Those who are familiar with Sam Robin’s design prowess understand that she comes by it naturally, but the extent to which it is alive in her may surprise even those who are close to her. “If I was your babysitter when I was young, you’d come home and the entire house would be redecorated!” she recalls. “I was the only babysitter in Chicago who would have the kids saying, ‘Can we go to bed now?’ in order to avoid moving furniture!”
Those guerilla tactics have gone by the wayside, but Robin’s current clients enjoy the same rapt attention she gave those early impulses, and the designer credits her father for at least some of her exuberance. “My dad was actually a frustrated designer,” she explains. “He was a glazer, and he owned a company that outfitted homes with shower and tub enclosures, and patio doors, which he brought in from Los Angeles.”
As a girl, Robin accompanied her father when he visited clients on the weekends, soaking in the luxury of the homes they entered. “One lady, who had a four-story penthouse on Lakeshore Drive, had the entire staircase glassed in so she could have an aviary for her birds,” she remarks. “I had access to some outrageously fabulous homes back then, and Chicago was such an inspiring city architecturally.”
In fact, architecture, design and art saturated her life. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied painting. “When I was attending the art institute, I was hired to catalog Buddy [Robert B.] Mayer’s art collection,” she recalls. “He had an entire wing for Ming Dynasty artifacts, and there were Picassos hanging in his bathroom and Lichtenstein’s everywhere!”
All of this stimuli coalesced to inform her design process as she matured, and she opened her eponymous Sam Robin Interior Design in Chicago in 1972. Robin came to Miami in 1979 when she was hired to design the interior of a 707 aircraft. “I came here for a month and a half, and a year and a half later, we were still designing the project,” she remarks. “Since I left Chicago in February during an ice storm, there was something about Miami that enticed me to stay—namely the weather!”
