Iris Dankner: Holiday House Hamptons Founder

Fighting Breast Cancer with Holiday House

Iris Dankner has had a remarkable career, making her mark on the interior design industry and in the fight against breast cancer as founder of Holiday House in the Hamptons and New York City. She’s even the creator of an icon of 20^th-century Americana; the Lord & Taylor logo we all know is actually her own handwriting!

Her interiors firm, ID Creations, has offices in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and Dankner is a breast cancer survivor whose determination to help find a cure led her to found Holiday House, the popular annual designer show houses benefitting research into the disease.

$2 Million Raised for Breast Cancer

Since its 2008 inception, Holiday House has raised over $2 million for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), on whose advisory board Dankner serves. Now, in its 15^th year, they hold annual designer show houses in New York City and the Hamptons, plus one-off events in London and Palm Beach. They have even released a coffee table book, Holiday House: Ten Years of Decorating for a Cure, documenting its first decade.

Of course, there have been remarkable properties over the years. One had Long Island’s only rooftop tennis court – so they got Venus Williams to host a party there. For the past few years she put together smaller “tabletop” shows, in which design firms presented their visions of place settings. “What’s better than being around a beautiful table with family and loved ones?” Dankner said.

This summer’s Hamptons Holiday House took place in a 9,000 square-foot home in Bridgehampton and ran through August 27. The event drew a capacity crowd to the opening party. “Everyone dressed in white, it was just magical,” Dankner said of the evening.

Every Day is a Holiday

The name “Holiday House” denotes a simple philosophy that every day after a cancer diagnosis feels like a holiday. “It’s not about designers choosing a holiday like Christmas or Thanksgiving, which they can, but it’s just making a memorable moment that they would like to celebrate,” Danker explained.

International Route to Holiday House

At age 40, with two young daughters and running her own design firm, Dankner was diagnosed with breast cancer at her first routine mammogram, which saved her life. “That was 26 years ago when nobody spoke the words, ‘breast cancer.’ And it was very hard being a young woman with no one to talk to, so I started fundraising, basically, as a way to help myself heal.” She put together a team for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and was later asked to join the board, chairing the race for three years.

Race for the Cure: Egypt & Israel

Invited as a delegate to the Race for the Cure in Egypt, she marched from the Pyramid to the Sphinx with women who had survived breast cancer. Dressed in burqas, some wore survivor caps, others pinned survivor T-shirts on their backs. For Dankner, it was an amazing experience, so she suggested a walk in Israel. The response from the board: “If you want to spearhead Israel, go ahead.”

She spent the next year working to establish the first Race for the Cure in Israel, which ended with the Wailing Wall bathed in pink. Arabs and Israelis walked side by side, as breast cancer has no boundaries. “It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, putting together a whole group to introduce a new project in a new country. It was spectacular.”

Lord & Taylor Log

Dankner’s path to becoming an interior designer was also circuitous. Unsure how to earn money with her fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon, she took a freelance job at Lord & Taylor, and stayed for 14 years, becoming their art director. “It was before computers – I am a dinosaur,” Dankner laughed. “We had 48 stores throughout the country, and every single ad needed to go by me so that I could put a handwritten logo around the artwork, and then we overnighted it. If you remember what the Lord & Taylor ads look like, each one of those logos is mine.”

When a new owner took over the company, Dankner decided to go back to school and study interior design. “I felt like I was just taking my two-dimensional skills and making them three-dimensional. When you have a good sense of color and texture, it was just putting it into a different form.”

After her breast cancer diagnosis, she had an “aha” moment and decided to combine her two passions and do something in the design industry that benefits women’s issues.

“I remember the night I said to my family, ‘Mommy has an idea,’ and everybody giggled, especially my husband. And now 15 years later, that dream has become a reality.” She plans to continue her work until we are living in a world without breast cancer. “I want my grandchildren not to understand what type of work I did or why.” Dankner’s Holiday House will host their next showcase in New York City in November.