`It’s nicely done but it doesn’t look like me yet,” says Holly Hunt, kicking off her shoes at the front door and walking across the oak hardwood floors in gray socks.
“I love the place I’m in,” she says of the 4,200-square-foot home she moved into four years ago. “I love this apartment, the openness and its airiness, but I feel like I’m always apologizing for it,” says Hunt, whose eye and home furnishings business have earned her respect around the world and whose work has been regularly featured in all of the major shelter publications. “I’m still customizing it to myself.”
Hunt, the driving force behind two namesake showrooms in The Merchandise Mart here and four others in New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Miami, moved to this East Lake Shore Drive apartment four years ago from a home in Winnetka. She sold the Tudor-style home, which was almost twice as large, furnished. She chose to bring only a few things, such as a writing desk and a chair from the Rose Tarlow/Melrose House Collection, one of the furniture lines she represents. “I wanted to start over and to start fresh,” she says. “I moved in with a few things and started to build on that.”
Hunt’s work-in-progress, by her estimation, is a few style beats short of being the home that best reflects her.
She sees where art needs to be hung, adjusts a tilted painting, notices pin-size holes in the wall from where a previous painting hung, and talks about different pieces that could be moved somewhere else.
A stuffed panda bear with a baby panda strapped to its back stands out in the living room where there are pre-Columbian pottery on the fireplace mantel, Robert Rauschenberg paintings and Robert Motherwell elegy art on the wall.
Hunt, who is no-frills in dress and attitude, preferring the clean softly tailored lines of a Jil Sander suit, doesn’t appear to be the stuffed toy type.
“I’m not,” she affirms.
The panda, which was sitting in the center of the dining table designed by French designer Christian Astuguevielle, was given to her by one of her sons.
Trent Tackbary, 21, presented it to her with a reading of one of his poems when he returned from a trip to China.
“It was very sweet,” she says, asking him to re-enact the presentation and the poem.
He does and and she’s right. (Hunt has two other sons: Jett Tackbary, 24, and Hunt Tackbary, 25).
“My son likes them and gave it to me when he came home,” says Hunt, who later placed the panda in her son’s bedroom.
On his mother’s eye for style, Trent smiles a long time and playfully looks his mother up and down before answering.
“He’d like me to wear more color,” Hunt says, turning to him. “Right?”
He nods yes and says, “I think you wear too much black.”
“I’m not in black today,” Hunt smiles.
And she’s not. Hunt is in another one of her favorite non-colors: cream and gray. The neutral palette best defines her and is seen throughout her home and showrooms.
She makes no apologies for the lack of color, which is evident even in her walk-in closet. The gray, black and cream theme continues. But it works for her.
And it works in her showrooms too.
Hunt has the most popular and most respected classic traditional and classic contemporary furniture showrooms in The Merchandise Mart–some in the design community would say in the country.
In her Chicago showrooms, there are about 30 different lines of fabrics and about 40 lines of furniture and furnishing accessories. Among them is her Holly Hunt Collection, which is shown in showrooms around the country and in Canada. It includes designs created not only by Hunt and her design staff, but also French designer Christian Liaigre.
And with showrooms already in Miami, Minneapolis, New York and Washington, D.C., Hunt is on the verge of opening her seventh–a 15,000-square-foot street-level showroom on Manhattan’s East Side.
The making of a trend
“She certainly has set the pace for furnishings appropriate to the times,” says Bill Olafsen of Olafsen Design Group in River North.
Hunt sets the pace by giving people what they didn’t know they wanted. That’s how trends begin. She started a trend and a look by introducing Liaigre to the United States in 1994. She did it at a time when espresso-hued woods and ethnic-inspired shapes were not seen. Liaigre’s African-influenced shaped stools and benches and wenge wood started a trend that has since been knocked off and mass-produced by low- to high-end furniture-makers.His look has become so popular that it is often referred to as the Liaigre style.
“No one understood Christian Liaigre at that time,” says Hunt, who also has a home in Aspen, Colo., and a pied-a-terre in Paris that once belonged to Astuguevielle, one of the designers she represents. “There was traditional that was overdone and overblown. It was time to get rid of all of the gilded.”
Other lines in her showrooms include Rose Tarlow’s Melrose House Collection and New York-based designer Dakota Jackson.
“Holly takes risks,” Jackson says. “She’s taken successful risks. I was one of them in the past. She is personally very stylish and very connected to what’s going on in a range of contemporary scenes–not only in design and art–and that’s attractive to many people.”
In Chicago, Jackson’s designs are only in Hunt’s showroom. Though he has his own showroom in New York, it was in Hunt’s Merchandise Mart showroom that his work was first seen outside of New York. That was in 1985, just two years after Hunt started her business.
“In the early ’80s I was a conspicuous shopper, the kind that people wrote about at that time,” she says. “My marriage began to deteriorate in the early ’80s. I bought the showroom in 1983. I needed a place to be.”
Hunt bought the R.J. (Randolph John) showroom and made it her own. She describes the company she bought as “a bankrupt little company.”
“But it saved me and I saved it,” she says.
She saved it with color, space and light.
In her home, the lightness and brightness come in the neutral palette she favors. The white-on-white theme in the room off the dining room, which is very much like a solarium, is proof of this.
The room faces south, but most of the brightness is an illusion because of the white-on-white furniture, the white-painted walls and the mirrored wall and door that are made to mimic the windowpanes of the surrounding windows.
Orchids in various stages of bloom are on the windowsill in this room, which feels like a retreat separate from the rest of the house. The chairs, which are from B&B Italia with a matching ottoman, are upholstered in white cotton.
The same feeling of a retreat is seen in her bedroom suite. The sitting area off her bedroom has two low wingback-like chairs with a matching ottoman, which are also upholstered in a pristine white cotton.
This sitting area is the most casual spot in the house and the place where you can most imagine Hunt kicking back to read a book or check out late-night television.
Does Hunt do this kind of thing?
“Sometimes,” she answers.
The desk and the chair that she brought with her from her Winnetka home are also in her bedroom suite, as is a four-poster bed by Liaigre. Here, she creates a timeless look that mixes traditional and contemporary with ease.
Born in Anson, Texas (26 miles southeast of Abilene), Hunt wrote her high school senior theme paper on Coco Chanel. “I was sure I was going to be the next Edith Head,” she says. “I liked making things, but West Texas was not the Milan of the West.”
So she headed east to New York and landed in Chicago after marrying.
“I had an independent and a can-do spirit. I loved everything new I saw,” says Hunt, the eldest of four children. “Growing up that way gave me stability and anchored me to have an appreciation for everything new and different.”
Hunt is the first to admit she was very green when she started her business.
But success wasn’t about making money at that point, she says. It was about making it the best.
And, says Hunt: “It’s still about making it the best.”
———-
The Holly Hunt 17 and Holly Hunt 18 showrooms are in The Merchandise Mart, Kinzie and Wells Streets, Suites 1728 and 1844, respectively; 312-661-1900.
