For the first time ever, the Trend House on the eighth floor of Marshall Field’s on State Street will be decorated for the holidays. Of course, it took a top-notch decorator to handle the job—and David Easton fit the bill quite nicely, for several reasons.
Easton is one of the nation’s leading residential designers. He attended the Pratt Institute, from which he received a degree in architecture, and then traveled and studied in Europe after receiving the prestigious Fountainbleu Scholarship. His professional endeavors have taken him from the revered office of Parrish-Hadley to the Parsons School of Design, where he taught history and theory of design. Today, Easton heads his own office and designs for several companies, including Walters Wicker, Robert Abbey Lighting, and Henredon Furniture Inc. He is also no stranger to receiving awards; among other honors, Interior Design Magazine inducted Easton into its Hall of Fame in 1992. Lastly, Easton has a local connection. He spent childhood summers and holidays in Chicago.
Easton, the first outside decorator to design the Trend House, worked with Marshall Field’s Interior Design Studio.
The season’s diverse ethnic celebrations served as the designer’s inspiration; he decorated individual rooms in colors and styles that reflect Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Chanukah. The primary colors he uses are red, green, and gold for Christmas; red, black, and green for Kwanzaa; and blue and silver for Chanukah. ‘Today, America is 72 percent Anglo; in 50 years, that percentage will drop to 50 percent or less. We should reflect this change when celebrating the holidays,’ Easton told Windy City Times.
‘It’s an architectural thing,’ he said when asked about his decorating style of this Trend House, the 67th one. ‘It sounds corny, but when you have a bare room, you put the big [items] in first. It’s like sculpture. You use focal points.’ When asked what inspires him in general, Easton likes to look back but realizes that things have changed and that flexibility is key to flourishing. ‘It’s been the past,’ he related. ‘I now realize that the past is critical to everyone because there’s a set of rules that you can work within; classical architecture has wonderful rules regarding scale, planning, and detail. However, people don’t live that way anymore; they don’t live in one place for long periods of time. I’m a traditionalist in a way, but I’m bright enough to see that things are changing; people are just living differently.’