Drawing Room

The first thing that strikes one upon meeting the celebrated interior designer Mark Hampton is that his personality is as lavishly decorated as any of the world famous houses, museums, clubs and public places he’s worked on around the globe. Like a character from a Wildean drawing room comedy, each comment he makes is deliberately phrased, furnished with clever bons mots, embellished by amusing anecdotes. One will note, too, a mellifluous Anglo lilt to his voice — an inflection that is definitely Upstairs, not Downstairs — that obscures his midwestern roots. His vocabulary as well is adorned with ornate expressions such as “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “fabulous,” and “gorgeous.” If, as Wilde insisted, life is an imitation of art, then Mark Hampton’s carefully constructed image mirrors his talent for design beautifully.

“I always wanted to be a decorator,” Mark Hampton says, sitting in a natty suit at a massive white marble travertine-top table situated dramatically in his attractive penthouse office. As he speaks, Mark sketches an imaginary decor on a sheet of white drafting paper. His pencil strokes are swift and effortless. A room takes shape, curtains are created, a tablecloth is added. One gets the impression he’s envisioned just such a room ten thousand times before. Without skipping a beat, the conversation continues. The drama of his childhood unfolds. As a young boy living in Indiana, Mark “grew tired of making jack o’ lanterns, valentines and seasonal drawings” like the other kids in school.
Forging a friendship with his teacher, he graduated to grander toys. “She taught me the difference between Greek Revival and Georgian,” he explains. Soon he was sketching “lots of Victorian houses with towers,” like those he saw in Charles Addams cartoons in The New Yorker. “I’ve always adored haunted houses,” he adds, especially the one Dickens so vividly depicted in Great Expectations. “I always wondered how Miss Havisham could be miserable living in that house!”

By the age of thirteen, Mark was eager to train his burgeoning aesthetic eye on his own surroundings — so with his parents’ permission he redid his room. “I installed wonderful antique walnut shutters which I lovingly stripped down and carefully refinished.” He’d discovered his medium of artistic expression. After attending De Pauw College in Indiana and spending a year studying at the London School of Economics, Mark received his masters in art history from New York University. Soon he was apprenticing with David Hicks in England and Sister Parish here in the States. The next six years he devoted to the firm McMillen, Inc., breaking away in 1976 to found his own company, Mark Hampton, Inc. During the last twelve years, he’s toiled on residential projects in West Germany, France, Ireland, Mexico and Venezuela. In America, he’s established his reputation by restoring many of the nation’s most important buildings: the Naval Observatory (home to the Vice-President and his wife), Gracie Mansion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design. A true professional, Mark is much admired for his attentiveness and dedication to his clients, although a former assistant nicknamed him Louis XIV because of his fiery temper.

Now, at forty-seven, Mark has undertaken the prize task of refurbishing Blair House in Washington D.C., working in tandem with Mario Buatta. The early 19th-century structure, built by the Blair family, “was simply falling down. It had been badly used, like a hotel. No major work had been done in twenty years…and the furniture collection had grown like topsy.” Working with Mario, Mark says, “is loads of fun.” Although for Mrs. Selwa Roosevelt, America’s Chief of Protocol, it has proven to be rather a perplexing partnership. According to Mario, she constantly confuses him for Mark and vice-versa. One day after she again called Mario “Mark,” he turned around and pointedly called her “Eleanor.” That did the trick. She turned pink, Mario says.

A preference for the traditions and craftmanship of the past is the centerpiece of Mark Hampton’s decorating style. A cursory glance at his office confirms it. The walls are imitation Ashlar stone executed in impeccable trompe l’oeil by the London painter Jim Smart. Dispersed throughout the space is an abundance of architectural drawings and an
obelisk or two. Against one wall is a hefty 19th-century console table done in the style of William Kent, complete with carved lions, paws and scrolls. Propped on top is a small oil painting of the Villa Torlonea done by one of Sargent’s pupils. By the windows which open onto an impressive terrace, one can’t help but notice an old three-sided Victorian clerk’s desk. Dominating the room is a lengthy William IV sofa (circa 1835) casually draped with an unfurled bolt of extraordinary fabric. Perhaps his most cherished items are the photographs of his two teenage daughters and his wife, Duane.

Asked if he senses a rapport with inanimate objects, the books, objets d’art, and furnishings which comprise the trappings of his work and play, Mark responds warmly. “Like Proust’s madeleine, an object can call to mind endless memories.” One such item is a plaster model of the Venus de Milo which he proudly displays amidst other more valuable pieces. “I used to have one as a child that an elderly aunt gave me,” he explains. It was a high-quality reproduction she’d picked up at an exposition in Paris in the 1890s. But his fondness for the sculpture got the better of him. “I was forever touching it, moving it around. I worried it so much that I eventually borke it.” Later, riding in a taxi in Paris, he saw an almost identical statue in a store window, stopped the cab, ran in, and bought it.
It’s precisely this sense of immediacy and nostalgia that Mark hopes to unleash in his clients. “I make an effort to find out actual things people like. I travel with them, look at a variety of installations, take them to see other people’s rooms.” How someone reacts to another person’s place has a great bearing on what he decides his client appreciates most. Still, it boils down to individual tastes. “They have to have a real idea for themselves,” he says. “Certain people say ‘What’s new?’ It’s inevitable that people do. But it’s not my concern. I’d rather know what a person truly likes.”

Occasionally, Hampton discovers he can’t work with someone because the client’s demands clash with the needs of the house itself. “Just before Christmas,” he relates, “I went up to see a house in the country. It has been ruined by its owners. They chopped into the gorgeous moldings, lowered the ceilings, and put a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. The house should have been left alone.” Some alterations, of course, are unavoidable. “Does the bathroom work for modern man?” he asks. “Or more specifically for the modern woman?” And there’s always the matter of renovating the kitchen. Quite often he has no other choice but to rip it out and put in a brand new one. “Only the most elderly decrepit patrician people can put up with an old kitchen!” he declares.

One wonders how Miss Havisham would respond to that. If she had employed Mark Hampton to redo her house, she might have lived happily ever after.