McCarthy Brian J - The Parish-Hadley Tree of Life: An Intimate History of the Legendary Design Firm

Published in 2015 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang
An imprint of ABRAMS

Copyright 2015 Brian McCarthy and Bunny Williams

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959138

ISBN: 978-1-61769-170-6

Editor: Judith Nasatir with Andrea Danese and Shawna Mullen
Designer: Doug Turshen with David Huang
Production Manager: True Sims

The text of this book was composed in Bembo and Requiem.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: Mrs. Parish and Mr. Hadley in the doorway of the firms Madison Avenue office. In the Sixty-Third Street office, c. 1989, are rear (l-r), Brian McCarthy, Mr. Hadley, Libby Cameron, and David McMahon; at the table, Gary Hager (l) and David Kleinberg flank Mrs. Parish. A preliminary sketch by Mr. Hadley and Brian McCarthy for a room setting for Steuben Glass, c. 1986. Mrs. Parish on a construction site with one of her favorite chintzes. Mrs. Parish and Mr. Hadley in the 1970s. Mrs. Parish in her apartment in the 1980s.

INTRODUCTION

B UNNY WILLIAMS: Parish-Hadley was the rarity of a combination of two people who were very different in their direction but both passionate about beautiful houses. They came at it from different ways. But it was the combination that made it magic. Mrs. Parish went to work in the Depression, and the business went through several iterations before it became Parish-Hadley. The first company was called Budget Decorating, which I know because David Easton and I found the stationery one afternoon when we were rummaging through the office closet. Some time later, she renamed the business Mrs. Henry Parish II. Mrs. Parish, who was from an old New York family, was becoming sought after by many of the leading socially preeminent families to decorate their homes. These projects needed more than just decorating and she realized she needed to find a strong designer to work with her. She reached out to Van Day Truex, a former teacher and then the creative director of Tiffanys. He connected her with Albert, who was unhappy at McMillen because Mrs. Brown would not make him a partner. Mrs. Parish and he agreed on a five-year probationary period before formalizing the partnership. When Albert got there, he established what were really design teams: a senior designer who was trained and qualified, who had an assistant, called the coordinator, who did all the backup paperwork (the worksheets, the purchase orders, the descriptions), and then the shoppers and assistants. Its the way we still do it.

BRIAN MCCARTHY: The clients were so different then, werent they? And the Parish-Hadley clients were a culture of incredibly sophisticated people. Design and decorating for them was all about a particular kind of lifestylehaving a gracious home, and perhaps collecting art and antiques. They were people who lived on a scale that we dont see any more, with extraordinarily beautiful things that mattered deeply to them. They were knowledgeable about what they collected. They traveled. They shopped. They knew how to run a house, to entertain, to be in the world in an exceptional way.

BW: We saw and were exposed to the most extraordinary interiors that ever happened. We were able to work with clients who had extraordinary taste, art collections, and furniture. The clients that came to them! The Whitneys house on Long Island, Greentree, had been lived in by three generation and was full of fabulous things. Albert said the first time he went there, Princess Margaret was coming and they had to do a wing of rooms: All I had to do was take everything out in the yard, organize it, and put it back to make it have a harmony. That is such a different world, and we were so lucky to be able to have this experience.

BJM: Look at the Paleys and the people they visited and associated with, the Agnellis, the Devonshires, and others. They always came back to New York wanting to somehow create what theyd seen. Its American social history.

BW: In those days, Mrs. Parish and Albert supervised almost every job. She could rearrange the furniture and make a comfortable room. She had a great sense of color, style, and arrangement. She could come in a room and make it pretty, but she wasnt a trained designer. And theres a big, big difference. Albert was that, and so much more. What was amazing for us always was that Albert would say, Youre going to work on this project, whatever it was. He would come back from a house or an apartment, and hed sit up for two nights and do these pen sketches of what he thought these rooms should look like.

Mrs. Parishs summer house in Dark Harbour, Maine, was a rich, distinctive riot of pattern on pattern, her favorite clear, happy colors, and familiar, beloved things.

BJM: He could draw the room just like that. To scale! You could truly take that sketch and plug it into a scale plan and elevate it.

BW: But they also had an ethereal quality to them. You didnt quite know what the chair was, but you knew it was probably a French chair. It was a little bit of an illusion. He came and he talked about the room. And then you, who were working on the project, had to go out, find things, and put some schemes together. And you presented them to him.

BJM: He forced us all to think of a room as a whole, from the bottom up. You would sit down with a plan. You would isolate everything in the plan. You would rotate the plan and consider what Albert famously called the skyline of the room. You would make yourself survey the room from each vantage point and perspective, what you would see from each chair in the room, what the possibilities were. As you would lay the scheme out and present it to him, you would say: and that chair is in this fabric. You would come back from shopping with at least four options for every piece of furniture in the room. The process really made you think in a very complete way outside the box, and not just in the way he might have directed. If you had an instinct about something as it related to what hed described, he made clear that you should feel free to come back with that. That was my view of him, and what I always did. And the purchase orders. We had to write such detailed descriptions of what we were ordering that a person who couldnt see would be able to visualize each item from the purchase order.