Surrounding her is ample proof of her well-honed eye: chairs found at Italy’s Parma antiques market, a mantel she designed for Chesneys, neoclassical commodes and consoles and obelisks and urns. At one end, a library holds an archive of shelter magazines, many of them from the 1970s and ’80s when the work of her father—the legendary decorator Mark Hampton, whose firm she took over in 1998—was regularly featured.
His watercolors are also displayed throughout the room, among them depictions of the Buccellati earrings he once gave to her mother and a room by Madeleine Castaing, a design hero for both father and daughter.
As pretty as it is, the office is also practical. The small new kitchen is fitted out with a wine cooler and an ice machine. “My favorite,” she says emphatically of the latter. “I had to have that.” At the back is a small private conference room that can double as a retreat for her husband. Picture lights, sconces, and lamps all throughout can accommodate various lighting permutations. “We put in track lights so we could show clients true colors,” explains Hampton, for whom the space serves as a virtual laboratory. “I can show clients a mahogany door and a faux-painted mahogany door. I can show them what a jib door is. They can examine a level-5 paint job and compare that to a normal one. I want clients to see the options, and how they operate in real life.”
