What do you want to be when you grow up?
At age 13, while in school in a very comfortable suburban midwestern community, my class was given an assignment on careers. I researched interior design; more specifically the kind of education that was required to work in that profession, and what the career choice might mean.
At the projects completion I declared to my teacher and peers that I wanted to be an interior designer!
In 1994 Chris Casson Madden asked me if she could photograph some of the bathrooms at the beachfront property I designed for Caroline Hirsch – there are 7-1/2 bathrooms in the house so she had a lot to choose from….
Van Day Truex (1904-79) may be the most significant interior designer that you have never heard.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with Scott Himmel to learn about the offerings in the launch of Truex American Style, a very exciting new line of furniture inspired by Van Day Truex, and his illustrious friends and colleagues including Billy Baldwin, and Francis Elkins, other important American designers of the period (and a few legendary taste-makers thrown in for good measure.)
It bears mentioning that philanthropist Brooke Astor (1902-2007) described Truex as “one of the most charming men I ever knew”, and Albert Hadley (1920-2012) said that “No one influenced American interior design more [than Van Day Truex]”.
This article in Art & Antiques focused on an apartment I shared with my wife and daughter in Greenwich Village, and the integration of an art and decorative arts collection in a family environment…
On a family vacation road trip in 1974 we drove our van down the Pacific Coast Highway – truly one of the most breathtaking routes in America – as it follows the Pacific Coastline.
We started at the northern border of California where housing and other buildings were scant, and as we got closer to San Francisco I started noticing hyper-cool 70’s buildings, house after house after of-the-moment house – and my adrenaline began rushing. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!
In the late 1980’s my then new client, Caroline Hirsch, was looking to purchase land on which to build a new Shingle Style home; she made a very wise decision to purchase 5 acres of property that fronts both the Atlantic Ocean, and Mecox Bay…
