A Collector’s Lair

September 16, 2025

With an intense passion for “the hunt,” interior designer Brent Thompson brings his coveted finds home to rest in his private, maximalist sanctuary.

Words
Susan Cannon
@susancannon1

Photos
Matthew Anderson
@matthewaphoto

Designer
Brent Thompson,
Noble Designs
@whatwouldtomforddo
@nobledesigns

f ever there was a person whose unrelenting appetite for collecting and styling was so apparent, it would be Brent Thompson, a senior designer at Noble Designs.

He is a passionate man of much depth, curiosity, and historical knowledge, and he has the eye for merging disparate influences like nobody’s business. When a gothic church pulpit that holds bad-boy photographer Terry Richardson’s book stands next to a four-foot hot pink meerkat sculpture under a colorful expressionist William Rainey painting, or, when a leather Karl Lagerfeld doll is displayed on an ornate neoclassical marble pedestal, you know there’s mad vision happening. After all, Thompson’s sensibility is informed by a mix of beauty, irony, the past, the present, subtle nuances, bold statements, touches of surrealism, and always fashion.

“The bridge between interior design and fashion is how I live and how I style,” he says.

When asked about his earliest influences, he first cites his late grandparents, whom he often traveled with, and specifically his grandmother, who had her own progressive style and taste. He mentions her repeatedly, regarding interiors, objects, and places that he is also drawn to, and he has many of her possessions in his home. Regarding fashion, his key influence goes back to designer Gianni Versace.

“He was very inspiring to me, and was the kind of gay man I wanted to be in the world,” he says.

There is certainly a direct link between the late Italian designer (his visage and the aesthetic of the Versace brand with its Medusa and Greek Key icons on tableware and silk prints) to the massive cache of Greek and Roman busts, art, intaglios, and other iconographic objects that Thompson collects.

During a recent trip to Rome, his experiences were profound. “Seeing the art was everything to me. I didn’t even look like myself,” he says. “I got inside my head. The idea that people made these sculptures…we don’t do that anymore. Their whole life was to put beauty into the world. I connect to that on a cellular level.”

To know Thompson and to have experienced his abundance of kind, positive energy, it is no wonder that his home is filled with an abundance of (fabulous) things. However, for such a social person, who knew he would be so private, and not be the type to bring people around to his house? As he explains, “My home is just very personal to me.”

Since 2006, when he bought the 1920s Brookside house, he has completely transformed it and filled it with a veritable soupçon of style books, Italian busts, vintage and antique furnishings, art and curios, all abounding with a sort of museum-quality importance, yet blended with a spicy dash of humor and a savory taste for the provocative. He also applied his own artistic hand to the home. Being an inspired fan of late French surrealist artists, Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard, he painted his own tromp l’oeil murals, most prominently in his kitchen, and with a nod toward French interior designer Vincent Darré, whose present-day imagination is an influence.

Every weekend, religiously, Thompson is out scouring for the goods, whether he’s in New York, or, most often, hitting his favorite Kansas City spots, such as Christopher Filley, Urban Mining, and the River Market and Glenwood antique malls, to name a few. His close friend, Addison Ford, the co-owner of home decor shop Afternoons knows him so well that he’ll snap items up for the shop he knows Thompson will love. And wherever the luxury, vintage fashion shop Born Into Money is popping up, Thompson is there with bells on. By the same token, the owner, Tracy Apperson, is known to specifically source pieces with him in mind, such as an early ’90s Gianni Versace gladiator skirt and a limited-edition Supreme for Louis Vuitton suitcase, which he uses as a living room side table. Thompson also frequents and shops the Heidmann Art Salons, which are unique, themed art “happenings” put on by Scott Heidmann and Ken Petti many times a year.

While in New York, where he travels at least quarterly, he’s a known regular at the Chelsea Flea Market. He does a lot of vintage sourcing for himself and for Noble Designs, as well as visiting his friend, whose business Inno Style sells unique fashion, including By Walid pieces he collects. Comme des Garçons and other avant-garde designers get his love at Dover Street Market, and he has scored fashion pieces from Nick Wooster’s closet at auction on the Real Real. Wooster, as many know, is a native of Salina, Kansas, but through the decades, he has risen on the international fashion scene as a style icon.

While there are so many other brilliant creatives who inspire Thompson over the vast internet, his own personal Instagram is a vibrant, visionary one to take in.