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S eventeenth-century drawings and 21st- century photographs by European women cohabitate within t h e h a n d s o m e cinematic interiors of a Houston high-rise. Its owner, the scion of an old Milwaukee family who's been knighted by the country of Italy, is Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl. Rather than collecting for personal pleasure or vanity, or to accrue marketplace value, Haukohl is carefully stewarding his collections towards a major museum donation (photography), and an important European tour (Old Masters, complemented by a 288-page art volume). Also engaging in this domestic tête-à-tête are: timeless furniture by Isamu Noguchi, Gio Ponti, Alvar Alto, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings; an early Henry Moore sculpture; Florentine majolica; and 13th- century ceramic vessels from Thailand. T he first time I met Sir Mark, he was a figure who stood out from the relentlessly trendy art crowd at Houston Center for Photography. Impeccable in a bespoke jacket and foulard, he exuded civility, and our concise conversation revealed a sparkling intelligence, rapier wit, and an ability to home in on the most significant artwork in the room. Four years later, I was watching Haukohl in collector action. It was December 2013, in a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. He had spotted a trio of Eva Schlegels offered by a European dealer. The images possessed great mystery, their central figures shrouded, challenging the viewer to decipher them. Our Houston group walked in. Haukohl asked advice. I suggested it would be impossible to select one over the other; the three images were part of a conversation. So he said yes to the trinity, and they now hang as part of his well- edited collection. Last December, I attended an intimate cocktail party at Haukohl's pied-à-terre — a salon of sorts, with a small group of art-world friends. A butler greeted us at the door — the start of an evening well stocked with ceremony, civilized conversation, and a side of insider art dish. The space is a lesson in living by a strict aesthetic and disciplined eye, with considered details: fresh lilies perfuming the air, formal tea or coffee service for daytime guests, the butler dispensing flutes of champagne in the later hours. A sense of social theater prevails, rather like a Cedric Gibbons film set from Deco-era Hollywood. Haukohl's sensibility was born six decades ago in an unlikely Midwestern culture capital: post-WWII Milwaukee, a city interwoven with his family's fortunes for more than a century. "My great-grandfather came to Milwaukee in 1836," Haukohl says, "and we still have Robert I, right down to Robert VI. My grandfather was a great philanthropist. He was involved with Marquette University, the Jesuit school. And my late father was a physician, co-founder of the College of American Pathologists and American Society for Clinical Pathology, and my great-grandfather and great-uncles did all sorts of things." Raised in this enlightened environment, Haukohl had an enviable childhood. "My parents traveled two months a year," he re- calls. "It was sort of a wonderful existence. Very 1950s, Mad Men. They took a month off in the winter and went to the Caribbean — Havana, Jamaica, places like that — and took a month off in the summer and went to Europe, mostly Spain and the Pyrenees. They brought back great souvenirs, and I am the lucky recipient of many of them." Aside from wealth, his parents possessed a curiosity about the world, a quality he inherited. "In the Haukohl family, it is all about the intellect," he says. This acumen has served him well in the pursuit of art. The young Haukohl's aptitude for business early on was apparent. After graduating from Michigan State University Honors College, he felt the siren call of Manhattan and earned his MBA from NYU. By the early 1980s, he was in a catbird seat on Wall Street. "I wasn't a stockbroker," he says. "I was managing director at Smith Barney, later called Salomon Smith Barney, a division of Citigroup. I was in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions." It was a heady time. Despite his Wall Street success, Haukohl moved from New York in 1984 due to family ties. His father had just passed away, and his younger brother was in Houston, so his mother, Tess, followed. The erudite Haukohls were enthusiastically embraced. "We decided we loved Houston," he says, "and we made it a permanent home." He immediately became involved with the Blaffer Gallery. "I was here only minutes when Jane Blaffer Owen came to me, along with the Borlenghis and Dominique de Menil, to ask us to exhibit our Italian Old Masters drawing collection at the Blaffer Gallery." The resulting 1985 exhibition, "Italian Drawings from the Sixteenth to the Eighteen Centuries from Houston Collections," organized by then Blaffer director Esther de Vécsey, is still remembered for its nuanced beauty and connoisseurship. Inspired by his parents' acquisition example, Haukohl has continued and expanded the family collection of Old Masters, both paintings and drawings, which tilted to the Italian, specifically the 75 Opposite page: Looking towards the dining room: MoMA-exhibited Marina Abramovic's Cleaning the Floor, 2004, has pride of place over the Alvar Aalto dining table for Finmar, a find from a Phillips auction. The Abromovic image, a calling card of Haukohl's 21st-century European women photography collection, appeared on the December 2009 cover of Artnews. Foreground, the Cloud settee and ottoman, produced by Herman Miller, circa 1948, "are original Noguchi that my parents bought in the 1950s, as are the T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings kidney table with matching slipper chairs," says Haukohl. This page: The kitchen showcases museum-caliber art and design: an original Alvar Aalto table, a turn-of-the century Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair, and three photographs by Caroline Heider.