ArchiDesign

1December 3, 2012 •

ArchiDesign

ArchiDesignThe Art of Living

DECEMBER 3, 2012

Riffing on the Giants of Modern Design on Shelter Island

question&answer: VICTOR-RAUL GARCIA

A RUSSIAN ENTREPRENEUR’S ONE-OF-A-KIND DACHA Designer Gabhan

O’Keeffe fashions a family retreat outside Moscow

77 HUDSON

www.77hudson.com


ArchiDesign

Con

tent

sSCARLET FEVER 4Add warmth and cheer to your home with a

touch of bold color. Find inspiration in 18 ravish-

ingly red rooms from the pages of AD.

FAMILY STYLE 5In honor of the 30th anniversary of the hit ‘80s

television show Family Ties, we look back at the

classic sitcom’s decade-defining set designs

DOUBLE FEATURE 11After converting his Paris apartment into a

duplex, designer Tino Zervudachi has twice

the space to display his diverse collection of

antiques, artwork, and mementos

FAMILY WISE 15AD visits the graceful Manhattan home of actors

Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan

BREAKOUT ROLE 21Brad Pitt teams with furnituremaker Frank Pol-

laro on a collection of inventive designs

PRESENT TIME 25AD rounds up 25 of the season’s most stylish

presents to give and get—and all cost less than

$150

LIGHT & LIVELY 33Featuring exotic trompe l’oeil, tropical art, and a

sprightly palette, Nancy and Bill Morton’s historic

Florida home is a Gulf Coast paradise

CLASSIC CHIC 39AD chats with celebrated tastemaker Ann Getty

about her lavish new book of interiors

SINGULAR SENSATION 45With an exuberant mix of bespoke furnishings,

designer Gabhan O’Keeffe fashions a one-of-a-

kind dacha for a Russian entrepreneur

DECK THE HALLS! 49Event designer Bronson van Wyck’s Manhattan

pop-up shop offers dashing decorations and styl-

ish gifts for the holidays

PALACE COUP 53This winter Four Seasons’ first property in

Russia—the 177-room Hotel Lion Palace St.

Petersburg—will open inside a onetime aristo-

cratic residence

4 • December 3, 2012

ArchiDesign

STORMS ARE CALLED ACTS OF GOD FOR A REASON.There was nothing in the short term that anyone could have done to stop Sandy. To the contrary—discounting the well-organized government response and many individual acts of heroism—humanity actually made the situation worse. How? Through neglect of our infrastructure and our ongoing failure to reduce carbon emissions, which aggravate climate change and encourage extreme weather events.

“Anyone who thinks that there is not a dra-matic change in weather patterns is denying reality,” New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at a press conference on the day after the storm. “We have a new reality, and old infrastructures and old systems.”

In 2010, voters gave Republicans control of the House and more senators to push back on the Obama agenda. Unfortunately, some Republicans were intimidated and yielded by allowing a debt-ceiling increase without specific, rational spending cuts in all areas to

be put in place. Now, Mr. Obama is still in full campaign mode, promoting his “fiscal cliff” solution, which, he contends, Republicans need to accept immediately to resolve the impending crisis. The president has neglected the issue for more than a year and deliber-ately put it off until after the election.

However, adding revenue through tax-code reform and appropriate spending cuts alone will not solve the problem. Essential will be a united effort to make our businesses competi-tive in promoting growth and increasing jobs. A comprehensive energy program using all sources available also is needed. Accountabil-ity on how tax dollars are spent and elimina-tion of waste, fraud, cronyism and unneces-sary government programs and personnel are all equally important.

President Obama is again pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy, which will fund the government for about eight days, and he will consider spending cuts in the future. He cannot be taken at his word. If he gets his way, our fall over the fiscal cliff will be deeper and last longer.

JOHN RONSON, Pennsylvania

From the MailNo DenyingHopefully some good will come of this national catastrophe. Hurricane Sandy might just serve as a wake-up call to those who live in a state of denial about the consequences of climate change and the urgent necessity for investment in infrastructure. A policy swing toward scientific reality and environ-mental responsibility would have profoundly posi-tive effects on our ecosystem and our economy. How many disasters will it take to make the case?NED CRAMER, New York City

WEEKLY RECAPBreathing the flames of sycophancy

and the hellish misperception that

President Obama is God, actor Jamie

Foxx recently said at the Soul Train

Awards, “It’s like church in here. First of

all, give an honor to God and our Lord

and Savior Barack Obama” (“Jamie

Foxx — ‘Give an honor to God and

our Lord and Savior Barack Obama,’ ”

Web, Monday).

DAVID LAWRENCE, New York

I can tolerate Mr. Foxx’s sacrilege, but I

can’t stand his deifying a failed presi-

dent. It would be sin enough to call John

F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt God.

At least they were responsible for some

positive acts. But Mr. Obama? Give me a

break. He has ruined the economy, de-

stroyed the oil industry, proliferated food

stamps and poverty, confused the sexes

and ratified homosexual “marriage,”

not to mention increased our enemies

around the world and significantly weak-

ened our defenses.

ROBERT PICKLES, Pennsylvania

Is this a man who walks on water?

He would probably sink in a boat. Mr.

Obama has holes in his rhetoric and in

his deeds. To call Mr. Obama a savior is

to call Forrest Gump a genius. Forrest

simply kept stepping into luck. Simi-

larly, Mr. Obama is a failure who keeps

garnering votes.

STEVEN POWERS, Las Vegas


ArchiDesign

Editor’s PageT

astes evolve—which has always been the lifeblood of the interior design business. Years spent in elegant rooms ar-rayed with polished antiques and touch-me-not fabrics might inspire a longing for surroundings that are lighter and less formal. Likewise, living in a spare modern space can

eventually leave one feeling a tad undernourished. In fact, I’m always puzzled by those who stick with the status quo, maintaining what has been instead of embracing a new design statement that reflects how far their aesthetic mind-set has shifted. I know of more than a few people who, when confronted by tired and threadbare curtains, upholstery, wallpaper, or carpets, will simply replace them with ho-hum replicas of the originals.

Happily, that’s not what we found when we visited the Manhattan resi-dence of actors Tracy Pollan and Michael J. Fox for this month’s cover story. In the 1990s the couple set up housekeeping in a spacious apart-ment in a refined prewar building near Central Park. They added a col-orful old-world–style design scheme dense with choice Swedish and Continental antiques, ornately patterned fabrics, and intricate decora-tive details (AD, October 1997). Fast-forward some 15 years, and it was finally time to refurbish the decor, which was showing some fatigue. Tracy tells us, “Our tastes changed, but we held off redecorating—it seemed like a big undertaking.” Michael adds, “This place has raised four kids. We beat the hell out of it.”

Recognizing who you’ve become can take some time, even for people who live in the public eye. Tracy and Michael knew that this time around they wanted “a younger-style apartment than we had when we were younger,” he says. Which, thanks to design-ers Mariette Himes Gomez and Brooke Gomez, is exactly what they now have—subtle, sophisticated, contemporary rooms that are inviting but without an excess of bells and whistles that demand, “Look at me!” It’s a fresh update that suits the needs of the Fox-Pollan family today.

Though it’s always a great pleasure to feature an interior that is at once stylish and relevant, it’s even more heartening to promote a worthy cause: Brooke is running in the NYC Marathon as part of Team Fox, raising funds on behalf of the Michael J. Fox Founda-tion for Parkinson’s Research. The race day is Sunday, November 4, but Brooke’s donation link on the foundation’s website will be active through the end of the year; please click here for details. Generosity, like good taste, will never go out of style.

—MARGARET RUSSELL, Editor in Chief


ArchiDesign

The Art of Living

Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat have their friend David Hock-ney to thank for the fact that the Shelter Island, New York, re-treat they designed for themselves is an unabashed synthesis of stylistic and theoretical influences.

“He told us something so liberating in the way we approach design,” says Stamberg, recalling a weekend visit to Los Angeles at a time when Hockney was contending with critics about his own relation-ship to Picasso and Cubism. “He said he always knows how great an artist is by how great the artist is he copies.”

Architects tapping the masters for inspiration is convention—far rarer is a design road map so freely annotated. The principals of New York City’s Stamberg Aferiat Architecture grew up on Long Island, where a Marcel Breuer house near their respective towns lit the formative spark—and then seeing Charles Gwathmey’s 1967 residence for his parents in Amagansett caused both, as teenagers, to envision themselves as architects. “It really began with that,” says Aferiat. They first collaborated in 1976, starting their firm 13 years later. “By that time we had become obsessed with the idea of putting everything we knew of art and the art of architecture into making our own defining object.”

The house—two volumes totaling 1,100 square feet—occupies a flat, verdant site overlooking a meadow, just inland from Coecles Harbor. A charge of color and form lassoed with rational coolness, it is an architec-tural feat requiring an all but clearing of the senses to fully process. The main volume of the steel-framed structure encases the living area and the east bedroom; also a parallelogram and also oriented toward the pool set in a concrete “plinth,” the smaller volume comprises the west bed-room. Walls are vertical at the primary spaces and leaning planes (after the works of Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly) where they enclose the pool and, off the living area and the east bedroom, the raised garden and reflecting pool.

The floor plan took shape on a trip to see the reconstructed Barcelo-na Pavilion (Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 masterpiece) the partners made right after acquiring the property. “It hit us on the plane going over,” says Aferiat. “We wanted to take Modernism from the teens and ’20s and re-analyze it in terms of where we are now. The glass box had been done. We wanted something more plastic, more fluid—but just as ordered, not deconstructed.”

In their plan, each plane corresponds to one at the Barcelona Pavil-ion, the first internationally recognized building in which floating planes

defined volume. Hewing to Mies’s distinction between structure and en-closure, Aferiat and Stamberg substituted translucency for transparency (“the reality of where and how we live as opposed to an abstract concept of domesticity that never really panned out,” Stamberg explains). They also went with non-posh materials, corrugated aluminum being more suitable for a country setting, more textural and more conducive to paint-ing than marble and travertine. Muses aside (though here again, Hock-ney’s voice reverberates), the house’s heartbeat is its application of color. The decision, the only one they debated, was made not to limit them-selves to one part of the spectrum but go completely around it. “Color is about making the space respond to light,” says Aferiat, remarking on the “thousands of shades” they could have chosen versus the ones they did, which don’t absorb or deaden light but amplify it. In its prepainted stage, the house had a luminousness from the reflective metal. “We were very conscious,” he adds, “not to lose that quality—or its equivalencies: color elements in the landscape that also reflect light.”

Multipaneled polycarbonate walls (insulating and wind braced by the exposed steel frame) extend light throughout; at night, the house becomes a softly glowing lantern. As in Barcelona, the roof overhang of the larger volume touches down on a wall extending from the smaller one. Hover-ing on canted, thin steel columns, the green butterfly roofs rise and dip, causing the ceiling in the loftlike living area to expand from seven feet to over twice that height. The curved steel beams allow for long cantilevers, and overhangs join with geothermal heating and cooling in a package of sustainability.

The translucency and unit dimensions of Maison de Verre, the low ceil-ing heights of Fallingwater, the opaque street elevation of Richard Meier’s Hoffman House. Le Corbusier’s sweeping roof at Ronchamp. Matisse’s exquisite range of colors in Luxe, Calme et Volupté. “As artists,” observes Stamberg, “our whole world is derivative.” However emphatic a distilla-tion of ideas this project represents, there was one he and Aferiat deemed inapplicable. “Philip Johnson cautioned young architects against trying to put everything they know into that first building for themselves. But we’re not in our 20s, and we’ve made a lot of architecture. Everything of us is in this house.”

Riffing on the Giants of Modern Design on Shelter Island

“Color is about making the space respond to light.”

By: Therese Bissell


ArchiDesign

Few things are more frustrating than a dream continu-ously postponed. Moscow businessman Vassily V. Sidorov had long imagined having the perfect dacha, a country retreat, to escape the stress of the city. He even got as far as building the structure, but three

design-and-architecture teams later, his getaway in Rublevo-Uspenskoye—a suburb long favored by the Russian capital’s elite—remained unfinished, unfurnished, and uninhabitable. “Neither the layout nor the decorating suggestions were to my satisfaction,” he says, adding, “Russia has a tradition of educat-ing architects but not interior designers.”

The solution to this impasse turned out to be simpler than he thought: employ a decorating visionary fluent in architectural de-sign to approach the interiors and the façade as a seamless unit. Through an acquaintance, Sidorov—the owner of Euroatlantic In-vestments, a corporate finance/mergers-and-acquisitions advisory boutique—heard about Gabhan O’Keeffe, a London-based South African designer known for his ebullient but exacting style. In his work for such clients as German arts patron Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and British rock star Bryan Ferry, nearly every component, from the fabrics to the moldings, is bespoke. Sidorov recalls that he and his artist wife, Victoria, were impressed from their first meeting with O’Keeffe. “We could tell from the pictures Gabhan shared with us that he was used to creating very special houses,” he recounts.

With the contract signed, O’Keeffe, along with his design director, George Warrington, and their 14-member team, began mitigating the prop-erty’s drawbacks. To harmonize the 35,000-square-foot building with its wooded lot, they applied umber-stained stucco to the exterior walls, establishing a tonal relationship with both the bark of the surrounding trees and the house’s monumental stone portico. Broad bands of iroko wood, which weathers to an autumnal shade, were installed just below the roofline and between some of the first- and second-floor windows. The horizontal details visually stretch the proportions of the house and give it a sense of breadth that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prai-rie School. Deep ground-floor terraces, also of iroko, provide a gracious base that balances the scale of the house while strengthening the link between architecture and landscape.

A similar sense of generosity fueled the interior renovations, which included the addition of walk-in closets and expansive baths. “The idea was to open everything up,” O’Keeffe says, “and create a rhythm between the rooms, so they weren’t just one-stop wonders.” Impres-sive 26-foot-high doorways, hung with overscale lanterns, connect the lofty drawing and dining rooms, the latter furnished with a mix of buttercup-yellow chairs, purple velvet sofas, scarlet silk lampshades, and a vividly striped carpet—a chromatic exuberance that is as un-mistakably O’Keeffe as it is thoroughly Russian. The circular entrance hall’s immense X-shaped staircase was replaced with a ribbonlike as-cent of glass and bronze that unfurls along curving walls cunningly painted and shaded by hand so they appear to be padded with Mi-chelin Man–esque rolls of white leather.

A RUSSIAN ENTREPRENEUR’S ONE-OF-A-KIND DACHA

With an exuberant mix of bespoke furnishings—from handwoven wall coverings to inlaid-wood low tables to baldachin beds—designer Gabhan O’Keeffe fashions a family retreat outside Moscow

By: Mitchell Owens


NATE BURKUS

Quick changes are second nature to interior decorator Nate Berkus. As the longtime home-makeover ma-ven on The Oprah Winfrey Show and later host of his own television

program, he has mastered the art of creating el-egant, welcoming rooms in seemingly no time at all. (Just consider, as evidence of his abili-ties, the uproarious audience applause, tears of joy, and effusive Winfrey whoops that greeted his projects upon their unveiling.) In the case of his Manhattan duplex, the designer—true to form—executed one of his hallmark speedy transformations, with chic results that are a thoughtful reflection of his past.

Berkus bought the apartment, in a 19th-century Greenwich Village building, in 2011, after a pe-riod of renting a loftlike space in a mod Jean Nouvel–designed tower overlooking the Hud-son River. “I always had this New York fantasy of living in a glass high-rise,” he says, adding that he relocated from Chicago three years ago to film The Nate Berkus Show (no longer in

production). It turns out panoramic views and sleek surfaces didn’t suit him. “While I respect contemporary architecture a great deal, I was uncomfortable from the moment I moved in,” he recalls. “I felt like I was living on a shelf.”

His current address, discovered after several rest-less nights searching real-estate listings, was far from perfect when he found it, distinguished not by venerable millwork or original fixtures but by

walls of whitewashed brick. Still, the floor plan possessed the key elements he wanted, namely three bedrooms (two would be for guests) and a terrace. Besides, he reasoned, even the duplex’s flaws had a certain amount of character. Says Berkus, “I like things that look like they have a story to tell,” a philosophy he explores in a new collection of furnishings for Target and in The Things That Matter, a style monograph being published this fall by Spiegel & Grau.

Collaborating with architectural designer Carlos Huber, Berkus spearheaded an aes-thetic overhaul that, given typical timelines, might as well have occurred overnight. In less than three months, the apartment had been renovated and decorated. Among other major alterations, the floors, whether painted parquetry or stone tile, were ripped up and replaced with white-oak boards, ensuring a seamless continuity between rooms; glass-and-metal planes were added in the form of double doors and interior partitions; and the upper level was recon-

Nate Berkus Renovates His Manhattan DuplexKnown for dispensing savvy decorating advice, the design guru shifts focus to his own New York City apartment, transforming it with equal parts sophistication and sentiment

“I BELIEVE A HOME

SHOULD BE LIVED IN”


figured so that a skylit space (formerly a small gym) could become the dressing room of Berkus’s dreams.

“There are certain details I obsessed over,” says the designer, citing such upgrades as an-tique marble mantels, bronze radiator grilles, and vintage Belgian hardware as products of his double-Virgo tunnel vision. “But I’m not the guy walking around with a flashlight, checking to see if there are dings in the wood. I believe a home should be lived in.”

Sophisticated tweaks and clever fixes shaved weeks off the already abbreviated construc-tion schedule. Rather than gut the kitchen, for example, Berkus retained the existing countertops and cabinets, having the latter painted a high-gloss black and crowned with moldings and ordering up matching panels to conceal the exposed washer and dryer. The apartment’s walls, meanwhile, were covered with either grass cloth or fresh coats

of paint. The staircase, previously a treacher-ous climb owing to its lack of a railing, was finessed into a dramatic focal point with the addition of a sinuous steel banister. Whereas some people might seize upon a new resi-dence as a reason to start shopping, Berkus instead furnished with items he had collected over time. The majority came from his Chi-cago home, an expansive apartment done in the 1940s by architect Samuel Marx. An enormous striped dhurrie by Madeline Wein-rib, for instance, is now rolled out across the first-floor family room, where the designer hosts casual meals of takeout. (“I can’t make anything myself,” he admits.) An image of a desert landscape at Joshua Tree National Park in California, snapped by his late part-ner, photographer Fernando Bengoechea, creates a rugged note in the dining room, where the designer’s onetime conference table is paired with Louis XVI–style Jansen side chairs.

“I am surrounded by memories of what I’ve done, where I’ve been, and whom I’ve loved,” Berkus says. Personal history is the common thread among his eclectic treasures, which include a miniature Pedro Friedeberg chair (purchased after rounds of tequila at the art-ist’s Mexico City home) and a child’s jacket—a garment that belonged to his maternal grandfa-ther—hanging in the stairwell.

As the designer explains, “Home has always been one of the most important things. If I don’t feel at home in my space, then I feel re-ally unmoored.” For him, home also seems to mean a group of discrete interiors imbued with exceptional functionality. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his dressing room, superbly appointed with painted floor-to-ceiling cabinets custom made to contain every element of his stylish wardrobe. Everything is where it ought to be—and now so is Nate Berkus

By: Samuel Cochran

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