Mark Hampton (Born 1940) was born and raised in Indiana. He schooled in fine arts and arts history, and cut his decorating teeth with Hicks David, along the lines and curves of modernism, and then with McMillen and Parish Hadley, where he slipped away from modernism into the world of decorating that was inspired by the past. Hampton never had a signature style. To him, decorating was not about bending clients to one's will, or ego or pyrotechnics; it was simple quality that counted and lasted. His first and great gift was friendship, and that was the entrance to his creativity. His particular distinction was that he resonated in whatever style suited a given project and was brilliant at absorbing it and then adapting it to the animate present. His clients were celebrated and rich, but a majority of them were also fraught.
Hampton believed that these rich people were often hard to please and they were proud of it, and he believed they were also short on gratitude. But he befriended them, and calmed them down, and amused them. And then he ensured that he satisfied them, but not quite in the way they anticipated – Hampton gave them rooms in which they could drop some of their pride and cares. All the rooms on which Hampton left his inimitable mark (fingertip, thumb-print, footprint) had an individual character – even for all their seeming effortlessness and pervasive harmony, a pulse. Hampton had a modern attitude, and up until the last he managed to keep his delicate balance between spontaneity and nostalgia.
