Ad Blocker Detected
Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.
Her magazine Your Good House was published by Hearst and sent to subscribers of Good Housekeeping for about two years starting in 2006.
She married Mr. Madden, then advertising director of New York Magazine, in 1974. He would go on to be publisher of Self, House & Garden and Bon Appétit, and then chief executive of his wife’s company, Chris Madden Inc.
Ann Christine Casson was born on June 1, 1948, in Rockville Centre, N.Y., on Long Island, one of nine children. Her father, Edward Gaynor Casson, was a sales executive at the Mohawk Brush Company. Her mother, Ann Marie (Hill) Casson, was a homemaker who taught her children to sew and cook, and even upholster furniture.
Chris was a model as a child and a teenager. She majored in fashion merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, though she dropped out in her senior year to work as an assistant in the photo department of Sports Illustrated.
She worked in the publicity departments at several publishing houses — when she was just 24, she was hired as director of publicity at Farrar, Straus & Giroux — until being fired by Simon & Schuster in the late 1970s, Mr. Madden said, for not being aggressive enough. She then started her own publicity company, Chris Madden & Associates (there were no associates), in their apartment on East 84th Street. Her clients included book publishers, an anti-censorship nonprofit and Ford Models.
At the same time, she began to produce coffee-table books. She first wrote a cookbook (“The Compleat Lemon,” with Susan Lee, published in 1979) and then a book on New York City (“Manhattan,” with Jean-Claude Suares, published in 1981). After her book on decorators, “Interior Visions: Great American Designers and the Showcase House,” was published in 1988, she began to focus on interior design.
