Alexa Hampton

How I Got Here


As the daughter of a famous and beloved decorator, I have often been asked when I knew I wanted to go into the very business that my father, Mark Hampton, helped pioneer alongside many greats such as David Hicks, Sister Parish, Albert Hadley, Mario Buatta, and the like, all of whom most shaped the profession into what it resembles today. As I have answered this question so many times in just the same way over many, many years, I will put it down, here and now, in writing, so I can easily refer to this as my official printed response.

Like many people who thrive in New York City, my parents, having grown up elsewhere, were not that rare breed of native-born New Yorkers. They met, married, and moved there together as recent college graduates. My father, like many cool cats before him, hailed from Indiana (see Halston, Bill Blass, and Cole Porter). My mother, Duane Flegel, had a more circuitous path. She was born in Portland, Oregon, spent a year in Thailand, and then came back to the United States to settle in Pennsylvania for her high school years. She and my father began courting after meeting in Europe one summer during college, and when they finally arrived as a couple in New York, they each attended graduate school to attain their master’s degrees—he in northern Renaissance art, and she in English.

Not-so-fun fact: I am the only person in my immediate family without a graduate degree. I gave up my graduate career after a year at my father’s illustrious alma mater: New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. I have since had the extreme honor of receiving two honorary PhDs, one from the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and the other from the New York School of Interior Design. (My joke is that I have twice the degrees but half the knowledge. I am not sure if I am actually amused by this.)

New York, to my mind, is for those who will take it. As with many working professionals (and I bet all those who are “children of”), I have often experienced imposter syndrome. Does it count that I was born here? Does it count that I came up through the ranks of a company owned by my father? Does it count as success, given that I bear his last name? It is all impossible to answer and surely not worth the breath to ask. As the Magic 8 Ball tells us, “Reply hazy, try again.” But, as youngsters, we all think that the world will be our oyster. What isn’t in our grasp? Ah, the folly and arrogance of youth.

As all the studies confirm, American children score highest in confidence and not much else. To my child’s mind, my parents’ life seemed thrilling (and it was). Hard work during the day, fancy parties at night, and glamorous trips to beautiful places seemed just the thing. I was born, and remain, an extreme extrovert. I confidently wanted to crash all of my parents’ parties and be included in all their trips. Their friends were so much fun! There was always room at the table for my sister and me and, for the most part, it could be terribly entertaining to be there. (I will not get into too much detail about the time we were served oeuf en gelée at Lee Radziwill’s—yes, the princess and younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—but I will tell you that my father pinching me hard under the table let it be known that I would have to eat that disgusting, congealed witches’ brew and that there would be no escape. So, there were definitely moments of resistance if not outright defiance. At least I also got to sneak downstairs to the TV room that particular weekend, where her patient son Anthony let me watch my first Saturday Night Live episode with him. I was somewhere between eight and ten, and he was a saint in his twenties. I remember thinking the Coneheads were ridiculous.)

I could draw at an early age, and I decided that, well, if my father can draw and I can draw, surely I should look toward him as an example for my future. Right? I mean the similarities were obvious (they were not). So, when I hit thirteen, I began working in his office for a few weeks that summer. What did this mean, you might ask? In the beginning, I would read romance novels at the front desk and answer calls. I imagine I presented to my father’s long-suffering colleagues as a hideous facsimile of Eloise trying to regale the staff of the Plaza, and they had to endure it. But I persisted in showing my genuine interest in interior decorating, and I kept coming back each summer. I’d go to the fabled Decoration & Design Building, home to most of the New York City fabric houses open only to the trade, to return or pick up samples for the decorators. Eventually, I was allowed to shop for them as my list of responsibilities grew.

Somewhere during this time, my mother and her friend Louise Grunwald (then Melhado) opened an antiques shop called MH Stockroom. Their Aladdin’s cave in that tiny, by-appointment-only space was beyond wonderful to visit. Even better, they replenished their store during shopping trips abroad (mon dieu!). Between MH Stockroom and Niall Smith Antiques on Bleecker Street, my passion for souvenirs from the grand tour (an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rite-of-passage trip that many aristocratic English college graduates took to the Continent to round out their education in classical art, history, and culture) was cemented for all time.

However, it was really when I was not in the office that the work of influence was wending its way through me. My academically minded parents wanted to tour houses and museums and galleries, ad nauseam, quite literally. (In my first book, I mentioned throwing up at Giverny, but I also threw up at Harry’s Bar in Florence, all over their dining room. I threw up all over the English countryside. I threw up in Tuscany. I threw up traveling through India. I even threw up once in my father’s face as he begged me to try to wait to get upstairs to our apartment’s bathroom.) In between all this dyspepsia, however, we were actually making it to all those museums and houses and antiques stores. What began as torture, boredom, and illness turned into fun, and, eventually, I was hooked.

These days, as a parent, I realize now that what my parents were doing then was teaching me and my sister a second language, a visual language by which to see and register good design. They kept speaking often and at great length in that language until we became fluent. Period. The museum-going was an obvious tactic, but an insidious campaign as well. Our exposure to the dwellings of interesting tastemakers, architects, doyennes, writers, and others was frequently wrapped up in happy occasions. Beauty came with Christmas. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence was smuggled in under the cover of gelato. And this is how my influences came to take root, and I am grateful for it.