New School President Bob Kerrey and Joel Towers, dean of Parsons The New School for Design, engage in an informal discussion with Parsons alumna Henriette Suhr, a renowned former interior design executive and celebrated creator of a well-known garden estate.

Born in Austria, Ms. Suhr spent her early years in Paris, where she attended Parsons’ interior design program. After graduating in 1937 and moving to the United States in 1941, Ms. Suhr went on to a distinguished career as an interior designer with a specialty in home furnishing displays. As head of Bloomingdale’s decorating department, she revolutionized interior design by introducing new, contemporary American and European furniture designers to the U.S. market and displaying their work in lavish model rooms (the first of their kind ) featuring a blend of merchandise from many different sources. As one of Ms. Suhr’s great innovations, these model rooms educated consumers’ tastes, thus enabling them to make easier, more informed purchasing and décor decisions. Ms. Suhr’s design displays received extensive media praise from the top journalists and magazines of the day.

After Bloomingdale’s, Ms. Suhr served as a consultant for numerous department stores, including Burdines, I. Magnin, and Lord & Taylor. She also designed the interiors for the Dansk headquarters in Mount Kisco, New York; designed Baker Furniture showrooms to highlight the work of Finn Juhl; and collaborated with the English interior designer T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings.

More recently, Ms. Suhr has won renown for creating and tending Rocky Hills, one of the country’s leading private gardens and a favorite of the Garden Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving extraordinary gardens. Beginning in the 1950s, Ms. Suhr and her husband, William, a distinguished art conservator, transformed their property into what the New York Times called an “eight-acre wonderland”—a rolling landscape of beautifully arranged flowers, shrubs, and trees—for which she won the Foundation for Landscape Studies’ 2009 Place Maker Award. Ms. Suhr has donated Rocky Hills to Westchester County for use as a public garden and education center.