What's in Their Library: Duane Hampton

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the world of American interior design, there have been few families with as much smarts, curiosity, and style as the Hamptons. Mark Hampton certainly ranked at the top of his profession, and his presence is still missed today. Duane, his wife, is a noted author whose books on her husband's design work and his watercolors- Mark Hampton: An American Decorator and Mark Hampton: The Art of Friendship respectively- hold places of prominence in my library and the libraries of many others. And their daughter, Alexa, is one of the top young decorators today. I think of her as the thinking man and woman's designer. Oh, and a book was recently published on her work as well. The other daughter, Kate, is an acclaimed actress who has appeared on Broadway and on TV. Wow. Talent seems to run in the family.

Somewhere I had read that Duane was a voracious reader, so I knew that she would provide us with an interesting list of her favorite books. (In fact, she has so many books in her home that she made a "Dec Lit Side Table" out of some of her current favorites. You'll see it below.) Her list features books on design and history as well as works of fiction and classic literature. She sent me an essay on her love of books and those she considers favorites, so I'm publishing it below. It's a different format from what I usually publish, but I think you'll find it as charming as I did.

And don't forget- Duane will be the honored guest at a lecture and tea at the Atlanta Decorators Show House this Saturday, April 16 at 4pm. She will be discussing her latest book. For more information, click here or visit decoratorsshowhouse.com.





"If it’s true that A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life, my dearest hope is that, after nosing about in my collection of books and related memorabilia, forensic “literary profilers” (who apparently exist, according to Goeff Nicholson in “Are We What We Read?” in the New York Times Book Review Jan. 30, 2011)—but, most especially, my children—might generously conclude that I spent my time well. Along those same lines, the title “Books do Furnish a Room,” from Anthony Powell’s well-worn 12-volume series of A Dance to the Music of Time,(also on the shelves), is equally relevant. My world is overrun by books! All my rooms are book rooms! In fact, an additional Books Do Furnish a Room, a picture book of an assortment of personal libraries, also has a place on my shelves—as if to emphasize my penchant for accumulation!

I have often in the past (and in my new book ”Mark Hampton An American Decorator”) fondly credited my husband Mark with verbosity, but the truth is I am just as bad. Especially when it comes to talking—or writing—about the books I cherish and choose to have about me. As you will see.




I have sent you photographs of a sampling of books I have collected on shelves, on coffee tables, on night tables, under sofas and beds and skirted tables and behind curtains.




They include the late-lamented, extraordinary Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet; Bill Bryson’s At Home (I’ll read anything by Bryson, and love this); Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life (anything by him, too—this made me teary); Jane Brox’s Brilliant (a history of electric lighting—just don’t get me started on the horrible bulb dilemma); Patrick and Thompson’s An Uncommon History of Common Things (about everything from high heels to safety pins); and my current fiction crushes Julian Fellowes’ Past Imperfect: A Novel and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth.




I have even sent along a photo of an end table—that I actually use, with caution—I put together using most of the wonderful decorating books published last year; not coincidentally incorporating those my daughter and I published. Was there a subliminal edict that enjoined us all to “Publish or Perish”?


Many of the books I own are the obvious selections of a couple with a mutual love of art, architecture and decorating. They have been accumulating for years; sometime in the early 1980’s Mark said, “I collect every new decorating book that comes out and I have tons of gallery catalogs and auction catalogs.” And this is 2011!




Some volumes served as reminder of trips we took to see them like Chatsworth: The House (our visit documented in MH AAD); Axel Vervoordt: Timeless Interiors (his castle/show room we traveled to see with Bill Blass and Glenn Bernbaum for a story in a travel magazine); the massive Groussay auction catalog (we saw the house with David Hicks and Rosamond Bernier just after Beistegui died); Dreaming of Florence (the cover is the view from the summer school I went to one college summer); Inside Rome (much of which we toured with the American Academy); In House (our friend Derry Moore’s excellent photographs of houses he likes); Historic Houses of Paris (where Mark and Alexa worked on Pamela Harriman’s rooms).





There’s a special section on the shelf by the fireplace for Palladio books and one for Sargent books and catalogs. We have both editions of The Finest Rooms (both Alexa’s bedroom and mine made the new Thomas Jayne edition).





One of the picture books I particularly love is Stafford Cliff’s The Way We Live which is an all-encompassing, beautifully photographed ( by Gilles de Chabaneix) compendium of streets, house exteriors, house interiors, vignettes and views from all over the world. There is a particularly charming segment devoted to photographs of interiors with windows looking out on the view (rather like modern versions of the 19th century paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that just opened a few days ago). I always look into the book when some part of the world is in the news (and, these days, worry that the beauty, mystery, serenity and way of life I see in those photographs is in jeopardy).





Another book I love is Crenshaw, Tucker and Warren’s Discovering the Great Masters, an astonishing, scholarly sort of pop-up book for adults that explores the iconography of major works of art.


In addition to our predictable love of picture books of exteriors and interiors, Mark and I always loved books where amazing settings and interiors were described, settings like Tara, Brideshead, Miss Havisham's house, Marcel's childhood bedroom, Anna Karenina's hallway, Mme. Forestier’s conservatory-like drawing room in Bel-Ami, Nana’s cramped dining room, and the rooms and lawns of Howard’s End.





In 1971 we joined a reading group of friends who wanted to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and felt that only regular meetings would make us stick with it. The concept proved so successful that we went on to Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolf, Virginia Woolf, Forester, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Hardy, Faulkner, James, Balzac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mme Murasaki, Ishiguro, Marquez, Borges, Powell, Waugh, Twain, Grant, Aciman, Mahfoz, dos Passos, Cather, Nabokov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Levi and Calvino, etc., etc. You get the picture. We are now in our 40th year and reading Zola and de Maupassant this go- round. Along with generations of readers, we had the houses, gardens, and interiors—and their inhabitants—from all those books seep fully furnished into our brains directly from the written word. So much so, that for many of us, most filmed versions prove disappointing.


The future generation segment:




Mark told me his adventures in reading about art and architecture began with Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels (Oh, the confidence of that title!), so I have garnered enough copies for all the family.





My first experience of the power of design was the transformation (in a process intriguingly called “the magic”) by Ram Das and the Indian gentleman of the cold, barren attic of Miss Minchin’s school into a bower of beauty and comfort for the mistreated Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. From that moment on, Sara (and this reader) was given hope for better times and prettier surroundings. Later in the book, in what would be now be called an “aha moment,” Sara says to Mr. Carrisford, a.k.a. the Indian gentleman, “Oh, I know Lascars . . . I was born in India.” I thrill to read it even now—and have always looked for moments as exciting as that in the novels and stories I have read over the years. I can’t wait to read “A Little Princess” to our grandchildren.





And, of course, I could not live without The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker to lighten my life—and I have saved some packets of special ones for our grandchildren will see what made their grandparents laugh."


All images courtesy of Duane Hampton. The photograph of Duane, above, was taken by Mark during a trip to Italy.