Alexa Hampton: Design, Style, and Influence

Interior designer Hampton, who has served as president of her father Mark Hampton’s design company since 1998, debuts with a flashy volume exhibiting the five apartments she’s occupied in the same midtown Manhattan building she moved into in 1995. She pairs discussions of her design choices alongside personal reflections, explaining that she shared her first apartment with her childhood best friend and filled it with “pieces from my father’s storeroom of various samples,” including a white marble Roman-style bust and a pair of small lion sculptures. Hampton recalls being a newlywed filled “with hope and optimism” when she moved into the third apartment and highlights the home’s numerous Greek accents, such as a custom-built table featuring a Greek key motif and a painted rendition of a Parthenon frieze in the living room. Anecdotes about hobnobbing with the rich and famous come across as name-dropping (she mentions eating dinner with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s sister and borrowing dresses as a teenager from fashion designer Bill Blass), but the regal interiors impress and chart the development of Hampton’s sensibilities; for instance, the brown hues that dominate her second apartment are a far cry from the bolder purples and oranges that decorate her current bedroom. It’s a lavish and personal look into a prominent designer’s style. (Oct.)