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Venerable Interior Design Firms Look to the Future

David Kleinberg Design Associates is featured in an article for Introspective Magazine at 1stDibs.com.

When Albert Hadley dissolved Parish-Hadley Associates in 1999, following the death of Sister Parish in 1994, it represented the end of arguably the most influential American interior design firm of the late 20th century. Parish-Hadley had fostered the careers of numerous designers who went on to earn their own acclaim — Bunny Williams, David Easton, David Kleinberg, Brian J. McCarthy, Thom Filicia and Mariette Himes Gomez, among them. But the company itself was finished.

Today, a number of widely respected firms are taking steps to ensure that they don’t suffer a similar fate, while also passing the torch to a new generation of designers. Kleinberg, who worked at Parish-Hadley for 16 years before striking out on his own in 1997, made five of his longtime principal designers — Scott Sloat, Sean Matijevich, Lance Scott, Christina Maroni and Matthew Bemis — equity partners in David Kleinberg Design Associates earlier this year. “There was a long history of people at Parish-Hadley who had moved on and opened their own firms, but I thought maybe that’s not what has to happen,” says Kleinberg. “I walked into our office near the end of last year after being away and saw it buzzing along and people collaborating, and I thought, This is really a team that works.”

Read the article