Designer Marshall Watson Will Speak at St. Luke’s on January 18

Interior designer Marshall Watson’s second book, “Defining Elegance,” is coming out in March, but before then, he will revisit his first, “The Art of Elegance: Classic Interiors,” with a talk at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church’s Hoie Hall in East Hampton.

Watson is the founder of design firm Marshall Watson & Reid Deane Ganes, based in Manhattan, and has been named a Traditional Home magazine Designer of the Year and featured on Luxe Interiors + Design’s Gold List. The Springs resident, who was a columnist for The Southampton Press and The East Hampton Press for more than a decade, will speak about his career, influences and inspirations on Saturday, January 18, at 4 p.m. for the free event.

“I always enjoyed distilling my personal viewpoints on design and bringing forth things that I thought were interesting,” he said of writing his former column, Interiors by Design. During an interview on Monday, he recalled settling by his fireplace in his home overlooking Gardiners Bay to work on the column. “I could just sit there and muse about design for a Sunday afternoon,” he said.

He concluded his column in 2018, the year after he published “The Art of Elegance.” He finds that the book is interesting to people who are changing careers because he has many careers and a fairly broad education prior to becoming an interior designer, he said.

“Interior design, like real estate, is one of those professions that people find after going through several professions,” he said. “I think that my story is interesting and somewhat inspiring to people.”

At Stanford University, Watson studied English, theater, design, art, engineering — “and also a little bit of astronomy thrown in for good measure, because I loved astronomy.”

Because he had so many interests — he was a singer, dancer, actor, designer and painter — when he got out of school, his mother told him to just focus on one thing and do it well.

“I loved the arts,” he said. “So I was soaked in it.”

He recalled that when he graduated from Stanford, during the Carter administration, there were gas lines and there was no work for anybody coming out of college. He knew he wanted to be a designer, but there were no design jobs to be had.

“But I could act and I could sing and I could dance, and I could do all that,” he said. “So I got work acting. That’s how I made my living.”

He said he always approached the craft from a character acting standpoint — discovering a character and bringing out the character’s soul. He explained that this helped him perceive and understand the psychology of the people he works with and to understand “it was never about me.”

When Watson got serious about design, he combined it with his love of theater and studied theater design, including scenography, set design, costume design, lighting design and sound design.

“Theater design taught me how to research,” he said. “... You started with the Egyptians, and you went through every period. Because as a theater designer, you have to know the 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, modern dress … You have to do everything as a theater designer. You just didn’t do one thing.”

That education taught him to interpret a Neil Simon comedy and “Henry the Fifth” differently, he said, and that helped him later on in life to interpret people.

“​​I was always more interested in interpreting someone’s fantasies and desires, but also paying attention to the architecture,” he said of designing for a client. “And that really gave me a sense of both being appropriate and true to the person, true to the architecture, true to the interior design and true to the moment of time.”

In his Hoie Hall talk, he will explain the specific ways theater design and acting affected some of the projects featured in “The Art of Elegance.” He’ll also share how gardening is part of his life and what it taught him about design, including the importance of looking from both the inside out and the outside in.

“Gardening is my side passion,” he said. “I think a lot of interior designers and architects really love gardening and horticulture and landscape design.”

Watson said he picked up a hate of gardening from his family.

“My father was an avid rosarian so I had to clip dead roses and pick off the yellow leaves,” he said. His brother all grew up hating gardening too. “And then, of course, what happened later in life? We’re all absolutely avid gardeners.”

“I’ve won the most awards from the Southampton Rose Society,” he added. “Very proud, very proud, and I lord that over my brothers.”

His mother had told him that gardeners are always great people. She said, “You’ll never go wrong if you’re involved with friends who are gardeners,” he recalled.

Gardening has taught him about foreground, middle ground and background.

In an interior, the architecture — the bones of the room — is the background, he explained. In a garden, the background may be hedges, the ocean beyond or a forest.

The middle ground in the garden could be items in the distance farther away from the house. And the foreground is the things around and close to the house. “You may have more detail, because this is where you’re going to see things more close at hand.”

In interior design, the places that are used most are the foreground.

“My coffee table is filled with things that are interesting to me, objects that I can lay my eyes on,” he said. “They have a complexity and interest to me — an intrinsic interest that draws my eyes.”

His coffee table in his West Side apartment will be on the cover of his upcoming book, “Defining Elegance.”

As he defines elegance, he conveys that he doesn’t view it as a “hoity-toity, snotty thing.”

Rather, the book points to gentility, graciousness and a sense of generosity — things he said have been lacking in the current period.

“I truly believe that a home is not a real estate investment,” Watson said. “It’s kind of antithetical to what people think about the East End, and I really believe in a sense of home, and I will talk about it in my lecture, and I will talk about it all the time.”

Watson started with a list of 19 projects and pared it down to 15 that were ultimately included in the book. He said it was hard to eliminate any from the list, like deciding which children he no longer wanted.

The book includes Hamptons homes among the 15.

“There’s a really beautiful home that we did on Middle Lane in East Hampton that’s a large focus of the book,” he said.

The owners have “a spectacular art collection,” he said, and he also designed their New York apartment.

“They had such a great collection. So I was able to enhance the collection — draw your eye to every piece in the house and echo what was going on in the paintings, which was really wonderful experience for me,” he said.

Marshall Watson will speak at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 18 James Lane, East Hampton Village on Saturday, January 18, at 4 p.m. There is no admission fee, and a light reception will follow the talk. For reservations, email lucykazickas@mail.com. “Defining Elegance” will be published on March 11 by Rizzoli.