Ravishing Revision

Updating a 1940s neoclassical townhouse in Buenos Aires, Kallos Turin balances welcoming elegance with animating art and design elements that read as anything but traditional

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Ricardo Labougle

Summer 2023

https://galeriemagazine.com/kallos-turin-buenos-aires/

One would be forgiven for thinking that Kallos Turin isn’t the most obvious architecture and interior design firm to have a thriving practice in South America. After all, founding principals Stephania Kallos and Abigail Turin are based in London and San Francisco, respectively. And yet the partners have built an impressive portfolio of residential and commercial projects in Uruguay and Argentina.

It all started with a commission from a London developer more than 15 years ago to design a series of strikingly modern residences in the Uruguayan beach town of Punta del Este, a popular retreat for wealthy Argentines. Kallos and Turin received an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects for their work, and other assignments in the region followed. The highest profile of these was their transformation of a stately 1920s mansion in the upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Chico into Casa Cavia, a stylish multifaceted destination with a restaurant, bar, florist, and event space.

It wasn’t long before the couple who own Casa Cavia reached out about another potential project, a new home on a nearby leafy street. The four-story, 1940s townhouse designed by Alejandro Bustillo, a prominent Argentinean architect known for his Beaux Arts buildings, features an elegant neoclassical façade, with pilasters and decorative ironwork, as well as a small front court and a private garden in back.

But the clients were concerned, Kallos says, with the way “the whole ground floor was cut up,” a portion of it turned over to a garage and storage area, leaving just a “small, dark entrance that was really weird.” The solution she and Turin devised was to create an expansive entry gallery across the front with symmetrical arched openings to the stair hall on one side and to an inviting library on the other. Most strikingly, they laid a new floor of painterly Rosso Levanto marble, its burgundy hues radiating like an Abstract Expressionist canvas. They also hung an eye-catching red painting by Argentinean artist Juan José Cambre at one end and furnished the room with just a few collectible design pieces, including a cabinet and a fancifully inlaid table by Studio Job, whose playful, exquisitely crafted work is sprinkled throughout the home.

The reconceived ground floor is ideal for hosting salons and other events related to the wife’s book company, with guests able to gather in the front hall or library and spill out onto a terrace overlooking the garden in back. “The entry area isn’t designed like a conventional residential interior,” says Turin. “It’s really geared to her business.”

There were other significant architectural changes—carried out with Mercer Seward Arquitectos, Kallos Turin’s local partner—not least, excavating beneath the house to create a subterranean level for a wine cellar and space for intimate-scale entertaining. They also extended the awkwardly truncated staircase to the top of the house, adding a skylight to bring in natural light and replacing the glossy-marble stair treads with warmer oak.

Given the condition of the house—“It was like an old lady had been living there since 1940,” jokes Kallos—all of the floors and baths had to be redone. Ditto the modestly scaled kitchen, now a “little jewel box of efficiency,” as Turin puts it, featuring minimalist glossy white cabinetry and an illusionistic cubic-pattern floor that weaves together stones used elsewhere in the house.

For Kallos and Turin, working on historical buildings typically involves finding ways to infuse the interior with a contemporary spirit. “The trick is always, what’s the foil?” says Turin. “It’s careful restoration combined with quirkiness or whimsy or something that cuts through the pretty picturesque.”

Here that meant wrapping a powder room in Studio Job’s droll gold-and-black Robber Baron wallpaper, say, or using Apparatus’s sexy, sophisticated lighting fixtures, including in the dining room, where Kallos and Turin covered the walls and ceiling in a terra-cotta-hued Venetian plaster that almost resembles suede. They designed a boldly geometric, blackened-iron fireplace in the living room, a long, narrow space they divided into three distinct seating areas furnished with mostly vintage modern designs that can be easily reconfigured for guests. “You have to do that in Argentina,” says Turin, “because the gatherings can get quite large.”

Another must-have in Argentina is a big outdoor grill. The duo installed one, partially enclosed in turquoise tile, in the back garden, where they also designed a lap pool and gravel terraces with multiple seating areas for cocktails and dining. They collaborated with landscape designer María Mulieri of Siempreverde on the plantings, including a lush poolside border of peace lilies.

The basement, which is outfitted with a wine room, a pool table, and lounge seating, is another entertaining area that gets a lot of use, especially by the husband. “He’s able to have his friends every Tuesday night to watch football,” says Kallos. “They bring food, lay it out on the table, and choose wine.”

As with the rest of the interior, the basement’s design feels appropriate both to the building’s historical architecture and to the owners’ modern-minded sensibility. “It’s beautifully built,” says Kallos. “And it just feels really good.”

Revolutionary Spirit

In his bare-bones rescue of a 270-year-old Connecticut house, designer Philip Gorrivan maintains the perseverance and ingenuity of the home’s early American roots while updating it for the next hundred years.

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Joshua McHugh

https://www.veranda.com/decorating-ideas/house-tours/a36704590/philip-gorrivan-colonial-connecticut-house-tour/

Designer Philip Gorrivan had passed the house a million times: a two-story Colonial at the head of a winding lane in Washington, Connecticut, just a short stroll from a cemetery where some of the town’s earliest settlers were laid to rest. Built around 1750, the house is believed to be one of the area’s oldest. “I’ve always admired its symmetry and scale. It is a perfect example of early American Colonial architecture,” says Gorrivan, whose own 19th-century home is just down the street.

He makes the two-hour drive from New York City, where his practice is based, to this quiet spot in the Berkshires foothills “almost every weekend and most holidays, plus for extended summer stays,” he says. First settled by independent-minded Congregationalists roughly 300 years ago, Washington has become a magnet for respite-seeking VIPs of business and culture, lured by the picturesque countryside, historic villages, and, for some, the chance to make a distinguished, old house their own.

Despite its appeal, the Colonial Gorrivan admired had fallen into a deteriorated state by the time his neighbors bought it. They had long lived across the street from the old house and, with an eye toward turning it into a guest house, enlisted him to mastermind its overhaul. “It had become dilapidated,” the designer says. “A lot of the wood was rotting, the roof was leaking, and the yard was getting overgrown. The house needed a fresh breath of life.”

For the new owners, it was also about preserving a piece of community history. And Gorrivan, who is well versed in historic renovations, preserved what he could: The fireplaces and chimney were reconstructed with the original materials, the wide-plank oak floors were refurbished, handsome wrought-iron hardware was reused. But it was also an opportunity to upgrade insulation and windows, plumbing and electrical, and install the home’s first HVAC system. “The goal,” says the designer, “was to restore the house in a way that would make it last the next hundred years.”

In the process, Gorrivan added a spacious ground-floor main bedroom that extends off the back of the house where a former shed had stood (in compliance with local restrictions against expanding beyond the existing footprint). Codes also required that the front hall staircase, narrow and vertiginously steep, be replaced. But because “it’s a beautiful architectural element,” Gorrivan says, they decided to keep it in place and satisfy modern codes by adding new stairs toward the back of the house.

For interior details, the designer did extensive research on Colonial New England architecture as part of his efforts to respect the spirit of the original house—without being slavishly correct. He added millwork throughout: trim moldings around windows and doors, wainscoting or even fully paneled walls in some rooms, simple chair rails in others. “There’s always a temptation when you have a blank slate to do interesting decorative things,” says Gorrivan. “The truth is, a house like that probably didn’t have paneled walls everywhere. I really wanted to keep it closer to the way I thought it would have been.”

He took other creative liberties, like the beadboard tray ceiling in the main bedroom, the Moroccan tile backsplash in the kitchen, and the almost clubby, paneled powder room he painted in the Farrow & Ball shade of purple called Brinjal. The clients’ numerous Swedish furnishings—ranging from neoclassical and antique country pieces to crisp, sculptural modern designs—are sprinkled throughout. “I thought the aesthetic fit really well,” he says. “The painted pieces, in particular, lighten and add a level of sophistication to this antique American house.”

Most spectacular is an elaborately paneled and columned Gustavian-style bed with built-in closets set into a wall of the couple’s bedroom. The bed was one of several elements brought over from their primary residence, which Gorrivan began renovating in collaboration with architect Gil Schafer a couple of years into this project. He also repurposed a 1920s bay window from that house, installing it above the tub in the main bath, as well as kitchen cabinets from the same period, giving that space a historic—though not Colonial-era—vibe while updating it for contemporary living and entertaining.

In many ways, functionality and comfort were the guiding principles, and the layering of objects with strong personal connections helps give the home its “special narrative,” says Gorrivan and makes it feel truly lived-in. There’s luxury in the uniqueness of the house, with its roughly 270 years of history, thoughtfully tailored and updated for its next chapter, with nothing stuffy or overly precious. “It couldn’t be too perfect,” says Gorrivan. “That’s just not the way people live today.”

Photographer Clifford Ross Gets The Spotlight This Summer

Lyrical beauty meets high-tech precision in the captivating work of photographer Clifford Ross

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 30, 2015·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/clifford-ross-wave-art-article

It’s hard to believe that, as a child, artist Clifford Ross was terrified of going into the ocean. Numerous times over the past two decades, he has ventured chest-deep into roiling surf off East Hampton, New York, camera in hand, to create his mesmerizing black-and-white photographs of hurricane waves. “I realized the only way to convey that power and lyricism was to put the audience closer,” says Ross, who began the series in the late ’90s. “You don’t fight that ocean, you just become part of it.”

The uncompromising Ross—whose work is the subject of multiple shows this summer, most notably a midcareer survey at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts—thrives on tackling challenges both creative and technical. Starting in 2002, he engineered and patented his own camera, which uses military aerial film, to capture Colorado’s Mount Sopris, producing some of the highest-resolution landscape images ever. “I spent a year and a half building the camera and another year figuring out how to get the prints right,” he says. “In the end it took about five years to make 14 photographs.”

As is typical for Ross, those pictures seeded new, related bodies of work. In recent years he has consulted endlessly with veneer experts on the elaborate process of printing a 114-foot-long version of a mountain photograph on wood, and fragments of that same image have found their way into Ross’s ongoing experiments with augmented-reality digital animation. “I like exploring,” remarks the artist. “It keeps me in a restless state.”

Ross’s growing interest in “creating immersive experiences with moving images,” as he puts it, eventually led him back to his great muse, the sea. Initially he tried shooting video of waves but couldn’t get the high-frame-rate, high-definition camera into the water. So Ross began collaborating with animators at his New York City studio to devise computer-generated waves with “movement as eccentric as I remember it in nature,” he explains.

The result of these efforts will be shown for the first time at MASS MoCA, on two 23-foot-wide LED walls conjuring crashing surf. “We’ve created something genuinely visceral,” Ross says. “Each video is made up of 1.6 million moving dots of light, and we’re firing them off at a furious rate. It’s almost like you’re being shotgunned with beauty.”

For more details on his work and current shows, visit cliffordross.com.

Click here to see one of Ross's wave videos.

Back to Nature

A Craftsman-style home in Portland, Ore., is reimagined as an ode to the Pacific Northwest

By Stephen Wallis

May 7, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/style/portland-home-renovation-craftsman.html

Like so many stories of creative inspiration, this one began with a shower. A broken shower, actually.

Several years ago, a couple in Portland, Ore., decided it was about time for some updates to their two-story Craftsman-style home, built in 1907. They and their two children had lived in the house for the better part of a decade, long enough for its awkward eccentricities to lose their charm and for renovation wish-list items to become imperatives — especially an out-of-commission upstairs bath that forced the family to share another one.

The homeowners had admired commercial spaces created by Jessica Helgerson, a Portland designer, so they invited her over to discuss a new bath and other upgrades they hoped to do, eventually. Right away, Ms. Helgerson identified opportunities for improvements in layout and flow that went well beyond a mere bathroom remodel. The 4,000-square-foot four-bedroom home had been “severely altered over the years,” the designer said. “At one point it was split into apartments.”

Though previous owners had restored the house to a single-family residence, a second staircase remained at the back that did little more than take up space. Ditto the phone booth at the top of the front stairs. And any decorative details had long ago been stripped away.

Ms. Helgerson and her team, including Mira Eng-Goetz, who served as the project’s lead designer, proposed a comprehensive makeover.

A couple of years passed before the owners agreed, and they eventually relocated to temporary quarters for 14 months during the renovations.

The first step was to remove the back staircase to make way for a new family room and an informal dining and project area downstairs, while expanding the children’s rooms above. The designers also reconfigured the kitchen, opening it up more to the dining room by replacing solid walls with double-sided glass cabinets, and created a generous master bath where a covered balcony had been.

Along the way, they added coffered ceilings, columns and ceiling rosettes. These and other architectural elements, Ms. Eng-Goetz said, helped “dress up a house that had lost a lot of its original charm and character.”

While the changes show respect for the home’s early 20th-century pedigree, this was not a restoration project, as no original plans or period photos exist.

“If a house has any sort of special renown, our office is apt to research it to death and really consider what that architect would have done, but this was not that,” said Ms. Helgerson, who is known for her stylishly thoughtful updates of historic spaces. “This house could be whatever it wants to be, and we felt quite free in that way, which was fun.”

The designers described what they created as an ode to the Pacific Northwest. That meant lots of rich wood, including Western walnut countertops and Oregon white oak floors; leafy wall patterns; and a lush, moody palette dominated by mossy greens and cloudy grays. (Notably, there are a few choice hits of pink, adding “a little bit of dawn or dusk,” as Ms. Helgerson put it.)

Located on a tree-lined block at the edge of Portland’s Northwest Alphabet district, the house isn’t far from 5,200-acre Forest Park, which is crisscrossed with hiking trails and home to firs, cedars, hemlocks and ferns. The family spends a lot of time in the park and embraced the décor as an extension of the natural surroundings.

The ultimate expression of that theme — and the home’s showstopping moment — comes in the kitchen. There, the walls are clad in hundreds of shimmering celadon tiles, hand-painted by Ms. Eng-Goetz with wispy, curling ferns that scroll across the space, even the integrated refrigerator.

“Sword ferns seemed like a perfect muse for this project,” she said. “I love their strong sculptural shapes, and I’ve certainly tromped through them many times while mushroom hunting in Oregon and Washington.”

Tiling the refrigerator was also a rare “feat of engineering,” Ms. Helgerson noted. “I feel like Mira’s ferns are the most beautiful thing our office has ever done, and I’m grateful to the clients for letting us do something so weird and wonderful.”

Botanical patterns also enliven the pink-hued powder room and the second-floor study, where the walls are papered in an exuberant Arts & Crafts floral print and the ceiling and moldings are painted dark sage green. Throughout the house, the furniture is lean and modern, with soft curving forms, monochrome upholstery — a Helgerson signature — and, again, plenty of wood. The lighting, mostly brass and contemporary in spirit, is by international design studios like Apparatus, Areti and Neri & Hu.

Because a four-story apartment building stands immediately next door, light and views are compromised, particularly at the center of the house, which is much deeper than it is wide. The designers used reflective surfaces, including smoked-mirror walls in the stairwell and a quartet of gold-leaf artworks by Yoshihiro Kitai in the dining room, to bounce light around the spaces. They also opted for sheer curtains to let light in while masking the view.

Though the children, now teenagers, spend an increasing amount of time in the basement (not part of the renovation), everyone enjoys piling onto the new family room’s U-shaped sofa. Built-in sofas like this are another Helgerson specialty, and she said her firm has learned to make them “more and more squishy and comfortable.”

Being enveloped by the plush cushions and throw pillows in verdant hues of soft velvet, within this forest-inspired home, the owners might almost imagine they’re lying on a bed of moss — one that is very stylish and exceptionally cozy.

The Bold Work of Charline von Heyl

With her richly dissonant, enigmatic canvases, the artist continually pushes painting in compelling new directions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted February 29, 2012·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-charline-von-heyl-article

Charline von Heyl is all about incongruities—in life as well as in her art. The German-born painter divides her time between New York and Marfa, the middle-of-nowhere West Texas town that, despite its well-documented rise as a cultural destination, remains undeniably sleepy. She and her husband, painter Christopher Wool, both did artist residencies in Marfa and fell in love with it. “I need the electric environment of New York, but I’m always so hungry to get to the solitude of Marfa,” says Von Heyl, who typically spends at least part of each winter in Texas. “It allows me to really concentrate and dig deeper.”

That intense engagement is evident in Von Heyl’s paintings, complexly layered compositions teeming with oppositions: abstraction and figuration, organic and geometric forms, depth and flatness. Though she draws inspiration from disparate sources ranging from comic books to Abstract Expressionist masters, her references are rarely literal; each canvas is an improvisation the artist works and reworks, obliterating and rebuilding as she goes, often mixing media. “It’s like bending bones,” she says, “combining things that don’t seem to want to go together to make a new kind of image.” This keen sense of process, even struggle, is what gives Von Heyl’s art its vitality, the interplay of elements amounting to a rich visual stew. As critic Jerry Saltz once wrote, “Much of her art takes me to a wonderful snake pit where styles I thought were outmoded turn dangerous again.”

Long respected within the art world as a painter’s painter, Von Heyl is now receiving wider recognition, thanks to a pair of traveling shows. The first U.S. museum survey of her work is at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston from March 21 to July 15, while another, larger exhibition is at the Tate Liverpool from February 24 to May 27. For the moment Von Heyl’s market remains more steady than spectacular, with her new canvases priced around $90,000 at the galleries 1301PE in Los Angeles (6150 Wilshire Blvd.; 323-938-5822) and Friedrich Petzel in New York (535/537 W. 22nd St.; 212-680-9467). As the artist herself puts it, her work is “an acquired taste—people have taken a long time to get into it because it really benefits from a second look.” Or even better, a third.

Curve Appeal

A modernist gem is reborn with sumptuous colors and 21st-century glam.

By Stephen Wallis

Photographs by Eric Piasecki

April 30, 2020

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/home-design/wallace-k-harrison-architecture-katonah-home

A few years ago, Sara Arnell was driving along one of the back roads in Katonah, the charming New York hamlet that had been her home for the better part of two decades, when an Open House sign caught her eye. “I thought, Huh, I wonder what’s up the hill, because you can’t see the house from the road,” she says. “So I pulled up the driveway and just fell in love.”

A veteran advertising and branding executive, Arnell spent much of her career at the storied agency founded by her ex-husband, Peter Arnell, even taking over as CEO after his departure in 2011. By the time the Arnell Group shut down two years later, the couple had divorced and the youngest of their three kids was headed to college. Arnell reinvented herself by teaching at Parsons and founding the company Karmic, which began as an app that encourages wellness through kindness and has since evolved to also serve as a platform for her consulting work. Swapping her rental home for one she could truly tailor as her own was the next step.

The residence Arnell had stumbled upon, it turned out, was quite out of the ordinary. Perched on three wooded acres, the 5,000-square-foot, white brick house combines a 1936 farmhouse with a 1941 modernist addition by Wallace K. Harrison, the architect famous for his role in creating such New York City landmarks as Rockefeller Center, the United Nations headquarters, and Lincoln Center—he personally designed the Metropolitan Opera House. Described by his patron and friend Nelson Rockefeller as “the greatest architect in the 20th century,” Harrison left behind relatively few houses, the most notable of which is his own estate in West Hills, on Long Island, built in the ’30s. As with that considerably larger project, the Katonah residence reflects the crisp, pared-down look of the era’s defining International Style. It also incorporates Harrison’s fondness for curved, nautical-inspired forms, leading some to characterize its design as Streamline Moderne.

Regardless of aesthetic label, the house appealed to Arnell’s fondness for the distinctive and idiosyncratic. “In a town of colonials and farmhouse-style homes,” she says, “it really stood out as something special. I just thought, This is meant to be.”
Still, the interiors—renovated by previous owners— demanded significant work. “It was decorated as a country house,” she says. “In the study, the walls were faux-finished to imitate knotty-pine paneling.”

After enlisting the local firm Kroeger Intinarelli to oversee the architectural work, Arnell took the recommendation of a trusted friend and reached out to Alberto Villalobos, a Colombian-born, New York City–based designer, about collaborating on the interiors.

“One of the main things for Sara was that the house could not be precious,” says Villalobos, the recipient of the New York School of Interior Design’s 2019 Rising Star Award. “In some moments she wanted a little glamour, but it was about finding that balance, with a relaxed, subtle elegance.”

Working in concert with the architects, they set about updating the house in a way that they felt would honor the spirit of Harrison’s midcentury design. They kept the existing four-bedroom layout—it offers plenty of space for Arnell’s three kids to visit “with their entourage and their dogs,” as she puts it—while making a number of modest tweaks. For starters, a superfluous sunroom, which earlier owners had added by enclosing part of the terrace, was dismantled to return the home to its original profile.

Guided by old photos, including a 1950 sales brochure, they also restored a large window that had been closed up near the main staircase. In the living room, beneath a curved wall of windows, they uncovered a planter that had been bricked over; it’s now filled with leafy ferns. “We did some archaeological investigating that was really fun,” says Arnell.

The most significant alterations were undertaken in the large open space that contains the kitchen, breakfast area, and family room and now serves as the home’s primary hub. Dramatically expanded kitchen windows enhance the natural light and views, while large green and white terrazzo floor tiles, laid in an irregular alternating pattern, lend some midcentury panache. A trim bookshelf spans the top of one wall, its eye-catching emerald green echoing both the kitchen’s glossy cabinetry and the family room’s tufted velvet sofa.

Most mornings Arnell can be found seated on the breakfast area’s long banquette, her laptop open on the sleek, no-fuss resin table. Hanging behind her is a favorite Slim Aarons photograph of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs— designed, Arnell notes, around the same time Harrison created this house. Meanwhile, her energetic year-old toy poodle, Otis, dashes to and from the walled courtyard outside the family room. “I just throw open the sliding doors and he runs in and out,” she says.

Throughout the house, the furnishings are distinctly modern in spirit and reflect Arnell’s preference for pieces that have a sculptural presence. “Everything needed to be interesting on its own, because Sara didn’t want things to be overly decorated,” says Villalobos. “She wanted simplicity.”

Nowhere is that mandate clearer than in the oval entrance hall. Empty except for a pair of ceramic dogs and a few sparely installed artworks, the space’s only flourish is the terrazzo floor Villalobos designed with ribbons of black that swirl across the white expanse.

The designer continued the black-and-white theme in the living room, which Harrison had given a distinctive kidney shape and an elegantly scalloped wall. Villalobos composed two seating areas with curving Vladimir Kagan sofas, classic modern chairs, and—to ensure things didn’t get too serious—lime-green mushroom stools. “We didn’t want to do anything there that would feel too heavy, too chunky,” says the designer.

The room’s curved bookshelves presented a challenge because of their shape and shallow depth. Arnell and Villalobos didn’t want a hodgepodge of objects or mismatched books jutting out that would disrupt the room’s graceful lines. So the designer had an artisan create imitation books, sized to fit perfectly flush and painted stark white. Adding to the visual mix are constellation-like pendant lights by Jan Pauwels and works by Raymond Pettibon, April Gornik, and photographer Robert Doisneau.

Arnell has been an avid collector of photographs, which are displayed throughout the house. Her trove spans rock ’n’ roll images such as a Jesse Frohman portrait of Kurt Cobain; civil rights–era photos by Gordon Parks, Flip Schulke, and others; and fashion and glamour shots by Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, Greg Lotus, and Bert Stern (“I’ve got a lot of Marilyn,” Arnell notes). But her passions extend to more esoteric collecting areas, like the centuries-old Palissy ware arrayed on one of the kitchen walls. Then there are her numerous religious sculptures, such as the pair of gilded angels that preside over the dining room (along with a version of the famous Lobmeyr chandelier Harrison designed for the Met Opera House).

“I started pulling out things that have sentimental value to me,” says Arnell. “I thought, Let’s just put them somewhere, because if I’m going to get eclectic, it needs to be with stuff that means something to me.” Adds Villalobos, “That’s what adds the layers and makes the house a home.”

It’s also what provides much of the actual color in rooms that have a predominantly neutral palette. The one very memorable exception is Arnell’s study, a space where virtually every surface but the ceiling is a shade of saffron, the color she uses for Karmic’s logo. “The ethos of my company is that what you do comes back to you,” she says. “If you’re putting out messages that are good and kind and helpful, you’ll get that back.”

Time Inc.'s Vibrant New Headquarters by Studios Architecture

September 29, 2016

By Stephen Wallis

http://www.interiordesign.net/projects/12368-tour-time-inc-s-vibrant-new-headquarters-by-studios-architecture

When Time Inc. announced that it would be leaving the storied Time & Life Building, the decision was about more than just finances and appeasing shareholders. The business founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden in 1922 had evolved from a group of tra­ditional print magazines into an increasingly integrated portfolio of digitally focused, multi-platform brands. As a result, the Mad Men–era Midtown office tower by Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris—where bar carts had famously rolled down the hallways—no longer suited Time Inc.’s needs.

Meanwhile, its bumpy transition into the new media landscape, accompanied by a spin-off from Time Warner, left the company looking to make some bold, image-changing moves. So Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, and more than a dozen other brands relocated to the financial district. The new headquarters by Interior Design Hall of Fame member Todd DeGarmo, CEO of Studios Architecture, occupies six levels of a building completed in 1988 by Cesar Pelli & Associates as part of a complex now called Brookfield Place.

As reinvented by DeGarmo, the interior is almost entirely open-plan. Private offices account for only 6 percent of the desks, a huge change from the Time & Life Building, where the number was more than 10 times that. There are also shared video and photo studios, an array of versatile meeting spaces, and an auditorium that hosts star-studded premieres.

Everything has been conceived with an eye toward interaction, efficiency, and flexibility. And lest there be any doubt that Time Inc. is more than a magazine company, the first stop for many visitors is a reception area where, just beyond the glass doors to the video studios’ control room, an array of screens is clearly visible. The message is immediate and unmistakable.

“The new space conveys energy and collaboration,” Time Inc. executive vice president Gregory Giangrande says. “We also needed the work we do—print, digital, video, photography, live events—to be a transparent part of the environment.”

But it took some persuading for Studios, which consulted on Time Inc.’s real-estate search, to convince executives that this location was the right fit, given its existing condition. “We had to help them imagine that it could be something spectacular,” DeGarmo says. That meant looking beyond the idiosyncratically configured, sprawling floor plates, the 8-foot ceilings, and the small windows.

Ultimately, those expansive floor plates helped to clinch the deal, as they offered the opportunity to bring multiple brands together while reducing the overall footprint to 700,000 square feet, down from 1.4 million at the Time & Life Building. The horizontal adjacencies would support the major restructuring the company has announced to further integrate editorial and business operations. “This is key to the reinvention of Time Inc.,” DeGarmo says. “From a design perspective, it was about reflecting how the brands are no longer stand-alone silos.”

The challenge, associate principal Joshua Rider adds, was “to make sure the spaces didn’t feel too confusing to navigate.” One solution was to carve out a top-to-bottom vertical circulation route, with open staircases flanked by lounges and self-serve coffee bars. Dubbed the Boulevard, this central artery promotes movement while encouraging informal meetings and “casual collisions,” as Rider puts it.

Animating walls along the Boulevard and serving as reminders of a rich corporate history, blowups from the Life Picture Collection include Audrey Hepburn backstage at the 1956 Academy Awards and models placing bets at the old Roosevelt Raceway horse track in Westbury, New York, in 1958. Furnishings mix vintage pieces, such as chairs and stools designed specifically for Time Inc. by Charles and Ray Eames, with current models of those designs and contemporary additions. “A lot of the new furniture we brought in is big, because these spaces are so bombastic,” DeGarmo explains. “Plus, upholstery was a way to introduce color.”

For the office areas, the aesthetic is subtly modulated by a palette of blue, red, and purple, with the dominant color varying by location. Time Inc. senior vice president for real estate Donna Clark explains that the priority was to “avoid a trading-floor look.” Above the rows of workstations, where employees can plug in their laptops, TVs flicker silently, creating a newsroom atmosphere.

People, InStyle, Essence, and the other brands now share a fashion storage area, and nearly all studio photog­raphy is shot in the same location. The video studios have allowed Time Inc. to ramp up production of Web series such as Fortune Live and SI Now. Food & Wine has a camera-ready test kitchen and a dedicated wine vault with a 3,500-bottle capacity and an area for tastings.

In the evening, the cafeteria can double as an events space hosting up to 400 people. Employees and guests take advantage of its terrace, complete with lush grasses and Hudson River views. That’s a long way from the Hemisphere Club, the members-only restaurant once perched at the top of the Time & Life Building, but this new power-lunch spot has its own undeniable appeal.

Project Team: Tomas Quijada; Randall Stogsdill; Elena Koroleva; Fei Chen; Lindsay Homer: Studios Architecture. Kugler Ning Lighting Design: Lighting Consultant. Airspace: Graphics Consultant. Arup: Theatrical, Acoustical, Audiovisual Consultant. Syska Hennessy Group: Audiovisual Consultant. Thornton Tomasetti: Structural Engineer. Robert Derector Associates: MEP. C.W. Keller & Associates: Metalwork, Woodwork. Jonathan Metal & Glass: Metalwork, Glasswork. Ferra Designs: Metal­work. Eastern Millwork: Wood­work. Coyle & Company; Drive21: Signage Workshops. Turner Con­struc­tion Company: Construction Manager. VVA Project Managers & Consultants: Project Manager.

Designer Shawn Henderson and architect Scott Lindenau fashion a discreetly luxurious Aspen retreat perfectly sited to appreciate the ravishing landscape

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 7, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/aspen-home-shawn-henderson-scott-lindenau

There’s a spot about ten miles outside the village of Aspen, Colorado, some 9,400 feet up, where the skies seem a brighter blue and the mountain views are almost surreal in their majesty. A nearby stream rushes with a dulcet murmur, and herds of elk roam amid slender white aspens whose leaves turn magnificently gold each autumn. It was here that a Hong Kong businessman bought a 24-acre plot several years ago, determined to create his ideal refuge.

The log cabin–style house that occupied the site was not what he had in mind, however. So he enlisted a local firm, Studio B Architecture + Interiors, to draw up concepts for a new home, while the existing dwelling was removed and donated to Habitat for Humanity. A divorced father of one at the time, the businessman soon remarried, and since his wife also had a child, the architects were tasked with thinking a bit more expansively—yet also modestly. “We were very conscious of preserving the feeling of unspoiled countryside,” says the wife, who recently gave birth to the couple’s twins. “We could have built something larger, but the setting is so perfect, the last thing we wanted was to ruin it with an over-the-top house. It had to be quiet.”

Studio B satisfied the brief with an 11,000-square-foot residence that projects an unexpectedly reserved attitude, thanks to its low horizontal profile and the fact that the first of its two floors is partially embedded in a slope. While the overall vibe of the L-shaped structure—which wraps around a rear courtyard and pool terrace—is minimal and modern, an unmistakable warmth emanates from the home’s materials. “The husband spoke a lot about the spirit and nature of wood,” says Studio B founder and design principal Scott Lindenau. “We used wire-brushed white oak and contrasted it with a beautifully grained reclaimed teak on both the interior and exterior.” The thoughtful palette also includes hand-chiseled limestone and wara juraku—a Japanese-style plaster that incorporates straw to produce an exquisite organic texture.

When it came to furnishing the seven-bedroom home, the couple initially decided to handle it themselves. Collectors of midcentury design, they owned a number of quality pieces—mostly American and Scandinavian—but the wife concedes that they just couldn’t pull it all together. “The house had a horribly empty feel,” she recalls.

Then, by chance, they were introduced to New York designer Shawn Henderson, whose discerning approach to texture and color and sophisticated vintage and contemporary pairings aligned perfectly with their own sensibilities. “They had been doing the interior piecemeal and wanted someone to come in and do a complete program,” Henderson explains.

While the designer’s handiwork is a study in lyrical restraint, the home certainly has its showstopping moments. The coup de théâtre is the living room, the first space you encounter after ascending the entrance hall stairs to the main floor. Measuring 25 by 40 feet, the room is enclosed on two adjacent sides by floor-to-ceiling windows, offering panoramic vistas across the valley to the Elk Mountains beyond. “I didn’t want it to feel overly decorated, with a thousand pieces,” the designer says, “so I decided to go with big gestures.”

To anchor the larger of the living room’s two seating areas, Henderson devised a sprawling 11-and-a-half-foot sofa based on a Jean Royère design, a pair of club chairs deep enough to curl up in, and a seven-foot-diameter cocktail table—all overlooked by a supersize Sam Orlando Miller mirror, mounted above the fire- place. In this room, as throughout the house, Henderson uphol- stered the clients’ existing seating in rich monotone fabrics. “For me, the landscape is what provides the color, so I wanted to be careful how I brought in other elements,” he notes.

Among those other elements are a smattering of large-scale artworks—including the living room’s Theaster Gates composition made with fire hoses and the stairwell’s Claudy Jongstra tapestry— as well as punchy Swedish carpets, which Henderson laid in the tailored wood-and-stone master bath and the meditation room. The latter, says the wife, is “probably the most important space for my husband”—a Buddhist who meditates every morning. “And because it’s mostly windows, it’s where you really feel closest to nature.”

That is if you’re not counting the guest cottage, which stands in a thicket just downhill from the main house. A later addition, also by Studio B and Henderson, the simple gable-roofed structure is all black, clad in a Japanese-style charred cedar that, Lindenau says, “picks up the dusky flecks in the bark of the aspen trees.” Inside, Henderson kept the furnishings uncomplicated, utilizing Danish pieces from the clients’ collection and tying everything together with a palette of soothing blues. “It’s amazing,” the designer says of the cottage. “You and I would be thrilled to live in it.”

In fact, the wife jokes about decamping to the cocoonlike cabin with her husband, leaving the children to fend for them- selves in the main house. But the cottage lacks two of the residence’s very important features—the inviting pool and the rooftop terrace, where the stargazing never fails to serve up a “wonderful shock,” as the wife puts it, for this family of city dwellers: “In Hong Kong we don’t get that kind of front-row seat to spectacular night skies,” she says. “It is truly breathtaking.”

By the Sea

Architecture | Feb 2017

By Stephen Wallis

It could be said that Richard Meier’s architecture career truly began, more than five decades ago, on the water. His first credited project was a modest beachfront cottage he designed on New York’s Fire Island for artist Saul Lambert and his wife. A simple rectilinear box, with abundant glass and an open interior, the house reflected Meier’s unshakable commitment to the modernist ideals espoused by Le Corbusier and by the young architect’s boss at the time, Marcel Breuer. “This small house, which was built in just nine days for a total cost of $9,000, was strongly inspired by what I’d learned from Marcel Breuer,” recounts Meier. The only thing the precut-timber structure lacked was the white palette he would become so famous for.

Within a year Meier founded his namesake firm in New York City, and he soon established a reputation as a designer of strikingly elegant residences that combined bold geometric volumes, dynamically intersecting planes and exquisitely minimalist surfaces. The most refined of the so-called New York Five architects—a group that also included Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk—Meier was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1984, when he was just 49, shortly after completing the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Coveted commissions for courthouses, campus buildings and more museums followed, notably his most famous project, the sprawling hilltop Getty Center in Los Angeles—which turns 20 this year.

Not atypically for an architect of his stature, Meier has had numerous opportunities to build on prime plots, and waterfront sites in particular have been a recurring theme across his long career. For one thing, his distinctive, crisply sculpted forms look particularly arresting and iconic set against blue expanses of water and sky, their white surfaces changing with the varying light conditions. And because of their emphasis on light, transparency and openness, his buildings are tailor-made for such settings, from the Ackerberg House on the beach in Malibu to the Perry Street condo towers overlooking the Hudson River in New York City to the recently completed Seamarq Hotel with panoramic lake and sea views in Gangneung, South Korea. “When I look back over 50 years, it’s amazing the number of projects I’ve had on the water, from private houses to hotels,” says the architect. “I’ve been very lucky to have worked on sites where the light reflected off the water changes with the different times of day and different seasons.”

It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Richard Meier & Partners is only now realizing its first project in Miami, given the city’s abundance of water and compelling light. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the Pritzker laureate joined the roster of celebrated architects who’ve contributed buildings to Miami’s runaway real estate boom. Enlisted by the developer Fort Partners, Meier has overseen a much-anticipated expansion of the Surf Club, the storied private getaway in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, that opened in 1930 and once welcomed Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor and Winston Churchill, who liked to paint in the ocean-facing cabanas that snaked gracefully along the sand.

Opening in April, the new Surf Club is a dramatic update from the old one. The original building, designed by Russell Pancoast in Mediterranean Revival style, with stucco walls and a terra-cotta tile roof, has been restored. But Meier, working in consultation with Miami architect Kobi Karp, has added an eye-catching trio of metal-and-glass structures. At the center, a tower housing a Four Seasons hotel and residences (with interiors by designer Joseph Dirand, known for his own sensuous brand of minimalism) rises above the Pancoast building, which will feature two restaurants. On either side of the building are large, 12-story asymmetrical towers—one has a curved façade, while the other is stepped—containing 150 airy condos finished in warmly spare, classic Meier style. The complex also boasts a spa, four swimming pools, gardens designed by Fernando Wong and some 40 beach cabanas arrayed in a serpentine pattern, nodding to the original.

The idea from the outset was “to keep the new buildings as minimal as possible and let the old Surf Club be the jewel in the operation,” says Bernhard Karpf, the project’s associate partner-in-charge who has worked in Meier’s offices since 1988. “Ultimately, the contrast between the old and new, in terms of scale and material finishes and detailing, works really well.”

In the end, the architecture is all about amplifying the setting and having 1,000 feet of unobstructed beachfront in Miami was a rare luxury. “I couldn’t imagine a more interesting site than this one,” says Meier. “With views out to the bay on one side and ocean views on the other, the quality of light is incredible.”

Looking ahead to other Meier projects slated for completion in 2017, there are residential towers in Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Taipei as well as a high-rise mixed-use complex in Mexico City. That last project, known as Reforma Towers, promises to establish a new landmark on one of the Mexican capital’s busiest thoroughfares, with the larger of the two buildings (40 and 27 stories) distinguished by a large wedge-shaped void spectacularly cut out of its middle, creating, as Meier describes it, “a sort of a plaza in the sky.” The terrace, which will likely feature a restaurant, not only offers views in virtually every direction, but it also serves the functional purpose of bringing natural ventilation into the building and reducing the need for air conditioning.

It’s notable that so many of the firm’s current projects are residential and office towers—something Meier wasn’t especially known for during the first decades of his career. Many of them are also in locales where Meier hasn’t previously worked. To a large extent these shifts have to do with global economics, but it also reflects how the practice is evolving under the leadership of the six partners not named Meier, who include, in addition to Karpf, James R. Crawford, Michael Palladino, Vivian Lee, Reynolds Logan and Dukho Yeon.

Not that Meier didn’t want to build tall buildings earlier on. Pointing to his 1987 proposal to put a 72-story skyscraper atop Madison Square Garden, he notes, “We’ve had designs that have never been built, and it’s nice now to have a number of these things coming to fruition. Good things come late in life.” At the moment, Meier has two residential buildings—each 460 feet tall—under construction on both coasts of Manhattan. One is part of the Riverside Center development on the West Side, while the other, on a parcel overlooking the East River just south of the United Nations, has received much fanfare as his first-ever black building. “It wasn’t my choice!” explains Meier, gamely noting that “even though the glass is very dark, there’s a still a transparency about it, and the interiors are all white. You could say it’s like living in a white building with sunglasses.”

After all these years, Meier says the most rewarding part of his work—other than seeing people enjoying a completed building—is still the early design stages, when he is conceptualizing and sketching. Despite the advances in digital modeling, Meier has never taken to working on a computer. He retains a deep love of physical, three-dimensional models, and dozens of the ones his firm has created are now on permanent display—as the Richard Meier Model Museum—at the Mana Contemporary space in Jersey City, New Jersey. Numerous exhibitions have been devoted to Meier’s prolific output—both his architecture and the spirited collages he continues to make. “You know,” remarks Meier, “some people take a day off and play golf. I take a day off and go work in a studio.”

In the heart of Napa Valley, Russell Groves transforms a humdrum, half-finished house into a heavenly retreat for longtime clients

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 4, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/russell-groves-napa-valley-estate

Adam Weiss likes to begin most days at his family’s Napa Valley getaway with a stroll. Perched high up in the Mayacamas Mountains, on the valley’s western edge, the home enjoys stunning views in every direction. “You get this coastal fog that settles in at night,” says Weiss. “After I wake up, I’ll walk around the gardens and watch the mist burn off. When the sun breaks through those clouds, it’s just spectacular.”

If the mornings here are magical, the afternoons and evenings can be even more so, which is what drew Weiss and his wife, Lydia Callaghan, to the house. Their primary residence is two hours south, in Palo Alto, where he runs a hedge fund and she recently launched Bouclier, a company that makes bicycle helmet visors designed to provide full-face sun protection. The couple and their twin preteen daughters come to Napa year-round, often with friends and extended family in tow. Days are spent playing on the tennis court, splashing in the infinity pool, or hiking down rugged trails to the creek that runs through the 250-acre property. Sunsets are frequently enjoyed with wine in hand, and star-filled skies and the occasional meteor put on nighttime shows. “In the summer, especially, we like to light a fire on the porch and make s’mores and play board games,” Callaghan says.

The vision from the beginning, she explains, was to create a retreat that would be “rustic and fun and camplike.” To do so, Callaghan and Weiss enlisted Russell Groves, the architect and designer who has done all of their homes and offices over the past 14 years—now seven projects in total. Certain they wanted a place in Napa, the couple initially eyed move-in-ready homes, until their broker insisted they look at this property. A developer was midway through building a house in a château style that, Groves recalls, was a bit too McMansion-esque.

But at 12,000 square feet, with eight bedrooms, including a two-bedroom guesthouse, it would allow for lots of visitors—and the setting was irresistible. “We thought, Wow, even if it’s going to be a major project, this place is so breathtaking,” says Callaghan. Adds Groves, “I don’t mean to deny our creativity, but you could have done practically nothing to this house and it would have been amazing because of its setting.”

In the end, however, Groves and his team spent more than two years on a gut renovation of the residence, which Callaghan and Weiss now call Rancho. In addition to putting on a new standing-seam metal roof and recladding the exterior with gray cedar panels, Groves replaced generic wood windows and doors with larger, leaner ones in steel, dramatically bringing in more light. He also created unimpeded sight lines that extend from the front porch through the house and—thanks to a retractable glass wall—all the way out to the pool and beyond.

When that 70-foot-wide window wall is open, as it often is, the rear terrace and the double-height great room become one continuous space. “Merging indoors and outdoors was a top priority,” says Weiss. “We wanted the house to be the kind of place where everyone would feel relaxed and at home and in nature.”

Which is not to say the house is lacking in refinement. Oak paneling and floorboards, stained in subtle shades of gray, and earthy Heath Ceramics tiles can be found throughout the rooms. The furnishings, meanwhile, are a sophisticated mix of midcentury-modern and bespoke pieces. In the great room, a showstopping table and set of chairs custom made by George Nakashima Woodworker anchor the dining area, while vintage Nakashima armchairs and ottomans accent the living area. And there’s more Nakashima in the master suite, including the bed’s headboard and built-in side tables.

When it comes to furniture, Weiss and Callaghan mostly defer to Groves, but it’s a different story with art, which Weiss says is his real passion. He has a particular affinity for postwar works by artists such as Richard Artschwager, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold, whose shaped yellow canvas is given pride of place above the living area hearth. Across the room is one of Sol LeWitt’s iconic white grid sculptures. “It’s so mathematical, so geometric,” says Callaghan. “Everyone delights in that piece.”

Certainly Rancho is often buzzing with visitors. “This house is actually much bigger than one we would have built,” says Weiss, “but there are many times when it is completely full with family and friends.” Which is exactly how the couple wants it. “That’s the magic of the place,” Weiss adds. “If I died next week, I would remember all the lovely times we’ve shared up here.” Easy to say, perhaps, when you’ve already got your own little bit of heaven.

Jean Royère’s Polar Bear Furniture

The French designer’s ultra-cozy sofa and chairs might be the only thing that can keep you calm.

By Stephen Wallis

April 15, 2019

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/home-decor/a27103657/polar-bear-sofa-jean-royere/

Blame it on gyrating markets, extreme weather, and hyperpartisan politics. In these vexing times comfy, cocooning furniture is having a moment. As part of her 2019 forecast, interiors trendwatcher Michelle Ogundehin noted that “in this acutely digital age, as physical, sensory beings we have a primal need to surround ourselves with surfaces that thrill our fingertips or tempt our toes.” Tactile comfort, more than ever, is in.

For the collecting cognoscenti, when it comes to make-you-want-to-melt-into-them furnishings, nothing tops the Ours Polaire (French for polar bear) sofa and armchair conceived by French designer Jean Royère in the late 1940s. Elegantly rounded and incomparably cushy, these zaftig icons were upholstered in a soft woolen velvet reminiscent of plush toy fabric. “The Ours Polaire furnishings are an alcove, a nest,” says Emiliano Salci, one half of the Milan-based interiors duo Dimore Studio. “They even transmit visual comfort to a room. They are timeless.”

Highly sought after today by tastemakers and collectors around the globe, Polar Bear sofas and pairs of chairs can command more than half a million dollars at auction or from a top dealer. Jennifer Aniston, Ellen DeGeneres, and Larry Gagosian have acquired pieces, as has Kanye West, who once tweeted that his Polar Bear sofa “is my favorite piece of furniture we own.”

Part of the brilliance of Royère’s design is how he made the minimalist pieces look almost structureless, entirely covering the skeletons—created using traditional wood-bending techniques—in layers of synthetic foam.

“Only the large circular feet underneath are visible,” notes Paris dealer Patrick Seguin, a leading Royère authority who collaborated with fellow dealer Jacques Lacoste on a 2013 monograph on the designer. “The Ours Polaire pieces are emblematic of Royère’s spirit of absolutely free creativity and reflect a true elegance without any kind of ostentation.”

It all began in 1947, when Royère, who left a career in banking at 29 to devote himself to interiors, was renovating an apartment for his mother on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. For that project he created some of his first biomorphic designs, including the sofa he originally called Boule (Ball) and later renamed Ours Polaire. “The model attracted a limited clientele initially,” Seguin says. “However, its innovative design enjoyed success during the 1950s, when free-form designs and Royère’s soft, round lines triumphed.”

From the late ’40s through the ’50s Royère’s profile grew internationally, particularly in the Middle East, where he opened showrooms in Cairo, Beirut, and Tehran before expanding to Lima and São Paulo. This period saw him develop some of his most famous designs: the Egg and Elephant chairs, the Puddle and Sphere tables, various iterations of the Persian and Vine lights. Sophisticated yet whimsical, his creations, which often reference the natural world, exude refinement without veering into preciousness.

Because everything Royère produced was made to order, quantities were limited. Clients could commission an individual Polar Bear sofa or pair of armchairs, or they could get them together as a set. According to Seguin, between 1947 and 1967 only around 150 sets were made, plus another 150 sofas and 150 pairs of chairs. (Unlike other iconic Midcentury styles, there has never been an authorized re-edition.)

Royère died in 1981, having stopped designing a decade earlier. He left the bulk of his archives to Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which staged a reputation-burnishing 1999 exhibition that coincided with surging collector interest in midcentury French designers.

Royère prices took a notable upward turn a decade ago, says Florent Jeanniard, the European head of design for Sotheby’s, which set an auction record for Royère last May, when a sideboard with a star-dappled marquetry design fetched $1.8 million. “The demand is really global, with collectors now coming from Asia as well as the U.S. and Europe,” Jeanniard says. “Royère’s furniture has a combination of seriousness and joy that appeals to today’s taste.”

With the Polar Bear pieces, the challenge is finding them. “It has become very difficult to source a set from the original owners, and collectors who already possess these pieces very rarely sell them,” says Seguin, who sold a set a few years ago that he says would be worth $1.2 million today.

Decades on, many of the Polar Bear pieces—which Royère produced in several colors—have been reupholstered, often in fabrics mimicking the originals. One of the vintage hues is an eye-catching yellow not far from what happens to be Ogundehin’s pick for this year’s trendiest color: mustard. About a year and a half ago a pair of Polar Bear armchairs covered in a supersoft fabric somewhere between classic Grey Poupon and French’s sold at Christie’s for just a hair under $1 million. It was a giant price for two chairs, but for utter on-trend comfort perfection—it’s hard to put a price tag on that.

This story appears in the April 2019 issue of Town & Country.

Neal Beckstedt Uses Color to Rev Up a Manhattan Pied-à-Terre

Inspired by two international clients, designer Neal Beckstedt looks beyond his neutral comfort zone to find a world of color awaits

Text by Stephen Wallis

Photographs by Eric Piasecki

Posted September 17, 2018

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/neal-beckstedt-uses-color-to-rev-up-a-manhattan-pied-a-terre

While not exactly a chromophobe, Neal Beckstedt was never—by his own admission—an interior designer you’d go to for rooms bursting with color. Known for warmly modern schemes, where refined materials, rich textures, and sculptural furnishings tend to be the statement gestures, he has typically deployed color with a reserve that falls somewhere between judicious and parsimonious. And yet. . . .

When a friend connected him with a Hong Kong–based couple who were looking to renovate a Manhattan pied-à-terre, Beckstedt knew right away that the project was going to take him out of his chromatic comfort zone. “They loved color,” he says. “In particular, their art collection was supervibrant and bold. That became the starting point.”

Situated in a West Side building by architect Thomas Juul-Hansen, the two-bedroom apartment features an open living-dining space, with great natural light and enviable views overlooking the High Line. After dropping the ceilings a couple of inches to put in lighting—better for displaying artworks by the likes of Matthew Brandt, Steven Klein, and Marc Quinn—and installing some millwork for discreet TV cabinets and a bar, Beckstedt turned to the finishes and furnishings.

“It was clear that the clients were attracted to things that are a little avant-garde,” says the designer, whose initial acquisitions for the apartment included an eye-catching Max Lamb dining table made of engineered terrazzo. Speckling the table’s surface are flecks of bluish green, golden yellow, and punchy persimmon red—colors that Beckstedt adopted for neighboring walls and furniture fabrics. In the living area, he embellished walls with subtly patterned gold leaf, upholstered a 1950s Italian sofa in a teal velvet, and clad an Edward Wormley chaise longue in an acid-lime velvet with burgundy piping. Joining the mix are a Johnny Swing coin chair, a Deco-style folding screen, and vintage Jindrich Halabala lounge chairs covered in Mongolian sheepskin. The animated ensemble is reflected in the high-gloss ceiling, into which Beckstedt inserted a recessed oval detail. “It was all about how we could do a different take on things,” the designer explains.

In terms of color, the question became, “How far are we going to go?” Quite a bit further, it turns out. In the guest bedroom, Beckstedt used shades of teal for the bed, walls, and even the ceiling, which he contrasted with rust-colored curtains. For the master suite, meanwhile, he opted for a two-tone scheme, with deep burgundy-meets-aubergine colors on the bed and walls offset by the pale greens of the ceiling and curtains.

If this palette marks a departure for Beckstedt, certain hallmarks remain. “I’m always pushing pottery—there’s just a warmth and a depth to it,” says the designer, who chose ceramics ranging from a modern Berndt Friberg vase to recent sculptural vessels by the Haas Brothers. Also evident is his fondness for distinctive details, like the exposed selvage edges on the master bedroom’s coverlet and the variations in texture and pile on the living room carpet. Handwoven in South America, the rug adds an element of coziness while taking that space “down a notch, so it didn’t become too glam,” Beckstedt notes. Clearly, he hasn’t lost all of his reserve. nbeckstedtstudio.com

No Such Thing As Too Much

At a Manhattan townhouse decorated by Russell Groves, a family of art aficionados finds that more is more

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 18, 2017·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/russel-groves-proves-that-theres-no-such-thing-as-too-much

Sitting in Melissa Neumann’s Manhattan living room, you can feel almost overcome—your eyes flitting from one artwork to the next, trying to take it all in. Over here a Jeff Koons sheepdog and a Futurist composition by Gino Severini. Over there classic abstractions by Joan Miró and Fernand Léger. Yet, for all the visual ping-pong, the room is actually one of the tamer spaces in the house, which is packed with a collection spanning three generations. Four, if you count the children. And this family does. “We just brought in a Kenny Scharf doughnut painting,” says Melissa, “and all three of my young kids were lobbying to put it in their room.”

Art has been embroidered into the fabric of the Neumanns’ lives ever since Melissa’s father, Hubert, and his father began buying, around 1950. Melissa and her sisters grew up surrounded with paintings and sculptures, and when she and her husband bought their latest home, there was no question it would be a showcase for art—the more the better. “This house is a cacophony,” says Hubert. “But so is the world. Why wouldn’t art, and showing art, reflect that?”

The 1899 residence, designed by architect Clarence True, might not have been an obvious fit for such dynamic treasures, but Melissa says she and her husband just felt it “had a great energy.” They hired Zivkovic Connolly Architects to renovate and expand the property, lightening its Victorian feel with a skylit central staircase whose walls and landings serve as galleries that reveal themselves as you ascend. “You see these fragmented views, which is similar to the visual vocabulary of many of the artists,” says Melissa, “but there’s also a sense of openness.”

For the furnishings the couple turned to Russell Groves, a designer known for rooms that exude a subtle glamour, combining warm palettes with a sophisticated mix of vintage and custom pieces. “The furniture couldn’t compete with the art,” says Groves. “We had to find a way to make the rooms feel softer and relaxed because there was already so much going on visually.”

The Neumanns have always favored art, Hubert says, that is “creative enough to make a significant step forward.” Translation: work that is joyously idiosyncratic and often obsessively intricate—if not outright chaotic. Take the entrance hall, where you are greeted by a vibrant 11-foot-tall totem by Charlie Roberts and a riotous 20-foot-wide Michael Bevilacqua painting with fragments of imagery and letters spelling out exclamations of joy. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, you encounter a pristine photo-realist portrait by Chuck Close beside a kaleidoscopic painting by Ashley Bickerton.

Nearby is a magisterial Jean-Michel Basquiat work, one of two the Neumanns bought from the artist in 1982. When it comes to the subject of curators and museums, Hubert, in particular, proudly wears his reputation for being opinionated and at times irascible. (Remarks like “Most museum installations are boring” are not uncommon.) But the family does regularly lend to exhibitions, like the recent Matthew Ronay show at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston and the Francis Picabia survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. These days, they are making hundreds of their works accessible on social media under the handle Aftermodernism.

Melissa says she and her husband plan to rotate what’s on display in their home and keep adding new acquisitions. Asked what unifies the mix, Hubert notes “it’s about antagonisms.” Melissa, pausing for a moment, remarks that while a lot of thought went into the way the house is laid out, there was also spontaneity. “Great art,” she adds, “just works.”

After Glow

Thanks to updates masterminded by designer Victoria Hagan, a family’s elegant prewar New York City apartment radiates with a fresh, youthful spirit

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by William Waldron

Fall 2023

https://galeriemagazine.com/victoria-hagan-new-york-city/

When a New York City couple approached designer Victoria Hagan about renovating an apartment they had bought for their young family on the Upper East Side, there was good news and bad news. First, the bad. Occupying a full floor in an elegant prewar building, the residence was “in estate condition,” as Hagan puts it, with “layers of time” fully in evidence. The apartment needed new everything, from mechanical and electrical systems to updated room configurations better tailored to how people live today.

And the good? Also the condition. Having avoided major alterations meant that the apartment retained many original architectural elements, notably the living room’s paneling with lovely foliate details and the library’s board-and-batten oak walls.

The thing was, the homeowners, who have two children under ten, weren’t sure those traditional elements aligned with their desire for a youthful and contemporary home that has places to play, do homework, and watch television. “They were like, ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t get rid of all this?’ And the contractor chimed in, ‘Well, you know, it’s more work to keep it,’ ” says Hagan. “I think I shocked my clients when I told them I love it the way it is. It’s special. And I always like to take a bit of the past and weave it into the present, because that sense of history gives an apartment its roots.”

Hagan prevailed and brought in architect Bryan Brown, a collaborator she’s done multiple projects with, to carry out the structural work, which was significant. Some changes were no-brainers, like knocking down walls in the original staff areas to open up the cramped kitchen and create a family room and playroom for the kids. Baths and closets were expanded, doorframes were raised, and millwork was lightened. “The whole apartment seems fresh now,” says Brown, “leaving some of the old and embracing the new.”

That mix of then and now starts in the entrance hall, where Hagan designed a striking marble floor using the classic combination of black and white, only in an overscale geometric pattern. “I wanted the apartment to be casually elegant, with a touch of the unexpected,” says the designer, who repaneled the entry in a traditional manner but outfitted it with contemporary lighting and furnishings, including a pair of zigzagging tiered bronze consoles by Ingrid Donat. “You come in and you’re like, Wow, this feels fun and open.”

Her approach was similar in the salon-like living room, where groupings of prints from Anish Kapoor’s “Shadow” series add a chromatic splash atop the paneling at both ends. Gleaming minimalist bronze sconces by Hervé Van der Straeten frame the burgundy-marble mantelpiece, around which Hagan arrayed cozy custom-made white sofas and a pair of voluptuous Jean Royère Polar Bear chairs covered in eye-catching emerald velvet. “I love using color for an added feeling of lushness,” says Hagan. “The apartment is close to Central Park, and the green just feels very natural, almost like topiaries in a garden.”

On the room’s opposite side, a blue velvet sofa echoes the radiant hues of the Idris Khan artwork above it, joined by vintage boomerang armchairs, playful side tables encrusted with silver balls, and, in the nearby corner, a funky ’70s Lucite console whose top is embedded with kaleidoscopic bands and blocks of color. The room-size rug, with grid-pattern variations in pile and texture, was specially designed for the space, while the curtains are made of a handwoven fabric. “There’s a very custom quality and a great attention to detail,” says Hagan.

One of the less obvious changes Hagan and Brown made was cutting an opening between the living and dining rooms, inserting bronze-framed glass doors that can be closed for greater intimacy or left open for an appealing sense of flow that extends through all of the entertaining spaces. The dining room, which features punchy black-and-white Ellsworth Kelly prints mounted asymmetrically on walls finished in a blue ombré plaster, was conceived as much as a seductive setting for dinner parties as a gathering place for daily family meals.

As a home with young children, functionality and comfort were paramount, from the kitchen’s breakfast-ready island counter with soft-leather barstools to the family room’s cushy sectional and big leather coffee tables that are perfectly geared toward relaxed movie nights. A somewhat more formal, clubby vibe can be found in the library, which was utterly transformed by stripping and bleaching the existing paneling, “giving the wood a fresh new life, shifting it from looking old and dowdy to a cleaner and more contemporary kind of feeling,” says Brown.

Throughout the residence, the rooms feel complementary but also distinctive, not least the primary bedroom, with its harmony of plush textures and pale hues—a soft upholstered bed, walls clad in a warm vanilla silk, and windows framed with blush sheers. “The whole room has a glow to it,” says Hagan, who sums up the space as something every parent needs now and then: “A touch of serenity.”

A Connoisseur of Novelty, Big Apple to Beijing

By Stephen Wallis

June 4, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304066504576343282755948362

Five years ago, Richard Chang decided to make supporting contemporary art his "second job." Since then, the 38-year-old Chinese-American collector, who oversees investments in real estate, hotels, media and fashion for his family, has raised his international art-scene profile considerably.

He splits much of his time between New York and Beijing, where he started the nonprofit Domus Collection to educate local audiences about Western art through exhibitions. The first such show, "Roundtrip: Beijing–New York Now," was staged at the Ullens Center last year. Mr. Chang is also a key adviser to the fast-rising Hong Kong International Art Fair. Attending the fair's latest edition last weekend, Mr. Chang talked about being a global collector today. Below, an edited transcript.

"The first work I bought, in 1997, was actually a Picasso, a drawing from 1961—nothing significant. It turned out to be not such a bad choice, but it was sort of a one-off. After that, I collected mostly young, emerging artists. As you get more confident as a collector, you get bolder and start raising the stakes. Now I'm buying some works that run well into seven figures. For me, that's high. So it becomes less impulse-driven. But even if I couldn't buy art, I think I would keep an inventory of my own imaginary museum.

"Outside of my business I spend 100% of my time on art, whether with institutions, with galleries, collecting, socializing, networking—it's all art. Last year I went to 12 or 13 art fairs. And I haven't even hit the Latin American fairs yet.

"For me, collecting is also a social thing, and many of the artists I collect I've gotten to know—Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Ryan Gander and Matthew Day Jackson, who is one of my favorite artists at the moment. One piece of his I own is a Hudson River School–type scene created using different types of Formica to represent the sunrays, mountains, water and everything. It's a painting made without a paintbrush. It's almost utopian kitsch—the colors are like you entered heaven or something, but underneath these surfaces the Formica is just cheap fiberboard.

"Another work I bought recently is a Damien Hirst butterfly triptych from Jay Jopling at White Cube. It's a beautiful stained-glass-window kaleidoscope about 10 feet high by almost 23 feet wide—the sheer scale is fantastic. Standing in front of it you get the full impact of what I think Damien is trying to say about religion and death and life.

"The Chinese artists I've collected include Zhang Xiaogang, famous for his 'Bloodline' paintings of Chinese families, and one not-so-famous painter, Yang Shaobin, who has been called the Francis Bacon of China. I'm also buying artists from the Middle East and India.

Matthew Day Jackson's 'Looking Down the Yosemite Valley' Domus Collection

"Because I'm American and also Chinese, I want my collection to reflect that global nature. Maybe I'll find out one day that the world is just too big to collect so broadly. Then maybe I'll a do complete 180 and zero in on New York artists. Who knows?"

Painter Enoc Perez's Latest Work

Known for his paintings of modernist buildings, artist Enoc Perez is pushing his work in bold new directions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Photography by Joshua McHugh

Posted October 31, 2013·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/enoc-perez-paintings-digital-prints-sculptures

Chalk it up to middle age, but Enoc Perez has never been more productive or creatively rangy. “You reach a point where you don’t feel like you have to prove anything, you just paint for yourself,” says the 46-year-old Manhattan-based artist. “I’m going to keep making art. Lately more is more.”

Perez’s signature works—large, seductive paintings of modernist buildings, from hotels in his native Puerto Rico to icons such as New York’s Lever House and Chicago’s Marina City towers—are owned by major museums and influential collectors like Peter Brant and Aby Rosen. The earliest examples were made via a meticulous process of transferring oil-stick drawings to canvas, sometimes dozens of layers of them, by hand. A couple years ago Perez began using a brush as well, giving the works a more painterly, abstract feel, with thick drips and daubs adding texture and complexity—“almost a sense of decay,” he notes. At the same time, his colors got more extreme, tending toward acid hues or dark, moody tones. “It’s not a naturalistic palette, because I want the works to be discovered as paintings first, not as images of architecture,” says the artist, who just completed a series on buildings by Swiss architects for a spring show at Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich.

But Perez is also moving into entirely new territory, namely with sculptures based on his collection of vintage swizzle sticks, most from Caribbean hotels. The finished works, several of which he debuted in January at Acquavella Galleries—his New York dealer—are cast in bronze or aluminum then painted white, and stand up to ten feet tall. Composed of enlarged versions of the stirrers fused together, the pieces suggest playful, oddly enchanting totems commemorating some faded tropical paradise. “They look like disasters—they’re broken,” the artist says, acknowledging the sense of “failed utopia” and disillusioned modernist ideals that pervades his work.

Perez also paints retro-ish, slightly kitschy nudes (the full scope of his output is chronicled in a monograph coming out from Assouline in December), and he has embarked on another series that involves making digital prints that combine those nudes with works by Picasso, no less, and then adding layers of paint and silver leaf. “I’m addressing perhaps the most important artist in history—that makes anyone nervous,” says Perez. “It’s about shifting out of my comfort zone.” 

Pace Gallery Unveils a Game-Changing Global Flagship in Manhattan

In the heart of the city’s art world, the new Bonetti/Kozerski–designed space signifies an ambitious new chapter for the gallery

By Stephen Wallis

August 23, 2019

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/pace-gallery-unveils-game-changing-global-flagship-manhattan

As New York’s Chelsea neighborhood continues its post–High Line makeover as a luxury real estate haven, some of the biggest galleries have an answer: Go bigger. On September 14, Pace will unveil a 75,000-square-foot, eight-story building created to be “a new kind of machine for displaying and selling art,” says architect Dominic Kozerski of Bonetti/Kozerski, which designed the structure in collaboration with Pace and the developer, Weinberg Properties. Clad in aluminum and volcanic-stone panels, the striking building will serve as Pace’s global flagship (which was one of AD's 14 Most Anticipated Buildings of 2019), joining branches in London, Geneva, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Palo Alto.

“Artists today need a different kind of venue to push boundaries,” says Pace president Marc Glimcher. “You have to go beyond just giving them someplace larger.” Occupying the structure’s first three floors are flexible, column-free exhibition spaces, including a 3,600-square-foot gallery with 18-foot-tall ceilings at street level, as well as more intimate spaces such as a by-appointment research library. But what really sets the building apart is what’s up top. On the sixth floor, Kozerski and his partner, Enrico Bonetti, devised a sprawling terrace—open on two sides—that will accommodate both exhibitions and events. “Being outside, 100 feet up, interacting with art is going to make it a really unique place,” notes Kozerski.

Hovering 15 feet above the terrace is a glass-walled box, the building’s eye-catching crown. Inside, there’s a double-height, 2,200-square-foot gallery for multimedia installations, performances, screenings, and other public programs, as well as an upper level with rooms for hosting intimate dinners and VIP meetings. “I wanted to make a space where we could have fun,” says Glimcher, who promises music and dancing. “There will be very serious things happening in there, but we will have a good time.”

This is what it now looks like keeping up with the Joneses—in this case, the Zwirners and the Hauser & Wirths, which have embarked on their own large-scale building projects in Chelsea. Gagosian, meanwhile, is expanding the larger of its two Chelsea locations by annexing adjacent spaces previously occupied by Pace and by Mary Boone (who is now in prison for tax fraud). It’s not merely a game of one-upmanship, it’s part of competing as a top-tier global gallery. For Pace, which has operated multiple spaces in New York for years, it means being able to consolidate everything in one place. (Though Weinberg Properties owns the building, Pace has signed a long-term lease, reportedly 20 years.)

Reflecting the diverse range of Pace’s roster, the inaugural shows will include early Alexander Calder pieces, new works by David Hockney and buzzy abstract painter Loie Hollowell, and a selection of Fred Wilson’s chandelier sculptures. As Pace looks toward its 60th anniversary next year, Glimcher emphasizes that artists are still the gallery’s core, but the mission has expanded, with 1,000 active clients and more than 800,000 Instagram followers. “They want to be consumers of an art experience,” he says, emphasizing how critical it is now to be accessible and welcoming. “We want people to walk into the gallery and feel like, I’m going to do all kinds of things, see all kinds of things. I’m going to have a great day here.” pacegallery.com

Santiago Calatrava: An Architect Spreads His Wings

By Stephen Wallis

May 2001

China's Xu Bing Gives Flight To Words at the Morgan

By Stephen Wallis

July 2, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304447804576413731008492102

Chinese artist Xu Bing is about to turn New York's Morgan Library & Museum into an installation site. For its second annual contemporary art commission, the Morgan invited Mr. Xu to create a larger version of his well-known work "The Living Word," originally made in 2001. The piece will consist of some 350 carved and painted Chinese characters for the word "bird" in various historical scripts—all hung from the ceiling of the Morgan's soaring entry court in a cloudlike cluster that will rise dramatically from the floor to the top of a 50-foot glass wall.

Along with Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang, Mr. Xu is among the most famous of China's New Wave artists who first came to prominence in the 1980s. He moved to New York in 1990 after falling out of favor with the authorities. Though he returned to China in 2008 as vice president of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he continues to do projects around the world.

Mr. Xu remains best-known for conceptual works dealing with written texts, often highlighting their unreliability. "He takes a somewhat critical position vis-à-vis the authority of the written word, which you could say for a library is a little ironic," said Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan's curator of modern and contemporary drawings. "The Living Word" has been shown in the city only once before, when a version sold for $408,000 (a record for the artist) in a landmark sale of contemporary Chinese art at Sotheby's in 2006.

Speaking from Beijing via a translator, Mr. Xu said "The Living Word" is largely about "the connection between writing and nature." The work begins on the floor, with a dictionary definition for "bird," rendered in a simplified calligraphic script that Mao Zedong made standard in a bid to improve literacy. Higher up, the characters shift to earlier styles, and the work ends with a primitive representation of a bird. "At the top, the colors become quite vivid, and it's almost like the bird is flying out of the window to escape this prison of language," said the artist.

Visitors to the Morgan will be able to watch Mr. Xu and his team install "The Living Word" over four days, starting July 12. The finished piece will be on view through Sept. 15.

Coming up this fall for Mr. Xu is the third part in his Tobacco Project, examining ties between the U.S. tobacco industry and China, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. And during the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council plans to exhibit his "Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?," a 2004 room-size work with a Zen Buddhist poem written into dust from the World Trade Center.

Jacob Lawrence: Portrait of a Serial Painter

Following a tradition as old as Egypt, this venerable American artist tells the stories of some very modern human struggles.

December 1996

By Stephen Wallis

The Natural

Arthur Dove’s intuitive landscapes led him to the nexus of abstraction and reality.

By Stephen Wallis

October 1997

Teresita Fernández

Through her stylized, minimalist abstractions, Teresita Fernández taps into the natural world of our imagination.

By Stephen Wallis

March 2005

Artist Ellsworth Kelly Dies at Age 92

The unorthodox talent was known for his deceptively simple-seeming, often brilliantly colored abstractions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 29, 2015

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-ellsworth-kelly-dies

America has lost one of its giants of postwar art, Ellsworth Kelly, who died at age 92 on December 27, 2015 at his home in Spencertown, New York, where he had lived and worked for the past 45 years. Known for his deceptively simple-seeming, often brilliantly colored abstractions, Kelly was an unorthodox talent whose seven-decade career defied easy categorization.

After serving as a designer in the army’s camouflage unit during World War II, Kelly studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and then set off for Paris, spending several years soaking up the influence of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, and other modernist luminaries. In 1954 Kelly moved to New York, which by then had replaced Paris as the premier art world center, but he had no affinity for the Abstract Expressionism that was then in vogue, rejecting in particular what he saw as its cult of personality. Instead he remained resolutely focused—as he would throughout his life—on the austere abstractions he’d begun painting in France, often basing the forms on shapes lifted from nature and life, such as shadows, the contours of leaves, and odd fragments of everyday objects. He did, however, embrace the American penchant for working big.

At the heart of Kelly’s unwavering exploration of form and color was his interest in the perceptual effects of juxtaposing various shapes and hues. He embraced rectilinear and organic forms alike, with gloriously arcing wedges being one favorite. He made captivating use of color but also demonstrated masterful use of black and white. While his work is sometimes lumped in with hard-edged abstraction and minimalist painting, his oeuvre was really too idiosyncratic, too personal for tidy labels.

In addition to paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and even photographs, Kelly made wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures—slender monoliths or intriguingly folded shapes that cast compelling shadows and interact with their settings. Much of Kelly’s art was about creating a dialogue with the surrounding space, and his work nearly always looks its best installed in groups. Never was this truer than for his magnificent 1996 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, with Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling rotunda partnering in a dazzling pas de deux.

Kelly received numerous commissions for site-specific works in buildings, and he was keenly interested in architecture. Last year he donated to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin an unrealized chapel-like structure he had conceived for a collector in the ’80s. His only building design—to be constructed once fundraising is completed—calls for a 2,715-square-foot stone edifice with colored-glass windows, a series of black-and-white marble panels, and a totemic wood sculpture. The artist envisioned it as a place to “rest your eyes, rest your mind,” as he told the New York Times.

Kelly worked up until the end of his life and just last spring impressively filled all four Manhattan spaces of his gallery, Matthew Marks, with new canvases and wall reliefs. Interviewed by A.M. Homes for a story in W magazine a few years ago, the artist enthused that he was “still excited about things I haven’t done,” adding, “Who needs heaven? I only feel my best when I’m working.”

One can imagine him up there in the pantheon, alongside some of his heroes, tools in hand, still toiling away.

Designer Paul Cocksedge Excavates His Studio for His Latest Creations

Facing eviction, the designer uses pieces of his London work space for a new suite of furniture to debut during Milan Design Week

By Stephen Wallis

March 24, 2017

http://www.galeriemagazine.com/paul-cocksedge-excavates-his-studio-for-his-latest-creations/

British designer Paul Cocksedge creates the kind of work that makes you think—if not exclaim outright—“That’s brilliant!” To conjure his minimalist furnishings and lighting, he experiments intensively with materials and process, but the resulting pieces inevitably embrace whimsy, surprise, even visual sleights of hand: ghostly pendant lights that appear to float in midair, say, or cantilevered metal tables that by all rights look as if they should topple over. There’s a moment of discovery that happens once you recognize the magic.

The latest works to emerge from Cocksedge’s London studio, former Victorian stables in Hackney, will be the last ones produced in the space. With an impending redevelopment of the site forcing the designer to relocate, he decided to make the building itself part of a farewell project.

Using special tools, Cocksedge repeatedly cut deep down into the studio floor and extracted hundreds of cylindrical core samples, each revealing layers of concrete, rubble, and brick. He then trimmed the circular pieces—some resembling rustic terrazzo—and incorporated them into glass-top tables and shelving.

Five of these works will be unveiled at the Palazzo Bocconi-Rizzoli-Carraro in Milan, April 4–9, to coincide with the Salone di Mobile. Titled “Excavation: Evicted,” the show is being presented by Friedman Benda, Cocksedge’s New York gallery, in collaboration with Beatrice Trussardi, whose foundation supports a variety of art projects, often in unconventional spaces. (The palazzo is currently undergoing renovations and is slated to reopen as a museum of Etruscan art next year.)

Cocksedge’s idea for the body of work was to commemorate the dozen years he spent in the studio and to reference the building’s history. He also sees it as being symbolic of how London’s surging real estate prices are pushing creative communities out of many neighborhoods and requiring them to take root elsewhere. “This project is a personal elegy,” notes Friedman Benda director Jennifer Olshin. “But it’s also a metaphor for reinvention.”

Marvin Rand's Legacy Captured

The late architectural photographer Marvin Rand finally gets his due in a new book

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted February 22, 2018·Magazine

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/marvin-rands-legacy-captured-in-a-new-book

Postwar Los Angeles was a boomtown, industrially and culturally—an ideal playground for architects. The result was some of America’s great midcentury homes and commercial buildings, devised by talents such as John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and Rudolph Schindler. There to record these masterworks—for promotion and posterity—were a handful of photographers, the most famous among them Julius Shulman. But the forthcoming book California Captured (Phaidon) makes a case for his peer Marvin Rand as an equally significant chronicler of the scene.

An L.A. native, Rand (1924–2009) launched his studio in 1950, focusing on advertising and product pictures before shifting—partly on the advice of design historian Esther McCoy—to architectural photography. One of his early clients was Craig Ellwood, a charismatic architect who was married to the actress Gloria Henry and had a fondness for sports cars. Rand shot nearly all of Ellwood’s most celebrated projects, including two Case Study houses, brilliantly capturing their interplay of recti­linear volumes as well as their integration with nature. For Ellwood’s 1955 Hunt House, overlooking the Malibu surf, Rand photographed the highway-facing exterior as a hyper-minimalist silhouette: two cubic garages flanking an opaque glass wall, all framed by open sea and sky.

“It’s the incredibly graphic sensibility and the way Rand approaches buildings almost as exercises in abstraction that really stand out,” says Emily Bills, who coauthored California Captured with Sam Lubell and Pierluigi Serraino. Another defining aspect of Rand’s work, she adds, is that “it was never about photographing a lifestyle image of L.A. His interest was really the structures and how they fit into the city.”

Take Rand’s 1956 shot of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. The cylindrical building, with its distinctive sunshades and spire, is seen from across a parking lot through an opening of tropical foliage. That building is perhaps the most famous creation by another of Rand’s key clients, Welton Becket and Assoc., the firm behind such L.A. landmarks as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center complex, and the Equitable Life Building—a modernist monolith with striking vertical striations, memorably shot in 1969 by Rand in three-quarter profile.

As California Captured vividly shows, Rand (a onetime AD contributor) photographed high-profile projects across Southern California, from the Salk Institute to the LAX Theme Building. But the book also highlights rarely seen works by such lesser-known architects as Lutah Maria Riggs and Douglas Honnold. The latter is represented by Rand’s nighttime shot of the drive-in Tiny Naylor’s, an evocative essay in light and shadow with cars parked beneath a soaring canopy. The authors, who spent more than five years combing through Rand’s archive—some 20,000 images strong—not only give the photographer his due but also further embellish “the grand mosaic,” as they put it, that is the story of California modernism.

Jaguar to Produce 9 New Jaguar XKSS Supercars from 1957

The British carmaker is traveling back in time to re-create the vintage model it calls the world’s first supercar

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted March 25, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/jaguar-produce-9-new-jaguar-xkss-supercars-1957

One of the holy grails for enthusiasts of classic sports cars has long been the Jaguar XKSS, the coolly charismatic 1957 roadster with Jayne Mansfield curves and a racing pedigree famously beloved by Steve McQueen. Based on the British carmaker’s D-Type, which won Le Mans three years in a row in the mid-’50s, the XKSS could hit 60 m.p.h. from a standstill in five seconds. Ultimately, only 16 were ever produced—a result of a devastating fire at the company’s factory—but six decades later Jaguar is bringing back the legend it calls the world’s first supercar.

Well, it’s making nine of them, anyway, with a price tag in excess of $1.5 million each. Unlike the recent, widespread moves by carmakers of rolling out retro-inspired designs, Jaguar Land Rover is experimenting with a different approach. Two years ago, the company’s special operations division built six Jaguar Lightweight E-Types, a sultry successor to the D-Type, handcrafting them, not as reengineered versions with cutting-edge performance capabilities and comforts but as unmodified replicas sticking to period specifications. The success of that project—all of the cars, priced between $1.6 million and $2.5 million, were quickly sold—encouraged Jaguar to do something similar with the XKSS, faithfully re-creating the riveted side panels, the leather hood straps, the throaty purr of the side exhaust pipes. As with the E-Types, the new XKSSs aren’t intended for road use, as they don’t meet today’s safety or emissions standards. Instead, they are targeted to top-end collectors who will bring them to shows and rallies. Although the new XKSSs won’t be ready until early next year, five of the nine have already been sold.

Buyers have a choice of colors: British racing green (preferred by McQueen), Old English white, red, black, or gray. The luggage rack and folding top are optional, as is the fuel gauge—a feature the original didn’t have. While the sticker price might seem shocking, keep in mind that McQueen’s XKSS, now owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, has been valued by some at more than $30 million.

Maison de Mulroney

Out of a dilapidated chapel in Montreal rises an art-filled penthouse for a former prime minister of Canada and his wife

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Thomas Loof

September/October 2021

https://www.veranda.com/decorating-ideas/house-tours/a37189759/les-ensembliers-montreal-penthouse-house-tour/

There was a moment early in a complex project overseen by designer Richard Ouellette and architect Maxime Vandal when they turned to each other and thought, Oh, what have we done?

The two men, partners in the Montreal-based firm Les Ensembliers, had brought an important client to visit what would be her home. The site was a former chapel on the upper floors of an early-20th-century convent that was being converted into residences next to Montreal’s Mount Royal Park. Gazing into a vast gutted shell with nothing but open sky above, Ouellette and Vandal exchanged knowing, uneasy glances while reassuring the client that, yes, this stark void would become a graceful, art-filled penthouse duplex with an enviable terrace and panoramic views.

Not that there was ever any serious doubt among the designers or their client, Mila Mulroney, the wife of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who served as Canada’s leader from 1984 to 1993. Ouellette and Vandal had known the couple for about a decade. The duo had done updates to the interiors of the Mulroneys’ previous residence in the nearby Westmount area, where they’d lived for more than 20 years and finished raising their four children. “They were ready for something else, but they didn’t really want to change their lifestyle completely,” says Ouellette, explaining that he and Vandal helped the Mulroneys find the build-from-scratch opportunity.

The location is ideal: closer to downtown and the museums and galleries Mila frequents but still in a beautiful residential area, surrounded by park greenery on three sides. And being at the top of the five-story building means incomparable views of the city, across the Saint Lawrence River, all the way to the U.S. border. “You can even see mountains like Jay Peak in Vermont,” notes Vandal.

When it came to devising the layout for the 6,000 square feet of living space—plus another 2,000 square feet of rooftop terrace—the challenge, Vandal says, “was to translate the Mulroneys’ life in their previous home to the more contained volume of the apartment without any compromise.” The aim was for the residence to feel intimate and comfortable when it’s just the two of them, while also allowing the couple to host family gatherings and entertain on the generous scale they are accustomed to.

Ultimately, Ouellette and Vandal created a fairly traditional sequence of rooms that feels classic but is animated by a spirited—even, at moments, unexpected—mix of furnishings and art. There’s a strong emphasis on works by Canadian designers and artists, a number of whom the Mulroneys have known and followed for many years. “They are lovers of Canadian art, and they’ve spent their lives collecting the stories that come with each piece,” says Ouellette.

That narrative starts at the apartment’s entrance area, where a branching, treelike sculpture specially commissioned from Canadian artist Laura Santini is suspended dramatically in the double-height space with the elegantly balustraded limestone stairs twisting around it. Additional Canadian works—a towering abstract canvas by François Lacasse among them—enliven the adjacent walls and long hallway, which functions as a gallery. The hallway’s sculptural pendant lights, handcrafted by the local studio Gabriel Scott, are composed of clusters of glass polyhedrons that Ouellette likens to “clouds floating over the gallery,” adding a decidedly contemporary note of whimsy.

“It’s all about creating little moments and building up momentum,” says Vandal. Building up, that is, to arrival in the main entertaining space: the spectacular 50-foot-long living room with 15-foot-high walls punctuated by soaring windows. The designers broke the imposing volume into three distinct areas, with a formal-but-not-too-formal seating group at the center, a dining area anchored by a majestic antique crystal chandelier at one end, and another inviting seating area with a fireplace opposite. French antiques combine with custom-designed contemporary pieces and an array of Asian accents, from a pair of Burmese gilded kneeling figures and various Chinese ceramic vessels to the eye-catching paisley ikat curtains.

The area near the fireplace is where Mila Mulroney likes to spend time with guests, often seated on a tufted sectional sofa upholstered in a strikingly patterned Kelly Wearstler fabric. “It’s her cozy spot, where she has her little desk,” says Ouellette. “It feels like it’s part of the larger room, but it’s also very intimate.”

Brian Mulroney has his favorite space too, often holing up down the hall in the library, which doubles as his office. An international business consultant who serves on multiple company boards (he has also advised Canada’s current leadership on negotiations over the 2018 North American Free Trade Agreement, arguably his signature achievement as prime minister), Mulroney wanted a space at the center of the home that afforded him privacy. Wrapped almost entirely in custom-made shelves for his books, photos, and other keepsakes, the room is furnished with plush, velvet-clad sofas and chairs and features select artworks, such as a Shirley Van Dusen painting of the Canadian Parliament building mounted above the French marble mantelpiece.

When family visits (the couple has 13 grandkids), they tend to spend a lot of time upstairs, which is essentially a 1,000-square-foot glass box outfitted as a family room, with lots of seating, a television, and a less-formal dining area with a long harvest table that fits 16 or more. Plus, there’s the spacious terrace outside. “It’s cozy, sort of like the basement of the home, but it’s in the sky,” says Vandal.

The designers emphasize that the goal throughout the home was to create understated rooms that “speak to a traditional character but are still modern,” as Ouellette puts it. “Making sure that all the discreet and well-detailed elements were right was key. A design is harder to make perfect when it’s simple.” For the Mulroneys, it seems, everything turned out simply perfect.

Romance and Coastal Charm Abound at This Historic Block Island Home

Miles Redd and Gil Schafer reimagine a historic indoor-outdoor living getaway for a family of six, prioritizing sunlight, salt air, and a landmark of summer's past.

By Stephen Wallis

Jun 16, 2022

https://www.veranda.com/decorating-ideas/house-tours/a40085935/miles-redd-gil-schafer-block-island-house-tour/

Block Islanders have passed a familiar barn near the southern end of the Great Salt Pond, a glimmering central harbor for the Rhode Island summering set. Perched on a picturesque vantage point amid gently rolling hills, the gambrel-roof landmark was once part of a farm that had remained in the same family for generations. By the time its current owners—longtime seasonal residents—acquired the 16-acre property a decade and a half ago, both the barn and the adjacent 19th-century farmhouse had deteriorated badly.

While the couple opted to start fresh with the house, the barn, they insisted, had to stay. “It’s this iconic barn that everyone stops their car on the roadside to take a picture of, with the Great Salt Pond and the sea beyond,” says architect Gil Schafer, a veteran of numerous historical renovations who worked with the couple to create a multibuilding family getaway. “It was important to restore as much of it as possible, much more so than the farmhouse, which didn’t really have the same presence,” says Schafer, who dismantled the barn down to its foundation and rebuilt it with reclaimed timber.

As for the new house that would accompany it, the couple were sensitive to how changes would be perceived. “There are no tall poppies on Block Island. You really don’t want to stand out,” says the wife, who has been spending summers here since she was eight. She and her husband were married here, and two of their four now-adult children were baptized here. “The island has worked hard to retain a spirit of simplicity and community, so we spent a lot of time on-site planning and making sure that everything sat well not only on the property but on the island.”

To help realize their vision, the Florida-based couple enlisted their longtime decorator, Miles Redd, who has worked on a handful of residences for them, and landscape designer Deborah Nevins. The project ultimately took about five years, counting two years of design and permitting (no simple process with Block Island’s restrictive codes). The result is a haute-pastoral family compound that includes, in addition to the barn, a five-bedroom main house and a guesthouse with two bedrooms and a garage—all designed in a style Schafer notes coexists comfortably with the island’s typically plain shingled architecture while taking cues from McKim, Mead & White’s famous Seven Sisters cottages in Montauk, New York, to bring “a little more visual interest.”

While large by Block Island standards, the roughly 5,300-square-foot main house, Redd says, has “a very human scale,” with modest-sized bedrooms. “They’re an active family, out and about on the land, on the water,” adds Schafer. “But the communal spaces are generous for the idea of getting everybody together.”

Primary among those spaces are the porches that wrap around the back of the house for dining and relaxing. “Everything we did was about creating connections to the view and indoor-outdoor living,” says Schafer, who maximized glass doors (some of which pocket to enhance the sense of openness) and windows throughout to “have light come from as many sides as possible and just be able to feel the presence of the sea air all around you.”

Nowhere is this more palpable than in the conversational living room, a study in balancing traditional elegance with put-your-sandy-feet-up ease. The crisscrossing ceiling beams and trim are painted a crisp white, the oak floors are lightly stained and padded with a simple striped cotton rug, and the walls are clad in a textured grass cloth painted “a blushy, pale pink,” as Redd describes the distinctive hue—an unconventional choice that required a bit of finesse. “I kept painting it, each time making it lighter and lighter, and the clients would still come back and say, ‘Would you add another pass on the walls, make them a little bit lighter?’”

The palette was inspired by a floral linen by Blithfield with soft pinks and blues the wife had fallen in love with, explains Redd, who used it to upholster the comfy sofas and tufted armchairs, adding skirting for an “old-fashioned, Sister Parishy” vibe. Joining the mix is a contrasting pair of oak spindle armchairs cushioned in a beachy, swimsuit-friendly white terry and woven rattan drum tables. Throughout the home a smattering of eclectic artworks—many acquired via 1stDibs during the pandemic—leans toward summery landscapes, marine subjects, and botanicals.

“For the clients, comfort is key, as are understatement and restraint,” the designer says. “Block Island is not the Hamptons. It’s not even remotely Nantucket. There’s a real kind of ‘Yankee New England’ reserve here. The idea was just to have this beautiful, simple house that felt like it had been there forever.”

And as for that old, long-familiar barn? It lives on as both poolhouse and entertaining pavilion, its rustic-wood interior outfitted with a bar, a central table that seats at least 20, and a sprawling U-shaped sectional—Redd playfully describes it as “the world’s longest sofa”—where groups can pile on and watch movies together on a retractable screen. “Last summer we had a couple dozen of my son and daughter’s friends in there,” the wife recalls. “On that long couch you can fit a lot of six-foot-tall boys.”

Schafer added a gable and window on the pool side of the barn to welcome in more light and installed doors on both sides that slide wide open, merging indoors with out when the weather is right. He also built a sleeping loft with two double bunks, plus a single, that will be perfect for grandchildren one day.

And when the time comes, a garden space, created by Nevins on the other side of the pool, is tailor-made for weddings, the wife notes. It’s an amphitheater-like series of curved grass-and-stone terraces built into the natural slope of the land, and the couple have already used it for parties. “My poor kids, I would love them all to get married here, but I think because I want it, probably none of them will,” jokes the wife.

Beyond the lawns around the house and pool—where Nevins’s plantings included hydrangea, quince, and ornamental grasses, as well as flowering herbaceous plants like lavender and Russian sage—former pastures have been allowed to grow mostly wild, their old stone walls still largely intact. “Seeing the fabric of farming over decades or even hundreds of years, how beautifully those stone walls are laid out, sometimes you almost feel like you’re in Ireland,” Nevins says.

Another element she sought to preserve and highlight is an old American elm, a rarity on Block Island, that stands majestically outside the kitchen’s side windows. Seated beneath its craggy canopy, the wife says you can nearly see all the way to Montauk. It’s one of the special spots on this magnificent property, which the couple want to ensure is kept as is for future generations. They’ve got the bunks ready.

Uptown Elegance, Downtown

Warm, tonal serenity floats above the high-flying action of New York’s Flatiron District in a polished pied-à-terre by Robert Passal

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson

September/October 2021

https://www.veranda.com/decorating-ideas/house-tours/a37189762/passal-nyc-apartment-house-tour/

For Jocelyn and Jeffrey Kraus, it was, as the saying goes, all about location. And the right decorator.

A few years ago, with their three adult children growing their own families and Jeff eyeing the day when he would scale back his role at Spectrum Retirement Communities (the company he cofounded), the Denver-based couple set out to fulfill a longtime desire for a pied-à-terre in New York City. “I have loved New York since I was a child,” says Jocey, as she prefers to be called. “And I’ve always had a particular fondness for the Flatiron Building and its neighborhood. It’s central, and I can walk everywhere: to the theater, to the West Village, to SoHo, and, of course, to a million restaurants.”

So when the couple found a three-bedroom apartment in a historic building overlooking Madison Square Park with views of the Flatiron, they wasted little time in dispatching trusted designer Robert Passal to weigh in. Passal had bonded with the family several years earlier while renovating the Manhattan apartment of the Krauses’ eldest son.

Jocey not only admired Passal’s flair for layering furnishings and objects from disparate periods but also his keen intuitiveness. “I rarely told him what I liked. It was as if he knew,” she says.

The designer gave his blessing to the couple’s purchase of the apartment, which sits on a high floor in a 24-story 1912 building with Gothic and Romanesque details. Once occupied by furniture and garment makers, the tower underwent a multiyear residential conversion starting in 2015, with Helpern Architects overseeing structural renovations and Pembrooke & Ives handling the interiors. The building made headlines when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos snapped up multiple units at the top, including the triplex penthouse.

While they may have some high-flying neighbors, the Krauses are decidedly down-to-earth, Passal says, and that’s reflected in their priorities for the space. “The apartment wasn’t meant to be splashy,” explains the designer. “We had a distinct look we were going for, which was calm and clean.”

Comfort and functionality were also key. “I didn’t want it to be casual, but I wanted an apartment where people felt like they could walk in and sit down anywhere,” says Jocey. “Not those rooms where you feel like you have to perch.”

They preserved the 3,200-square-foot residence’s existing layout and retained a good deal of Pembrooke & Ives’s millwork and surfaces, but Passal added a number of space-redefining touches. For starters, he stripped the gray-tone floors and refinished them using a matte wax oil that reveals more of the wood’s natural graining and color variations. In the entrance area, the designer brought in artisans to embellish the walls with fluted plaster, making a subtle yet high-impact statement. “It’s all hand-trawled,” he says. “That was two months’ worth of work.”

The plasterwork serves as a backdrop for a Picasso-esque painting of sunbathers by Hayley Mitchell along one wall, while opposite, Passal installed a vintage straw marquetry mirror over a contemporary bronze-and-leather console that hosts a sinuous abstract bronze sculpture by Antonio Grediaga Kieff. As with the rest of the home, “the idea was to make the space feel approachable but artful, using a mix of different eras and aesthetics,” says the designer, who got his start in interiors working in John Rosselli’s New York showroom, a legendary source of sophisticated eclecticism.

Sprinkled around the living room among the pale upholstered seating are diverse works of art and objects, from Wedgwood ceramics to ancient sculptures. A handful of pieces are displayed on a circular table that can be expanded with leaves to seat eight for dinner. But Passal says the Krauses never intended this as a place for entertaining: “Jocey said, ‘You know, I’m not coming to New York to cook for 20.’ ”

From the outset, the couple envisioned the apartment as a private sanctuary where they could each have cozy spaces of their own. In Jeff’s case, it’s the cocoon-like, walnut-paneled den outfitted with a plush L-shaped sofa facing a large television and everything in a palette of chocolaty hues. Jocey, meanwhile, can often be found on her Jean-Louis Deniot chaise next to the window with a book, sometimes just gazing out. “She wanted little reading nooks and places to hang out or have a conversation,” says Passal, who commissioned Vietnamese artist Francis Nguyen to paint the folding screen with ethereal abstract nudes for Jocey’s quiet corner, adding a splash of soothing color. “It was a way to create a moment without it being over-the-top.”

A bigger showstopper can be found in the couple’s bath. Jocey had fallen in love with a light fixture that resembles a strand of pearls by Quebec’s Larose Guyon, only to abandon the idea for cost reasons. But with renovations wrapping up just as Jocey was having a major birthday, her husband colluded with Passal to surprise her. When the designer brought the couple to see the completed apartment for the first time, there it was, floating above the freestanding tub. “I had no idea,” says Jocey. “My favorite kind of jewelry is pearls, and it not only made the bathroom, I think it made the whole apartment. I mean, it’s just magnificent, isn’t it?”

See the Designs for the First Free-Form 3D-Printed House

A Chicago-based design consultant has proposed a technology that could build a single-story, 600- to 800-square-foot residence using 3D printing

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted June 17, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/tour-worlds-first-free-form-3-d-printed-house

The Chicago office of WATG’s Urban Architecture Studio has conceived what it hopes will be the world’s first free-form 3D-printed house. The proposal won first prize in a competition organized by an entrepreneurial firm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called Branch Technology, which solicited plans for a single-story, 600- to 800-square-foot residence to be constructed using its proprietary 3D printing process.

WATG’s design, dubbed Curve Appeal, calls for an amorphic structure that would wrap around a mostly glass-walled core containing a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. The scheme features a carport and interior terrace illuminated by skylights. It’s a complex form made possible by Branch’s so-called Cellular Fabrication technology, which uses a customized Kuka robotic arm to print diagrid elements with a carbon-fiber-reinforced composite—in basically whatever shape is desired. After these components are welded together into a complete framework, conventional insulation and concrete can be sprayed to form the walls. The goal is to eventually have a multi-element robotic arm capable of extruding the fill-in material as well as the structural framing, but for now, it’s essentially a hybrid process. “It’s a little like having a UFO and strapping ordinary jet engines to it to make it fly,” says WATG associate vice president Christopher Hurst, who helped oversee the project. “But this is just the infancy of where we’re looking to go with the technology.”

For years, evangelists have been proclaiming the potential of 3D printing to make everything from simple household objects to entire houses. While early experiments in scaling up to create habitable structures have produced aesthetically underwhelming (i.e., boxy, simplistic) results due to the limitations of how conventional 3D printers layer material, the development of robotic arms that can print in midair has opened up a world of dynamic possibilities.

“Right now, 3D modeling and parametric design is going crazy—you can do all kinds of things with the technology,” Hurst says. “But the problem is that so many designs being produced are too complicated and expensive to be fabricated. A lot of gymnastics goes into making standard materials fit onto these designs.” What 3D printing can do, in principle, is allow architects to avoid having to dumb down designs for cost reasons. “Eventually, you’ll be able to hand over your designs to a contractor, and they’ll be able to go out with their army of Kuka arms and fabricate the structure on site,” adds Hurst. “The effect would be to level the economic playing field—and free up the minds of designers.”

Napa Valley Now

California’s most celebrated wine region is buzzing with stylish hotels, smart tasting experiences, and talented new players.

By Stephen Wallis

July/August 2010

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/wine-spirits/best-napa-california

Yes, the economic downturn hit Napa Valley pretty hard. Declining land values, tighter credit, and consumers buying fewer premium bottles of wine have pushed a number of winemakers to the brink. And some predict the hangover could last a while, with quite a few foreclosures and distressed sales of vineyards before things turn around. The prices of many Napa wines will almost certainly come down, especially after the huge 2009 harvest left a glut of Cabernet grapes. Not a bad thing for wine drinkers!

Actually, there’s plenty of good news for visitors to this epicurean paradise, as the success of recent years has brought more quality options than ever in the form of sophisticated restaurants, new and improved hotels, and intimate, hands-on experiences with wine and food. Lessons learned during the nineties dot-com boom encouraged thoughtful development, and all across Napa Valley the watchwords are sustainable, organic, and local, local, local.

“Green is not a political statement anymore—it’s almost a necessity,” says John Conover, general manager and partner at PlumpJack Winery and its newer sister, Cade, which just joined nearby Hall as California’s only gold-LEED-certified wineries. With sexy state-of-the-art architecture and an eco-smart approach, Cade and Hall are representative of the new generation that’s defining Napa today.

For full story, see pages at left.

Hello Chiho

A self-taught visionary inspired by scroll painting, Symbolism, and anime, Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima is stepping out of the shadow of her celebrated mentor.

By Stephen Wallis

September 2007

http://www.departures.com/letters/features/hello-chiho

To stand before a mural-size panorama by Chiho Aoshima is to lose yourself in another world—one where Japanese anime, traditional scroll paintings, apocalyptic visions, and Hello Kitty meld in magnetic, eye-popping fantasy. I was first seduced by her work several years ago, when I came across Japanese Apricot 2, an eight-foot-high image of a doe-eyed girl (in Aoshima's universe it's always girls) elaborately bound up in a tree. The scene is set in an intensely stylized landscape against a cotton candy–colored sky. While the cloud swirls and impossible mountain peaks owe a debt to classical Japanese painting, the apricot blossoms and sweet little birds are pure kawaii, the culture of cuteness that's so prevalent in contemporary Japan.

At the time I knew little about Aoshima beyond the fact that her mentor was Takashi Murakami, the guru-impresario who almost single-handedly launched the Japanese contemporary art sensation in the late nineties. Her digital creations seemed to tap into many of the same currents—interest in anime and kawaii, two-dimensional graphic imagery, fetishistic impulses—that gave Murakami's art an irresistible Pop appeal. Yet, compared with his detached, industrial-commercial style, hers registered as more emotional, more intriguingly personal.

Soon Aoshima's work started cropping up more frequently: images of anthropomorphized mountains and buildings, fantastically lush landscapes, otherworldly dreamscapes, dramatic conflagrations, at least one tsunami, and (clearly something of an obsession of hers) zombies. From the beginning she has veered between happy, almost utopian imagery and scenes of loneliness, death, and destruction. In some cases both can be found in the same piece, creating a kind of bipolar tension that runs throughout her art.

"Because of the places where I'm presenting my work, I sometimes feel I have to make lighter, happier images," Aoshima told me via a translator. "But I really enjoy drawing the dark, disturbing worlds. I believe the only way to feel positive is by being aware of darker things. Of course, in the end, even those should be cute."

In May the 32-year-old artist sat down with me at the New York studio of Kaikai Kiki, the company founded by Murakami to handle fabrication, licensing, and promotion for him and the handful of artists he represents, including Aoshima. She had come to the city for the summer to practice her English, prepare for a solo show this fall at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, and simply be at the center of the international art world. With a string of prominent public commissions and museum projects under her belt, she is establishing herself as more than just a talented Murakami protégée.

Unlike other Kaikai Kiki artists, Aoshima didn't go to art school. After getting her degree in economics at Tokyo's Hosei University in 1995, she spent a few years at an advertising firm, where a graphic designer taught her how to use Illustrator software. She started doodling on her computer, as she put it, and when Murakami came in to oversee one of the firm's ad campaigns, she showed him a few pieces. "He thought they were interesting and encouraged me to keep doing them," Aoshima recounted. "About a year after that, he offered to include my work in a show he organized, 'Tokyo Girls Bravo.' I guess that's when I started thinking of myself as an artist."

He also hired Aoshima as a designer for Kaikai Kiki in Tokyo, working on Murakami-branded projects. It was her team, for example, that came up with the multicolor logo pattern on those hugely popular Louis Vuitton bags. At the same time she continued making her art which, especially at first, had a strong Pop sensibility, influenced by Japanese manga, or comics. She featured cheerleaders and schoolgirls and occasionally incorporated text. Building, from 1999, shows a girl wedged into a narrow space between hulking high-rises, where the only signs of life are a few wispy ferns, a centipede, and a snake. The kawaii elements are there, but the image hints at darker thoughts: It isn't clear whether the girl is trapped or taking refuge.

Between 2000 and 2005 Aoshima enjoyed an accelerating stream of shows and projects. She did a couple of high-profile collaborations with designer Issey Miyake (an installation at his Tokyo store and two lines of dresses printed with her images). Her work appeared in several shows at Perrotin and the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe. And most influentially, Murakami featured her in all three exhibitions of his celebrated trilogy, "Superflat," "Coloriage," and "Little Boy." Last year, with her career shifting into high gear, she gave up her position at the studio to focus on her own art.

Kaikai Kiki still represents Aoshima, and she remains in close contact with her mentor. "Takashi really understands me and my work," the artist said. "He will often make suggestions on how I should do things: 'Why don't you emphasize this part or downplay or eliminate that part of a piece?' And if he sees me slacking off, he comes and pushes me to work faster—kicks me in the ass a little bit."

Not that it's a two-way exchange. I asked if she ever offers him ideas or criticism. "I almost never—" she responded tentatively, before adding, "I don't."

For his part, Murakami said he has never thought of Aoshima as a disciple and certainly not, as one critic recently described the Kaikai Kiki artists, a clone. "Basically the similarity between us is that we were born and raised in Japan, in Tokyo," he said. "Our expressive mechanisms are animelike, but our messages are totally different. My works are inundated with resentment, whereas unease and happiness coexist in hers."

The full span of Murakami's output will be on display this fall, in a midcareer retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary branch of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The curator, Paul Schimmel, has been involved with both artists' work for years. "I think Takashi is, in some ways, in awe of Chiho's command of the computer, her complete control of her materials," he said. "She ran Kaikai Kiki's design department with great authority, and he always gave her a lot of respect and a lot of room. She's very quiet, but she's a force."

During my visit with Aoshima she came off as thoughtful and, at moments, quite serious—an impression softened by her disarming laugh and gestures of girlish animation, like when she skipped off to fetch a stack of books she has been using for inspiration. She came back with a small paperback on traditional Japanese painting, a book of satellite images titled Earthcam: Watching the World from Orbit, and chunky volumes on Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture and Japonisme—the term for that country's influence, especially of its 19th-century woodblock prints, on Western artists from Van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec to Gustav Klimt.

Lately, she told me, she's been looking a lot at the work of the 17th-century Japanese artist Tawaraya Sotatsu and the French Symbolist Odilon Redon, two distant yet eccentric figures. A cofounder of the Rimpa school of decorative painting, Sotatsu was known for his simple, exquisite scenes from nature and literature, often done on gold backgrounds. It's not hard to see connections between Sotatsu's stylized, two-dimensional imagery and Aoshima's digital prints. Similarly, her interest in nature and cycles of life, in fantasy and nightmares relates closely to Redon's. In fact, Schimmel described her as "kind of a 21st-century Symbolist."

To give a sense of how she works, Aoshima pulled out a laptop, her roving studio. She opened the Illustrator file for A Fleeting Moment of Happiness, a piece she made last year for the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon, France. It's an ultrawide Technicolor landscape of hills and wormlike buildings with cute faces seemingly about to be overcome by a purplish, toxic-looking cloud. The image could be read as a statement about man's relationship with nature—and the future appears pretty dim.

Once the work was up on her screen Aoshima switched to a black-and-white view that revealed the hundreds of intricate vectors making up the image. With a few clicks she showed how she could adjust the contour of a building or add a butterfly. Aoshima maintains a library of motifs that she occasionally recycles, with modifications, but she draws most things from scratch. Then she started dropping in colors. The brief demonstration revealed how complex, infinitely changeable, and time-consuming her work can be.

It typically takes Aoshima about two months to complete her pieces, which she then outputs as editioned ink-jet or chromogenic prints. For exhibitions she sometimes creates huge one-off prints that she calls wallpapers. When installed at the Lyon museum, A Fleeting Moment of Happiness measured some 86 feet across.

"With the computer you can print things out at almost any size. It was kind of an accident when I did the first wallpaper," she said. "Looking at it on a small screen and then printing it out so big, it was completely different from the way I had imagined. Every time I do one, it seems there's something in the result that surpasses my imagination."

Aoshima also does sketches in watercolor and colored pencil, and she usually keeps a pile at her side for reference when she's working on the computer. She has also started to incorporate hand-drawing into finished works, including the 40-foot-long wall piece she created last year while participating in the well-known Artpace residency program in San Antonio—her first extended stay in this country. As We Died, We Began to Regain Our Spirit features comic-book renderings of San Antonio landmarks, each with a human face, floating on cloudlike trails of green and blue. After printing digitally made images of the buildings on traditional Japanese paper, she collaged the sheets on a wall and added the other elements by hand, using watercolor and colored pencil. The result is a kind of Pop riff on Japanese screen painting.

In addition, she has begun making video animations, a natural-seeming step for an artist working digitally on a cinematic scale. Her first, City Glow, created in 2005 with animator Bruce Ferguson, is a seven-minute loop that plays across five screens. It's a surrealistic evolution sequence that opens in an Edenic forest, which gives rise to a city of glowworm buildings, followed by a nightmarish scene in a ghoul-infested cemetery, and, finally, a new dawn with fairies, a rainbow, and blue skies.

Schimmel acquired City Glow for MOCA from Aoshima's 2005 show at Blum & Poe and included it in his re-cent "Ecstasy" exhibition at the museum. He called it "one of the most extraordinary pieces of animation ever made by an artist, period. It's something Takashi could never imagine. The use of the sweeping horizontal composition and the movement and timing of it are absolutely breathtaking."

When I met with Aoshima in May, deadlines for her upcoming show at Perrotin were already looming. She admitted she was feeling a little behind. She had a tabletop model of the gallery interior that she'd started filling in with miniature works, which will be a mix of printed and hand-drawn images and at least one three-dimensional piece. Among the core elements is a large sculpture of a demon figure that, if the sketches she made are a good indication, will look like a cross between a creature by Mau-rice Sendak and one of Odilon Redon's Gothic noirs. She also promised "a pretty scary, shocking" wallpaper piece.

All great Pop artists—Warhol, Koons, and Murakami, of course—have a dark side, and Aoshima enjoys channeling hers. For this show she is defying those who want her to stick to the happy work and is making images of a world she says she really wants to create. It will be dark, but it'll still be cute.

Chiho Aoshima's latest work is at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris from September 15 to October 11 (76 Rue de Turenne; 33-1/42-16-79-79; galerieperrotin.com). Her video animation, City Glow, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through October 21 (5601 Main St.; 713-639-7300; mfah.org).

A Geometric Hamptons Guesthouse

The architects at Leroy Street Studio and decorator Thad Hayes design a beach retreat with a modern edge

Text by Stephen Wallis

Photography by Scott Frances

Posted July 31, 2011·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/leroy-street-studio-hamptons-beach-house-article

The brief a Manhattan-based couple gave the architects of Leroy Street Studio was fairly simple: Build a modern guesthouse that both accommodates visiting families and takes advantage of the spectacular wetlands of the Long Island, New York, village of Westhampton. The firm’s solution, however, turned out to be far more inventive than just a response to a checklist.

Despite its six bedrooms, the couple’s Hamptons retreat had begun to feel cramped, thanks to their five young children and endless guests. “We were chock-full, weekend after weekend,” the wife says, adding that during some Jewish holidays, namely the fall feast of Sukkoth, “we can have up to 30 people eating all their meals here and staying over for three or four days.” So when a property across the street fortuitously came up for sale—a sandy wedge of land facing glittering Quantuck Bay—she and her husband jumped at the opportunity to build expansive guest quarters that would, she explains, “reflect some of our evolving contemporary sensibilities.”

In a part of Long Island where most new construction is hardly shy and retiring, the building reveals itself gradually. Viewed from the road, the two-story, four-bedroom structure appears at first glance to be a modernist box with few windows and cedar cladding. But there is a twist—literally. A section of the first floor is rotated out at a 20-degree angle, with a small portion of the second floor cantilevered above it. Eye-catching too is the slot in the center of the façade that takes the place of a traditional front door; a gangway-style walk passes straight through it to the other side of the house.

“It’s the inverse of a big, grand entrance,” says Marc Turkel, one of the founding partners of Leroy Street Studio, a New York City firm known for high-end residential work and socially minded community-development projects. “The house is quiet on the street, and then, after you pass through this aperture, it opens up to a courtyardlike space with unexpected diagonal views.” Overlooking the bay out back, two wings—raised on stilts above the floodplain—form a bold V shape, with a mahogany deck, a small pool, and a grove of birch trees (the latter had to be hoisted over the house by crane) between them.

The architects’ unusual plan “maximizes the bay experience,” as Morgan Hare, Leroy Street Studio’s other founding partner, puts it. Transparent materials dominate the bay side, most dramatically in the double-height living space and adjacent dining area, where soaring glass walls offer unimpeded views of salt marshes and flocks of shorebirds. All that glass, metal, and pale wood, coupled with the structure’s strong geometries, give the house a somewhat sober personality, but interior designer Thad Hayes ensures that its rooms are also welcoming.

“Because the architecture is very rigorous, I introduced more color and texture than I’d typically use, in order to soften it,” says the Manhattan-based Hayes. “I wanted the spaces to be tailored and clean without being icy or hard-edged.” In the living area, where one wall is taken up with glass-fronted storage for kosher wines, the designer placed custom-made sofas upholstered in a lively cotton by Florence Broadhurst, as well as a lava-stone cocktail table and a handwoven rug from Colombia. Throughout the house, whether on banquettes in the Bulthaup-appointed kitchen or on headboards in the bedrooms upstairs, the fabrics Hayes chose are sturdy and patterned (“nothing precious,” he says) to hold up to children’s play. The designer also accented the spaces with ruggedly stylish vintage furniture, such as George Nelson desks for the bedrooms and George Nakashima chairs around the dining table.

The art, acquired through adviser Candace Worth, is displayed sparingly, often just one work per room. “In the city everything is shown one on top of another,” says the wife. “I really like how the pieces here stand alone.” A suite of abstract oil-stick drawings by Jack Pierson hangs in the living area, and a painting by Daan van Golden—a bold, silhouette-style detail of a flower—blooms above the dining area mantel.

This being the shore, however, family and guests spend most of their time outdoors. Children frolic in the pool or fish off the dock while parents relax in deck chairs, drinks in hand—especially in the evenings, when cinematic sunsets fill the sky. “Unlike the typical arrangement of many homes, where the focus is a great room,” says Hare, “here the great room is the bay.”

The Fate of Art in a Poor Economy

When the economy went topsy-turvy, everyone could see art was next. How bad will it get?

By Stephen Wallis on March 30, 2010

http://www.departures.com/art-culture/culture-watch/fate-art-poor-economy

It wasn’t a promising start. Two days before the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, the economy was officially declared to be in recession. The Dow, on cue, plunged 700 points. Not that any of this was entirely a surprise. Expectations at the country’s top contemporary art fair—an event that has ballooned into a huge festival with nearly 20 fairs, endless exhibitions, and nonstop parties—were already subdued.

The parade of bad news, from the real estate debacle to the credit crunch to Wall Street’s implosion (the latest poke in the eye, Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, came just days later), had thrown a big wet blanket on the global art boom and left galleries, auction houses, collectors, and artists bracing. Hefty declines at the major fall auctions, where large numbers of works went for well below their estimates or failed to sell at all, added to the anxiety.

In the end, the results in Miami were mixed. While far from a disaster for most, overall sales were down, with many collectors focusing on less-expensive works and galleries having to offer substantial discounts and payment plans. “There is a lot of hesitation,” says Rachel Lehmann, co-owner of the Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York. “Lots of hand-holding is needed, not just with collectors but with artists, staff, curators. Before Miami we had serious talks with all of our artists.
We said, ‘Would you rather go for deeper discounts and sell? Or if you don’t want to, that’s fine, and we won’t push to sell your work in the same way.’ Work by artists who agreed to discounts sold well in Miami. Those who didn’t, barely sold.”

Undeniably, it’s a different world out there, especially in the previously frenzied market for contemporary art. Galleries are laying off staff and cutting back on expenses. Sure, during Art Basel heavyweight dealers like Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling could be seen drinking $18 cocktails at the Setai, but these days flying coach is more likely to be viewed as a badge of honor than an embarrassment. Dealers are having to work harder, be more patient, and be less controlling in placing works. Laura Solomon, a New York art advisor, recounts how last year, when she approached a prominent gallery about buying a young artist’s work for a client, “they practically asked for his firstborn, requesting information on his collection and a commitment in writing that he’d donate the piece to a museum,” she says. “Recently that same gallery overnighted images and followed up with me every day for a week about a possible sale. They bent over backward.”

New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, who delivered a talk at Art Basel with the Cassandra-ish title “This Is the End: The Rising Tide of Money Goes Out of the Art World and All Boats Are Sinking,” is among those who argue that the brave new world is actually a blessing for artists, because “marketability will no longer equal likability.” It’s an interesting point, but how will artists fare in a downturn Saltz himself predicted will be harsher than the one in the early nineties? Many galleries are sure to close—maybe 50 or more in New York alone. Who knows? Everyone agrees tough times are here.

That includes the auction houses, which spent the past several years offering sellers ever more generous terms, including lavish guarantees (a privately negotiated sum given to the seller regardless of the result) and splashy catalogues. For the November sales in New York, Christie’s bundled the Hillman and Lawrence collections of late-19th- and 20th-century art into companion hardcover catalogues branded “The Modern Age.” Together they made $47 million, less than half the $104 million low estimate. Especially painful for Christie’s was that the Lawrence works were guaranteed, a practice the company has now essentially stopped, as has Sotheby’s, which announced losses of $52 million on guaranteed property in its fall sales.

The old saw “quality always sells” still (mostly) holds true, though not at any price. Failures in the autumn auctions included major works by Richter, Rothko, and Lichtenstein. Francis Bacon, whose skyrocketing prices reached $86 million last May, also fell back to earth: A 1964 self-portrait, estimated at around $40 million by Christie’s, found no takers. At Sotheby’s an early Philip Guston abstraction from the fifties went for just half its $18 million guarantee.

Based on the recent backsliding in contemporary art prices, some have suggested we’ve returned to 2005–06 price levels, which are, taking a long-term view, still quite high. And while many of the young hedge funders and new buyers from emerging markets who helped fuel the worldwide art boom have retreated in the face of recession, experienced collectors are hunting for opportunities. “The way I look at the fall auctions in New York is that $300 million was spent on postwar and contemporary art in three days,” says art advisor Allan Schwartzman, whose clients include Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky. “That’s a huge amount of money at a moment when the world is in a financial crisis whose depth and length is totally unclear. I was surrounded by real collectors who were bidding—and bidding comfortably. It’s a very different situation from 1990, when the art market crashed and there was a loss of confidence at every price level.”

While it’s to be expected that postwar and contemporary art, which saw the sharpest gains, would fall farthest in a downturn, there were relative bright spots in other categories at the end of 2008: the notably solid Old Masters sales; Sotheby’s antiquities sale, which more than doubled its $4 million low estimate; the Constantiner collection of fashion and celebrity photos at Christie’s, which made $7.7 million and was 90 percent sold.

“It was a quite interesting autumn in fields other than postwar and contemporary,” says Marc Porter, president of Christie’s Americas. “It would be conventional wisdom to say that the whole market has dropped dramatically, but, in fact, other collector markets are chugging along pretty steadily.”

Nonetheless, both houses are cutting costs, laying off staff, and pressing consignors to accept lower estimates and reserves. Of course, the next six months will be critical in assessing how wide and deep the market retrenchment goes. A number of important tests loomed as this issue went to press: the January Old Masters sales in New York, London’s February sales of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art, and the Yves Saint Laurent collection in Paris, which is expected to bring upwards of $400 million. In March and April there are benchmark New York sales of photographs and of Russian and Asian art—two closely watched categories. Already, a former centerpiece of New York’s Asia Week, the International Asian Art Fair, has been canceled, citing concerns about the economy.

The slump has hit museums hard, too, not only in their endowment investments but also in charitable donations and government funding. In one of the highest profile cases, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art agreed to a much-debated financial bailout by collector Eli Broad after its endowment dwindled to just $6 million from more than $40 million several years ago. Broad, for his part, could be seen at the November auctions snapping up works by Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, and others. “It was a half-price sale,” he told The New York Times after Sotheby’s contemporary art evening session.

“This is normal—cycles never go only up,” says Rachel Lehmann. “There are fantastic opportunities in times like this. Personally I think we’ve seen the bottom of it, but nobody knows how long it’s going to last.”

Sector Watch

Troubled Waters

1. Contemporary Chinese Art

There are all kinds of concerning issues in this recently fast-rising market—rampant speculative buying, artists churning out vast quantities of work in factorylike studios. At the fall contemporary Asian auctions in Hong Kong, results for Chinese works were spotty, with major paintings by high-flying artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Yue Minjun, and Fang Lijun failing to find buyers. One of the top lots at Christie’s—which saw its total for these sales free-fall from $73 million in May to just under $19 million in November—was Tang Zhigang’s Chinese Fairytale. Meanwhile, reports from New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Fair in November and Miami’s new Art Asia in December weren’t especially encouraging.

2. Russian Art

The meltdown of Moscow’s stock market and plunging oil prices have taken a toll on the newly rich Russians who fueled the swift run-up in this field. At the late-November London sales, Christie’s sold $21 million worth of Russian paintings, silver objects, and icons, compared with $81 million a year ago. Sotheby’s did $38 million—including $337,000 for a Fabergé heart-shaped frame with a miniature of Empress Maria Fedorovna—but that was down from $80 million. Less expensive auctions at Bonhams and MacDougall’s fared even worse. Undeterred, dealer Peter London of West-Eleven gallery is launching the Russian Art Fair in London, slated for early June.

3. Richard Prince (ET Al)

Not to pick on Prince, whose work is much admired (and coveted), but prices paid for his “Nurse” paintings—$8.4 million for one last summer that sold for less than $100,000 six years ago—seem to typify the irrational exuberance that has characterized segments of the contemporary market. In November Sotheby’s and Christie’s each offered a “Nurse” painting, with equally disappointing outcomes. Christie’s had estimated Lake Resort Nurse, from 2003, at $5 million to $7 million, and Valentino’s partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, snagged it for “just” $3.3 million. Of course, similar stories can be told about other artists—Damien Hirst, for one, whose market has been all but dead since his $200 million sale at Sotheby’s in September.

Safer Harbors

1. Old Masters

Stable, steady, driven by connoisseurship rather than investment interests: That’s how the Old Masters market is often described. Without question, the field is not as reliant on the new wealth that pumped up contemporary prices, and results were reassuringly solid at the December auctions in London, where Giambattista Tiepolo’s Portrait of a Lady as Flora brought $4.2 million at Christie’s. As this issue went to press, a big test loomed at the late-January Old Masters sales in New York: Sotheby’s was offering a $12–$16 million J.M.W. Turner and a pair of Frans Hals portraits expected to fetch up to $21 million combined.

2. Modern Decorative Arts

As prices for contemporary design spiked in recent years, early-20th-century decorative arts, generally speaking, enjoyed a more modest rise. And areas like Arts & Crafts, Tiffany, and Art Deco—the traditional core of the design-collecting field—have performed relatively well in spite of the economic downturn. The $3.6 million sale of the Lindemann collection at Christie’s in December—heavy on French pieces from the twenties through forties by Eugène Printz, Pierre Chareau, and Paul Dupré-Lafon—saw robust buying. And both houses’ sessions dedicated to Tiffany were around 90 percent sold.

Cy Twombly and Sally Mann’s Studio Days

Painter Cy Twombly and photographer Sally Mann developed a special bond through many shared days in Twombly’s studio, documented by Mann and compiled in her upcoming book Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery

By Stephen Wallis

Sept. 7, 2016

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cy-twombly-and-sally-manns-studio-days-1473270128

IT WAS INEVITABLE that Cy Twombly and Sally Mann would find each other. After all, the two most famous artists from Lexington, Virginia, were both misfits. He was the idiosyncratic painter whose mix of graffiti-like scrawls and literary references defied easy categorization, and she the photographer of evocative family pictures and landscapes who always cleaved a distinctive path. Both chose to work outside the glare of art-capital spotlights: Mann has always been based in rural Lexington, while Twombly spent most of his career in Gaeta, Italy. But in the early ’90s, when he started returning home for half the year, they developed a special bond that lasted until his 2011 death.

“We thought of each other as kindred spirits,” says Mann, who recounts how the two often took walks, went for long rides in her old BMW (“Cy loved that car because it was like a luxury boat, and he could stretch out in it”) and spent time in each other’s studios. His unlikely workspace, a former gas company office, was a humdrum, 1950s brick building with single-pane windows. But there, amid low ceilings and fluorescent lighting, Twombly completed a number of major works. One day in 1999, Mann decided to take a few pictures of his studio, and it turned out to be the start of a 13-year project.

“It began very casually and became sort of a labor of love,” she says. “It never occurred to me that they would ever be published or exhibited.” But this fall, Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, a book of those photographs, will be published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery, which will exhibit a selection of the images at its Madison Avenue location through October 29. The pictures capture works in various stages of progress, tabletops piled with materials, walls and floors splashed with paint. “Cy had these competing impulses between personal restraint and this feeling of Dionysian excess and celebration,” says Mann. “In the earliest photographs, the studio was pristine. And by the end you could barely walk through.”

Art Dealers Like Design, Too

These gallerists refuse to see a divide between art and design.

By Stephen Wallis

July 8, 2018

https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/art-dealers-who-like-design-too/

In this era when so many ambitious artists and designers are discipline-hopping, multi-hyphenate makers who defy easy labels, more and more contemporary galleries are straying out of their conventional lanes. Heavyweights like Gagosian and Sean Kelly have ventured into modern and contemporary furniture, while design dealers such as Friedman Benda, Cristina Grajales and R & Company are behaving a lot like art galleries.

The perceptual wall between art and design has been crumbling for years. At the same time, fairs that freely mix the two have proliferated, from FOG, in San Francisco, to the Salon Art + Design, in New York. As collectors become more comfortable with this fluid environment, enterprising dealers are taking various approaches to diversifying their exhibition programs and extending their reach to new audiences and clients. The three art galleries featured here have found success going outside the lines, each in its own distinctive way.

Peter Blake Gallery

Over the past quarter century, Peter Blake has made his gallery in Laguna Beach, California, a go-to destination for minimalist and Light and Space works by such artists as Larry Bell, Joe Goode and Helen Pashgian. A couple of years ago, he decided to diversify.

For his 2016 summer show, Blake staged his first-ever exhibition of vintage furnishings, showcasing pieces that he and his wife, artist Stephanie Bachiero, had collected over the years. “A lot of things had been in storage, and in some ways we just wanted to see our own stuff,” recounts Blake. “Even though we expected that some of our artists would get upset with us over having furniture in the gallery or clients might question what direction we were taking, we just said, ‘Screw it, let’s do what we want.’ ”

Among the pieces in the show, titled “The Tendency of the Moment — International Design: The Bauhaus Through Modern,” were chairs by Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, an Edward Wormley sofa, a Charlotte Perriand sideboard and a David Gammon–designed turntable used as a prop in the film A Clockwork Orange. Nearly everything was presented on pedestals, like sculpture, and there was zero art. “At first, we were very hesitant to combine the two. We wanted to ensure that there was no way the furniture would look decorative,” explains Blake.

The show was a hit. As for the anticipated backlash from artists and clients, it never came. Earlier this year, the gallery presented its second design show: a survey of standout Brazilian furniture curated by São Paulo native Ulysses de Santi. And Blake now exhibits design and art together at such venues as the Dallas Art Fair and Collective Design, in New York, for which he conjured the home of an imaginary collector this spring. “They’re no longer the typical concrete-floor booths that we used to do,” he says. “Now, great design helps set the tone. The type of art we sell tends to be clean, minimalist, seductive, sophisticated, and the furniture kind of lightens and warms it up a bit.”

Blake is plotting several future design shows, including an exhibition featuring Antoine Philippon and Jacqueline Lecoq as well as one that will re-create a Walt Disney office based on pieces architect KEM Weber designed in the ’30s. A vintage stereo design show is in the works, too. “Unlike the regional art that we show, the design has an international audience, so we find ourselves selling to markets we would never sell to otherwise,” says Blake. “And people who like what we do on the design front are finding a way into the art side of the gallery. The two are growing each other.”

Ethan Cohen Gallery

Visitors to Ethan Cohen’s booth in the Spotlight section of this spring’s Frieze New York fair encountered a captivating selection of Hans Breder’s surreal, mostly chromatically muted photographs and videos. Offsetting those works was an incongruously purple suite of metal furniture used by staff manning the booth. The eye-catching table and chairs were specially created for the space by buzzy — and very busy — Russian-born designer Harry Nuriev, who heads his own firm, Crosby Studios.

“We needed something in the booth to balance out the pieces by Hans Breder — we needed a splash of energy,” says Vlad Sludskiy, the general manager at Ethan Cohen’s Manhattan gallery, who brokered the commission from Nuriev. “Harry is a friend of a friend from Moscow who moved to New York two years ago, and he’s been so successful in part because of his ability to collaborate. He’s done several collaborations with established brands and other design studios, and this was his first with a gallery that specializes in contemporary art.”

The abstracted arch forms that define the custom-made pieces are Nuriev signatures, as is the distinctive monochromatic hue. “This vivid purple color that he used all of a sudden seemed to become so popular,” says Sludskiy, noting that Frieze used the same hue in its navigation signage for the Spotlight section. (Nuriev, for his part, has apparently moved on to a new color crush.)

Sludskiy says that he and Cohen — who, in addition to the New York gallery, also oversees a building with studios and an exhibition space in Beacon, New York — hope to keep the relationship with Nuriev going. “I strongly believe in collaborations,” remarks Sludskiy. “The world is no longer with us in which you stick to a narrowly defined mission or assigned role. Fashion and design and art are part of an interrelated universe of creative minds. It’s really about expanding your audience and exhibiting unconventional objects in unconventional spaces.”

Cohen may be best known for showing high-profile Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun and Zhang Dali, but the gallery is looking at expanding its engagement with design. Says Sludskiy, “We see design as a new channel of communication for the gallery.”

Paul Kasmin Gallery

When it comes to collectible design with crossover appeal, few names can compete with the Lalannes: 94-year-old Claude and her late husband, François-Xavier. The French couple’s nature-inspired furnishings and sculptures are coveted by collectors around the world, thanks in part to the efforts of New York dealer Paul Kasmin, who began showing their work about 15 years ago, when Lalannes mania was just beginning to take hold. Today, they are superstars of a gallery roster that includes such artists as Saint Clair Cemin, Walton Ford and Tina Barney, not to mention the estates of Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis and Constantin Brancusi.

The Lalannes, however, are hardly outliers at Kasmin, where design is an integral part of the mix. The gallery also represents Mattia Bonetti, the Swiss-born conjurer of baroquely imaginative furnishings. And in recent years, it has exhibited Scott Burton’s minimalist sculptural chairs and benches and tables, as well as inventive pieces by Ron Arad. “Throughout our program, you see a lot of people who don’t fit into particular categories easily,” says gallery director Nick Olney. “To us, functional work is another medium of contemporary practice. It’s when artists, sculptors, designers, makers are working in the intersections, pushing what art can be in different directions, that a lot of really creative and exciting things are made.”

Olney notes that Burton came to creating functional pieces from his early performance work in the ’70s, while Claude Lalanne’s exquisite chairs, tables and mirrors and her husband’s animalistic cabinets and desks were born out of the couple’s practice making Surrealist sculpture. As for Bonetti, showing furniture in an art gallery context has never been merely about blurring the boundary between design and art but rather about using it “as something to play with and prick at people’s expectations on both sides,” says Olney.

At a prominent art fair later this year, the gallery will present a new body of work by Bonetti, who marries refined craftsmanship and 21st-century technology in fantastical forms. “He’ll have someone who is making incredible leaps in what can be done with acrylics combined with traditional marble carvers combined with scagliola makers and experts in the leafing process or hand-wrought iron,” says Olney. “He’s playing with decorative-arts traditions but then infusing that with a very contemporary language.”

That emphasis on materials and artistry, wed to a compelling conceptual approach, appeals to adventurous collectors of all stripes. “Our clients have become more aware of design as unique or limited-edition or custom pieces,” says Olney. “It’s about objects that tell a story and really enrich a space and a collection.”

Art of the West Rounded Up for a Rebound

By Stephen Wallis

July 23, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303661904576454192598674396

For those who sell art of the American West, it's hard not to feel nostalgic for the good ol' days—not the cowboy era but the wild-west years of 2003 to 2008, when prices blasted to record highs.

On Saturday the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, the best-known annual sale of Western, wildlife and sporting art, will take over the grand ballroom at the Silver Legacy Resort in Reno, Nev. The auction's totals peaked at $37 million in 2008. A year ago, by contrast, the auction brought in just $9.2 million.

"That was probably the weakest we've seen the market since we started 26 years ago," said Reno art dealer Peter Stremmel, a Coeur d'Alene founder who also serves as its auctioneer. Though buyers are still being cautious, he says, he anticipates a bounce-back year.

A summer ritual since 1985, the Coeur d'Alene auction (which kept its name, despite moving from Idaho to Nevada a decade ago) is basically Art Basel for the ranching and oil set, who come for the Western camaraderie as well as for the art.

Among those expected this year is Idaho lumber magnate Marc Brinkmeyer, who primarily collects contemporary Western works. Mr. Brinkmeyer has attended the auction for close to 15 years: "Usually I come home with more than I bargained for. It's good for us collectors that the market's down a little bit."

At Saturday's sale, just under 300 lots will be hammered down in roughly five hours, with spotters in the room pointing out bidders with enthusiastic "yips" and "has." Highlights include four works by the 19th-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, whose view of "Mount Rainier" carries a high estimate of $2.5 million. Stalwarts Frederic Remington and Charles Russell will be represented, the latter by an 1892 painting of an Indian camp with a top estimate of $1.2 million. Among the more recent-vintage material, there are 13 works, expected to fetch upwards of $425,000, from the estate of the sculptor Harry Jackson.

Unlike most collecting fields, Sotheby's and Christie's aren't necessarily the go-to options for sellers of top Western material. Coeur d'Alene, a bellwether for the market, holds several major artist auction records, including those for Russell and N.C. Wyeth.

But it has rivals. The Scottsdale Art Auction in Arizona could surpass Coeur this year, having posted a $15.3 million total in April, including $4.2 million for a landscape by the Hudson River School master Thomas Moran. Not far behind are the Jackson Hole Art Auction, in Wyoming on Sept. 17, and the Santa Fe Art Auction, which emphasizes Southwestern works, on Nov. 12. Bonhams, meanwhile, is holding one of its three yearly sales of California and Western paintings in Los Angeles on Aug. 9.

Construction Begins on SHoP’s American Copper Buildings in New York City

The New York–based firm’s design features two buildings connected by a dramatic three-story sky bridge

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted April 27, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/construction-begins-shop-architects-new-york-skyscrapers-linked-skybridge

A pair of tilting apartment towers now under construction on Manhattan’s far east side is bringing a stretch of humdrum riverfront some serious architectural pizzazz. Designed by SHoP Architects, the recently topped-out buildings at 626 First Avenue feature distinctively bent profiles that suggest a dancing couple, their backs gracefully arched. Rising 41 and 48 floors, the two structures are linked in the middle by a three-story sky bridge—the highest in the city—containing a lounge area and a 75-foot lap pool with dramatic views.

“We thought about how we could push the idea of a residential tower in terms of form but also stay within the site’s prescribed envelope,” says SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli. “The idea we came up with was to have one building fold north-south and the other fold east-west. Then where they come closest together, we thought about connecting them with this public amenity space—it’s like the moment in a tango when the arm goes around the small of the back.”

The towers, created for JDS Development Group, have been named the American Copper Buildings, thanks to another eye-catching feature: their shimmering metal façades. While the sides looking east and west are entirely glass, the windows on the north and south exposures are framed by copper panels—some 5,000 of them, weighing a total of more than four million pounds. “I don’t think anyone had ever done a copper building that tall,” says Pasquarelli. “We really liked the idea that the material comes as this super-shiny penny, then mellows to a kind of chocolate-brown and eventually turns green.” Just how long that process will take isn’t certain—anywhere from a decade to half a century. Pasquarelli notes that they could have treated the copper to make it green from the get-go, but given the building’s highly visible location next to FDR Drive, the East River Ferry’s 34th Street terminal, and the Midtown Tunnel, they decided to leave the metal raw. “We thought it would be cool for the whole city to be able to watch it age and develop a patina, until it becomes the color of the Statue of Liberty,” he says. “We thought of it almost as a building performance art piece for New York.”

The buildings will contain 761 rental apartments, 20 percent of which have been designated as affordable housing. Amenities include a fitness center, hammam, yoga studio, rock-climbing wall, screening room, and rooftop deck with an infinity-edge pool. SHoP is devising the finishes, fixtures, and cabinetry for the residences as well as overseeing all aspects of the decor for the public spaces. Outdoors, the landscape firm Scape is designing a 38,000-square-foot park with storm buffers that would offer protection in the event of flooding from the East River.

The refinements and amenities in the American Copper Buildings, which are slated for completion by early 2017, aim to be on par with those of high-end condo properties. It’s the same strategy behind another high-profile collaboration between SHoP and JDS, the recently approved 73-story rental apartment tower in downtown Brooklyn, which will be that borough’s tallest structure. Says Pasquarelli, “Our client, Michael Stern at JDS, has said that his goal is to reposition how people think about rental buildings.”

Michael Del Piero’s Hamptons home is the ideal backdrop for her distinctive, far-flung finds. 

By Stephen Wallis

August 27, 2018

https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/home-design/michael-del-pieoro-minimalist-hamptons-cottage

“I hope you like music,” interior designer Michael Del Piero says, cheerfully, in the entryway to her not-quite-year-old home in Amagansett, on Long Island’s East End. It seems the audio system that she and her partner, antiques dealer Stuart Grannen, installed has been glitchy, and for the life of her, she can’t get it to turn off.

But then, even before we’ve settled down to talk, the music suddenly stops, and the only background noise is that of afternoon birdsong coming through the open sliding glass doors. Well, that and the occasional barks of a pair of Brussels Griffons staying at the house while their owners help ready a Hamptons outpost of Michael Del Piero Good Design, the interiors studio and shop the decorator founded in Chicago a decade ago. The new offices and shop, which features a mix of seating by Del Piero and furnishings that she sources on her global travels, occupy a renovated barn about 15 minutes down the road in Wainscott. “This is such a natural place for me to be,” she says, noting that 75 percent of what she sells on 1stdibs ends up in New York City or the Hamptons.

Despite the designer’s decision to expand her business to the East End, it’s not what brought her here. “Thirty years ago I married a man whose parents had a home in Amagansett, and every summer we would bring our two daughters,” says Del Piero, who worked for a couple of decades as an executive coach in Chicago before switching gears to a new career in antiques and interior design. “I fell in love with it the minute I arrived.”

When Del Piero and Grannen—who met while she was shopping at Architectural Artifacts, Inc., his 80,000-square-foot emporium in Chicago—began looking for homes in the Hamptons several years ago, they weren’t set on Amagansett. But they came across a small, late-19th-century cottage that enjoyed a covetable location on a quiet road just a five-minute drive from the beach. While clearly a project, it just felt right.

Del Piero and Grannen used the cottage as a summer getaway for a few years while considering what to do with the place. “The house was charming but falling apart,” she says. And the grounds, which total just over one acre, were awkwardly steep and overgrown with vines. In the end, the decision was clear: tear it down and build anew.

Working with Kathryn Fee, an architect in nearby Sag Harbor, the couple conceived a three-bedroom house that is as attuned to its location as it is to their shared sensibilities. For starters, that meant minimal and modest, with flexible spaces suited to relaxed entertaining and an emphasis on connections between indoors and out.

“It was about simplicity, and we wanted as much glass and openness as possible,” says Grannen, who recently sold the building that houses Architectural Artifacts and plans to convert his business to an online model. “To me, the Hamptons is about people, and we like to share the house with friends and relatives.”

The L-shaped residence is composed of two peaked-roof structures joined by a glass entry vestibule. The larger, two-story part contains the entertaining spaces and a pair of guest rooms, while the other holds the master suite. Rooftop solar panels provide most of the electricity. Black-painted cedar cladding, which calls to mind Japanese charred wood, gives the house a distinctive, dusky silhouette. The results are contemporary while nodding to vernacular Long Island barn architecture.

To make the grounds more appealing and accommodate a 50-foot swimming pool and small pool house, Del Piero and Grannen enlisted the firm Hampton Rustic Landscapes to regrade much of the property to no more than a gentle slope. They also extracted dense vines that had overgrown the perimeter, which opened up the views, and planted all new trees, along with low shrubs, grasses, and herbs. “I didn’t want lots of color or flowers,” explains Del Piero.

That chromatic restraint, one of her signatures as a designer, is also reflected in the interiors. The aesthetic is defined by a neutral, predominantly black-and white palette, with occasional warming hits of wood, including the kitchen’s beamed ceiling and the wide-plank floors upstairs. Floors on the main level are polished concrete, an unconventional beach- house choice that Del Piero explains as “really easy—you can just sweep the sand off them,” though a few furry rugs are strategically placed for softness.

The furnishings, meanwhile, are spare and sculptural. Del Piero’s own upholstered designs—mostly covered in pale, nubby linen—commingle with vintage pieces like the dining room’s 11-foot-long French farmhouse table and cerused chairs and a lightly restored Pierre Jeanneret teak-and-rattan armchair. “I like to combine things that are rough and worn with super-minimal and sleek finishes,” she says.

Animating the mix are standout objects and artworks discovered on the pair’s travels—both pleasure trips and more targeted “hunting and gathering” excursions, as Del Piero calls them. Among their finds is an abstract plaster figure reputedly once owned by Maria Callas that now lives in the foyer and a rustic, grape-harvest leather bag that hangs outside a guest room like a work of post-minimalist sculpture. “I love objects as art,” remarks Del Piero. “I usually don’t research things. I buy them because they’re beautiful.”

Most days here begin with breakfast on the porch of Brent’s General Store, catching up with friends. The couple often goes for a drive in Grannen’s 1960 Porsche 356 or another of his vintage convertibles, and there’s always some exercise, whether stand-up paddleboarding in Napeague Bay or going for runs (in the case of Grannen, a marathoner, very long runs), as well as beach and pool time. Del Piero teases her partner for initially resisting the idea of having a pool. “He didn’t even want it,” she says, laughing. “Now he’s in it every single day.”

Why WeWork Hired a Fashion Designer to Guide Its Expansion

Adam Kimmel takes a new direction as the chief creative officer of the coworking space company

By Stephen Wallis
Nov. 1, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-wework-hired-a-fashion-designer-to-guide-its-expansion-1541095882

WHEN ADAM KIMMEL halted work on his namesake men’s fashion label in 2012, it was meant to be a temporary hiatus, to focus on family life. He wasn’t walking away. Until he did.

“I was thinking in different ways as far as the clothing was concerned, maybe doing more sportswear, like a surf or skate line,” says Kimmel, now 39. “But nothing clicked with a gut feeling. It was Adam Neumann who pulled me out from under a rock, and we just started having conversations.”

Neumann, the co-founder and CEO of WeWork, ended up hiring Kimmel to be his chief creative officer, to oversee the interiors of the company’s shared workspaces, used by more than 250,000 members in 22 countries. WeWork is popular not only with freelancers and startups, but also with corporations like GE, Microsoft, HSBC and Facebook, helping to push WeWork’s revenues toward $1.8 billion this year. Launched with one SoHo location eight years ago, WeWork has now surpassed JPMorgan Chase as the company with the most Manhattan office space.

“The success of WeWork was built on going into an office that doesn’t feel like an office,” explains Kimmel, who says he oversees some 1.5 million square feet of new space each month. He works with a team of 450 designers and architects, as well as a staff of artists who create all the art on WeWork walls.

“My focus is on the physical design of the spaces and their general vibration—the materials, the colors, the art, the furniture— and I geek out on that,” says Kimmel, noting that his design passions always went beyond fashion. “This is the first thing to come along that has really fully engaged my heart.” As WeWork expands into residences, gyms and even schools, Kimmel says, “the goal of this company is to make an impact, and the only way to really do that is to carve your own path.”

Dubuffet Fakes Make Foundation a Target

By Stephen Wallis, with reporting by Judith Benhamou-Huet and Charlotte Kaiser

June 1, 1999

The Quiet Americans

As the market booms for the American Impressionists and modernists, demand for genre paintings remains flat. The reasons have less to do with the quality and interest of the art than the changing tastes of newer collectors.

By Stephen Wallis

November 2000

A (Mostly) Private Affair

Amid growing collector interest and record prices, Old Masters dealers are increasingly moving upstairs—as well as out into less familiar areas of the art market.

By Stephen Wallis

The Modern Art of Fashion

In the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts, the work of Sol Lewitt, on three floors at Mass MoCA, is the backdrop for, literally, much local color.

Text by Stephen Wallis

September 2009

https://www.departures.com/art-culture/art-design/modern-art-fashion

Sometimes it does take a village to make great art—and a departures fashion shoot—come to life. In this case, a former mill town called North Adams, Massachusetts, the unlikely home of the country’s largest museum of contemporary art, Mass MoCA.

Set on a 13-acre campus of 19th-century brick factory buildings, Mass MoCA has been, since opening in 1999, a unique playground for artists with very big ideas. And just in time for its tenth anniversary, the museum unveiled its biggest yet: a magisterial survey of Sol LeWitt’s signature Wall Drawings that occupies all three floors of the 27,000-square-foot Building 7.

Two dozen trained assistants, teamed with some 40 art students from local colleges and beyond, spent almost six months creating just over 100 of the Conceptual master’s works—from the austere line drawings of the sixties and seventies to the more lyrical bands of color and geometric forms of the eighties to the exuberant arcs and waves and blobs from his last decade, which look like coltish late-career exercises in pure pleasure.

LeWitt, who died in 2007, did not get to see the project through to completion, but his Wall Drawings—each of which began as a set of instructions or a diagram—were always intended to be executed by others. Intellectually rigorous yet accessible, this is art at its most collaborative, participatory, democratic. And it has never looked better than it does amid the partially sanded brick walls, exposed pipes, and ceiling beams of these industrial spaces.

Some have compared LeWitt’s Wall Drawings to music, with him as maestro and composer and his assistants the players. Featured on these pages are several of those who helped pull off this virtuoso performance as well as a few others who give this northern Berkshire community such great local color. They’re wearing classics, with some bold tones and a bit of pattern (how could we resist in this setting?). These are looks that will stand the test of time, certain to be just as stylish in a quarter-century, when LeWitt’s drawings are slated to come down. —Stephen Wallis

Mass MoCA is located at 87 Marshall Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. For more information on “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective,” including time-lapse videos of the works being created, visit massmoca.org or call 413-662-2111. The exhibition runs through 2033.

Object of Desire

By Stephen Wallis

March/April 2006

Lisa Yuskavage’s artistic terrain has always been the female body. It’s a landscape she has explored in her work with almost fetishistic relish, particularly the breasts. As she once remarked to fellow painter Chuck Close, “The whole world is obsessed by hard nipples.”

While you might have to look twice to find them, they’re there alright. Nearly passing as gently curving hills or melons, voluptuous breasts (and, yes, erect nipples) pop up incongruously amid fruits and vegetation in a pair of tapestries the artist has created with the nonprofit Art Production Fund. Titled, unapologetically, Tit Heaven, these paeans to the bosom are based on watercolors Yuskavage did in the early nineties, around the time she began painting the kitschy, stylized, self-absorbed nudes she’s now famous for.

“Because the disembodied parts are sort of hidden in the watercolors, it takes a little longer to see them,” says the 43-year-old artist. “But once you realize what you’re looking at, they’re pretty provocative.”

Translating the images into wool tapestries took six months of dyeing and hand-looming by a special fabricator in Guadalajara. The finished weavings are available in editions of three, at $30,000 apiece. (Yuskavage also collaborated with the Art Production Fund on a shower curtain featuring a pensive nude—done in an edition of 300, at $1,500 each). The artist, whose first New York show in three years will be held this fall at the David Zwirner Gallery, notes that tapestries were originally functional, “made to keep the castles warm,” Yuskavage says she likes to picture someone hanging hers in a cabin with a fireplace, “using them in the way tapestries were intended.”

Art Production Fund, 212-966-0193; www.artproductionfund.org

Seattle Art Museum Sues Knoedler Gallery

By Stephen Wallis

October 5–19, 1998

Seattle Court Tosses Museum’s Knoedler Suit

By Stephen Wallis

November 15, 1999

Ciao Bellagio: Casino Gallery Closes

By Stephen Wallis

June 2000

Will Wynn Take All? Mirage Merger Raises Questions

By Stephen Wallis

April 1, 2000

Wildensteins and Critic Head to Court

By Stephen Wallis

April 15, 1999

French Court Rejects Wildenstein Claim, Again

By Stephen Wallis

June 2000

Feliciano Sues Rosenbergs for Fees

By Stephen Wallis

September/October 2001

As the past several years have shown, sorting out claims made by Jewish families seeking to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis a half-century ago can be a messy and sometimes bitter business. But the rancorous legal battle that has erupted between Hector Feliciano, author of the acclaimed book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, and the heirs of dealer Paul Rosenberg has come as a surprise to most people who follow Holocaust restitution cases. The dispute has drawn attention to the issue of fair compensation for those who help families recover valuable looted artworks, while raising questions about the delicate boundaries between journalism and consulting.

On the Trail of the Elusive Olmec

A visit to Mexico illuminates an early Gulf Coast culture.

By Stephen Wallis

September 1996