Talent and personality shine through in The Tailored Interior"

Making it to the top of the design world typically takes a lifetime of hard work, drive and superior talent.

And though success might seem effortless for someone with the easy charm and affable personality of Thad Hayes, it is his hard earned expertise, aesthetic sense, and understanding of—and sensitivity to—a client’s needs that not only vaulted him to the top of his game, but has prominent patrons such as style-maker Evelyn Lauder clamoring for more.

Summing up Mr. Hayes’s no-nonsense and accessible approach to design, Ms. Lauder wrote in the forward to his first book “Thad Hayes: The Tailored Interior,” released this month: “Thad Hayes can make a home fit its own skin, and not into his skin.

“Designers can be formulaic; they can leave their stamp on a room, leaving the client in an anonymous abyss. Not so with Thad Hayes.”

The name of the book seems to pinpoint Mr. Hayes’s approach as an interior designer. The 21 distinctly different homes that are featured in his book do share a simple, common thread: they reflect his clients’ taste. To be sure, the homes represent Mr. Hayes’s design signature of timeless, understated elegance, but all the designs reflect his willingness to collaborate with his clients.

Three South Fork homes are featured in the book: a two-story, shingle-style, oceanfront Southampton beach house; a more traditional, rambling family summer home in Wainscott; and a flat-roofed, wood and glass contemporary Water Mill residence. The book also contains photographs of, among others, a modern penthouse overlooking Central Park, an Art Deco duplex on Park Avenue, and an ornate Palm Beach home owned by Ms. Lauder and her husband, Leonard.

The Water Mill home, which is prominently featured as the last house in the book (the back of the dust cover is a photographic detail of the living room), has specific significance for Mr. Hayes, who said during a recent telephone interview that he’d like to own his own “mini-version” of the house.

“That’s probably the most modern house in the book ... There’s lots of air and space,” he said, adding that the Water Mill house was the third project he had worked on with that pair of homeowners.

Mr. Hayes discussed his design point of view, which has been described as “subtle,” “extraordinarily beautiful” and “elegant” by different design and architecture authorities.

“I have a desire to communicate the concept without using 1,000 words, but instead with 20 words,” he said when describing the Water Mill beach house. “What I’ve come to realize is the consistency of the work has been a lifelong attempt at seeking inner peace and serenity that we all tend to strive for.”

Named one of the “Deans of Design” and to the list of “The AD 100” by Architectural Digest magazine, Mr. Hayes is one of today’s preeminent interior designers, though that fact is not likely to emerge in conversations with the modest man.

“I listen to the client and I’m tuned in to the type of house they are trying to create,” Mr. Hayes said of his low-key approach. “I’m very understanding and rational, I don’t act out with clients.”

Client Brooke Garber Neidich, who owns the house in Wainscott featured in the book—and also on the cover of Architectural Digest in 2005—sang Mr. Hayes’s praises in a recent e-mail exchange. “Thad is low-key and unpretentious. There is no excess and yet there is excitement and surprise,” she wrote of the man who has designed several of her homes. “It is a long-term collaboration ... He truly understands the concept of home and hearth.”

Mr. Hayes, who originally hails from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, earned a degree from the Louisiana State University School of Environmental Design. He got his start in design working first as a manual laborer for landscape designer Tim Duvall in Manhattan.

“For the first four to six months I was a laborer, hauling bags of dirt through people’s apartments,” Mr. Hayes said of his arrival in Manhattan in 1979. But it wasn’t long before he began designing and drawing for Mr. Duvall as a landscape architect in his own right.

One of the first big projects Mr. Hayes worked on with his boss as a designer was Robert DeNiro’s rooftop garden in Tribeca.

After a few years of landscape architecture, Mr. Hayes went back to school and changed his focus to interiors. He apprenticed under Robert Bray in the early 1980s after graduating from Parsons School of Design with a degree in interior design.

Some three years later, Mr. Bray encouraged his young assistant to hang out his own shingle. He opened Thad Hayes, Inc. in 1985.

“Thad Hayes: The Tailored Interior” is now on sale at local bookstores and is available online at amazon.com.