Island profile: Ken Walker, artist, architect followed a visual path to success

“The one you really should be interviewing is Mary,” Ken Walker, 72, said one cold morning in the breakfast nook at the Walkers’ house on the Dering Harbor waterfront. “She has the real deep roots here.”

Despite the pale stucco and the red clay roof tiles, their house is not Spanish Revival, he explained. Built on the site of the Manhanset House Hotel, which burned down twice over a century ago, the goal was building something fireproof when it and the house next door were built as overnight quarters and clubhouse, respectively, for the former hotel golf course.

He should know. A Brown and Harvard-educated architectural historian — as well as race car driver; accomplished painter; guest lecturer at the Columbia Business School with a course called “Innovate or Die”; and founder of a global interior design firm that specializes in turning retail spaces into exciting customer experiences — he keeps a collection of Manhanset House Hotel photos on display in his studio down by the pool and dock.

Mary, a Royer whose family has summered on Shelter Island for generations, bustled about doing laundry. “She’s really the Shelter Island hero, not me. I love it but I come here to hide,” Ken said.

Married in 1971 after meeting at a party in New York, they rented the turret room in the manor house at the Mashomack Preserve when it was a private club as their weekend getaway. They were either going to buy an apartment in the city or a place on the Island, when they came to see what would become their home here one rainy October day.

What hooked him wasn’t the view of Greenport across the water or the rolling grounds with majestic specimen trees: “This is the best garage I’ve ever seen!” he thought.

Ken was into cars well before discovering his passion for art, architecture and retail design. Growing up in Manhattan, the son of high-end custom men’s clothier, he couldn’t get a license there until he was 18. But at age 17 he went to California to run in “a junior Olympics thing,” he said, explaining he was not a good student but did well in sports, and stayed with friends of his parents in the San Joquin valley and “learned how to build engines and drag race.”

By the time he was 18, he’d already had his license revoked speeding. When he went to Brown in the late 1950s — thanks to his prowess as a soccer goalie at the Fieldstone School in Riverdale— “I joined the driving club and never stopped.”

A former share owner of the Bridgehampton race track, he has driven Ferraris, Porsches and Minis and even as Lotus 7 in events all over the world, including Le Mans and even on ice in Chaminix, and he is an instructor for Ferrari North America.

That spotless garage he loved now features a display of his racing photos and two street cars, a Mercedes station wagon and a BMW Mini he customized. An “M0” designation is on the back, which he said “drives aficionados crazy” because there is no such car in the BMW or Mini lineup.

His favorite racing photo is upstairs, showing famed driver Michelle Aboreto in a Formula I Ferrari — startled by the fast-approaching Mini coming up on him in a turn  — waving him by. “That’s my ego picture of all time,” Ken said.

While driving fired him up, his courses at Brown didn’t. He started out studying economics, “falling asleep trying to read Samuelson’s textbook,” and landing on academic probation.

“I am a product of mentors,” Ken said. “I was fortunate to take a course in architectural history the next semester given by a really great teacher,” William Jordy, a famed architectural historian.

“He made it exciting for me. I got an A in his course, became an art history and fine arts major and absolutely sailed through Brown, ending up in my senior year doing a little bit of lecturing as fill in” teacher’s assistant.

When he went on to get a graduate degree at Harvard in architecture, he became the teaching assistant of an MIT professor who had taught a course at Brown. “He passed me on to Harvard and I ended up teaching at the Fogg Museum,” holding discussion groups to follow up on lecture topics.

“To this day I take any spare seven-year-old to MOMA. I just love seeing things through their eyes. They can see more clearly than you or I can.”

“If I could have afforded to teach” for a living, “I might have,” but because of what turned out to be ADD, “I followed a visual path.”

Fired from his first job at a major architectural firm “because I was terrible” doing drudge work, he worked from his apartment and later from an office he shared, doing “anything I could get my hands on” from commercial clients. He preferred them to residential clients. “I didn’t like other peoples’ taste. It didn’t give me much satisfaction.”

The big break for what became WalkerGroup, which Ken founded in 1970 and sold to WPP Group in 1987, came when a neighbor in his office building who ran a concession called Shoe Biz on the ground floor of the Henri Bendel store on 57th Street asked him to redesign his modest space. Jerry Stutz, then president of Bendel, “loved it and asked us to do the second floor of the store.”

Mel Jacobs, a VP at Bloomingdale’s who’d been tapped to head Burdine’s, part of Federated stores, also liked the shoe store and came to see Ken, expecting to stay 15 minutes. Their chat lasted two hours.

Jacobs was “a real visionary” with whom Ken later became a partner along with Verna Gibson of the Limited in a design group called Retail Options Inc., which they founded after Ken left WPP Group, which by then — the late 1980s — had allowed him to expand his business to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and London.

“We became prettiest girl at the dance in relation to these big marketing firms. They all came at us,” Ken said.

“We turned it into entertainment,” he said of retail design. “We were creating environments that were very theatrical” and that “changed all the time. We got associated with bringing theatre to retail. The Japanese started flying people over to see our work.”

Asked for examples, he cited “FAO Schwartz” and described how opening up the ceiling over an escalator to expose higher levels cost space that had always been considered too valuable to touch. But overall, the redesign increased sales all over the building.

“Once you do it and it succeeds, then people trust you and you get a reputation for doing innovative things,” and he’s been the Ferrari in the fast lane ever since.