Adam Lewis, who wrote a biography of Mr. Hadley, confirmed the death. Mr. Hadley, who was born in Tennessee, died of cancer at the home of his sister, Elizabeth Hadley, his only survivor. He had homes in Manhattan and in Southport, Conn.
Both independently and as a partner with the prominent interior designer Sister Parish, Mr. Hadley created residences for an illustrious roster of clients with resonant family names like Astor, Grunwald, Paley, Rockefeller, Bronfman, Getty, Whitney and Mellon, not to mention Al and Tipper Gore and Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer.
His taste was relatively spare and modernist, but he was willing to mix ideas, drawing on a deep knowledge of design history. And reflecting his own moderate temperament, he had a keen sense of how much was too much and how much was not enough.
He and Mrs. Parish, whose work was more English in style, worked together as the firm Parish-Hadley for 33 years, creating interiors that were always beautiful, sometimes lush but never overstuffed.
“Never less, never more,” Mr. Hadley was fond of saying of a well-realized interior. “Glamour is part of it,” he added in a 2004 interview in New York magazine. “But glamour is not the essence. Design is about discipline and reality, not about fantasy beyond reality.”
Perhaps his most celebrated work was the library at the Park Avenue home of Brooke Astor. He transformed a high-ceilinged faux-French drawing room into a strikingly elegant space with red-lacquered shelves and brass trim befitting a client who had given considerable philanthropic support to libraries, especially the New York Public Library.
One early project was for the Park Avenue apartment of Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of Seagram, and his wife, Ann Loeb. They wanted more modern quarters with a good deal of open space, so Mr. Hadley demolished a drawing room wall, replaced it with glass and installed a travertine staircase. It was a contemporary space forged from a traditional one. Mrs. Parish then filled it with 18th-century furniture.
“The chairs became like sculptures,” Mr. Hadley recalled, “and it was fantastic.”
Albert Livingston Hadley Jr. was born in Springfield, Tenn., north of Nashville, on Nov. 18, 1920. His father owned a farm implement business, and the family moved often, giving his mother, Elizabeth, the opportunity to decorate several houses and young Albert to develop an interest in it himself.
As a child, Mr. Hadley studied fashion and design magazines and was enthralled by the movies, and by the time he was 13 he had already determined that his future lay in New York. Later in life he said he continued to prefer black-and-white movies because they let him supply all the color.
After high school and two years of college in Nashville, Mr. Hadley approached A. Herbert Rogers, a prominent local decorator, for a job as a junior assistant. Hired, he gained entry to many of Nashville’s finest houses and began his career as an expert on high residential style.
He was drafted into the Army in 1942 and served as a company payroll clerk in Chelmsford, England. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he was able to make the long-awaited move to New York in 1947, to attend the Parsons School of Design. There he caught the attention of Van Day Truex, the president of the school and an avatar of the urbanity and sleek good manners of postwar design. (He was later design director at Tiffany & Company.) Recognizing his abilities, Mr. Truex offered Mr. Hadley a teaching job shortly after his graduation in 1949.
In 1956, Mr. Hadley went to work for Eleanor Brown at McMillen, then the most prestigious decorating firm in the country. As he recalled for Mr. Lewis, the author of “Albert Hadley: The Story of America’s Preeminent Interior Designer” (2005), Mrs. Brown’s establishment was graciously strict. Hours were 9 to 5, with no Saturday or Sunday work allowed. Every afternoon a maid pushed a mahogany cart of tea and cookies from office to office, and Mrs. Brown would visit with her decorators, discussing their work and, by example, instilling the social finesse required to be in the business.
Next Page »
- 1
- 2
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.