True Colors in New York
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The client, a self-described “bachelor girl from Mississippi” with seven grown children and many more grandchildren, was interested in moving from a small East Side pied-à-terre to a place with ample room for small dinners and a steady stream of houseguests. She would also need two rooms of her own. And as the client’s primary residence is in Connecticut, she wanted this project to have a distinctly urban feeling.
She found both the space and the designer close at hand. The apartment she chose was in the same neighborhood, and the person she commissioned to decorate it was Alexa Hampton, whose late father, Mark Hampton, had designed her Connecticut house.
“The client is a great family friend and has been a wonderful champion of mine,” says Hampton, who started working with her father at the age of thirteen. “My father was already ill when she brought the job to us, and she said, ‘I want to do this with Alexa.’”
Hampton began her work with a practically clean slate. The proportions of the apartment were good, but it had been neglected: Every window needed to be replaced, and the walls were in a state of disrepair. “All the surfaces had to be replastered and sanded, and the previous owners had added one too many crown moldings,” she says. “We were able to subdue most of them with paint, though we did end up ripping out the chair rail in the dining room.”
The proportions of the apartment were good, but it had been neglected: Every window needed to be replaced, and the walls were in disrepair.
There were a number of small but significant structural adaptations. A tiny bedroom was dispensed with and integrated into the kitchen, and the room that now does duty as the master sitting room was taken back to its original configuration. “It had been split in two,” remembers Hampton. “The previous owners had used one half as a windowless dining room, and the remaining space, reached through a wall with pocket doors, housed a sofa bed.” Hampton shakes her head. “Truly bizarre. We immediately blew out the wall.”
Because the living room and the adjacent library—the primary public rooms—are at the opposite end of the hall from the kitchen, entertaining guests posed a problem: The client didn’t want to tramp from one end of the apartment to the other for ice. Hampton solved it by turning a vestibule off the library into a bar, lining it with mahogany and installing a drinks cabinet and a hidden ice machine.
Proportion, comfort and a sense of what color and texture can accomplish are hallmarks of the Hampton style. Although the client’s house in Connecticut is by no means casual (it’s filled with English antiques and what Hampton describes as “cabbage chintz”), she saw this project as an opportunity to create a more urban scheme. She brought to it her knowledge of Regency furniture and her taste for porcelain and miniature chairs—perfect for visiting grandchildren.
“We started less with a concept than with a feeling for color, ”Hampton says. “Green kept popping up. My father always told me never to steer anyone away from their palette; the colors people like generally have a real emotional resonance.” She glazed the walls of the entrance hall a pale lettuce green and stained the parquetry a warm mahogany.
The apartment’s layout is unorthodox. Directly across from the entrance, where one would expect to find the living room and perhaps a study, is the master sitting room; the master bedroom is adjacent. The plan underscores the fact that while the resident is clearly hospitable (a pair of sofa beds attests to that), this is a dwelling primarily intended for private, individual use.
The two rooms making up the master suite are of a piece. The silver-walled bedroom—an homage to Syrie Maugham —shines like mother-of-pearl, and its tones are replayed in the sitting room. The same raw silk, albeit differently pleated, was used for the bedcovering and canopy and for the sitting room draperies; the diamond pattern on the cuffed silk slipper chair in the bedroom (“It looks like a Chanel bag,” jokes Hampton) is echoed by the grid of the carpet next door. “In pale rooms I like to use dark mahogany furniture as a counterpoint,” the designer explains, referring to the bed and to the chinoiserie low table in the sitting room. “It creates a dramatic moment.”
Color takes over, however, in the living room, where the wallcovering’s floral pattern is underscored by the sisal rug painted with a flower motif. The upholstery fabrics there are also muted, but visual punch is provided by the red-lacquered secretary, whose colors are repeated—like bright daubs of paint— in the Chinese wedding chest and the red leather nursing chair in the library. There, a wallpaper in a William Morris design sets the tone. “The library is green and red,” says Hampton, “but it’s decidedly not Christmassy. It’s a nice muddy Edwardian green.”
The library’s loden green is echoed in the painted woodwork in the dining room. “It’s a jewel box,” Hampton says. “Among other treasures, it houses a Rembrandt drawing and a portion of the client’s porcelain collection. The nineteenth-century English table and klismos chairs were brought by the client when she moved in.” The painted floor—of Hampton’s own design—is an Arts and Crafts touch that links this space to the Morris pattern in the library
The dining room is down the hall from the kitchen, whose thirties green-marble countertops were left intact (although the cabinets were replaced). The American round pine table is from the client’s own collection, as are the nineteenth-century painted chairs. The focal point is a mural painted by Susannah Martin of a lakeside retreat bordered by mountains—a pastoral touch for an urban, but still decidedly human, apartment. “She’s not one-dimensional,” Hampton says of the client. “She wanted to figure it out as she went along, and it was fun figuring it out with her.”
Would Alexa Hampton’s father have liked the result?
She pauses. “I certainly hope so. We’re all influenced by his taste. I loved working with my father, and I loved his sensibility. But I am younger. I get computers and fax machines; I know how people live now. And I don’t think I’m at all intimidating! But I miss him. He had the answers to the questions I’m interested in asking.”