It may come as a surprise that interior designer Patrick Sutton’s office is a bit conventional.
“That’s the basics,” he admits from behind a simple wooden desk crammed into the Federal Hill rowhouse where his company has occupied since September 2001. “We never set out to design a showcase. A showcase is basically a vessel for creating designs.”
And after three decades in the business, Sutton’s design portfolio is as thick as it is impressive.
Patrick Sutton is a “regular guy” who loves the game of football and baseball, playing with his kids, vacationing with his wife and calling his 13-year-old dog Stella “the center of my world.” It turned out that. A world-class designer with movie-star hair, a resume filled with industry awards and honors, and a client list that can best be described as luxurious.
“I’ll tell you this: You’re going to laugh at me,” Sutton says. “I’m 61 years old, but I still think of myself as if I were a 25-year-old.”
The staff (17 employees entered the building “wearing shoes like Keebler’s elves,” he jokes) now includes six from the Baltimore-based Atlas Restaurant Group. He said this while working on about 40 projects.
Sutton looks around the room as he reflects on his 30 years in the business. Admittedly, the space is surprisingly bare-bones, but it’s not without its personality. He gestures to a photo by contemporary Dutch visual artist Hendrik Kerstens depicting a stoic woman in a red turban, a playful nod to the work of the Dutch masters. “It’s art that money can buy,” he jokes. “It’s not hundreds, it’s tens of thousands.”
On a side table between two bookshelves sits her first book, Footloose in France, written by her father, Horace Sutton, a travel writer and a huge influence on Sutton’s life. “When I went to book signings across America, I carried this with me in his memory. I thought it was kind of cool.”
Next to the book is a candy corn lamp that I bought at an auction. Yes, the entire base is Halloween candy with seashells, and the colors are fuzzy yellow and pink. “My favorite part is when you turn on the air conditioner and the blades dance a little bit,” Sutton adds, adding that the decoration is flashy and a bit unexpected. “So that when people come here they can see that I don’t take myself too seriously.”
From a distance, Sutton’s childhood seemed charming. His father was a pioneer in transatlantic travel journalism, so young Patrick grew up accompanying him on overseas trips to the world’s most beautiful places, “hotels, restaurants, palaces, etc.,” he recalls. He remembers being young and just soaking in all the sounds, sights and smells.
“You can feel the design, romance and lifestyle as you wander through the beautiful hallways or stroll through the gardens.”
But another part of Sutton’s upbringing was his mother’s continued struggle with mental illness. He did not know any other life, but he suspected that something was different in his home. “It made me a keen listener and observer,” Sutton says, traits that serve him well in his work.
And after years of treatment, there was another thing he realized. “I couldn’t heal her, so I tried to heal others through design,” he says.
His first foray into design was in high school, when his teacher recognized his natural talent in an architectural drafting class. After a summer program at Harvard University called Career Discovery, Sutton headed to Carnegie Mellon University to study architecture.
“It went really, really well there,” Sutton says. He was so immersed in his studies that he kept his sleeping bag under his drafting table so he wouldn’t have to waste time going back to his dormitory to sleep. “I just wanted to get all this design out there. For example, if you talk to artists, they’ll say there’s an overwhelming need to get this work out into the world. And I had that.”
After graduating, I received a job offer. Sutton didn’t want to return to her hometown of New York, so she thought the next best option was Washington, D.C., which was close enough to visit her family but “far enough to fulfill her wishes.” your own path. ”
But when he visited, he felt no connection to the city. One of the companies that pitched to Sutton said its headquarters were in Baltimore, “just an hour away,” he told Sutton. Sutton went to see it.
“I had just spent four years of my life in Pittsburgh, which is like Baltimore. It’s a working-class neighborhood city. So I saw something so familiar that I thought it was fascinating. And I said, “Okay, I’ll just try it for a year.” That was in 1985. ”
He stayed at the firm for nine months, but because he disliked the corporate atmosphere, he moved to a smaller agency, Robert Kaplan & Associates. Within three years he became a partner.
“I was passionate about it, but I started to get a little disillusioned with the work of architecture, because I designed these houses and then they turned it into something that I had in mind. “That’s what I wanted the project to look like,” Sutton says.
And he began adding interiors to his architectural projects. “For the first time, I realized that there was a whole story here about the people living in this house that needed to be crafted and managed as a whole,” he says. He found himself drawn to the more human side of interior design.
“I know this is going to be an unpopular statement, but I think it’s true that most architects need to step back a little bit from the owner and think a little more abstractly than people in the interior design industry,” he says. say. . “We focus on lifestyle: how people live, eat, entertain and raise their children in this space.”
