Robert Mcbreen, Interior Designer Whose Standards Inspired Loyalty

Of course you can't design a life like you would design, say, a room.

But Robert McBreen, who created some of Seattle's most beautiful rooms in his long career as an interior designer, filled his 80 years with some of the same themes he brought to his work: loyalty, respect for tradition and a flair for the original.

McBreen died Oct. 8 in his Capitol Hill home, in the same neighborhood where he spent virtually his entire professional life. A service is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. tomorrow at First Covenant Church, 400 E. Pike St.

First as a designer and corporate treasurer for R.J. Skewes, at the time a landmark furniture store on Broadway North (now Broadway East), and then for nearly 40 years running his own fine furniture and design firm at Broadway East and East John Street, McBreen was synonymous with classic, traditional styling.

"His firm was very well-known," recalled Ernest Wulff, a McBreen designer for 24 years who now has his own Seattle business.

"He had some of the top lines of furniture. And wonderful antiques, many of which Bob and his partner bought in Europe . . . That was our forte. Traditional. Clients would come to us for that reason."

Wulff and other friends say McBreen's personal and business relationships aged as well as the European finds he brought back to Capitol Hill.

Loyalty and mutual respect were so entrenched at Robert L. McBreen and Associates that, even with his 24-year tenure, Wulff always remained the rookie. Every other designer in the shop worked with McBreen longer than he did, Wulff said.

Lucille Hewson tells a similar story. She was McBreen's friend for 73 years.

Shortly after he was born - Feb. 8, 1911 - McBreen's mother died, Hewson said, and he was raised by his grandmother, a neighbor of Hewson's family near Woodland Park. As a child, she recalled, McBreen showed a fondness for style, especially for antiques.

"His grandmother had rooms of old-fashioned stuff, old furniture, and Robert loved it," Hewson said. "My family had antiques, too, and he was just fascinated by them. Later, when he had a chance to work for Dick Skewes, he jumped at it."

But it wasn't a chance that came right away. After a short stint at the University of Washington, McBreen went to work for the Shell Oil Co., in a desk job secured for him by his father, whom Hewson recalls as a powerful man.

But the young McBreen hated the desk work and, at the first opportunity, joined the Skewes furniture store as a designer.

Later, in the early 1950s, McBreen and a partner opened their own store down the street.

During this time, Hewson said, McBreen became an accomplished entertainer and well-known in the city's social circles. He was quite a cook, friends say, and threw and frequented some of Seattle's most glittering parties.

Hewson recalls him as a tall man, "well-built and I would say he was handsome." She glanced at a photograph taken some years later on a beach. McBreen had the same handsome features but had lost his hair and, in this picture at least, didn't seem to mind.

"He was still handsome when he was bald," she said. "Look at him. Pompous, bald head and all."

Eventually he bought a hairpiece, but in an example of his self-deprecating humor, he would tease himself about needing to go to the barber. "He was extremely comical," Hewson said. "He coined phrases I wish I had set down, they were so funny and so original."

McBreen was a member of the Seattle Tennis Club and a supporter of the Seattle Historical Society, the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. He also participated in professional organizations, including a stint as an early president of the American Institute of Interior Designers state chapter.

McBreen, who didn't marry, is survived by a cousin, Seattle architect Wendell Lovett, who also grew up knowing McBreen but was 10 years his junior.

"He was a very fine guy," Lovett said, "but our feeling for style was so different. I tend to be a strong modernist, and my cousin Robert was much more a traditionalist."