Her magazine At Home With Chris Madden was published by Hearst and sent to Good Housekeeping subscribers for about two years beginning in 2005.
She married Mr. Madden, then advertising director of New York Magazine, in 1974. He would later become publisher of Self, House & Garden and Bon Appétit, then chief executive of his wife’s company, Chris Madden Inc.
Ann Christine Casson was born on June 1, 1948 in Rockville Centre, NY, on Long Island, as 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 upholstered furniture.
Chris was a model as a child and teenager. She studied fashion merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, though she dropped out in her senior year to work as an assistant in Sports Illustrated’s photography department.
She worked in the publicity departments of several publishing houses — at just 24, she was hired as a publicity director at Farrar, Straus & Giroux — until she was fired by Simon & Schuster in the late 1970s, Madden said, for not being aggressive enough. She then started her own publicity company, Chris Madden & Associates (there were no employees), in their apartment on East 84th Street. Her clients included book publishers, an anti-censorship nonprofit, and Ford Models.
At the same time, she started producing coffee table books. She first wrote a cookbook (“The Compleat Lemon,” with Susan Lee, published 1979) and then a book about New York City (“Manhattan,” with Jean-Claude Suares, published 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.
