THOM 1 | Fall / Winter 2013
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trailblazer<br />
Written by<br />
Michele Arwood<br />
Photographed by<br />
Rinne Allen<br />
IT’S A RAINY SUMMER day when the big bungalow door swings open and my travel<br />
companion, Nan Myers, and I are greeted by a petite blond rockin’ a pair of gym<br />
shorts, T-shirt, and a pony tail tinted with slight traces of pink. One enthusiastic<br />
“Hey, y’all!” and we find ourselves inside the home of Susan Hable Smith.<br />
She’s the creative force behind Hable Construction, a NYC based textile design<br />
business she co-founded with her sister, Katharine Hable Sweeney, almost 15<br />
years ago. It’s a company that has evolved with the times and continued to grow<br />
on the founding principles of practicality, sophistication and timelessness. Their<br />
fabric lines are represented in interior design showrooms around the world with<br />
home and personal accessories marketed through an online shop.<br />
The idea of visiting with a design leader who you’ve followed for more than<br />
a decade is one thing, but getting to spend a few days living the Hable life is<br />
another. She’s at the top of her field in textile design, so we expected her home to<br />
be fabulous, of course. But what we really found was an artist living an authentic<br />
life in a home layered with the things she loves deeply: her family, an eclectic art<br />
collection, trinkets from her travels, nubby textiles, lots of friends, and a garden<br />
that’s to die for.<br />
She’s known for the bold, hand-drawn abstract patterns that anchor the Hable<br />
line, but has started blazing a new trail as a notable watercolorist. Ask her what<br />
inspired her to take this new path and she’ll share the story of an unlikely shift<br />
from life in the Big Apple to small town life in Athens, Georgia. It was a little<br />
more than three years ago when she followed her longtime photographer friend,<br />
Rinne Allen, to Athens to shoot photography for the product line. That visit left<br />
her charmed by the south and led to a big move for her family.<br />
On the second day of our visit, I take a walk through her garden to the historic<br />
cottage at the back of her property. It houses her design studio. Painted a deep<br />
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