Alexa Hampton, photographed in her self

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TK; ILLUSTRATION BY TK
Alexa Hampton,
photographed in her
self-decorated Hamptons
home, is one of the cochairs
of this summer’s Hampton
Designer Showhouse.
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Superlatives
PEOPLE, CULTURE, STYLE
SOCIAL STUDIES
her name speaks for itself
HAMPTON DESIGNER SHOWHOUSE COCHAIR ALEXA HAMPTON TAPS INTO HER FAMILY’S LEGACY
AND HISTORY ON THE SOUTH FORK TO INFORM HER BREATHTAKING DESIGNS. BY R. COURI HAY
“Y
ou could say I was born into the Hamptons, since it’s my last “The living room is really dark brown with a wonderful upholstery covname,” jokes interior designer Alexa Hampton, who this year ered in either a Fortuny or a chintz, but all of them became slipcovered
joins Jamie Drake as honorary design cochair of the 2013 with white on white stripes,” says Hampton, who favors local landmarks
Hampton Designer Showhouse, which benefits the Southampton such as Mecox, English Country Antiques, and Old Town Crossing for her
Hospital, opening with a gala preview cocktail party on Saturday, July own décor. “It’s hilarious because, of course, only a totally urban family
20. “We got the house my mother presently has in the village of would consider a dark brown room with white trim country-looking—I
Southampton in 1983; my kids have rooms here, my sister has a room, so guess it’s progressively urban, but I love it.”
Also like her father, Hampton is the author of two tomes—Decorating in
we treat it like the family compound.”
Detail (Clarkson Potter), due out this fall, and The
Alexa’s father was the legendary interior designer
Language of Interior Design (Clarkson Potter), in which
Mark Hampton, who worked with everyone from
she describes “the Julie Andrews approach” to interior
President George H. W. Bush to Jackie Kennedy—who
design—once you learn the notes, Contrast, Color,
was also the editor on Mark’s second book, Legendary
Proportion, and Balance, you can “sing” most anything.
Decorators of the Twentieth Century (Doubleday)—even
“I don’t think it’s a credit to this field to promote the
Brooke Astor. (“How could you not be inspired by
notions that design is without rationale or without rules,”
someone who lived in that Albert Hadley room with
she says. “There are some very valid reasons why we do
the red lacquer walls and the brass inlay?”) Alexa
started interning for her father when she was just 13. “I
—ALEXA HAMPTON what we do. I think it is a good thing to be practical.”
Her need for design to be practical as well as beaualways wanted to grow up and be a decorator like
daddy,” says Hampton, who owns the Mark Hampton company name tiful is another way she shares her father’s aesthetic. “The generation I
under her umbrella corporation Alexa Hampton Inc. “He and I could am of informs how I live and, hence, how I design,” says Hampton, who
draw, so it made me immediately associate myself with him. I would graduated from Brown University and did graduate studies at New York
University’s Institute of Fine Arts in New York and Florence, Italy.
assume that most of my bag of tricks is filled with ‘Mark-isms.’”
Mark Hampton’s style was most happily displayed at the family’s “When I get to work on a very formal interior, I enjoy it immeasurably
Southampton home, and it remains one of Alexa’s favorites of his designs.
continued on page 96
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ERIC STRIFFLER
“The minute you
start believing
the good things
people say, you’re
in trouble.”
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Displayed in this
living room, Alexa
Hampton’s designs
are both sophisticated
and comfortable.
continued from page95
because it is so unusual. I think, generally speaking, interiors are a lot more lax than when my father
was alive and practicing. People don’t have enormous staffs; we all live in our kitchens, people are
wearing yoga pants—it’s a totally different world.
My father, when he died, never owned a cell phone.
Can you imagine?”
Hampton has been on Architectural Digest’s top
100 list since 2002. “Any time you have someone tell you something good about yourself, I’m
sure everybody feels unworthy, right?” Hampton says. “You just get thrilled, but nervous, and
you don’t want to believe it, because the minute you start believing the good things people say,
you’re in trouble.”
However, as a wife and the mother of twin boys, Michalis and Markos, age 6, and 4-year-old
daughter Aliki, Hampton is far from “in trouble” in her rapidly expanding career. Currently,
she designs lines for Stark Carpet, Visual Comfort, and Hickory Chair as well as fabrics for
Kravet. She’s also the first American designer to create mantels for Chesney’s and has also just
launched the Alexa Hampton Home collection for HSN. “What’s interAlexa Hampton’s
esting about interior design right now, it is totally de rigueur to have
fabrics collection
for Kravet (HERE AND
mass-market lines,” she says of her collection that features linens and
BELOW) is inspired by
home accents. “It’s not a career-killer to be on television. We’re branchthe Northeastern
coastal landscape.
ing out and trying new things; it’s a new era,
and it’s exciting. ”
On top of all this, she sits on a variety of
boards, including the New York Landmarks
Conservancy. So how does she balance it all?
“Does anybody you know have balance?”
Hampton laughs. “You just are who you are,
and you do what you do.” H
SOUTH FORK
SECRETS
*on summering in the hamptons
“I love Sant Ambroeus. I’m a total
Euro wannabe. I married a Euro,
and we’ve had three little Euros,
and I still just love it.”
*on her famous father
“As proper as he was, he had an
incredibly saucy sense of humor.
He didn’t use it a lot, but he could
have a very filthy mouth, which I
brought out in him because I have an
extraordinarily filthy mouth. It would
amuse us to be very bawdy.”
*on her recurring nightmare
“I constantly wake up thinking that I
haven’t graduated from college. It’s a
horrible, horrible dream. I graduated
with honors! But if Freud were alive,
he’d probably say that it’s anxiety
about achievement. And maybe when
you’re the daughter of somebody
very famous in a field, and you follow
him into that field, that’s a constant
companion. And I’m ok with that.”
*on mixing high and low
in her designs
“While I have a lot of custom pieces in
my professional life, I’m not afraid to
use things from the mass market.
They’ve gotten so much better in the
past 10 years. I don’t mind finding
things that are flat-out inexpensive—
why would you want something solely
because you can describe its cost?”
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