Albert Hadley

Albert Hadley, a renowned interior designer whose brave and creative eye, distilling both classic and contemporary styles, made him a standard-bearing decorator for the rich and powerful in American society, died on Thursday in Nashville. He was 91. 

 

Albert Hadley, at his 85th birthday party in 2005

Albert Hadley kept the chintz in the library that Sister Parish designed for Brooke Astor's apartment on Park Avenue, but he tore out the walls and put in brass-fitted bookshelves. 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. 

This set the stage for Mr. Hadley’s second act. In 1962, at Mr. Truex’s suggestion, he introduced himself to the decorator Sister Parish — the familiar name of the former Dorothy May Kinnicutt and wife of Henry Parish II. Well born, well connected and well established, she was also looking for help. When Mr. Hadley knocked nervously at her door, she answered in stocking feet and a black wool dress and asked him to zip her up.

As the decorator Tom Britt said in Mr. Lewis’s book, “When Albert zipped up Mrs. Parish’s dress, it was the biggest explosion in 20th-century decorating.” Mr. Hadley’s first assignment with Mrs. Parish was the White House breakfast room of Jacqueline and President John F. Kennedy, though he was modest about his contribution. “I only did the curtains,” he said in 1999. 

He became a full partner two years later, and their collaboration, playing on strong opposites, became one of the most productive and distinguished in American interior design, continuing until Mrs. Parish’s death in 1994. Their methods differed as much as their tastes. Mrs. Parish worked on instinct; Mr. Hadley, with his Parsons training and encyclopedic historical knowledge, worked with an innate sense of plan, proceeding from a project’s architectural frame to its decorative surface with ordered precision. 

His influence was wide, reflected in the work of Bunny Williams, Thomas Jayne, Mariette Himes Gomez and David Easton, who studied or worked with him. Mr. Hadley continued the business of Parish-Hadley until 1999, when he again became independent, continuing to work well into his 80s. In 2005, on the occasion of his 85th birthday, The New York Times interviewed one of his clients, Diana Quasha, for whom Mr. Hadley was designing the interior of a condominium in the Bloomberg tower at Lexington Avenue and 58th Street.

“He’s still the hippest thing out there,” Ms. Quasha said. “I don’t want it to be modern, and I don’t want it to be traditional. I want it to look interesting. Who else would I ask?”