Interior Designer Shawn Henderson's Home Run

Photography Stephen Kent Johnson

They don’t make decorators like they used to. Too many upstart interior designers today are obsessed with their Instagram followers, and look to run before they can walk—fashion victims of a personality economy that prizes selfies and self-promotion more than the satisfaction of their wealthy clients. And for many of them, the selfies go hand-in-hand with the rent-a-friend nature of the business where prospective clients sometimes look to their designers as personal shoppers rather than professionals with expertise that should be trusted. 

Shawn Henderson isn’t one of those decorators. You’re more likely to see a photo of him with his mom than you are to see him lounging in Mykonos. And that’s just the way the devilishly handsome, attitude-free New York-based talent likes it. There’s something to both his personal story and his process that seems like a throwback to yesteryear in the best possible way. “I’m not just a decorator, even though I am one,” Henderson says. 

He's also strategic about his choices. For one of his more “outrageous” projects, a house in New Orleans, he designed a four-poster bed and wrapped it in an Yves Klein–blue velvet. (It’s a favorite color he uses sparingly throughout his projects, popping up like a Where’s Waldo–like signature accent.) The bed says everything you need to know about his approach, he believes. Its large size brought down the volume of the room and its tall ceilings, without loading up walls with artwork or going over the top with adding lots of stuff. “It’s anarchitectural way of decorating,” he says. “It’s about creatinga space within a space."

Henderson’s unassuming nature is only surprising if you don’t know his self-made story. Raised by working-class parents in a suburb of Albany, New York, he recalls obsessively rearranging the furniture in his parents’ Arts-and-Crafts-style bungalow. “I had a little bit of OCD,” he says. “I was very lucky that I always knew what I wanted to do.” Even as a child—the youngest of six kids—he gave his parents decorating advice. “I was always trying to make things better, to make the experience of the room better.” His first foray into design appreciation came from reading the now-shuttered American edition of House & Garden. In a manner that befits the age when young men wouldn’t admit to loving interiors, Henderson remembers stealing the magazine from a doctor’s office and later hiding it in another magazineas though it were an issue of Playboy. 

After studying interior design and art history in nearby Rochester, he worked at a local design firm doing residential and restaurant work, helping with doing drawings by hand (he still does it that way, without CAD), and would sew pillows on the side for cash. After taking an unexpected job offer in New York, he eventually found himself working for respected designer Thad Hayes. (He admits to being rejected for the job initially, but got the gig two years later after the other person didn’t work out. True to form, he credits a polite handwritten note sent after rejection as making a lasting impression.)

The job with Hayes, which he had for four years, would be pivotal for the young designer. “I learned about the process of design,” he says. “From Thad, what I connected to is that there has to be a reason for everything.” Shawn had a lot of autonomy and learned to manage clients. Before online decorating and iPhones, he recalls running around Manhattan with a camera, taking pictures of furniture and learning as much as he could from dealers in person, probably the last generation of designers to be trained that way. “I’m very nostalgic about those times,” he says. He was 31 when he struck out on his own in 2003. 

Today, his first book makes him ever more appreciative of his time with Hayes, and sees a common thread between Hayes and the industry darling Henderson would go on to become. “You can relax in Thad’s interiors,” he says. “That’s so importantin my work, too. There has to be a sense of appropriateness. It needs to feel right.”

Henderson points to a wood-paneled, contemporary modern interior in Aspen that’s in the book as being the most in line with what he thinks Hayes would have done, where the low-key furnishings don’t compete with the drop-dead mountain views outside the windows. Instead, the scheme uses a muted palette and Earthly materials like wood, glass, and leather.“ It just feels tight,” he says. 

Henderson might be a head-down, old-fashioned type, but he’s still looking forward to the next phase in his career. His first hotel, Rock House Turks and Caicos, will be completed early next year, and he’s getting ready to debut his own line of furniture next year called Swain with fellow interior designer Mike Rupp. The collection is inspired by French furniture from the 1930s and creates an eclectic mix that “theoretically you could put together,” he says, not unlike his own portfolio.