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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen she was a girl, Victoria Hagan's father suggested she join her school's swimming team. \"But, Dad, I don't know how to swim,\" she objected. \"That's not a problem,\" he replied, and every night he would take her to the community pool for a lesson. \"It was the most difficult thing I'd ever tried to do, just getting from one end of the pool to the other,\" she recalls, \"but he'd act as if I were a great swimmer. You're doing fine!' he'd say.\"\n\nThough Hagan lost her first race\u2014she came in dead last\u2014that defeat did more for her than a victory. \"It put a fire under me,\" she says. \"I was determined to become a good swimmer.\" So she did, winning all her races thereafter.\n\nWhat does swimming have to do with interior design? Quite a lot, in Hagan's opinion. \"There's always a point in swimming where you have to push yourself. You're beat. But you have to find something within you to take you to the finish line. I think about that now when days get difficult. Interior design is about finishing. If you don't know how to finish something, nothing will ever get done.\"\n\n\"An idyllic neighborhood, with little white houses,\" is how Hagan remembers Pocantico Hills, the town just north of New York City in which she and her three younger sisters grew up. If her father, a corporate litigator in Manhattan, gave her determination, her mother, a onetime fashion illustrator, encouraged Hagan's interest in art and design. \"When she went fabric shopping, she'd always ask my opinion: Victoria, which one do you like?' And I'd definitely have an opinion. Before I was 10 I was advising my friends on wallpaper or the color to paint their rooms.\"\n\nFrequent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded that precocious vision. Though she enjoyed the period rooms, the place that most excited her was the restaurant, with its fountain of dancing nymphs, its black-and-white floor and its stately columns. Only later did Hagan learn that the enchanting space bore the imprint of Dorothy Draper. A trip to Virginia showed her an altogether different, but equally exciting, room: Thomas Jefferson's bedroom at Monticello. \"I was fascinated by the way he put his bed in a wall. Wow!' I said. Why would one do that?'\"\n\nAfter graduating from The Masters School, a private school not far from Pocantico Hills, Hagan attended Maryland's Washington College. Then, certain of her career, she transferred to Parsons School of Design. To gain practical experience while she was studying, she interned for the late Simone Feldman, the only designer who replied to her application. \"Meeting Simone was one of the luckiest days of my life,\" says Hagan. \"She was not only very talented, but stylish in a way I'd never seen before.\"\n\nHagan's unbridled admiration\u2014\"I would sing Simone's praises to everyone I saw\"\u2014brought clients to the firm, and in the late '80s Feldman offered her a partnership. Hagan did not have to be asked twice.\n\nConvinced her mentor deserved more recognition, Hagan suggested they decorate a room in Southampton's annual show house, which is always in the media spotlight. But when Feldman telephoned the organizers, she discovered they were too late; all the rooms had been assigned to other designers. \"Isn't there anything we can do?\" a desperate Hagan whispered as Feldman was saying her goodbyes. It turned out there was: a staircase landing just below the attic.\n\n\"Not much of a space,\" was how their landing had been described to Feldman, but its awkwardness was, in fact, an advantage. If they could smooth the feathers of that ugly duckling, Feldman and Hagan could do anything. That, in any event, is what New York magazine thought when it put their landing on its cover. And who would not have been struck by the huge portrait of a little girl, in front of which had been placed one lone candle atop a skinny claw table?\n\nThe two women pulled a similar publicity coup in 1990, two years later, when The New York Times featured a room they did for Manhattan's Kips Bay show house on the front page of its Home section. \"A salon of social consciousness,\" was how the Times characterized their room, noting that they had even included a niche for newspaper recycling. \"Our room wasn't about decorating,\" says Hagan. \"We wanted to say something, and what we said was that there is beauty in taking responsibility for one's life.\" To underline that point, they stenciled on a wall a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00E9ry's The Little Prince: \"You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.\"\n\nTheir happy partnership ended in 1991 with Feldman's death, a devastating blow to Hagan. \"Simone was not only my mentor, she was my partner and my best friend,\" says Hagan. \"She trusted and believed in me. For a young designer, that's a gift.\"\n\nWith Feldman gone, many assumed Hagan would disband the business. \"I'm going to meet every deadline I have,\" she insisted\u2014and she did. \"For years I felt as if I were pedaling so fast just so I wouldn't fall off the bicycle.\" Now, working out of a penthouse office on Madison Avenue, with a staff of 15 to help her, Hagan doesn't have to pedal so hard.\n\nThese days she is often joined by her five-year-old twin boys. \"I want to be with them as much as possible,\" she says. \"I want to enjoy the moment.\" Indeed, Hagan and her husband, Michael Berman, a media executive and the cofounder, together with John F. Kennedy, Jr., of the now defunct George magazine, wrap their schedules around their sons. Hagan makes a point of staying home\u2014home is an eight-room apartment on Park Avenue\u2014until the boys are asleep. Weekends they spend on Long Island, in a plain saltbox in the Hamptons. \"It's family time,\" says the designer. \"You'll usually find us on the beach or at the bowling alley or the miniature golf course. I try not to work on weekends, because if I did, I could be working seven days a week.\"\n\nYet work, for Victoria Hagan, is just another kind of fun. She was, after all, the only nine-year-old in Pocantico Hills who actually wanted a summer job. \"I think I was genetically predisposed to the design profession,\" she says. \"For better or worse, I love it, and it's a real treat to do what you love. I've been blessed with great luck.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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